You know, usually when we pick a topic for these
deep dives, I feel a sense of, let's call it
intellectual excitement. We grab a stack of papers
on AI or history or economics, and we just tear
into it with this sense of adventure. But today...
Today feels different. It feels heavier. How
so? It feels like we're walking into a minefield.
We aren't just talking about a set of abstract
ideas. We're talking about a figure who sits
right at the center of the 20th century like
a massive black hole. You can't escape his gravity.
He pulled everyone in. But if you get too close,
you get crushed. We are talking about... Martin
Heidegger. That is actually a perfect description.
And you're right to feel that way, because with
Heidegger, you don't just get a philosophy. You
get a moral crisis wrapped inside a metaphysical
enigma. Right. And that's the elephant in the
room we have to acknowledge before we even open
the books. On one side of the ledger, you have
a man who is arguably the most important philosopher
of the last hundred years. Oh, easily. Some would
say the most important since Kant. I mean, look
at the sources we have here. He influenced Sartre,
de Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault. He's cited in
architecture, in psychotherapy, even in the Code
of Artificial Intelligence. Absolutely. He effectively
rewrote. the source code of how we think about
existence. If you've ever used the phrase lifestyle
or talked about authenticity, you're unknowingly
speaking Heidegger. His ideas have just, they've
seeped into the culture. But then you flip the
page and you see the photos, you see the pin
on the lapel. The man was a Nazi. And not just,
I need to survive, Nazi. He was the rector of
Freiburg University under Hitler. He signed his
letters, Heil Hitler. No. That. is the mission
today. We are going to try to do two things that
seem impossible to do at the same time. We are
going to unpack his fundamental ontology, and
I promise we will make that actually understandable.
His noble goal. And we are going to look unflinchingly
at his descent into National Socialism. We're
stripping the varnish off. Yeah, we have the
documents to do it. We've got his magnum opus,
Being in Time. We've got the biographies. And
crucially, we have the Black Notebooks, his private
journals that were only published recently, which
really, really changed the game on how we view
his anti -Semitism. No sugarcoating. So let's
start with the human being. Before he becomes
this giant of philosophy who is Morton Heidegger,
where does this guy come from? He's a nobody
from nowhere. Born 1889 in Meskirch. Meskirch.
That sounds very rural. It's deep in the Black
Forest, and that matters. This isn't some cosmopolitan
city boy like Walter Benjamin or some of his
contemporaries. He was a child of the soil. Right.
His father was the sexton of the local Catholic
church, literally the guy who rings the bells
and digs the graves. So he grows up surrounded
by religion and dirt. That's a stark beginning.
A very elemental kind of childhood, I imagine.
Exactly. A very conservative, Catholic, blood
and soil environment. In fact, his first ambition
wasn't philosophy. It was the priesthood. He
actually joined a Jesuit seminary in 1909. Father
Heidegger. That's a strange alternate timeline
to imagine. Well, he didn't last long. He was
discharged within a few weeks. The official reason
was a heart condition, psychosomatic chest pains.
But you can see this tension early on. He wanted
the structure of the church, the rigor of it,
but he physically couldn't handle the constriction.
It was too small for him. Something like that.
So he leaves the Jesuits, walks across the street
to the University of Freiburg, and trades theology
for philosophy. But he keeps that religious intensity,
doesn't he? I mean, looking at the accounts of
his early lectures, he doesn't sound like a typical
academic. He doesn't sound like he's just explaining
Aristotle. Oh, absolutely not. When he starts
teaching in the 1920s, he isn't lecturing like
a normal professor. Yeah. Accounts from his students,
people like Hannah Arendt or Hans Gorgatimer,
describe him as a magician. A magician. Yeah.
He wasn't just analyzing logic puzzles. He made
philosophy feel like a thunderstorm. Yeah. He
was intense, charismatic, and used language in
a way that hypnotized people. There was a rumor
going around German universities that the hidden
king of philosophy was reigning in the Black
Forest. the hidden king. And a king needs his
declaration. His manifesto. Which brings us to
1927. The book that drops like a meteor. Sein
and Zeit. Being and Time. The book that changed
everything. Okay, I have tried to read this book.
