Episode 10, The Question of Being: Why do things exist rather than not?
Description
This episode is the first of two where I introduce the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his essay "The Question Concerning Technology."
Heidegger's goal was to highlight the need for humans to once again question the uncanny fact of existence itself. Rather than focusing on how "we know" elements of existence or, as he puts it, Being, he wants us to instead ask the more fundamental question of why things exist at all.
I also provide some context for Heidegger's work, particularly the intellectual culture in Germany after WWI and the associated rise of the National Socialists. Unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger was a Nazi, although for what may seem very strange reasons. He thought that the Nazis would destroy the technological infrastructure that was somehow forcing the German Volk to live in the inauthentic world of the post-Enlightenment.
He hope that with technology swept aside Germany and its people could once again live in a world free of its assimilating demands. How wrong he was.
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