A Simple Guide to Being and Time has the admirable goal of making Heidegger digestible. It is hard to say whether the author succeeds here, since even Foulds’ “simple” treatment is fairly recondite. My subjective experience of reading this is similar to what I imagine mud wrestling must be like –  just when I think I have a grasp of the ideas, I slip and suddenly find myself pinned face down in an intellectual quagmire. Concepts aren’t introduced linearly, and Foulds often uses precise language in precisely different ways. I truly don’t think he is to blame for this – uniquely among introductory Heidegger commentators, he really does try to engage with the nuance and complexity inherent to Being and Time. In any case, since I first dipped into the Simple Guide a few months ago, Heidegger’s thought has embedded itself in my thinking, so regardless of whether this is a good or bad book (I lack the experience to pass judgment), I have derived an enormous amount of value from it.

Now let me preface any further discussion with two disclaimers and a housekeeping note. Firstly, I think it is hard to discuss Heidegger without sounding like a snob. Secondly, Heidegger is not straightforward, and there is likely a hefty amount of Dunning-Kruger in this review. Please grant me some indulgence, therefore. Housekeeping: all Heidegger-specific technical terminology is italicised in its first use.

Heidegger’s project is to understand Being-with-a-capital-B. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you’re in good company, for Heidegger believes that none of the philosophers of the prior two millennia had adequately considered that question. Instead, they had been exploring what human beings are (ontology, philosophy of mind), how they should behave (ethics), and how they can know things (epistemology). Each of these avenues essentially treats humans as things to be deconstructed, without trying to understand human Being. The Continental tradition makes some progress, but even the phenomenology of Husserl (Heidegger’s mentor) dances around the question of what human Being is – by “bracketing” out the real world to understand subjective impressions, Husserl is still saying “there is this thing I call me; what is the precise nature of the impressions being made on this thing”. Heidegger is trying to deeply understand what it means to Be, and in particular, what human Being means.

The core concept of Being and Time is Dasein (translated as ”there-being” or “being-there”). Dasein is the type of Being that humans are. What makes Dasein special is that we engage with the world in terms of different possibilities for existence (we are ”Possibility Incarnate”), and we are able to understand (disclose) the Being of other objects and ourselves. A stick does not inherently have possibilities for existence – those possibilities are imbued on it by humans using it to achieve different possibilities in our existence: playing fetch with a dog, using it as a walking stick, using it as a weapon. Heidegger rejects the dualist notion that we are some soul inhabiting a physical world; instead, he conceives of being-in-the-world as something inseparable from Dasein. We cannot help but be-in-the-world – we need a world in which to manifest possibility, and we give meaning to the world.

This sounds rather motivational, but sadly, most humans exist inauthentically. We forget our deep potentiality-for-being, and often let society (Das Man, “them”) dictate how we should behave. We do this because it kinda sucks to have to deal with the ever-present potentiality-for-being! It causes anxiety to have to choose between different modes of existing, one at the expense of others, so we would rather let Das Man tranquillise into a state of internalised averageness. Authenticity requires resoluteness in the face of existential anxiety – fully recognising our potentiality-for-being, and ignoring the lulling siren song of Das Man.

It’s not lost on me that this may sound like the soundbites one hears on motivational TikToks. Live life to the fullest! Have high agency and choose how you want to live! Don’t listen to society! Heidegger would probably argue that these people are still not authentically experiencing the anxiety of being possibility incarnate – in fact, Heidegger explicitly calls out this perpetual fascination with “self-discovery” as inauthentic (he calls it self-entanglement), because by trying to discover yourself, you are still attempting to understand your being as a “thing-ish” object rather than potentiality-for-being.

There is this idea, forwarded by various Heidegger scholars as well as this author, that when Heidegger uses words like authentic and inauthentic, he is not making value judgments – he is simply seeking to understand Being. Inauthenticity is only problematic to the extent that it obscures being, which is his particular project. The natural state of falling into idle chatter and being tranquillised by Das Man isn’t morally wrong, it’s just the way we are.

I choose to disagree. I am possibility incarnate, and Heidegger’s philosophy itself is something ready-at-hand, onto which I can project my potentiality-for-being. I shall do this by interpreting his philosophy normatively – I should want to understand Being and think for myself rather than blindly adopting the will of Das Man. I should live resolutely and gracefully accept the anxiety that comes with infinite possibility. I should treat every passing second as the “moment of vision” (Kierkegaard), an opportunity to carry forward my past values and project my potentiality onto the world.

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