26 Quotes About Heidegger

Precisely because we have embarked on the great and long venture of demolishing a world that has grown old and of rebuilding it authentically anew, i.e. historically, we must know the tradition. We must know more—i.e. our knowledge must be stricter and more binding—than all the epochs before us, even the most revolutionary. Only the most radical historical knowledge can make us aware of our extraordinary tasks and preserve us from a new wave of mere restoration and uncreative imitation.

The past of authentic history indeed was, but it is by no means over and done with. It is not done with because it is not done with us. And because we are the historical beings that we are, we are not done with it.

Being and Time begins by quoting a great philosophical authority not for his knowledge but for his perplexity, then tells us that we don’t understand the question, and demonstrates this by giving us the answer which means nothing to us at this point.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

Heidegger’s philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent.

In opposition to the absolutely and directly false Heideggerian theses attributing to Aquinas an onto-theo-logical metaphysics of Being, Aquinas's actual and genuine conception of God is articulated in the famous formulation according to which God is ipsum esse per se subsistens, Being itself subsisting through itself.God is not a being (ens,) among other beings, thus not anything like the highest, first, or maximal being.(p. 43)

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

Turning away from a flight from death, you see a horizon of opportunity that puts you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakeable joy.

Heidegger’s concept for the kind of being we ourselves are is Dasein. Literally it means ‘being-there’.We are the sort of beings who are there, in the world. What characterizes Dasein is that its existence is a concern for it in its existence.