Martin Heidegger
Born September 26, 1889, Heidegger was a German philosopher who some regard as the most prominent philosopher of the 20th century. His quest throughout his career was to unravel the nature of “being,” consistent with his famous quote “Man is a being whose nature is to question the nature of being.” His book Being and Time analyzed the structure of human consciousness based on how we approach the issue of knowledge and how we know things, chiefly looking at the way we ask questions. He concluded that we’ve been positing the wrong questions – that the phenomenological vision of a world of beings must be bypassed toward the apprehension of Being itself, or pure awareness, which for Heidegger was always grounded in “care.” He came to a deep intuitive understanding of the structure of consciousness, which he expressed ultimately poetically, rather than analytically. For Heidegger, the types of questions we ask say everything about who and what we are and how we function. He theorized that we can anlyze how consciousness works based on how we’re asking the questions. His school of thought is referred to as “existential phenomenology.”
