Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Martin Heidegger

German Existentialist Philosopher

"Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The “they” which supplies the answer to the question of the “who”... is nobody."

"Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being."

"Whatever and however we may try to think, we think within the sphere of tradition. Tradition prevails when it frees us from thinking back to a thinking forward, which is no longer a planning. Only when we turn thoughtfully toward what has already been thought, will we be turned to use for what must still be thought."

"We should accept the suitability of partial views for partial contexts... Too often the attempt to devise moral theories and systems that can encompass all problems leads to so much vagueness, unclarity, grandiosity, and indeterminacy in applying them that these theories and systems are actually applied to almost nothing."

"Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning f Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of the question."

"Teaching is more difficult that learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, let nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information."

"Every nationalism is metaphorically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome though mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system."

"The world is what I share with others."

"We are too late for the gods and too early for Being. Being’s poem, just begun, is man."

"Thinking should catch sight of what can be heard. Thinking is a fair hearing that catches a glimpse."

"But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history."

"Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a being."

"Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day."

"Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time."

"Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative."

"The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner."

"Since time itself is not movement, it must somehow have to do with movement.Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable, change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change? Does it here give itself as itself in what it is? Can an axplacation of time starts here guarantee that time will thereby provide as it were the fundamental phenomena that determine it in its own being?"

"Transcendence constitutes selfhood. "

"True time is four-dimensional."

"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."

"Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."

"The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being."

"We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time."

"A science?s level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In these immanent crises of the sciences the relation of positive questioning to the matter in question becomes unstable. Today tendencies to place research on new foundations have cropped up on all sides in the various disciplines."

"All of our decisions will continue to be made for us by the unnoticed forces of the cultures in which we live. We may not be told which spouse to 'choose' or which job to take, but how free are we to reject both marriage and work as basic styles of life? How have we been carried along so successfully by culture without noticing it?"

"And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him."

"Being is only Being for Dasein."

"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."

"As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself."

"Body', 'soul', and 'spirit' may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limits their ontological indefiniteness may not be important. When, however, we come to the question of man's Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess--kinds of being whose nature has not as yet been determined. And even if we should attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed."

"Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter."

"Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot."

"Being-in is not a ?property? which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could just be just as well as it could be with it. It is not the case that man ?is? and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ?world??a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never ?proximally? an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ?relationship? towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ?meet up with? Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world"

"But if the self is conceived ?only? as a way of the being of this being, then that seems tantamount to volatizing the true ?core? of Da-sein. But such fears are nourished by the incorrect preconception that the being in question really has, after all, the kind of being of something objectively present, even if one avoids attributing to it the massive element of a corporeal thing. However, the ?substance? of human being is not the spirit as the synthesis of body and soul, but existence."

"But if we notice our conformity, inauthenticity, and lostness, perhaps we have the possibility of emerging from our cultural cocoon and creating lives that we clearly own. Initially we are creatures of our genetic make-up and cultural conditioning. And if we do not notice our conformity and find ways to retrieve our beings, we will remain in our culturally-given, inauthentic selves all our lives. However, in addition to being products of human culture, we are also our powerful and pervasive internal threat-to-being. On this foundation, we can begin to construct our Authentic Existence."

"But nowhere does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already there - and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one?s breath - and yet it is nowhere."

"Dasein is a being which I myself am, its being is in each case mine."

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."

"Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Daseinhas always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another?In these characteristics of being which we have discussed ? everyday being-among-one-another, distantiality, averageness, leveling down, publicness, disburdening of one?s being, and accommodation ? lies the initial ?constancy? of Da-sein. This constancy pertains not to the enduring objective presence of something, but to the kind of being of Daseinas being-with."

"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology."

"For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely ?What basic character do beings manifest?? or ?How may the being of beings be characterized?? but ?What is this ?being? itself?? The decisive question is that of ?the meaning of being,? not merely that of the being of beings."

"By ?Others? we do not mean everyone else but me?those over against whom the ?I? stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself?those among whom one is too? By reason of this with-like Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others."

"But what is great can only begin great."

"Death is only the ?end? of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein's totality is closed round. The other ?end?, however, is the ?beginning?, the ?birth?. Only that entity which is ?between? birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking? Dasein has [so far] been our theme only in the way in which it exists ?facing forward?, as it were, leaving ?behind? all that has been. Not only has Being-towards-the-beginning remained unnoticed; but so too, and above all, has the way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and death."

"Eternity, not as a static ?now,? nor as a sequence of ?nows? rolling off into the infinite, but as the ?now? that bends back into itself. ? Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time."

"Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein."

"Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist."

"He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors"

"Form displays the relation [to beings] itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open."

"From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today?s literature is, for instance, largely destructive."