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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page research paper/essay that argues that Martin Heidegger, a twentieth century German philosopher, was not a nihilist. Bibliography lists 5 sources.
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5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khheid.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
and that nothing can be known or communicated" (Nihilism). As this indicates, nihilism constitutes a philosophical impasse in which positive action of any sort becomes meaningless. It is
easy to see why German philosopher Martin Heidegger has often been accused of being a nihilist, as he once wrote that Western culture is "an age of consummate meaninglessness in
which man stretches his essence thin, flattens it, and loses it" (Hicks 74). What Heideggers critics, however, overlook is that while he associated the creation of nihilism with the direction
chosen by Western civilization and understood the conditions that had served to promote a nihilistic culture, his philosophy was not in and of itself nihilistic. Rather Heidegger perceived nihilism as
the inevitable "result of various forms of concealment and forgetfulness inherent in the history of the West" (Hicks 75). An examination of Heideggers philosophy demonstrates that he was able to
successfully overcome the impasse of nihilism. At the foundation of Heideggers philosophy is the idea of being, which Heidegger referred to as the capitalized "Being" (Dreyfus 30).
According to Heidegger, what makes us human is grounded specifically in our ability to be the sort of beings "who put Being into question" (Sawicki 68). In other words, it
is the ability of human beings to question that is at the foundation of human nature. As this suggests, for Heidegger, Being is the basis on which human beings can
be understood, that is, how different epochs have conceptualized what it means to be human has influenced how human beings lived their lives in those eras. For instance, in
ancient Greece, people were understood as "heroes or slaves," while in the Middle Ages, they were understood as "saints or sinners and things were creatures to be mastered and interpreted"
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