Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Martin Heidegger

3 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger is drawn upon in the book not as a direct authority for the ontology of the person, but in a twofold respect: as the thinker who supplied the cue for Spaemann’s concept of the oblivion of the person, and as the thinker of the phainomenon who deepened the methodological self-understanding of phenomenology.

Key Contribution

Heidegger coins the concept of the oblivion of Being (Seinsvergessenheit): Western philosophy has forgotten the question of Being by always attempting to explain Being through entities. Spaemann transfers this diagnosis to the person: modern philosophy has forgotten personhood by always attempting to explain the person through the impersonal — functions, processes, structures. The oblivion of the person is the analogue of the oblivion of Being (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 218 ff.).

Central Ideas in the Book

Oblivion of Being and Oblivion of the Person

The parallel between the oblivion of Being and the oblivion of the person is structural: just as Being is not an entity and therefore cannot be explained through entities, personhood is not person-behavior and cannot be explained through person-behavior. In both cases the fundamental is concealed by the derivative. The archphenomenon (Being or personhood) is reduced to epiphenomena.

Phainomenon: That Which Shows Itself from Itself

Heidegger recalls the original meaning of the Greek phainomenon: that which shows itself from itself. This determination is important for the method of the book: the person shows herself — in the gaze, in the word, in affirmation, in free action. The task of philosophy is not to construct an “actual” essence behind the appearances, but to accept what shows itself as what it is. The phenomenological method (Husserl: “back to the things themselves”) finds its deepest grounding here.

Limits of the Reception

The book receives Heidegger selectively: his analysis of the oblivion of Being and his understanding of the phenomenon are taken up, but not his existential analytic of Dasein. The ontology of the person in the book stands in the tradition of substantial ontology (Aristotle, Thomas, Boethius), not of Heidegger’s existential ontology.

Place in the Book

Heidegger is drawn upon in the chapters Chapter 2: How Can This Question Be Answered? (German) and Chapter 5: What Happens When We Forget Who the Human Being Is? (German). His oblivion of Being serves as the foil against which Spaemann’s oblivion of the person is profiled as an independent yet analogous concept.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 218 ff. (Heidegger’s oblivion of Being as analogy to the oblivion of the person and the concept of the phainomenon).

Further sources:

  • Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927, in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. VIII, ed. E. Husserl, and as offprint Halle a. d. S.: Niemeyer), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962 (the oblivion of Being as analogy to the oblivion of the person; the concept of the phainomenon)

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