Heidegger's Trap

May 15, 2025

Let me try to make the point about this modern trap that is easy to fall into—and that society more generally has fallen into.

I mean, you can imagine being born into the world we live in, inheriting a kind of Enlightenment optimism, a Christian idealism—believing that the mind is inside a body, that there is one truth that reveals itself, and that getting to this objective truth should be our highest priority in life.

And you can imagine looking around you for people to inspire you in this pursuit. Who do you see? You see scientists, philosophers—what seem to be the highest-level people committed to finding the truth. And what do they say to do? We’ve got to study the objects out there and how they relate to each other. We’ve got to find the best way to know what these things are and how to manipulate them to our advantage. Because not only does this bring us closer to the truth—our ultimate goal—but it also produces technology that can do miraculous things and make people’s lives better, more efficient, more optimized. That’s what we’re told to focus on.

And you can imagine hearing all that and thinking: Yeah, I’m on board with that. The correct way for me to view my existence, if I want to live in reality, is the scientific way of looking at things. I’m going to work hard to remove my cultural biases, I’m going to make sure language doesn’t get in the way of that truth, I’m going to remove how history shades my way of thinking—and if only I can do all that fully, then one day I’ll be able to get out of Plato’s cave. I’ll be able to see the truth, not just the shadows on the wall.

But if Heidegger is right, then as spectators from the outside, we can see how this person is simplifying things—how they’re really just stuck in the allegory of the cave. They think they’re arriving at the truth, but we can predict the outcome of this single way of framing things: they’ll struggle with nihilism, because they’re trying to create meaning out of theoretical abstractions. They’ll live in confusion about subjectivity and consciousness, or free will and determinism, because they’re always committing a category error when trying to describe their being. They’ll see culture, language, and history as barriers to truth, rather than the very things that make their experience of being even possible.

This doesn’t mean we should abandon the concept of framing things as objective and subjective. What Heidegger is saying is that relying solely on this one framing is problematic and incomplete. Certain elements of being are described better—or worse—in different framings. And when you overuse one of these framings, you inevitably run into very predictable problems when that framing reaches its limitations.

So, if you live your entire life in the framing of subject and object, of course you’re left with a cold, disinterested universe filled with objects that you are always detached from.

And even if, based on that, you construct some theoretical framework, that system will always be rooted in the idea of being a subject in a world of objects—centered around manipulating those objects in ways that are useful or beneficial to you.

That’s why Nietzsche is, for Heidegger, the last great metaphysician—because his framework of the will to power is still based on the subject-object framing.

As long as our systems are based on this framing, they are ultimately corrupted by a technological viewpoint. We are always looking at people and things as if they are objects-at-hand—as if they are things to be understood, controlled, manipulated, and optimized for a particular outcome.

Dasein and the work in Being and Time is not the sole viewpoint Heidegger thinks we should use to look at the relation of being—it’s a reframing of what being is, meant to free people from seeing things only through a subject-object lens.

And nature is more complicated than having just a single framing.

~ Philosophize This! Epsiode: 214