Caring comes first, because it’s caring about things that “unconceals” them in your day-to-day life, so that they can be known about. He believed that, before you could know the truth about things, you had to care about them. In “The Essence of Truth,” meanwhile, Heidegger proposed a different and, to my mind, a more realistic idea of truth than any I’d encountered before. These words, for him, captured the way that we try, amidst the flow of time, to “take a stand” on what it means to exist. For Heidegger, human being was an activity, with its own unique qualities, for which he had invented names: thrownness, fallenness, projection. Mountains might outlast us, but they can’t out-be us.

(A human being, he writes, is the “entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue.”) This gives us depth. Instead of subjects and objects, Heidegger wanted to talk about “beings.” The world, he argued, is full of beings-numbers, oceans, mountains, animals-but human beings are the only ones who care about what it means to be themselves. It wasn’t religious, and it wasn’t scientific it got its arms around everything, from rocks to the soul. Heidegger had developed his own way of describing the nature of human existence. It was as if, having been trapped on the ground floor of a building, I had found an express elevator to the roof, from which I could see the stars. Then, in the course of a year, I read Heidegger’s 1927 masterwork, “Being and Time,” along with “The Essence of Truth,” a book based on a series of lectures that Heidegger gave in 1932. Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place-never both. This had turned out to be an impossible subject. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound-a tendentious task, but there you are-one of them would be reading Heidegger.

Heidegger time