I think many of our listeners have probably tried
and failed. It is notoriously difficult. The
language is thick. He invents words. He uses
hyphens like they're going out of style. It is
a fortress of a book. It was written in a rush,
actually, because he needed to publish something
to get a promotion to a full professorship. He
basically locked himself in a cabin for a year
and hammered it out. But despite the density,
the core idea is revolutionary. So let's play
Blinkist here. What is the central problem he
is trying to solve? Why did he write 400 pages
of hyphenated German? The core complaint is actually
stunningly simple. Heidegger looks at the entire
history of Western thought from Plato and Aristotle
all the way down to Descartes and Kant. And he
says, you have all made a mistake, a fundamental
error. You have forgotten the most important
question of all. Which is? The question of being.
Okay. I'm going to play the skeptic here. Yeah.
Being. Seems like the most obvious thing in the
world. Things are. I am, the table is, the microphone
is. It seems pretty self -evident. Why is forgetting
this such a crisis? Because we treat being like
it's just a fact, like it's the most general
property of things. You have a red apple. It
has the property of redness, the property of
roundness, and the property of existence. We
treat existence like it's just another trait
on a list. We just sort of check the box. Yep,
exists. Exactly. And Heidegger says that is catastrophic.
Right. Because being isn't a thing. It's not
an entity. He makes this distinction, and this
is the first technical hurdle, so speak with
me, between the ontic and the ontological. Ontic
versus ontological. break that down. The ontic
is the realm of stuff, entities, rocks, trees,
atoms, voters, stars. Science deals with the
ontic. You measure it, you weigh it, you categorize
it. It's the what of the world. Okay, that makes
sense. The inventory of the universe, all the
things in the room. Right. The ontological is
the investigation of the meaning of being itself.
How is it that things appear to us at all? What
is the background lighting, if you will, that
allows a rock to show up as a rock in the first
place instead of just a meaningless blur? So
science asks, what is that thing? And Heidegger
asks, what does it mean to be? Precisely. Think
of it like a movie theater. Western philosophy
has been obsessed with the actors and the props
on the screen. Look at that hero. Look at that
car. Look at that explosion. We analyze the plot,
the characters, the script. Heidegger is the
guy standing at the back of the room pointing
at the projector. The projector. He's asking
about the light. Without the light of the projector,
there is no movie. There are no characters. There
is nothing. He says we have been staring at the
screen for 2 ,000 years, obsessing over the entities,
and we have completely forgotten that there is
a projector humming behind us that makes it all
possible. We've forgotten the light of being.
That's a helpful image. So we are so distracted
by the stuff of our lives, our jobs, our phones,
our objects, that... We've lost touch with the
miracle that there is anything at all. And more
importantly, we've misunderstood our own being.
And this is where he introduces his most famous
term. He refuses to call us humans. He refuses
to call us people or subjects or consciousness.
He calls us Dessign. Dessign. I always sound
this pretentious, honestly. It feels like a way
to gatekeep the conversation. Why use a German
term when human works fine? Is he just being
difficult? For once, no. He's trying to break
a habit. If I say the word human or consciousness,
what image pops into your head? Probably a brain.
Or a person, like a distinct biological unit.
A mind inside a skull. A thinking thing. Exactly.
You picture a subject here, inside your head,
looking at an object there, the world. It's the
Cartesian view. Descartes said, I think, therefore
I am. He started with the isolated mind. The
ghost in the machine. Yes. And Heidegger hates
that. He wants to smash that box. Desaigne translates
literally to being there. Being there. The there
is crucial. You are never just a mind in a jar.
You are always already there in a world, in a
context, in a situation. You cannot be separated
from your world any more than a smile can be
separated from a face. We are being in the world.
Okay, being in the world, that still sounds a
little abstract. It is, but he grounds it immediately.
