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A brief wrestle with Heidegger

Writer's picture: Andrew WhiteAndrew White

Gloomy forest
Image: Wix Media

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff necked adversary of thought Martin Heidegger

The desire of trying to discover and pin down a certain, unchanging truth, so that we may confidently stride forward without doubt seems wrong. We will never find certainty, as the ‘true’ way of being is something that never completely reveals itself. This truth is constantly shifting and changing depending on our relationship to it, existing in a mercurial relation to our being. The nature of ‘discovering’ truth is a process of unconcealing, stripping away the layers of mental and physical habits, social necessities and professional distraction in order to more closely experience that which we grasp toward, but which actually hums faintly, deep within us. Truth isn’t found by building, it is found by stripping away what we have already built around us and remembering that we are in fact a part of the world, not apart from the world.


Whilst we often grasp outwardly toward truth, the real nature of discovery is an inward process. A process of removing the noise so that the faint murmur of true Being within us can be allowed to be heard. For Heidigger, truth was not something to be arrived at, to be grasped with certainty, rather it was an ideal that guided us, an ideal that we could aim at, the resulting uncertainty requiring a leap of faith toward that horizon. The necessity of intuition are not lost for Heidegger, they are still critical to understanding in what direction we should aim. In some ways, reason and intuition will clash with one another, but intuition will often be the foundation, unknown to the conscious mind, on which reason builds its capability to grasp and manipulate the world around us for our own purposes. Our attention toward something in the world is drawn almost instantly by autonomic processes, that attention is then evaluated by intuitive emotional reactions long before our conscious, rational mind begins to evaluate the phenomena. Instinct and intuition serves the basis of our interest, with reason then manifesting the potential of that interest into something tangible, usable.


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