[Colette]

Putting aside Heidegger's infamous links to the Nazi party (and subsequent discrediting of his ontological ideas, based on such affiliations), what is your view of Heidigger's theory of the nature of generic existence being founded in a 'care' concept (the 'dasein' existence, as he called it in his magnum opus - Being and Time).

Set out below is a Wiki description of the idea (in broad terms), which doesn't do too bad a job of summing it up - although as always, I find, Wiki articles take somewhat more of a simplistic approach than is often accurate the original text
To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

The second intuition animating Heidegger’s philosophy derives from the influence of Edmund Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, “to the things themselves”). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended toward something, and is always "about" something; intentionality has been called the "aboutness" of things) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in "care." This is the basis of Heidegger’s “existential analytic,” as he develops it in Being and Time. Heidegger argues that to be able to describe experience properly means finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to “Dasein," the being for whom being is a question. In Being and Time, Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. Dasein, then, is not intended as a way of conducting a "philosophical anthropology," but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything like a "philosophical anthropology." Dasein, according to Heidegger, is care. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that Dasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one’s own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one’s own existence, is the basis of Heidegger’s notions of authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for Dasein which depend on escaping the “vulgar” temporality of calculation and of public life.

Note also that Heidegger maintained the history of philosophy had placed an overweaning and unjustified focus on the nature of the existence of specific things (as distinct from the idea of what it is to exist, at an ontological level). He thought that philosophers from Plato onwards, had fallen into this 'fundamental error' (think, for instance, of Plato's 'ideals', and the metaphor of the cave).