Existential Homelessness: Heidegger on Being, Technology, and Architecture

The Diagnosis of Existential Homelessness

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Alongside Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir, he is one of the most important figures of existential philosophy, although he distanced himself from existentialism and referred to his work as fundamental ontology. In his major work Being and Time, he lays out, with artistic finesse, the existential structures of Dasein, “being-there”. However, he also dedicated several texts to analysing how these structures have been obscured in our modern age of technology and functionalism. He not only offers a distinctive perspective on the significance of technology, but also on how it has profoundly transformed architecture, converting its essence from dwelling into building. According to Heidegger, we live in a time in which we have lost a home; we have become “existentially homeless”, something that is readily observable when we look at modern buildings. Finally, it is essential to address the criticism Heidegger’s philosophy faces and his connection to national socialism.

Nevertheless, before we begin, let us revisit the foundations of Heidegger’s philosophy in order to better understand his views on technology and architecture. I have already written elsewhere on Heidegger and the existentials he proposes, specifically in the context of silence and his conception of it. Nonetheless, it is worth returning to them here, as doing so will, I think, foster a clearer understanding of the points he aims to make.

Being and Time

To understand Heidegger’s philosophy, we must first grasp his idea of fundamental ontology. Of course, summarising this magnum opus necessarily means I will have to simplify some aspects. Furthermore, please be aware that I have mainly studied Heidegger through secondary literature and am not an expert.

When we consider the world, or reality, we can approach it in different ways. On one hand, we can examine it from various ontological perspectives. For example, zoology is not a fundamental ontology; it is a single ontology, the logic of animals. Geology is the logic of the earth, biology the logic of life, and so on. But in doing so, we are merely subdividing aspects of Dasein into different ontologies, each of which makes claims about particular parts of reality.

According to Heidegger, however, all of these ontologies share a common denominator at the core of being: the possibility for humans to understand and to be there in the first place. This is why Heidegger analyzes fundamental ontology, the deepest, or core, ontology, one might say. He is interested in the meaning of being-there itself.

And when we seek to understand being-there, we must first ask: who is posing these questions? Clearly, it is the human being, or, as Heidegger puts it, being-there itself.

“The elaboration of the question of Being therefore means making transparent a being, the questioning being, in its being. This being, which we ourselves are, and which among other things has the possibility of questioning, we terminologically designate as Dasein.”

Furthermore, the core difference between human beings and other parts of the world is that humans are always concerned with being-there. For example, a stone will never be concerned with its own being-there. Humans, thrown into the world, are always already being-there. And from this starting point, we are always concerned with being-there itself. As Heidegger puts it,

Dasein is a being that, in its very being, is concerned with itself.

Meaning, a human, like a stone, is a being, but in contrast to a stone, it is a being who is concerned with its being-there. This means that the human is a being that is always concerned with its own life, one could say, with its own existence. This is exactly where Heidegger’s philosophy begins.

Heidegger uses a method called phenomenological analysis. This means he turns inward, looking at the experience we have of our world, or, in other words, analyzing our being-there in its purest essence—not empirically, not verifiably or objectively, but in its most raw form. In this analysis, he finds so-called existentials, core pillars of existence, of being-there.

The “first” of the central existentials is being-in-the-world. Human beings can never not be concerned with their being-there and are thrown into existence. We are always trying to understand the world, interpret our experience, and relate ourselves to it. Thus, we are always being in the world. With this he abolishes the subject (being) object (world) distinction established by philosophers like Kant or Descartes.

“In directing itself toward... and in grasping something, Dasein does not first go out from some inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered.”

Heidegger notes that this being in the world is always characterized by a certain anxiety or care. This is not just about everyday worries like money, health, or food, but a structural feature of our being in the world, because we are always exposed, at the mercy of existence, and must confront decisions. We cannot pause time; we are always in the flow of reality, facing possibilities and needing to take the next step.

“In the directed, caring being-out-for something, the whereupon of life’s care is there: the respective world.”

This also means this projective character of life leaves us in the constant act of creation, the creation of our life.

Now, Heidegger proposes that because we can always make the wrong choice and fail to act according to our ownmost potential, we can fall into the inauthentic mode of being, the impersonal “they”. At times, we simply conform to what one does: one or “they” goes to school, to university, or to a nine-to-five job. That is simply what “one normally does”. Instead of taking up our own possibilities and realizing our authentic potential, we live according to the conventions of the impersonal “they.”

“We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking.”

Furthermore, Heidegger emphasizes that being-there is always in relation to our own death. We are always on the way to dying; we can never stop the passage of time. Being-there is therefore fundamentally oriented toward death.

“As thrown Being-in-the-world, Dasein has in every case already been delivered over to its death. Being-towards-its-death, it dies factically and indeed constantly.”

This is also one reason, Heidegger explains, why we fall into the inauthentic, impersonal “they,” the inauthentic mode of being-there: we seek to escape the anxiety of our finitude. However, he argues that we should confront this awareness and integrate it positively into our being-there, allowing it to motivate us to take up our possibilities, make authentic choices, and avoid falling into the inauthentic “they.” In this sense, death functions as a kind of incentive. Thus, for Heidegger, the awareness of death is ultimately positive—one might think of the saying memento mori.

How, then, do we extricate ourselves from the anonymous “they” we fall into out of this existential dread? According to Heidegger, the breakthrough occurs through the call of conscience. Crucially, however, this conscience is not equivalent to what we might call the Superego (Über-Ich) in psychoanalytic theory; it is not a moralizing internal critic or a collection of societal norms. Rather, it is an existential phenomenon of Dasein itself.

But what is the content of this call?

“What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a ‘soliloquy’ in the Self to which it has appealed. ‘Nothing’ gets called to this Self, but it has been summoned to itself—that is, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”

This means the call possesses no concrete content or specific instructions. Instead, it is an imperative to realize one’s own being, the sheer possibility of existence. Who is the caller? It is Dasein itself. As we have established, Dasein is defined in its very essence by Care. Because it cares about its being, it calls out to itself from a state of alienation:

“In conscience Dasein calls itself (...) from its uncanniness (...) The call is a forward-calling recall... to the possibility of taking over, in existing, the thrown entity which it is.”

This means that Being-there calls upon itself to accept the projective character of its own life. Or in other words the human being encourages itself to embrace this freedom. This call is a result of the “care structure” of our life emerging from the point of deep nothingness and anxiety:

“The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.”

To embrace an authentic existence, we must accept this invitation. If we refuse, we fall back into the anonymous “they”. By accepting the call, we achieve what Heidegger calls resoluteness:

“With this choice, Dasein makes possible its ownmost Being-guilty, which remains a debt the They-self can never pay.”

This, however, leads us to existential guilt. To take up this freedom and live authentically, we must assume responsibility for our own being. Dasein is fundamentally guilty in the sense that it is responsible for shaping its own life. We must accept this guilt and not fall into the anonymous “they” and we must stand up for our own decisions. Importantly, to Heidegger, this is simply a structural description of existence not a moral or theistic claim.

“Dasein is essentially guilty—not at times and then again not guilty.”

To conclude, in light of the finite nature of life, we must recognise the importance of our decisions and live life authentically and autonomously to embrace our full potential.

Heidegger on Technology