And this is what makes him so powerful. He brings
it down to earth. This brings us to what I think
is the best example in all of philosophy. If
anyone remembers one thing about Heidegger, it's
usually the hammer. The famous hammer analysis.
It's brilliant because it grounds all this high
-flying talk in sweat and wood. So walk us through
it. How does a hammer explain the meaning of
existence? Okay. Imagine you are a carpenter.
You're in your workshop. You're building a table.
You reach out, grab a hammer, and start driving
in a nail. In that specific moment of action,
what is your relationship to the hammer? I'm
not really thinking about it. I'm thinking about
the nail or the table. The hammer is just...
An extension of my arm. It's not even a thing.
Exactly. It's transparent. It withdraws from
your view. It is, in Heidegger's terms, zuhanden.
Ready to hand. It is defined by its usefulness.
It's in order to. You don't stare at its properties,
its weight, its color, its material composition.
You use it. You are absorbed in the task. It's
invisible because it works. Right. And Heidegger
argues that this. This absorbed practical coping
is our primary way of being. We aren't scientists
staring at the world. We are agents doing things
in the world. But what happens if the hammer
breaks? The head flies off. Yeah. Or the handle
snaps. Snap. Now suddenly the transparency is
gone. You stop. You look at the handle in your
hand and the metal head on the floor. Now for
the first time you see the hammer. Right. Now
I'm looking at it, not through it. You see it
as a wooden object with a specific weight and
mass. You might analyze why it broke. It stops
being a tool and becomes a thing. It becomes
an object of study. Yes. It goes from ready to
hand, zuhenden, to present at hand, vorhenden.
It becomes an object of theoretical study, something
with properties. So the scientific view looking
at things as cold, static objects only happens
when things go wrong. Or when we're detached.
Or when we step back and intentionally detach
ourselves like a scientist does. But Heidegger's
point is that Western philosophy, since Plato,
has assumed that the present at hand view, the
scientific view, is the real reality and our
everyday use is just secondary or sloppy. Heidegger
flips it. He says, no, our everyday messy involved
engagement is the primary reality. The scientific
view is a derivative, a more abstract way of
looking at things that only emerges when our
practical flow is interrupted. We know the world
by using it, not by staring at it. That's actually
a huge shift. It feels humbler. It puts philosophy
back in the workshop in the kitchen, not just
the ivory tower. It says that the carpenter knows
the hammer better than the physicist who could
tell you its atomic structure. In a fundamental
way, yes. The carpenter knows it's in order to...
The physicist knows its properties. Heidegger
privileges the in order to. This also redefines
what knowing is. It isn't just data processing.
Knowing is know -how. It's familiarity. Like
driving a car. I don't think about the physics
of internal combustion. I just drive. The car
is ready to hand. But if it breaks down... It
becomes very present at hand. Suddenly you're
looking at this lump of metal and thinking about
spark plugs and engine oil. You know your house
not because you've memorized the blueprints,
but because you can walk to the bathroom in the
dark without stubbing your toe. That is Dasein.
That's a perfect example of it. That's being
in the world. I love that distinction. It feels
very intuitive. So if we are these beings who
are absorbed in the world, dealing with tools
and tasks, how are we structured? Because Heidegger
doesn't just stop at we use hammers. He builds
a whole anatomy of the soul, or at least the
self. Yes, this is division two of the book.
This is where he gets into what we now call existentialism,
even though he didn't like the term. He asks,
If we aren't just biological machines, what are
the fundamental structures, the existentialia
that make Dasein tick? And he finds three big
ones. First is understanding. But again, this
is Heidegger, so it's not intellectual understanding.
He means the ability to project into possibilities.
What does that mean? To Dasein, a chair isn't
a collection of atoms. It's a possibility for
sitting. A road is a possibility for travel.
A door is a possibility for entering or exiting.
We are constantly seeing the world in terms of
what we can do. We're throwing ourselves into
the future. We are always ahead of ourselves.
