Heidegger: What the Fuck?

Early Childhood Explorations of Da-sein

When I was a little kid, I asked my mom if fish went to school. My mom inferred that I had heard the phrase “school of fish” on one of my PBS educational programs, and explained to me that the word school meant different things in these contexts, and that, no, fish do not go to school. But this was not the question I was asking her. Even as kid I knew that fish did not go to school. What I was really asking, without fully realizing, was why fish (an all other non-human animals) didn’t go to school, and why humans did. What was it that drove humans to seek knowledge and education? Why weren’t we satisfied with an understanding of the world that allowed us to survive and not much else?

There seems to be something uniquely human about being concerned with questions like why we exist and what our purpose is and what’s going to happen when we die. Heidegger’s ability to give terminology to our existential dread was extremely confusing but once it was explained it was helpful.

My favorite piece of Heidegger’s The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics is the quote “it is in the very nature of philosophy never to make things easier but only more difficult.” It certainly seems in the very nature of Heidegger’s writing never to make things easier but only more difficult. It seems that philosophy occurs almost naturally from our da-sein and mitda-sein. Once we become concerned with our own existence and how that’s different from the existence of other beings, we have to start philosophizing to even begin to understand that. We cannot have full understand simply from sociology because sociology only accounts for our relationship to other beings in society. It does not offer any explanation as to why there is something rather than nothing, or why we are being-toward-death. And since we are da-sein, we have to philosophize.

But to try to answer the question as to why there is something rather than nothing, it is probably just coincidence. There could have been nothing. But once there was something there could no longer be nothing, because that something becomes everything, and everything cannot contain nothing, it must be something. Since nothing and something are incompatible, coincidental existence of something made it impossible for there to be nothing. That’s not a complete answer as it still leaves the question as to why that first something ever became something. So we’re back to square one. Since this question seems impossible to answer, it would be easier to abandon it. But the nature of da-sein drives us to ponder these impossible questions because we are so inherently aware of our own existence. And that concern drives us to philosophize even when it seems like nonsense. This is why philosophy naturally makes things harder and never easier. This is why even as a kid I wanted an explanation for what made humans different from fish and why that difference meant I needed to go to school and fish didn’t.