Heidegger’s Later Philosophy

Abstract

Heidegger’s early strategy for answering the question of Being—his lifelong quest—had been to analyse human being. He eventually decided that this strategy was flawed and called this realisation his ‘Turn’. Although the question of Being remained his focus, he approached it in different ways. He explored the idea of the ‘truth’ of Being as the self-concealing/self-revealing Event in which beings are disclosed. Language became a central concern of Heidegger’s explorations. Through language, the event of Being is preserved and passed on, keeping the world open for human beings. Heidegger investigated art and poetry, finding them to be sites for the disclosure of Being. He also described a meditative style of thinking in which we allow things to be revealed without attempting to reduce them to traditional representations. The later Heidegger also produced many critical insights. Humanism was analysed as a potent form of the Tradition in which standard representations of human being are coupled with programs for character formation. To the extent that these representations are limited, as Heidegger contends, the educational endeavours they inform must be suspect. Heidegger also analysed our fascination with technology. He argued that the essence of technology or ‘enframing’ has become the dominant understanding of Being in the contemporary world. It typically reduces everything to resources and thereby fosters an instrumental mentality that threatens to overshadow our own being, as evident in our perception of ourselves as human resources.