We are possibility machines. We are defined not
by what we are at this exact moment, but by what
we can be. Yes, that's the core of his existentialism.
The second structure is attunement or moods,
stimming. Now, usually when people talk about
moods, they dismiss them. Oh, I'm just cranky
today. Ignore me. Or I'm being irrational. We
treat them like clouds passing over the sun of
our real rational mind. Heidegger says that's
a profound mistake. You are never not in a mood.
Even being calm or neutral is a mood. And moods
aren't just internal weather. They are how the
world is disclosed to us. They are fundamental
ways of knowing. How so? Give me an example.
Think about when you are deeply anxious. How
does the world look? It looks hostile or strange.
A ringing phone feels like a threat. Every sharp
corner looks dangerous. The world feels alien.
And if you were in deep love? Everything glows.
The annoyance of traffic doesn't matter. The
city sounds like music. It's like wearing rose
-colored glasses, but more than that. The world
itself seems to have changed. Exactly. The mood
isn't paint you put on the world. It's the light
you see the world in. You can't see the world
without a mood. Moods disclose what matters.
Think of a do not disturb sign on a hotel door.
A mood hangs a sign on the world telling it how
to appear to you. And this connects to another
big Heidegger word, right? This feeling of being
subject to moods we don't choose. We are thrown.
Yes, geworfenheit, thrownness. We don't choose
to be born. We don't choose our parents, our
time period, our native language, our body type.
We are thrown into this movie halfway through,
and we have to figure out the plot while we're
acting in it. That is the tragedy and the beauty
of Dasein. And this leads to the third feature,
discourse or language. We articulate this world
we are thrown into. We talk about it. Right.
Language is how we make sense of our understanding
and our moods. But all of this, understanding,
mood, discourse, is held together by one superstructure.
He says it's the fundamental constitution of
Dasein. Care. Sorge. Sorge. Care. It sounds nice
and gentle, like, I care about you. But he means
it more structurally, right? It's not an emotion.
Exactly. It's not a feeling. It's the architecture
of our being. He means that to be Dasein is to
be concerned. A rock doesn't care that it's a
rock. A table doesn't worry about tomorrow. But
Dasein is a being for whom its own being is an
issue. We care about our existence. We are anxious
about it. We plan for it. We regret it. To be
human is to care. So we are thrown into this
world, projecting ourselves into the future,
caring about what happens. But we aren't alone.
We aren't doing this in a vacuum. And this brings
us to the part of Heidegger that hits the hardest
in the age of social media. The social self.
The they. Das Man. Oh, this is the most blistering
critique in the book. It's absolutely savage.
Heidegger asks, who are you, really? And his
answer is, most of the time, you aren't you at
all. You are Das Man. The one. or the they, or
some people translate it as the anyone. It's
that invisible authority we refer to when we
say, well, one doesn't do that, or they say kale
is good for you. Who is they? Nobody. Everybody.
It's the phantom consensus, the voice of the
average. Exactly. It's the average, the herd.
Heidegger says that because we are social beings,
our default setting is to drift along with the
crowd. He has this savage quote. We take pleasure
and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure. We
read, see, and judge literature and art as they
see and judge. We find shocking what they find
shocking. That part always gets me. Even our
outrage is scripted. It's the dictatorship of
the norm. It is a dictatorship. And the seductive
thing about the they is that it relieves us of
the burden of choice. Right. It makes life easy.
So easy. If you just do what everyone else does,
go to the right college, get the stable job,
buy the gray sectional sofa, watch the popular
Netflix show, you don't have to take responsibility
for your own existence. You can just float along.
Heiger calls this fallenness. It's inauthentic
existence. Inauthenticity. So most of us are
walking around as they selves. just copying the
script written by an anonymous public. But Heidegger
thinks we can be authentic, right? He offers
a way out. What does authenticity look like for
him? Authenticity, or eigenlichkeit, literally
means ownedness, taking hold of your own life.
But the path to get there is not fun. You don't
get there by going on a retreat or meditating
on a beach. No. You get there through... Anxiety.
