The Characteristics Of Martin Heidegger's Contribution To Existentialism

1.2 Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889 -1976) was a German Philosopher and is known as the most influential continental philosopher of the 20th century. While he is considered part of the existentialist movement due to his influence on Sartre, his own influences being Kierkegaard and Jaspers; Being and Time is arguably his sole contribution to existentialism.

Heidegger’s work revolved around finding the meaning of Being. He makes a distinction, which he calls the ontological difference, between Being and being, i.e. entities. Being refers to what makes humans comprehensible as beings. It considers the way humans exist, the nature of man who is the only being who can raise questions about Being. The distinction is ontological because it

He emphasizes that an entity, a human, has a place in the world, that one cannot be considered in isolation from its surroundings. Thus, Dasein can be taken as a way of life, shared by a community and possessing the structure of being-in-the-world. Each human being has a characteristic individuality or femeinigkeit, which is a potentiality, a set of possibilities for each one. Under these possibilities, lie two kinds: inauthentic and authentic existence. He once said, “The essence of human being lies in its existence.” There is no pre-ordained nature of Dasein, every individual has several possible choices but is limited in their choices in some way or another. These choices are made in the context of the

Heidegger proclaims that in the quest to enquire into Being itself, we must consider not-being equally as much. We must accept our future non-existence and recognize our distinctness and isolation during our death. Death can thus be taken as the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all”. This acknowledgement of the impossibly of our existence is a key step towards an authentic life. There will be a point in an individual’s life where the existence of all ordinary things will cease and this is the point, before acceptance of his mortality, when the individual feels a sense of alarm while imagining oneself suspended over a void. It is this recognition of nothing, that we raise the question of why there is something at all and thus lead us to the contemplation of