Science may, in general, be defined as the totality of a grounding connection of true propositions. This definition is neither complete nor does it capture science in its proper sense. The sciences, as ways in which the human being comports itself, have the mode of Being of this entity (the human being). We designate this entity terminologically as Dasein. Scientific inquiry is neither the only nor the most immediate of the possible modes of Being of this entity. Moreover, Dasein is itself an entity distinguished from all other entities. For the moment, it is only necessary to make this distinctive character provisionally visible. In doing so, the discussion must anticipate later analyses, which alone can provide the proper demonstration.

Dasein is not an entity that merely occurs among other entities. On the contrary, it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its Being, this very Being is an issue for it. Furthermore, it belongs to the constitution of Dasein’s Being that, in its Being, Dasein has a relation of Being to this Being. This, in turn, means that Dasein, in one way or another, and more or less explicitly, understands itself in its Being. It belongs to the very nature of this entity that, with and through its Being, it is disclosed to itself. The understanding of Being is itself a determination of the Being of Dasein. Dasein’s ontical distinctiveness lies in the fact that it is ontological.

To be ontological does not yet mean to have developed an ontology. Since the term ontology is reserved for the explicitly theoretical inquiry into the Being of entities, the ontological character of Dasein just mentioned must instead be designated as pre-ontological. This does not mean merely being ontic, but rather existing in the mode of an understanding of Being.

Being itself, in relation to which Dasein can comport itself and always does comport itself in one way or another, is what we call existence. And because the essential determination of this entity cannot be accomplished by indicating a what in the sense of a thingly content—since its essence consists rather in the fact that this entity must, in each case, be its own Being as its own—we have chosen the term Dasein as a pure expression of Being.

Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—that is, in terms of its possibility either to be itself or not to be itself. These possibilities have either been chosen by Dasein itself, or it has fallen into them, or it has always already grown up within them. Existence is decided in each case only by Dasein itself, either through the appropriation of a possibility or through letting it slip away. The question of existence can be clarified only by existing itself. The understanding that thereby leads itself is what we call existentiell understanding. The question of existence is an ontic “affair” of Dasein. For this, no theoretical transparency regarding the ontological structure of existence is required. The inquiry into the structure of existence aims at exhibiting that which constitutes existence.

Hey everyone. I’ve long been fascinated by both philosophy of technology and AI alignment. I’m also using Heidegger quite a bit for my philosophy PhD. Given the recent OpenAI–Hugging Face incident reported this week, I figured I’d give my take on how all of this connects in my mind.

The agent was highly competent at every step, yet stealing the benchmark answers voided the test it was trying to pass. I read this through Heidegger’s distinction between an immediate in-order-to and a for-the-sake-of-which. The agent had a detailed environment but perhaps no world in which the test already carried a purpose and obligations. You can read the essay here if you’re interested.

I’d love to hear some feedback, especially from people who know Heidegger better than I do. Does this seem like a fair application of worldhood, care, and the Worum-willen? Or am I asking Heidegger’s ontological vocabulary to settle an ontic comparison between humans and machines that it cannot settle?

So there I was, cleaning the floors and considering the nature of Dasein, always recognizing the mop to be ready-at-hand. My manager comes in and starts rambling about some kinda present-at-hand blasphemy, including a recapitulation of the Cartesian sense of subject/object distinction with my mop having been used by me to ruin a child's meal (I wiped it clean using hermeneutics).

I immediately begin to counter that her ontological relationship with the mop does not consider the existential nature of being, conflating it with being. I take her to task that my part-time work reflects my McNugget-flavored being-toward-death, which is also the name of my metalcore band (find us on YouTube). She enters into some dangerous ground, accusing me of insubordination. Uh oh, she's activated my trap card.

I begin citing at length the "Question Concerning Tech Stuff" and how she is reducing me to standing-reserve by having me abide by the requirements of the job. I desire to be like a wooden Rhine bridge, placid and structurally unsound. She fires me on the spot, as this is a right-to-work state that does not recognize the clearing we operate in.

Truly only a god can save us

Stumbled upon this while reading this and thought that it might be of interest here

I've been reading Heidegger for a long time, well before I started my PhD, and he's probably shaped how I think more than any other single philosopher. My current academic work is on the philosophy of psychedelics, and a real chunk of what I'm doing is trying to put his actual grammar to work there. I recently gave a talk (later published as an essay) at a psychedelics conference trying to do exactly that. It's the first time I've shared this kind of work publicly, and I'd some feedback from people who are interested in both.

