What is Ontology and Why Does it Matter? Beginning with Heidegger’s Being and Time.

This week, we have the first installment of our exploration of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) (See my Welcome post for some context on this series). Today, we are beginning only with the first page of the book. 

Welcome to Ontological Perplexity

Being and Time opens with a couple lines from an enigmatic dialogue by Plato called The Sophist. The characters are considering various ways to distinguish between the different kinds of things that exist, for example, between the non-physical concepts we use to think about the world, and the physical world itself.

But the path of such fundamental reflection is perilous and exhausting. Switchbacks and dead ends abound. One of the characters eventually declares:

“We, who used to think we understood being, have now become perplexed.”

Heidegger invokes these lines to inspire us to drop our pretensions about what we already “know” about being. The lines are a solicitation to enter into our own mood of ontological perplexity. Only through cultivating such perplexity can we embark upon such a fundamental inquiry.

Plato’s dialogues are among the first systematic reflections in ontology, the study of being. Being and Time joins and reignites this conversation.

Heidegger frames his ontological project around what he calls “the question of the meaning of being” or simply “the question of being.” Ultimately, Heidegger aims to show us that pursuing this question of being requires completely rethinking the question of human being: What are we?

Fundamentally rethinking the question of human being requires bracketing and putting out of play all previous definitions of ourselves, especially the ones that we inherited from our parents, our religions, our philosophy books, and even our scientific traditions.

In a fascinating twist, Heidegger goes on to argue that such an inquiry into human being demands that we completely reimagine the nature of time along the way. Hence the title of the book.

Being Human is Weird 

What kind of beings are we, such that we get caught up in asking “What is the meaning of being? What are we as human beings?” Why do we even bother to ask these questions? Somehow, for some reason and at some deep level, we seem to have an ongoing concern about being, including a concern for our own being. We care about being. Being gets to us. Being weirds us out.

Here, it is important to listen to the word "being" as a verb, something that we do, not as a noun, a thing that we are.

It turns out that these abstract philosophical conversations about being—what we call “ontology”—are rooted in this primordial concern we have for our own being.

Even so, most of the time we just don’t bother with all of this concern about being. We tend to keep our ontological perplexity stifled. We accept the previous answers that have been given to the question of being, or we just pretend that these questions have nothing to do with us. We busy ourselves with our to-do list instead.

When Does Ontology Matter?

When does it become imperative to connect with and awaken our concern for being? When the world stops making sense.

The mid-1920s when Heidegger wrote Being and Time were a period of tremendous change and upheaval. The mid-2020s—our present moment—are marked by change and disorientation as well. 

Developments in AI, biotechnology, and geopolitics, and questions about the very viability of life on our planet call us to ontological perplexity. They call us to the task of making sense of ourselves and our world anew. 

Thus begins our adventure in exploring Heidegger’s ontology.

Next Time

In the next installment in this series, we will focus on Being and Time, Section 1: “The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being.” In doing so, we will reprise some of the above themes and look deeper into Heidegger’s understanding of why the question of being has been forgotten, why that matters, and what we can do about it.

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