#31: Martin Heidegger
Hello dear friends. Some massive moves in my life have been happening. Quinn and I broke up after nearly 6 years together, greatly adding to the newness of my post-graduation, newly-employed, recently-moved life. I look forward to what comes next for me and for Quinn as we take what we learned from each other and embark on separate journeys. I hope that all of my friends can continue to think fondly of Quinn and be her friend! And so, in order to avoid turning my Substack into a Livejournal, I will stop there.
Aside from the above announcement, life has been cool. I took a trip to NY to see friends and felt clarity and happiness. NY has often been a place where the reality of my life can’t seem to catch up to me, but I do hope to actually create a life there not too many years from now.
My friend Yesnely and I published a paper. We were both hoping we’d get asked to do a second round of revisions, but the journal went ahead and published it. If you’d like to read it, you can do so here and if that doesn’t work for you feel free to ask me for a pdf.
Big congrats to loyal reader of my little book reviews, Richard, on getting tenure!
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
My break up has taken place alongside a reading of what many, though perhaps not I, consider to be a landmark text of existentialism (only because I don’t really know what existentialism is). Though the last month or so of my life has often been suffuse with melancholy, I promise I had started the book at least a week before the chaotic ending of my relationship. Even so, my reading of Heidegger felt infinitely lighter and more hopeful than the dank, gloomy, candle-lit solipsism that a Cartesian understanding of ~being~ offers. I think it was a nice thing to read as I grieve the end of my most meaningful romantic relationship yet.
Aside from the lightness, I was also surprised by the ease of reading Heidegger (at least through the first half). Though he introduces a ton of new terms that are so fucking close to each to other (e.g. existentiell, existential, ontological, ontical, ready-to-hand, being-with, being-there, etc.) the terms become clearer with a little thought and a little more reading. After all, to make something as familiar as being seem strange enough to examine, new words are clearly needed and these ones certainly do turn being into something you can hold under a microscope.
Similarly, I was struck by the structure of Heidegger’s thought. The late 19th and early 20th century saw the theorization and development of the mathematical branch called set theory and Heidegger, who seemed to pay attention to mathematics, though I don’t know how much, seems to have been inspired, knowingly or unknowingly, by this mode of thinking. Instead of the Cartesian ergo cogito sum, “I think therefore I am,” Heidegger situates the Dasein within the world first, as an entity, before anything so special as thinking can take place, ‘I exist within a world there I can think.’ This sort of nested thinking extends beyond thought without being strictly linear, i.e. World ⊂ Objects ⊂ Tools or World ⊂ Objects ⊂ Humans. It may be a stretch but it seems clear to me that the revolution of set theory allowed Heidegger to break free from the ego-centrism and solipsism of Descartes and reframe existence as something that I am not actively creating, but something that happens to me. To me, this creates a potential world with a little less self-importance, a little more compassion - I am just as sure that life is happening to you as it is happening to me. How Heidegger then ended up being an official member of the Nazi party makes no sense to me given what I saw as the ethical ramifications of his work. There are books on that that I should be reading soon enough.
If you decide to read Being and Time in the amateur mode that I read all my books in, let me suggest Heidegger: An Introduction by Richard Polt. Thanks to Jasmine for mailing me her copy <3.