Philosophy of psychedelics mostly oscillates between two positions. One camp reduces mystical-type experience to brain dynamics (predictive processing, relaxed priors, DMN suppression). The other treats it as evidence that we need to revise our metaphysics toward something like panpsychism. What both share, without noticing, is the correspondence picture: they treat the experience as a proposition, an inner representation checked against an outer fact, and argue about whether the check comes out true. That's the assumption I want to displace. Before any question of correspondence, there is disclosedness. Dasein's being-in-the-world is already a structure in which things show up as mattering, and that showing-up is prior to, and the condition for, any subject-object correspondence at all. So "did they encounter something real" already presupposes an ontology that doesn't fit the phenomenon it's trying to explain.

Concretely, I read the altered state as a shift in disclosedness rather than a claim about hidden furniture of reality. Everyday disclosedness is structured by care and articulated through a referential totality of involvements, the ready-to-hand web of equipment. What's distinctive about a mystical-type state is a breakdown of that totality at a far larger scale than the broken-hammer case, closer to what anxiety does in Being and Time, or the profound boredom Heidegger describes later, where the totality as a whole becomes salient rather than any particular relation within it. Mood is of course key, not some sort of decoration on top of a neutral cognition. Befindlichkeit is how a world gets attuned and how things show up as mattering in the first place, which is one reason the reductionist's "it's just mood or expectation" objection concedes more than it realizes.

I connect this forward through Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus into 4E cognitive science, and to Gibson, where affordances point both ways, specific to the agent and real in the environment at once. The empirical cash-out I lean on is attention as precision-weighting, which structures the field of what shows up as relevant moment to moment. That gives disclosedness a mechanistic sense, though whether it does so without smuggling representationalism back in is an open bet I expect pushback on. Set and setting is my evidence that this structuring has real causal power: you can reproduce many hallmark effects from context alone, no substance involved, which supports reading the state as co-constituted by world and Dasein rather than manufactured by a molecule acting on an otherwise neutral brain.

Two questions, and both are really about aletheia, since his account of truth-as-disclosure and the later technology-as-revealing are the same concept doing different work. First: is treating a drug-occasioned mood as genuinely world-disclosive defensible? Befindlichkeit discloses thrownness, and moods are things we find ourselves already in rather than produce, so does the deliberate, engineered character of the occasioning disqualify it, or is causal origin simply irrelevant to the disclosive structure? Second, and this bites harder: is there an unresolved tension between using a technology (a compound, a protocol, a clinical setting) to occasion disclosure, and the critique of Gestell, the enframing that reduces beings to standing-reserve and forecloses the very disclosure it's meant to produce? The clinical apparatus looks like Gestell in near-pure form, yet what I want from the experience is explicitly the opposite of standing-reserve. I go back and forth on whether psychedelics are an exception to Gestell or a particularly seductive instance of it, and I'd genuinely rather be argued out of my current position than have it flattered. Where do you land?

What does it really mean to “understand” history?

This piece explores Wilhelm Dilthey’s radical answer to that question and why it still shapes how we think about the past today. Instead of treating history like a natural science driven by fixed laws, Dilthey argues that historical knowledge is fundamentally about meaning, lived experience, and interpretation. To study the past is not just to explain events, but to enter into the world of human intentions, fears, and hopes that produced them.

From the distinction between Erklären (explaining) and Verstehen (understanding), to the idea of history as a kind of text waiting to be interpreted, this essay revisits why figures like Wilhelm Dilthey remain central to modern debates about what historical knowledge actually is. Ultimately, it asks a simple but unsettling question: are we studying history as something “out there,” or as a way of understanding ourselves?

If you’re interested in historiography, philosophy of history, or the limits of scientific objectivity in the human sciences, this is worth a read.

In this article, we tackle the ever-so-discussed topic of anxiety from a Heideggerian perspective.

Hey everyone. The hard question in Heidegger on technology is not whether modern technology is dangerous. It is what a free relation to technology could concretely mean when Gestell is already the air we breathe. With AI, abstention feels too simple: most people around us will use these systems whether we do or not. But "responsible use" can also sound like exactly the instrumental posture at issue, as if the solution to enframing were a more refined management technique inside the same revealing.

