Heidegger’s Dasein: The Philosophy Everyone Should Know

Confused about Heidegger's word DASEIN? I've got you covered. This video is designed to make the notion slightly easier to understand. You'll get the most out of it if you watch until the end but if the lightbulb goes off at any point, thank God for that!

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[zzzaaayyynnn]

Speaking as an academic with some knowledge of Heidegger, you do a WONDERFUL job of breaking down the basic concepts.

[tz]

i would recommend this channel to anyone, anytime, anywhere, in whatever state they are "being". 💪

[helnock]

I think the penny dropped for me at the 25.08. mark onwards when you said that with an inanimate object it is about being IN the world, spatially, but with Dasein it is about BEING in the world, the modes of being in the world. You explained subtle but crucial difference very well.

[PaulThronson]

I'm still there 30 minutes in! I love Heidegger because for me he was the first well known thinker and writer to give our emotional state its due and how we create the space for two distinct environments that humans can move in and out of: being in the moment - responding largely to the environment in front of us, and imagining an environment that is not in the moment but constructed through a dialectic of language.

Human beings are lords of space-time. Ours is the only soul that can regret the past and worry for the future, imagine a universe a trillion years from now, or a region of space trillions of miles away. These powers are the result of acquiring complex language. I find that traditional philosophy ignores how this happens and its purpose based on what we know of theory of mind and affective neuroscience. Scientifically, we understand that life is part of its environment and we use labels to logically separate the two concepts, but this has limited value when trying to understand the true nature of either. This is why I find philosophy, while useful in creating the academic vernacular to frame discussion, also leads to simplifications that make it mostly irrelevant to explaining the human condition and the universe as we objectively know it today.

[Cd]

As someone who has no idea WHEN I subscribed to you, my subscriptions recommended the channel again and I really enjoyed the talk. Thanks

[Chris-zkx]

I think the best way to explain this is to go through Husserl first. Once you realize that this is phenomenological description without the bracketing, it is pretty clear

[lindenbrook]

Really interesting video. I've never read Heidegger but here is my take on what you were trying to explain: Potential and faith (unlimited expectations) are uniquely human and that concept of faith, uniquely human, manifests the potential.

[Kali-kz]

I have observed that readers or experts in Heidegger cannot explain him plain. But, this is really a good video that explains in a very clear and authoritative manner the complex concepts of Heidegger .

[philip]

Good job 👏 Michael do more even in contemporary philosophy

[SP-SP-SP]

Being and Time was a life changing read. Thanks for this video!

[kenwatanabe]

Heidegger was a big influence on the major figures in Japanese philosophy. Thinkers like Nishitani, Watsuji, Suzuki, and Tanabe were students of Heidegger and they are considered the most significant philosophers of the early-mid 20th century in Japan. Many of them were also practicing Buddhists.

[jake]

Loved this, thank you. I appreciate your effort and courage to try out different approaches to videos, become more vulnerable and open up, while also sharing your expertise. I watched to the end. You might be surprised how many can watch a long video. Especially with good headphones and increasing playback rate its possible to watch a long video and not lose attention.

[gwfbagel]

Excellent informal approach to explaining philosophical concepts. Good job.

[johnshaplin]

Roland Barthes concept of the neutral seems to have originated with Heidegger. As Tiphaine Samoyault wrote about Barthes strange clarity: Unlike Blanchot, the neutral in Barthes is neither negative, nor the unspeakable, nor the night. Its positive force lies in the way it reduces intimidation of every kind: arrogance, totality, virility, the definitive judgment. It attenuates without abolishing, calms without lulling completely to sleep, renders expression more subtle and less vain. Herein resides its stranger power of clarification. Instead of displaying thought in the harsh light of an illusory intelligibility, the neutral makes it glitter for a while while as it scatters it in fragments, creating gaps and pauses, times and places that elude meaning.’
Derrida: ‘From where did the singular clarity of Roland Barthes come from? From where did it come to him, since he had to receive it? Without simplifying anything, without doing violence to either the fold or the reserve, it always emanated from a certain point that was not yet a point, remaining invisible it its own way.’ 36:39

[AIainMConnachie]

Great video as always.
Have you considered - just for fun - doing a little critique of Kosinski's novel "Being There"? And or the film version with Peter Sellers?

[markcounseling]

I see a direct connection between the older Dasein of things that Heidegger reconceptualized, and the Buddhist concept of the conventional or relative truth. But the new Dasein doesn’t seem to match the Absolute in Buddhism. The ultimate truth of Emptiness seems to be more akin to Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung?

With Heidegger’s Dasein, at least for me at the moment, he seems to be attempting to elucidate aspects of human “becoming”, or relationality, or interdependence. Something like the living _experience_ of emptiness rather than a formal definition of it.

Earlier this year in Hamburg I caught an exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich’s works and was a bit stunned by them. He had a series of sketches of a tree that clearly were attempting to demonstrate what are normally hidden aspects of human perspective, distortions that our mind sort of fixes for us to make an actual tree look more like our concept of a tree rather than what we are actually encountering. And then when I saw his famous Wanderer painting, it seemed to me that it might have originated from an experience of nondual presence, which he was trying to paint. Like Heidegger he was interested in being super-precise about what normally are for us hidden elements. I think he achieved something like in-der-Welt-sein, and I wonder now if this might have been an influence on Heidegger’s much later elucidation of that experience?

[Arnaud]

Fascinating. Lessons of Don Juan by Castaneda teach of the Tonal and Nagual, the Objects " named into being through language" and the "empty space" enveloping them. According to the shaman the real action takes place in the " empty" space " which enevelops the world of " named things", the negative space determines the positive form and vice versa.

[matsa]

If I am not mistaken, also Kant went a bit in this general direction when he pointed out that it is a mistake to think of subjectivity ("subjects") as yet another (special) type of objects, instead of realising that subjectivity is something radically different.

[HankRearden]

Just subbed. This is excellent content.

[sina]

It's interesting that you mention that your dissertation included Rorty as well as Heidegger. I have found comparing and contrasting the two interesting- and puzzling. Rorty listed Heidegger as one of the biggest influences on his thought (along with Dewey and Wittgenstein). And yet he says that we find our meanings of being in the world through imaginatively *creating* our reality and meanings (a la Proust or Nietzsche), not through looking deep and hard at something deeper to find them as an act of discovery. He didn't think there was any pre-existing thing there to find. If we want it, we have to make it ourselves. He said that we should have the mindset of artists or engineers, engaged in imagination and creation, rather than discoverers and scientists looking hard to find something already pre-existing out there. I wonder what he would have thought of Heidegger's seeming insistence that we could find such meaning through looking hard for the "ground of being" somewhere deep- as if it has an existence already and we are just not looking hard enough to see it, or that it is concealed and only exposes itself fleetingly to us through flashes of "Aletheia". In this view, Heidegger's talk of Being may just be chasing after a rainbow or mirage.