Since Plato, a dominant strain of Western philosophy has understood human beings primarily as rational thinkers, a view typified by René Descartes’s conclusion: cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). But in 1927, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger radically upended this tradition in his monumental opus Being and Time. Thinking and theorising, he argued, presupposes a special mode of being that is unique to humans: I am, therefore I think. The world is revealed to us not through theorising but through our way of being in the world, which Heidegger did so much to illuminate. In this excerpt from his feature-length documentary Being in the World (2010), the Italian American director Tao Ruspoli makes Heidegger’s infamously dense arguments digestible via interviews with philosophers, including the late Hubert Dreyfus, and with skilled artists and artisans whose work demonstrates the degree to which our selves are often expressed through our interactions with the world rather than our thoughts about it.
This is the first of three excerpts from Being in the World to be featured on Aeon Video. You can watch the film in its entirety here.
