Nothing quite rivals the prose in his masterpiece Being and Time, which is filled with complex

compound German words like ‘Seinsvergessenheit’ ‘Bodenständigkeit’ and ‘Wesensverfassung’.

Yet beneath the jargon, Heidegger tells us some simple, even at times homespun truths

about the meaning of our lives, the sicknesses of our time and the routes to freedom.

We should bother with him.

He was born, and in many ways remained, a rural provincial German, who loved picking

mushrooms, walking in the countryside and going to bed early. He hated television, aeroplanes,

pop music and processed food. At one time, he'd been a supporter of Hitler, but saw the

error of his ways. Much of his life he spent in a hut in the woods, away from modern civilisation.

He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of diseases of the soul.

Firstly: We have forgotten to notice we're alive.

We know it in theory, of course, but we aren't day-to-day properly in touch with the sheer

mystery of existence, the mystery of what Heidegger called ‘das Sein’ or in English,

'Being'.

It's only at a few odd moments, perhaps late at night, or when we're ill and have been

alone all day, or are on a walk through the countryside, that we come up against the uncanny

strangeness of everything: why things exist as they do, why we are here rather than there,

why the world is like it is.

What we’re running away from is a confrontation with the opposite of Being, what Heidegger

called: ‘das Nichts’ (The Nothing).

The second problems is we have forgotten that all Being is connected

Most of the time, our jobs and daily routines make us egoistic and focused. We treat others

and nature as means and not as ends.

But occasionally (and again walks in the country are particularly conducive to this realisation),

we may step outside our narrow orbit - and take a more expansive view.

We may sense what Heidegger termed 'the Unity of Being', noticing for example that we,

and that ladybird on the bark, and that rock, and that cloud over there are all in existence right now

and are fundamentally united by the basic fact of our common Being.

Heidegger values these moments immensely - and wants us to use them as the springboard to

a deeper form of generosity, an overcoming of alienation and egoism and a more profound

appreciation of the brief time that remains to us before ‘das Nichts’ claims us in turn.

The third problem is we forget to be free and to live for ourselves

Much about us isn’t of course very free. We are - in Heidegger’s unusual formulation

- ‘thrown into the world’ at the start of our lives: thrown into a particular and

narrow social milieu, surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices and practical

necessities not of our own making.

The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this ‘Thrownness’ (‘Geworfenheit’ as he puts it in german)

by understanding it. We need to grasp our psychological, social and professional

provincialism - and then rise above it to a more universal perspective.

In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from ‘Uneigentlichkeit’ to

‘Eigentlichkeit’ (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start

to live for ourselves.

And yet most of the time, for Heidegger, we fail dismally at this task. We merely surrender

to a socialised, superficial mode of being he called ‘they-self’ (as opposed to ‘our-selves’).

We follow The Chatter (‘das Gerede’), which we hear about in the newspapers, on

TV and in the large cities Heidegger hated to spend time in.

What will help us to pull away from the ‘they-self’ is an appropriately intense focus on our own

upcoming death. It’s only when we realise that other people cannot save us from ‘das

Nichts’ that we’re likely to stop living for them; to stop worrying so much about what

others think, and to cease giving up the lion’s share of our lives and energies to impress

people who never really liked us in the first place.

When in a lecture, in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we should better lead our lives,

he replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time ‘in graveyards'.

It would be lying to say that Heidegger’s meaning and moral is ever very clear. Nevertheless,

what he tells us is intermittently fascinating, wise and surprisingly useful. Despite the

extraordinary words and language, in a sense, we know a lot of it already. We merely need

reminding and emboldening to take it seriously, which the odd prose style helps us to do.

We know in our hearts that it is time to overcome our ‘Geworfenheit’, that we should become

more conscious of ‘das Nichts’ day-to-day, and that we owe it to ourselves to escape

the clutches of ‘das Gerede’ for the sake of ‘Eigentlichkeit’ - with a little help

from that graveyard.