Introducing Heidegger

And a darker hint is his known admiration for the totalitarian social doctrines of the novelist Ernst Jünger (b. 1895), an acquaintance and correspondent.

But his later texts carry some hints – a sense of fundamental crisis, of anarchistic individualism as the only way that humans can transcend the situations into which they are thrown.

René Descartes (1596–1650) had proposed a distinction between SUBJECT and OBJECT: the “knowing subject” was identified with the conscious, rational mind – the Ego – whose own processes of reasoning offered the assured knowledge of the “objects” of the world, “out there” beyond it.

As a transcendental Being, the uncaused causer, God had to encompass and generate all other beings – all substances and attributes.

Heidegger entered a world of fitful collisions between continuity and change, settled existences and dynamic mobilities.

world of new invention, permeated by the rhetorics of modernism: progress, change, valorization of the new.

Freiburg connected to a different world, one marked by modernity: burgeoning metropolitan cities, time-compressing transport and telecommunications (the telephone, for commerce of all kinds), industrialization, mechanization (new labour patterns, new forms of social life).

Ontology – thinking about being – has been part of Western philosophy since its inauguration in Greece in the 5th century BC.

Resisting sensory apprehension, characterization, disposability, commodification, measurement, etc., being is highly resistant to our usual ways of dealing with, and thinking about, beings ...

ONTOLOGICAL: a statement concerning the being of such entities ...