Being and Humans in Heidegger's Letter on Humanism and in his Contributions to Philosophy

The Question of Identity- (What does it mean to be human? Are humans more important than animals?

Take a minute to relax. Enjoy the lightness, or surprising heaviness, of the paper, the crispness of the ink, and the regularity of the type. There are over four pages in this stack, brimming with the answer to some question, proposed about subjects that are necessarily personal in nature. All of philosophy is personal, but some philosophers may deny this. Discussed here are philosophers that would not be that silly. Two proto-existentialists, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, were keen observers of humanity, and yet their conclusions were different enough to seem contradictory. Discussed here will be Nietzsche’s “preparatory human being” and Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”. Both are archetypal human beings that exist in

Additionally, both Hegel and Nietzsche use the Master / Slave dichotomy to account for identity and difference in the relationship between the powerful subject and the weak object. Both thinkers see identity and morality emerging out of a relationship of conflict. Moreover, in both Hegel and Nietzsche’s narratives, there is a change in the structure of acknowledgment, where the antagonistic relationship allows one side to define itself by negating the other. Both thinkers find that negation is an integral part of identity formation. Hegel and Nietzsche both concur, in dialectical terms, ‘Being’ is represented by the ‘object’, or Master, and the ‘subject’, or Slave, is constantly in the process of ‘Becoming’. From these similarities, is that clear that both 19th century philosophers have made a massive impact on philosophical thought in todays day and age, despite their distinct

Jean Paul Sartre's Existential philosophy posits that is in man, and in man alone, that existence precedes essence. Simply put, Sartre means that man is first, and only subsequently to his “isness” does he become this or that. The implication in Sartre's philosophy is that man must create his own essence: it is in being thrown into the world through consciounsess intent, loving, struggling, experiencing and being in the world that man is alllowed to define itself. Yet, the definition always remains open ended: we cannot say that a human is definitively this or that before its death and indeed, it is the ultimate nothingness of death that being is defined. The concepts that Sartre examines in Being and Nothingness

It is a creature created by God. We are extraordinary machines full of mystery images of God and we were made to serve God. “Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness and creativity” (Sire, 2009). In postmodernism and scientism human beings are created by matter and there is no foundation of human beings from the beginning or why we exist.

Methods and Meditations on First Philosophy is a discourse by Rene Descartes, which largely focuses on the nature of humanity and divinity. This essay is a discussion of this discourse, and will summarize, explain and object to various parts of his work. The majority of this essay focuses on Descartes Sixth Meditation, which includes his argument that corporeal things do exist.

To understand the connection between the occasion for Heidegger’s speech and its content, the setting needs to be clarified. Heidegger’s speech takes place during a memorial of the 175th birthday of famous

A human being is described as being a creature capable of questioning concepts such as “who am I” and “why am I here” in order to give meaning to their existence. (Creech Ph.D., 2015)

Ever since the existence of a civilization, the fundamental question of how and why; to identify and explain the human’s nature and how man is ought to live, has been the key element in philosophical world. Many philosophers provided and made public of how they viewed this world as, and the human in it, and experimented themselves with their approaches, however, no philosophers could possibly bring forth the same views as other philosophers nor yield an answer which do not leave a sense of doubt in our mind. None of the theories were incorrect, but none of them were right in the sense that even two

In the 15th section of The Worldhood of the World, Heidegger writes about the how we can experience things phenomenologically if we pay attention to our everyday environment. He calls this “Being-in-the-world” or our “dealings”. Each entity that we encounter has a Being, and in order to investigate those Beings, we must closely investigate how we deal with the environment. Entities that we encounter are not object, but what gets used, produced and more, such as a tool. Entities are not defined as “Things” rather, the way in which humans interact with them changes their meaning, and transform these entities into something that can be manipulated. Heidegger calls the entities which we encounter “equipment” however, he also

Self-consciousness implies a state of mind that makes the individual aware of how others perceive him, and thus influences how he sees himself. In a sub-section of the Phenomenology of Spirit entitled ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’, Hegel describes the development of self-consciousness, and that while he agrees with the notion put forth by earlier philosophers that an individual is aware of himself as a conscious being and a subject, he also advances the argument that other beings (and fellow subjects) are objects from the point of view of the primary subject (self). In addition, within the realm of the social arena the individual is often locked into a struggle for the affirmation of his

In the stages leading up to self-consciousness, consciousness placed the locus of truth into that which it took to be other than itself. The particular and immediate being of the

As we have explored, Arendt’s understanding of freedom is intimately tied with the traditional Western story of man as social individual equipped with reason living in a world without ultimate answers to questions of meaning and being. Her location within the Kantian tradition of epistemological separation between ultimates and experience means that mankind is always and forever a work in progress, a never completed or perfected possibility. This story results in the need for ‘politics’, which is equatable to individual engagement with the plurality of man and vice versa. The freedom to ‘act’ or to take political ‘action’ in this sphere is neccesary given that no one has access to the fullness of Truth and so all perspetives are legitimate and need a voice in the formation of the best approximation of Mankind. In contrast, the story of man and politics in the totalitian movement is one of the ‘mass’ moving toward an ultimate end within the temporal realm, toward the fullness of what Mankind is intended to be (581). It is a mass rather than individual as the purpose of Man is subsumed within the movement, and so to submit, to be placed in a “band of iron” is to accept the becoming

Aristotle and Heidegger have conflicting views on what a human or beings are. Although, there are some similarities to each of their set of ideas. Aristotle has a clear hierarchical framework classifying the differences between humans, animals, and plants. Heidegger opposes this strict definitions by discussing this idea of “Dasein” which states of being there. Although, their approaches to this topic are different with the types of question one asks and how they theorize about what is a being. There is key similarities that they discuss almost two thousand years apart. Aristotle and Heidegger are two philosophers that have tackled the enormous question, what is it to be a being? This paper discusses the two different approaches to defining this long standing question.

To understand Martin Heidigger's response to Modernity one would have to examine the relationship between their notions of Man. Martin Heidigger's concept of Man, a being-in-the world, is very different from the Modern view of man as a thinking being. One believes that understanding comes from a purely subject-object perspective wherein the understanding of the world around us is performed by our internal, completely separate, “I” because it is perfect and known innately while the other believes that to be a being is to actively “Be”, which is the same as Heidigger's notion of Being, and to Be is to exist or to be engaged in the world therefore connecting being, Being and the world forming the concept of Dasein or a being-in-the-world.