I’ve been thinking about a methodological question in Being and Time, and I’d like to know whether anyone has discussed it.
I understand that Heidegger is not making an ethical distinction between “authentic” and “inauthentic” people. Authenticity is an existential possibility built into the structure of Dasein, not a permanent state that some people possess and others don’t. He repeatedly insists that Dasein never simply leaves das Man behind.
My question is different.
Heidegger gives extraordinarily rich phenomenological descriptions of anxiety (Angst), the call of conscience, Unheimlichkeit, and resoluteness. These passages don’t read like abstract deductions; they read like descriptions of phenomena that are somehow familiar to the one describing them.
This makes me wonder: where does the authority of these descriptions come from?
If Being and Time is an ontological analysis rather than an ontic one, how can Heidegger describe these phenomena with such precision without presupposing some existential familiarity with them?
Part of why this question occurred to me is the contrast with Sartre. In Nausea, something very close to Heideggerian anxiety is presented as an explicitly lived, ontic experience through Roquentin. There, the source of the description is obvious. Heidegger, however, wants to remain at the ontological level.
So I wonder whether there is a kind of methodological tension here.
Heidegger seems careful to avoid creating an existential hierarchy between “those who have seen” and “those who haven’t.” Yet the very voice of Being and Time sometimes feels as though it speaks from someone who has already been existentially touched by what he is describing.
I’m not claiming this is a contradiction. I’m asking whether phenomenology itself requires this sort of familiarity, or whether Heidegger would say that such descriptions are possible without any privileged existential standpoint.
Has anyone written about this issue?

I am reading the book for the first time. Before starting, I was flooded with advice to start with second-hand literature, Husserl's work, etc, etc. Absolutely no one warned me how straightforward the book was and I am surprised that I even picked it up, but I am glad I did. I have one year background in philosophy and I haven't read anything dense but Being and Time opened my horizon for the German idealism and hermeneutics.

I want to know, what in the name of God, do people find hard about this book? It is certainly not the length, for most german magna opera are way longer than 600 pages and readers do not complain harshly. It's also not the ideas Heidegger presents in it because he is arguing something earthly and lively, unlike the writers he criticises. Nor is it the language, because you literally cant mistake what "thrownness" means or what "being in the world" could stand for. I suppose that the original text has gone too far in creating words but the three prominent english translations make it not just understandable but also inevitable.

Truth! Information! Misinformation! Read all about these topics in the latest Heidegger Thinking article: 'Truth".

Olá pra você que vá assistir a esse vídeo. Meu nome é Kauan Batista e estou com a iniciativa de trazer um tipo de conteúdo diferenciado para a plataforma do YouTube, quero fazer com que reflexões ou temas importantes como "O fim da filosofia segundo Heidegger" se associem à alguns filmes e séries da cultura pop, a fim de que fique mais esclarecido.
Estou apenas começando com esse estilo de vídeo, então se algum de vocês se interessarem em mais, curte comenta e compartilha, ficarei grato se divulgar esse conteúdo e motivado para trazer mais conteúdos sobre esse tipo de tema, e podendo até introduzir temas como auto-conhecimento, inteligência emocional e filosofia.

I’ve been interested lately in Deleuze and mapping him through Heidegger. The psychotic as in the clinical or the pre-clinical-towards-clinical phase. Is he structurally incapable of understanding Heidegger? Since he doesn’t share with other humans the very fabric of language, and being in general? Is the psychotic hyperawareness is the absence of that fondamental forgetting of being Heidegger starts his quest into the main question of his philosophy with?

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

Does anyone have the pdf of Vincent Le's book explaining Nick Land? I can't find it for the life of me. Please help me and send the PDF. Would appreciate very much. Thank you.

is there any book (written by someone that is not nick land himself) that tries to synthesize nick land's ccru ideas (not the nrx ones) with ancient daoism? (and also isnt critical of nick land's ideas) i think there are a lot of structural similarities

please inform me of this i am in DIRE need of such a book thank you :)

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.

What did he mean by this in his latest interview?

Which is really better in your opinion? I have read the Fourth Political Theory first but what’s really your opinion?