Martin Heidegger
1889-1976 · Phenomenology · Household name
Heidegger was a German philosopher who thought metaphysics had forgotten the plainest question, and reopened it in Being and Time: what does it mean for anything to be at all? He described human life as thrown into a world it never chose and shaped by anxiety and by the knowledge that it ends. Later he cast modern technology as a way of seeing that turns the whole world into stock to be used. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
Signature
The position Heidegger is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ignorance
- Bondage – Bliss
- Human Nature
- Existence Precedes Essence
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature
- leans Harmony (88 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Heidegger refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Knowledge
- Embodied Cognition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Other
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Time
- Kairotic / Phenomenological Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Logos
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Apophatic Pointer
What is the status of paradox? - Role of Emotion
- Cognitive Theory of Emotion
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Existence Precedes Essence
What is human nature?