On Being

by Inah Robles

12 July 2013
Discussed text: Heidegger, "What is Philosophy?"

I have two insights about Heidegger's work - (1) the immensity of Being and (2) its forgetting.
Honestly, I've been having difficulty in understanding the reading because it uses being in many different senses and ways. One thing that makes it difficult to understand is the sheer immensity of Being. It must have been very challenging for Heidegger to write about the topic of Being, knowing that many aspects of Being cannot be encapsulated in human language or even comprehended by human rationality.

My struggle as a reader to understand Heidegger's point could also be a reflection of the struggle of the great Heidegger himself in facing Being. From his very insights, he is able to illustrate how perplexing the phenomenon is, being-in-the-world and being-toward-death.

This leads me to my next insight, about the forgetting of Being. While Heidegger's thoughts are astounding in themselves, it is also striking that I did not reflect about my being-in-the-world until I went through the reading. On one hand, there is a level of simplicity in the concept of the thrown-ness. I cannot deny that there were many things I did not choose - appearance, gender, genetic attributes, economic standing, family, nationality, freedom, and even existence itself. On the other hand, this simple concept has also eluded me. Our merit-based society has come to conceal the thrown-ness or the given-ness of the human person, and sought to explain a great deal of where I am and who I am based on what I have done, instead of what I have been given or how I have been thrown into the world. This is how the forgetting of Being has happened.
With these two things in mind, the immensity and forgetting of Being, I feel that I have developed a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the human person and the human condition.