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Tallis in Wonderland

On Being (Roughly) Here

Raymond Tallis tries to work out where he is.

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) is one of the greatest works of twentieth century philosophy. At its heart is the notion of human being as Da-sein or ‘being-there’. This is a profound and complex thought, which Heidegger unpacks through nearly 500 densely argued pages. By making being-there fundamental, Heidegger aims to by-pass the hoary problem of the relationship between mind and body and some of the epistemological anxieties that have haunted Western philosophy. Instead of having a consciousness as a mere spectator – a mind mysteriously located in the cabinet of a body trying to construct a world out of data generated through interaction with a putatively external reality – human being is being-in-the-world.

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