Angst. Angst. And he distinguishes this from
fear. Fear is always about something specific.
I'm afraid of a spider. I'm afraid of losing
my job. I'm afraid of that dark alley. Anxiety
is different. Anxiety is about nothing. Nothing
in particular. Right. It's that feeling when
the world suddenly loses its significance. The
normal ready to hand world of tools and tasks
just. falls away the they stops making sense
the things you usually do seem meaningless you
feel uncanny unheimlich literally not at home
anxiety strips away the comfort of the herd and
leaves you standing alone face to face with the
sheer strangeness of your own existence that
sounds terrifying why would we want that yeah
because only when you are stripped of the illusions
of the they can you choose your own life anxiety
individualizes you it forces you to ask what
am i going to do with my life now that the public
script is gone And the ultimate clarifier for
this, the thing that makes anxiety truly hit
home is death. Being towards death. Exactly.
Death is the one possibility that is non -transferable.
No one can die for you. The they can't save you
from it. The public talks about death as something
that happens to other people, an event we'll
all get to eventually. But Heidegger says you
have to confront it as your own most possibility.
When you truly confront your own finitude, not
just intellectually knowing you'll die, but feeling
the limitedness of your time, that shatters the
triviality of everyday life. It frees you to
live authentically, to make choices that actually
matter to you. So death is the ultimate life
coach. In a very dark German way, yes. It's the
wake -up call that pulls you out of the slumber
of the they. Okay, so up to this point, Heidegger
sounds like this profound existential guide.
He's telling us to wake up, stop following the
herd, face our mortality, and live our own lives.
It's powerful stuff. It is. It's heroic. It inspired
a generation. But... We have to turn the page.
Because while he was writing about authenticity
and escaping the herd, history was moving in
a very dark direction. And Heidegger didn't just
get swept up in it. He stepped right into the
front row. He joined a different kind of herd.
This brings us to Section 3, the dark chapter.
Heidegger and Nazism. And we have to be very
precise here with the facts and the timeline.
Laid out for us. Hitler comes to power in January
1933. Where's Heidegger? What is he doing? Heidegger
is a full professor at the University of Freiburg.
He's a star. In April 1933, just a few months
after Hitler becomes chancellor, Heidegger is
elected rector of the university, basically the
president of the university. And he joins the
party. Yes. On May 1st, 1933, he officially joins
the Nazi party. And this wasn't just a paperwork
thing. He gave an inaugural address, right? The
rectorate's raid. Yes. The self -assertion of
the German university. It's a chilling speech
to read today. He delivered it in a hall decorated
with swastikas. He spoke about the self -assertion
of the university, but he tied it directly to
the German Revolution. He urged students to service
labor service, military service, and knowledge
service, all aligned with the fate of the nation.
He was trying to align the university with the
Fuhrer principle. He wanted to be the spiritual
leader of the university in the Nazi state. He
saw a greatness in the movement. We know this
from his lectures. And we have sources saying
he ended lectures with Heil Hitler. In November
1933, he signed a vow of allegiance to Hitler
and the National Socialist State. But it's not
just the public speeches. It's the personal betrayals.
We have to talk about Edmund Husserl. His mentor.
The man who championed Heidegger's career. The
man to whom being and time was dedicated. Husserl
was Jewish. Yes. Husserl had retired, but he
was still an emeritus professor with library
privileges. In April 1933, under the new Nazi
laws, Jewish government employees were suspended.
Now, formally, the order to suspend Husserl came
from the state, not Heidegger personally. But
Heidegger, as rector, signed the order forbidding
Husserl from using the university library. He
locked his own mentor out of the library, the
man who made his career possible. Effectively.
And more than that, he broke off all contact.