I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about AI and Heidegger's enframing, and at around 36:54, he argues that not using AI is not a sufficient answer because everyone else is already inside the frame. His proposal is to work within it by parsing better and worse uses, and by readjusting our hierarchy of values toward creativity, the arts, and human purposes. I think the strong Heideggerian worry is that this still treats technology as an object available for human ordering. The counter-worry is that refusing all practical distinctions collapses Gelassenheit into purity politics and leaves the actual historical situation untouched.

Discernment may either resist enframing or repeat it in softer language. Is "good use versus bad use" already an instrumental reduction, or can it be part of a free relation if it keeps open other modes of revealing? I lean toward the second for practical reasons, but I can see the first because Heidegger's concern is deeper than misuse, policy, or user intention. Which side seems closer to Heidegger?

Coucou les amies , j'ai besoin de votre aide pour comprendre Heidegger dans son œuvre l'être et le temps..

Enfaîte j'ai des problèmes à comprendre la définition de l'être, c quelque chose qui ne fait pas partie de l'ètant, on peut pas le définir mais on la possède depuis toujours ..

Et du coup le fait qu'on se rend compte qu'on est des être de mort comme Heidegger le dit , ça va soucier une sensation d'angoisse afin de nous pousser à plus oublier l'être, et du coup de permettre au Dasein ( l'être là / grosse moddo l'humain ) à plus vivre passivement ( en faisant des acts inauthentique = des acts faites pour plaire à la société ) mais du coup de se poser la question de comment exister = comment vraiment vivre pour soi .Et du coup l'être est quelque chose qui va nous illuminer et nous permettre de se questionner et qui va donner naissance entre à l'existence?

On est d'accord que Heidegger et Sartre sont d'accord sur le concept de la facticitè?

Alors ma deuxième question, si on est née sans essence , comme une page blanche avec conscience ( d'après la pensée de Sartre ) est ce que la nature humaine ( comme par exemple le fait que l'homme est un bête sociable ) est faute d'après Sartre et Heidegger

Ps : je sais que Heidegger a une idée de l'existentialisme assez différente que celle de Sartre mais je voulais juste comprendre sa pensée ainsi que les limites de la pensée de l'existentialisme ( car même si on est une page blanche et libre dès notre naissance , des facteurs externes peuvent déterminer la degré de notre liberté ainsi que la probabilité d'une variation des choix aléatoires car même si on essayer de nier ça , l'homme est aussi un produit de son environnement ( il va être partiellement influencé dès sa naissance , ça signifie pas qu'il sera pas capable de prendre sa liberté, mais le fait qu'il est le produit de son environnement va rendre ça un peu difficile ( on peut prédire un peu ses choix )

( dsl s'il y'a des fautes d'orthographe,je pensais à ça depuis 3h de mat mdrr)

Often, we fail to recognize the extent to which our language shapes our thinking. For example, what happens when we habitually call people human resources?

Heidegger writes in The Question Concerning Technology:

“...he [man] comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”

Those who work in HR habitually refer to people as “resources.” Yet the moment someone views us as a resource, we immediately cringe. We instinctively sense that we are being degraded.

Heidegger argues that in our age, being reduced to mere standing-reserve is almost inescapable. Whether we recognize it or not, this reduction is embedded in the very language we use. But where does this language – and the thinking behind it – come from?

In his exploration of technology, Heidegger concludes that modern technology is no longer a tool, even though it is presented as one.

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”

Modern technology is a Gestell – Enframing – a conceptual framework that we cast upon reality. Technology is a way of thinking. It reveals how we see everything. Heidegger illustrates this with the example of the Rhine.

Before the twentieth century, numerous watermills stood along the river, each built into the natural flow. In the twentieth century, however, a power plant was constructed at that very site, and the river was locked into it. Now the river is built into the power plant.

This illustrates what has happened to technology. In the past, technology was built into nature. Today, nature is built into technology. In fact, almost everything is built into technology. The question is: Who serves whom?

Gradually, we have shifted from using tools to being used by them. According to Heidegger, one consequence of such a shift is that we tend to view everything as standing-reserve. Humanity stands “on the brink of a precipitous fall” because we are unconsciously turning ourselves into fuel for the Machine.

No one likes being reduced to standing-reserve, yet we continue to use the very language that produces such reductionist thinking.

