Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing”- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense […] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.
Martin Heidegger is one of the world’s most famous and important philosophers. Born in
Germany in 1889, he grew to worldwide fame with the publication of his great work Being and Time
in 1927.
Heidegger’s thought
His desire to wake us up to the idea that we are surrounded by death.
He didn’t use that word, though. He preferred the grander term: The Nothing. In German–Das Nichts. This is inexistence: the opposite of life. We live surrounded by it but deny its scary presence through elaborate means, by hiding from the truth that we are so close to death all the time.
Existence or Being is finite, fragile and very temporary… But we rarely appreciate how temporary existence is.
It can be beautiful. It can be intense. Most of all, it can be terrifying. We live wisely and philosophically by always acknowledging our precariousness against The Nothing. It isn’t just us who are so temporary. It is all living beings, all living things – the animals, the trees, the clouds… They too exist briefly against the background of Nothingness.
Heidegger is very aware of the way in which we hide from a confrontation with Being escaping into the warm folds of daily life, of society and of what he termed its endless ‘chatter’, “Das Gerede”.We can imagine Das Gerede as an enormous pancake like dough layer that smothers connection with Being.
Chatter is everywhere, it comes in via the airwaves, the media, our social circle and it seeks to reassure us that trivia actually matters, that our jobs count, that what we are doing and thinking has importance. It hides us from the nature of Being in a world of death.