When Husserl died in 1938, Heidegger didn't attend
the funeral. He later apologized to Husserl's
widow, but the damage was done. And in 1941,
under pressure from his publisher, Heidegger
removed the dedication to Husserl from new editions
of Being and Time. That is cold. It's professional
and personal erasure. But Heidegger stepped down
as rector after only a year, in 1934. Why? Did
he have a change of heart? Did he see the error
of his ways? This is where it gets murky. Heidegger's
defenders, and Heidegger himself later, claimed
he resigned because he wouldn't compromise enough
with the Nazi officials. Basically, he claimed
he was trying to protect the university from
the worst of the politicization. He was trying
to be a bulwark from within. That was his story.
But historians view it differently. They suggest
he resigned out of administrative frustration,
he wasn't a good bureaucrat, and frankly, some
of the hardline Nazis thought his philosophy
was too abstract and weird. He wanted to be the
philosopher king of the Nazi party, but they
preferred simpler biological racism. His vision
of a spiritual national socialism lost out to
the thuggery. But he stayed in the party until
the end of the war. He did. He never turned in
his card. He paid his dues until 1945. Now, for
a long time, there was this debate. Was his Nazism
just a political error, a stupendously bad judgment
call by a man who was naive about politics? Or
was it rooted in his philosophy? And this brings
us to the Black Notebooks. These were published
only recently, starting in 2014. What did we
find in there? The Black Notebooks were the smoking
gun for many scholars. There's private philosophical
journals. Before 2014, defenders could argue,
well, his philosophy is about being. It has nothing
to do with biological racism. You can't find
anti -Semitism in being and time. But in these
private journals, Heidegger writes explicitly
about world Judaism. And what does he say? He
connects it directly to his philosophical critique
of modernity. He talks about Judaism as being
ungraspable and rootless. He claims that Jewish
people have a talent for calculation, but lack
a connection to the soil or to being. He suggests
that world Judaism is a primary force of the
modern technological world that uproots everything.
So he's tying his philosophical hatred of calculation
and modernity directly to classic anti -Semitic
tropes. Exactly. It's in just as anti -Semitism
wasn't just political opportunism. It was metaphysical.
He saw Jewish as the philosophical embodiment
of the modern, technological, rootless world
he hated. It's deeply disturbing because it weaves
the hate right into his core concepts. It's not
a bug. It's a feature. And after the war, when
the full horror of the Holocaust was revealed
to the world, what did he say? Did he fall to
his knees and beg for forgiveness? Silence. Almost
total silence. He never fully apologized for
the Holocaust. He never fully apologized for
his involvement. In fact, he said something in
a 1949 lecture that is, well, it's infamous.
Let's hear it. He was giving a lecture on technology
and how it dehumanizes the world, he said. Agriculture
is now a motorized food industry. The same thing
in its essence as the production of corpses in
the gas chambers and the extermination camps.
The same thing as blockades and the reduction
of countries to famine. The same thing as the
manufacture of hydrogen bombs. Now, he equated
factory farming with the gas chambers. In its
essence. He viewed them all as examples of technology
gone wrong, of treating beings as mere material
to be processed. While philosophically you can
trace his logic about the essence of technological
thinking, morally it's a monstrous comparison.
It flattens the specific horror of the genocide
into just another technological problem. It's
an act of profound moral evasion. Yes. And in
his famous final interview with Der Spiegel,
recorded in 1966 but published only after his
death, he still defended his rectorship. He never
uttered a word of apology. He just said, only
a God can save us. That is hard to stomach. It
really highlights the central conflict we started
with. The man who thought so deeply about care
and authenticity seemed to have a massive blind
spot when it came to actual human suffering on
a mass scale. That is the tragedy of Martin Heidegger.
A genius of the abstract, a moral failure in
the concrete. So after the war, he was banned
from teaching for a while during the denazification
process. He was classified as a follower, but
he didn't stop thinking and his philosophy shifted.
Scholars call this the turn or die care. Yes.
In his later years, roughly from the 1940s on,
his focus shifts. He stops talking so much about
Dase and human existence and starts talking about
the history of being itself. He becomes much
more. mystical, poetic. Less about the human
condition and more about something grander. Exactly.
