"Heidegger had developed his own way of describing the nature of human existence. It wasn’t religious, and it wasn’t scientific; it got its arms around everything, from rocks to the soul. Instead of subjects and objects, Heidegger wanted to talk about 'beings.' The world, he argued, is full of beings—numbers, oceans, mountains, animals—but human beings are the only ones who care about what it means to be themselves. (A human being, he writes, is the 'entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue.') This gives us depth. Mountains might outlast us, but they can’t out-be us. For Heidegger, human being was an activity, with its own unique qualities, for which he had invented names: thrownness, fallenness, projection. These words, for him, captured the way that we try, amidst the flow of time, to 'take a stand' on what it means to exist. (Thus the title: Being and Time).

In 'The Essence of Truth,' meanwhile, Heidegger proposed a different and, to my mind, a more realistic idea of truth than any I’d encountered before. He believed that, before you could know the truth about things, you had to care about them. Caring comes first, because it’s caring about things that 'unconceals' them in your day-to-day life, so that they can be known about. If you don’t care about things, they stay 'hidden'—and, because there are limits to our care, to be alive is 'to be surrounded by the hidden.' (A century’s worth of intellectual history has flowed from this insight: that caring and not caring about things has a history, and that this history shapes our thinking). This is a humble way to think about truth. It acknowledges that, while we claim to 'know' about a lot of things intellectually, we usually seek and know the deeper truth about only a few. Put another way: truth is as much about what we allow ourselves to experience as it is about what we know."
- posted by cjb @ 4:17 PM