Comrades

Edmund Husserl

This guy was all about phenomenology, which means that he was all about studying how we perceive the world in our own individual consciousness. I can't say I got behind old Edmund's project, to whom I dedicated my book, Being and Time, but I can say that I admired his thought. Mostly. Sometimes it got a little complicated. Okay, so I basically rejected his methodology and overall objectives. Still, good man, that Eddy.

Immanuel Kant

By no stretch of the imagination am I a Kantian, but I do owe a lot to his project. Special K investigated how we sense, perceive, and think in relation to time. In his view, you couldn't account for the meaning of concepts without first establishing how time informs that meaning. In this he was right—so, so right—but because he neglected the problem of Being, he didn't develop a theory of Dasein, and therefore, he couldn't achieve philosophical insight into how time and thinking are related. If only he had been more like me…

Hannah Arendt

A student of mine at Marburg, Hannah applied my reading of the Western philosophical tradition to the sphere of political philosophy. Like me, she sought to get at the origins of our philosophical concepts, origins that the philosophical tradition has obscured. But whereas I kept my eye on the meaning of existence, she thought more in terms of finding political inspiration for the future. She wanted to find and redeem elements of the past that would help humanity move into a better future.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey's work on the meaning of interpretation helped me out a lot. Both Wilhelm and I think that interpretation requires a relationship with what is interpreted. For Dilthey, mapping out the mental life of authors is possible only because he thinks we can, in some sense, enter into the minds of others.

I kind of think that, too, only I express it differently—like, really differently. I think that Dasein (my fancy-shmancy name for the human being) already "dwells" with others: Dasein is a "being-with" others. Because of this shared dwelling, we're not alien to each other. We exist in the same Being.

What, you want a translation? Okay, fine: humans can communicate with each other because they live in and are a part of the same big reality.

Max Scheler

A brilliant and regrettably underappreciated mind, Max Scheler, like me, philosophically described the human person not as a Thing or a Substance or a Subject or an Object. Instead—and also like me—he interpreted the human person by way of lived experience. Unlike me, he didn't sufficiently dwell in Dasein.

Rivals

Jean-Paul Sartre

France's premiere existentialist based some of his phenomenological analysis off my work in Being and Time, but it's about as loosely based as the Noah movie on the Bible. Sartre is famous for saying that the meaning of our existence is what we make of it, but this idea differs entirely from my claim that we must seek the meaning of human life in the fact of our existence. (Translation: Why are we alive at all? Why do we exist in the first place?)

Theodor Adorno

Adorno didn't think much of my work, possibly because he thought… insufficiently. He took me to be an enemy of rigorous philosophical argumentation, but only because he had too narrow an understanding of such argumentation. He didn't get my circular style, so the form of my writing was less than philosophical to him.

In a sense, he was right: I'm less concerned with proving that my conclusions are true than I am with working towards them descriptively. It's more important to me to ask the right questions, and sometimes the right questions just don't have answers because they're beyond human comprehension.

Proving things is overrated. You can prove anything if you make the right presuppositions—but whatever you prove will still be based on presuppositions. Take a breath, Theo, and go with the flow of Dasein.

The Western Tradition of Metaphysics

Let's be real: the entire Western tradition of metaphysics has forgotten Being. How did it do that? Well, everybody from Plato onward forgot to ask the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (source).

Most Western philosophers try to come up with definitions of existence, and then they build huge systems based on these definitions. But can we actually define anything if we don't know why we exist in the first place? I say no. If you do that, all you're doing is making up stuff based on your own individual perceptions.

What would happen if you asked a beetle about the meaning of existence? The beetle would probably come up with a lot of stuff based on how it perceives the world, but would that beetle be right to generalize based on its own experience? No more right than we are when we do the same. We always have to remember the great unknown out there—and that's something Western metaphysics forgot.