Last Time:

Celebrating 100 Years of Martin Heidegger’s “BEING AND TIME” (Dedicated to Edmund Husserl April 8, 1926)

Now the Conclusion

For those of you intellectually impatient like me, here’s the gist:

Preamble:

Paul was an apocalyptic Jew who thought the end times were underway as he saw the resurrected Jesus as the “first fruits” of the general resurrection of souls at the end of the age (1 Cor 15:20-23). His overall goal was to present his pure churches as a wedding gift to Jesus upon Jesus’ soon return. Paul developed a system of spiritual virtues vs fleshly/worldly vices for his churches to live according to as that would be the state of things in the coming kingdom. As an apocalyptic Jew of that time period Paul saw the world under demonic control and that Christ would soon return to destroy God’s enemies. The fleshly vices and the world were to be overcome. The parousia or return of Jesus was thought soon and Paul needed to get his churches ready and pure, even kicking out those who didn’t fall in line, e.g., The Incestuous Man in Corinth (1 Corinthians 5)

Paul hated this world, as Nietzsche noted. Paul said if the dead were not raised we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die (1 Cor 15:32). Paul says “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (NRSVUE).” Paul and his early Christians gave up social status, comfort, and safety to preach the gospel. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then Christian faith is a delusion, and believers are suffering for a lie. Without the resurrection, Christians are “most to be pitied” because they sacrificed earthly pleasures for a future reward that does not exist. In the last post I noted how Heidegger tried to appropriate some of Paul’s concepts in a secular way without Paul’s hatred for this life and this world.

1. Heidegger’s Methodological Reversal:

Fundamental Ontology vs. Disciplinary “Objects of Inquiry.” The post contrasts standard academic disciplines (e.g., anthropology) with Heidegger’s approach. Disciplines start with a pre-given domain or “object of inquiry” (specific categories, methods, and contexts for studying beings like cultures, biology, or kinship) and work within those boundaries. Heidegger inverts this: he begins with the vague pre-understanding of Being itself (which we all have) and the average everyday ways we encounter the world (e.g., using tools like a hammer in a referential totality of purposes). From there, Heidegger uncovers more fundamental existential structures (Being-in-the-world, care/Sorge, temporality) that make any regional ontology or science possible in the first place.

This is phenomenological and hermeneutic: it interprets everydayness to retrieve what tradition (e.g., Cartesian subject-object split) has covered over. Sciences operate at the “ontic” level (studying particular beings); Heidegger does “fundamental ontology.”

2. The Torn Sock Example and Phenomenological Seeing

A vivid illustration (from Heidegger’s Four Seminars): When a sock is intact and on your foot, you don’t notice it as a sock—it’s transparently ready-to-hand in use. When torn, the unity of the sock becomes conspicuous precisely as lost. This “lack” positively reveals the structure that was inconspicuous before. Heidegger uses such breakdowns to train phenomenological attention: seeing how things show up (or withdraw) in contexts.

(The post notes the audience laughed, and Heidegger responded that one must learn to endure the scope of such sentences.)

3. Care (Cura) vs. Acedia (Lack of Care), and Links to Deep Boredom and Authenticity

Drawing on the ancient Roman Myth of Cura (which Heidegger explicitly uses in Being and Time §42), the post argues that Care is the fundamental structure of human existence (Dasein): we are “possessed” by care throughout life, negotiating thrownness (facticity, body/earth) and projection (possibilities, spirit). This ties directly to temporality and finitude.

Acedia (the “noonday demon” of monastic tradition—apathy, restlessness, spiritual sloth) is presented as the breakdown or inauthentic mode of care: fleeing anxiety through distractions (das Man, falling/Verfallensein), leading to deep boredom where the world withdraws into indifference. Yet this crisis can be revelatory—a call back to authentic care by facing freedom and mortality.

The post connects this to thinkers like Benjamin, Huxley, and Nietzsche on boredom/ennui, framing deep boredom as a potential gift for growth (echoing Heidegger’s analyses of moods/Stimmungen like anxiety).

4. Anxiety (Angst), the Uncanny, and the “Big Question Disposition”

Anxiety has no specific object; it discloses Being-in-the-world as such and the “nothing.” This uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) pulls us out of everyday absorption. The post links this to creative/thinker types who feel out of place in the mundane world (examples: Faust, Don Quixote, Spinoza, Borges, etc.) and thus dwell longer in disclosive moods, enabling fundamental questioning.

It relates this to Howard Gardner’s “existential intelligence” (pondering big questions about meaning, death, cosmos) and a “Big Question Disposition”—the passionate drive toward the whole/Big Pictures (meletē tou pantos).

5. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Death and Being-Toward-Death

Death as one’s “ownmost possibility” that cannot be outstripped individuates Dasein and makes existence a unified whole (temporally structured). The post contrasts inauthentic fleeing from finitude with authentic anticipation, drawing parallels to Stoic memento mori, Paul’s theology (e.g., “to live is Christ and to die is gain”), and Nietzsche’s critiques. It highlights how attaching meaning to death gives coherence to life.

Other threads touch on the historicality of Being, the mathematical projection in modern science, Greek vs. modern views of axioms (“common notions” as insights vs. posited rules), and critiques of superficial “obviousness” in thought/debate.

I think the post is celebratory and wide-ranging, blending exegesis of Being and Time with cultural, historical, and personal reflections. It emphasizes Heidegger’s invitation to see phenomenologically and question more primordially.