Martin Heidegger is without doubt the most incomprehensible German philosopher that ever lived nothing quite rivals the prose in his masterpiece being in time which is filled with complex-compound German words like zines Ferguson Haight Borden stand a kite and visions for fussing 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 left 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 civilization he diagnosed modern humanity our suffering from a number of diseases of the soul firstly we have forgotten to notice were alive we know it in theory of course but we aren't day-to-day properly in touch with a sheer mystery of existence the mystery of what Heidegger called design 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're 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 best needs than nothing the second problem is we've 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 realization 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 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 death needs 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 thrown us give off and height as he put 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 Heidegger Ian journey away from UN agency height to ican't Lee height from inauthenticity to authenticity we will in essence start to live for ourselves and yet most of the time for Heidegger we failed dismally at this task we merely surrender to a socialized superficial mode of being he called they self as opposed to ourselves we follow the chatter the skier leader in German which we hear about in the newspapers on TV and in the large cities that 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 realize that other people cannot save us from the Snead's 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 Ursula that we should simply aim to spend more time in graveyards it would be lying to say that Heidegger's meaning and moral 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 embolden akitsu riously which the odd prose style may help us to do we know in our hearts that it's time to overcome our give off and height that we should become more conscious of deaths needs day to day and that we owe it to ourselves to escape the clutches of dusk gear leader for the sake of eigentlich height with a little help from that graveyard you