He claimed it wasn't a reversal, but a change
in orientation. In Being and Time, he approached
the question of being through Dasein. In his
later work, he tries to think about being itself
and how it has revealed itself differently throughout
history. And a big part of this later work is
about technology. And honestly, this part feels
more relevant today than ever. We touched on
it with the gas chamber quote. But what is his
actual critique of technology? Because he's not
just a Luddite smashing machines, is he? No,
not at all. That's a common misunderstanding.
He says technology is not just a tool. We usually
think a smartphone is a tool. It's neutral. I
can use it for good or evil. Heidegger says no.
Technology is a way of revealing the world. It's
a pair of glasses we can't take off. It determines
what shows up for us as real. And what kind of
world does modern technology reveal? A world
of standing reserve. Standing reserve. Right.
It means we look at the world only as a resource
to be stored, calculated, and exploited on demand.
A forest is no longer a forest. It is timber
inventory. A river is no longer a river. It is
a hydroelectric power source. A mountain is no
longer a mountain. It's a pile of coal to be
mined. And people. That's the ultimate danger.
Eventually, humans just become human resources.
We become standing reserve to be optimized and
used. This is what he calls Gestell or in framing.
We are trapped in a framework where everything,
including ourselves, must be efficient, optimized
and available for use. That sounds exactly like
the 21st century. The gig economy. Self -optimization,
tracking our sleep data, personal branding. We
are turning ourselves into standing reserve for
the market. Heidegger saw it coming. He believed
this technological thinking flattens the world.
It strips away mystery and meaning and replaces
it with calculability. So what's the solution?
If technology is turning us into batteries in
the matrix, how do we escape? Well, only a god
can save us, as he said in that interview. He
was pretty pessimistic. But on a human level,
he turns to art and specifically poetry. Poetry.
After all this talk of technology and Nazism,
the answer is poetry. For him, yes. He believed
that poetic language, especially the work of
the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, could help
us recover a sense of the holy, a non -technological
way of revealing the world. He famously said,
language is the house of being. Language is the
house of being. I love that phrase, even if it
is a bit cryptic. He means that language isn't
just a tool for communication like pass the salt.
Language discloses the world. The kind of language
we use determines the kind of world we live in.
In our technological age, our language has become
technical, data -driven, reduced to information.
He wants us to listen to the poets who use language
to reveal truth and mystery, not just to transfer
information. He has another famous line, language
speaks, not man. We are participants in language,
not its masters. It's a beautiful idea that we
need to re -enchant the world through language.
It's such a stark contrast to the brutality of
his political history. It is. It's a philosophy
of dwelling and letting be. Coming from a man
who supported a regime of total domination and
control, the contradiction is staggering. We
can't wrap this up without looking at his personal
life a bit more because it's just as messy as
his politics. Specifically, Hannah Arndt. This
is one of the most fascinating and troubling
relationships in intellectual history. Hannah
Arndt, a brilliant Jewish student, and Heidegger,
her professor, they began an affair in 1925.
He was 35, married with two sons. She was 19.
And this wasn't just a fling. The letters show
it was an intense intellectual and romantic bond.
He was the great love of her life. It was. But
they had to keep it secret. Then, obviously,
the war comes. He joins the Nazi party, Arndt,
being Jewish, flees Germany, is interned in a
camp in France, escapes, and makes her way to
America. She becomes one of the most important
political theorists of the century, writing The
Origins of Totalitarianism, a book about the
very forces her former lover had allied himself
with. And yet, after the war, she reconnects
with him. She does. She visits him in Germany
in 1950, and she actually becomes one of his
defenders in the English -speaking world. She
helped get his work translated and helped rehabilitate
his reputation in America. She argued that he
was a great thinker who made a personal error.
She put error in quotes like a philosopher who
fell into a well because he was staring at the
stars. That is incredibly generous. Too generous.