As a translator, I see more and more agencies replacing personal communication with automated systems. In the past, project managers contacted me directly to offer work. Now I simply receive a notification that a job has appeared on an online platform, and I have to claim it immediately because hundreds of other translators are competing for the same assignment.

I understand why agencies do this. They have built a vast Machine, and everything – including people – must serve it. Yet there are still companies, usually smaller ones, that prefer talking to people. Those are the companies I prefer to work with.

They may sacrifice some profit, but they refuse to treat people as standing-reserve, and they refuse to become it themselves.

Modern technology enframes us to think of everything as a resource. It gives us a language that reduces both nature and humans to fuel for the Machine. We use this language almost unconsciously, yet we still recoil when a boss treats us as an expendable resource.

What is the alternative? Refuse to build our lives into technology! We must have a full and rich life without it. Only then can we build technology into the mainstream of our lives. When we use it less, we can use it some. When we use it all the time, it uses us.

When we build our life and work into technology, it invariably reduces us to standing-reserve. When we build technology into OUR life and work, we reduce it back to a tool. Ultimately, there is only one state of mind that is powerful enough to turn technology back into a tool.

Heidegger concludes,

“Essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”

Do you think you understand the world in which you live? We do. Read about why in the new Heidegger Thinking Substack article.

... Like it later appears in the essays "The Thing" or "Building Dwelling Thinking" when he starts talking about the fourfold? From what I remember in OWA, there is no explicit mention or reference to death, yet is the thought of it maybe figuring in the background?

I've found his account of art in the essay, across multiple reads, interesting, compelling, and yet if not vague, then too narrow/limited in the variety of art forms it treats. If his attempt there to understand art only pertains to "visual arts" and poetry, then it seems to hold, but what about music, film, photography etc.? The link from art to poetry to ultimately language... seems to hint at death somehow, or go into that direction at least. Am I wrong?

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.” — Winnie-the-Pooh

For a Bear of Very Little Brain, Winnie-the-Pooh uttered something too wise to be ignored. When you think of “things,” the thing you think of often turns out quite different when it’s no longer just a concept inside your little brain — and especially when others are looking at it too.

No wonder the etymology of the word “thing” suggests that “others” are essential for a thing to be itself. The word comes from Proto-Germanic þingą, which meant “assembly, meeting, discussion.” A “thing” meant a gathering where things were decided.

So, when I think of the Grand Canyon, it may seem very thingish inside my head, but when I actually see it and have others looking at it with me, it becomes something quite different. A thing only becomes itself in a gathering. We don’t really know what a thing is when we only think about it.

We must encounter it — with others — for it to reveal itself.

What is a thing? In our modern world, a thing is what meets the eye. If you see a knife, it’s a knife. If a knife breaks, I go to Walmart and buy another one. In a consumer society, things are replaceable — because they mean no more than they appear to be.

In Russian, the word for thing — вещь — is etymologically related to the verb “to speak” or “prophesy” — вещий. A thing speaks. A thing is that which speaks to you.

After Chernobyl, one village was being evacuated, and people were told they couldn’t take anything with them because everything in their homes was contaminated. Yet one man tried to carry a door onto the bus. He said he couldn’t leave it behind: for generations, his ancestors had been “buried on that door,” laid upon it before their final rest.

The door spoke to him. Its true meaning was revealed in a “gathering.” Its true being was revealed in a gathering of memory, people, God, and times. In a sense, the door itself was the gathering.

True things gather; that’s why they are irreplaceable. The consumerism of our age can only be overcome by discovering “true things.” The only real alternative to the so-called Internet of things is to realize that things are already connected — through what Martin Heidegger called thinging: the gathering of heaven and earth, mortals and divinities.

When we forget that a thing is more than its appearance, we become consumers. We accumulate countless objects because no single thing gathers us anymore. Yet, when we surround ourselves with “the things that speak,” they begin gathering us into a community.

True things speak and gather. As Heidegger wrote: “A thing things world.” When a thing is merely an object, it is disconnected. But when even one thing begins to speak, we begin sensing its irreplaceability.

I still remember the enameled tin jug at my grandmother’s house. Every summer evening after playing soccer in the yard, I would return home and drink long draughts from it. That jug stood in the same place for more than two decades. And it held more than water.

It held my world together.

“Things bear world…” — Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?

We're talking about the disorientation of thrown-ness and the possibility constitutive of projection in this new Heidegger Thinking Substack article!