Sublime

Heidegger believed that modern technology uprooted and dislodged man from his time and place and thus his spiritual grounding. When he said “only a god can save us,” he feared that something the pre-Socratic Greeks grasped was being lost or forgotten through the general triumph of technology. He called this “Seinsvergessenheit,” or the obliviousnes

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger.

A student of Edmund Husserl’s, Martin Heidegger, in his most famous book, Being and Time, attempted to reconcile the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity through the notion of Dasein, a German word that means being here and is sometimes interpreted to mean presence.

As George Steiner puts it, speaking eloquently of Heidegger: As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and posi