Many people think so. She once called him a potential
murderer in a private letter regarding his treatment
of Hustle, but she later softened. It speaks
to his personal charisma. He had this magnetic,
almost hypnotic effect on people, especially
his students. He also had an open marriage, essentially.
Yes. His wife, Elfrida, was a strong figure and
an ardent Nazi herself, by the way. It was a
complex marriage. In fact, Heidegger knew that
he wasn't the biological father of one of their
sons, Hermann, but he raised him as his own.
And he had another long -term relationship with
Elisabeth Blockmann, who was also Jewish. His
personal life was a web of contradictions. Let's
look at his legacy now. Despite the Nazism, despite
the black notebooks, you can't walk into a philosophy
department without tripping over Heidegger. Who
did he influence? It would be easier to list
who he didn't influence. In France, you have
Jean -Paul Sartre, who basically built French
existentialism on a reading of being and time,
though Heidegger later said Sartre misunderstood
him. Then you have Jacques Derrida, who used
Heidegger's critique of Western philosophy to
create deconstruction and beyond philosophy architecture
christian norberg schultz used heidegger's ideas
of dwelling to rethink modern architecture psychotherapy
there's a whole field called day sun's analysis
which is an existential form of therapy and surprisingly
artificial intelligence wait ai how does the
anti -technology guy who hung out in the cabin
influence ai Through an American philosopher
named Hubert Dreyfus at UC Berkeley. In the 60s
and 70s, early AI researchers had this idea called
good old -fashioned AI. They thought the mind
was just a computer processing symbols. Give
a computer a dictionary and a set of grammar
rules and it can understand language. Right.
The brain as hardware, the mind as software.
Exactly. Dreyfus used Heidegger to say, no, that's
completely wrong. Remember the hammer. We function
by being in the world, having a body, having
know -how. You can't program a computer to have
common sense just by giving it facts and rules.
It needs a world. It needs to be ready to hand.
So Dreyfus's critique basically said you can't
build a disembodied brain in a box and expect
it to be intelligent. Precisely. And this critique
was hugely influential. It actually changed the
direction of AI research towards embodied robotics
and machine learning that learns from context,
not just rules, all thanks to a guy from the
Black Forest. That is wild. And I know film buffs
love him, too. Terrence Malick, the director
of The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line, he
actually translated one of Heidegger's works
as a student. His movies are visual meditations
on being, nature, and our thrownness into the
world. You can feel Heidegger in every shot.
So here we are. We have unpacked the question
of being, the hammer, the anxiety, the Nazis,
the poetry, the technology. What is the final
synthesis? How do we hold this fractured legacy?
I don't think we resolve it. I think the lesson
of Heidegger is that you have to sit with the
fracture. You have to hold both things in your
head at once. If you throw Heidegger in the trash
because he was a Nazi, you lose the most powerful
tools we have for understanding our technological
age. But if you read him without the context
of his politics, you're being naive and irresponsible.
You have to read it with a warning label. A very
large, flashing warning label. He teaches us
that you can be the smartest person in the world,
you can see deeper into the structure of reality
than anyone else, and still be a complete moral
failure. Intelligence is not a guardrail against
evil. That is a sobering thought. Thinking alone
isn't enough. You need heart. You need ethics.
You need the things his philosophy in some ways
forgot. Exactly. The human things. So here's
the thought we want to leave you with today.
We talked about in framing the idea that technology
forces us to view the world and ourselves as
data to be mined and resources to be used. Standing
reserve. Right. Look at your phone. Look at your
social media feed. Look at how you talk about
yourself on LinkedIn. Personal brand, human capital,
optimization, life hacks. Are we treating ourselves
like standing reserve? Are we inframing our own
lives? And more importantly, if Heidegger is
right and language speaks us, what is the language
of the algorithm doing to our souls? If our language
is reduced to hashtags, 280 characters, search
engine optimization, and binary code, can we
even think anymore? Or are we just processing
data? Are we still dessing being there or are
we just users? That's the question. Thanks for
diving deep with us. It was a heavy one, but
I think it was worth it. Absolutely. See you
next time.