Thinking in One’s Own Time

Heidegger, German Idealism, and Practical Philosophy

On the table in front of me lies one of the volumes of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. Volume 28 bears a title that, at first glance, may seem to promise a series of lectures intended mainly for specialists in the history of philosophy: Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart.

German Idealism – and the philosophical problem-situation of the present.

The latter may be the more important part.

Heidegger delivered these lectures in Freiburg during the summer semester of 1929. Being and Time had appeared only two years earlier. He was in the midst of a period in which the question of Being, human finitude, and the task of philosophy itself were undergoing intense development. When he turned to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, therefore, his primary purpose was not simply to tell his students what three dead philosophers had once thought.

He read them in order to understand his own time.

And for me, this is precisely where practical philosophy begins.

The History of Philosophy as Conversation

We can read the history of philosophy in at least two ways. We can try to reconstruct what a philosopher meant, which concepts he used, whom he was arguing against, and what place he occupied in his own historical context. This is necessary work. Without it, we risk turning thinkers of the past into mouthpieces for our own ideas.

But we can also ask another question: What can this text enable us to see?

This comes closer to the way Heidegger works in GA 28. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel become partners in a conversation concerned with the philosophical situation of 1929. Heidegger does not merely ask what German Idealism was. He asks what its problems can tell us about the problems of philosophy now.

At the same time, this is a hermeneutical idea I recognize in Gadamer: we never encounter the past from a vantage point outside history. We read from somewhere, carrying questions that are already our own. The past can speak to us precisely because the distance between its world and ours is not merely an obstacle; it can also be productive.

The history of philosophy then becomes something other than a museum. It becomes a conversation in which questions from the past can make our own presuppositions visible.

What Is a Human Being?

In these lectures Heidegger identifies two powerful tendencies in the philosophy of his own time: anthropology and metaphysics.

The first asks about the human being.

What is a human being?

It sounds like the most natural place to begin. Psychology studies human beings. Biology studies them. Sociology, education, and the social sciences do the same. In our own time, we can add neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence.

We know more and more about human beings. But Heidegger makes a characteristic move. He asks whether the question itself already presupposes something we have not yet understood. For what does it mean that the human being is? And what does it mean that human beings can understand that they themselves, and other things, are?

He thus moves from the question of the human being back to the question of Being.

This may seem far removed from practical philosophy. I think the opposite is true.

Professional practice, too, begins with a conception of the human being, whether we are conscious of it or not. When a social worker encounters a child, a family, or a person in a difficult life situation, understanding has already begun before the first professional assessment has been completed. We bring concepts, theories, experiences, and categories into the room with us.

They are necessary.

But they can also get in the way.

Fichte’s I

It is Fichte in particular whom Heidegger engages with in these lectures. In Fichte he finds an attempt to locate the foundation of philosophy in the I – not the I as one thing among other things, but as activity and self-relation.

The famous concept of Tathandlung points towards something that cannot simply be turned into an object. This interests Heidegger because for him, too, the human being is not primarily an object possessing certain characteristics. Dasein is always already out in a world, engaged with something, together with others, and oriented towards possibilities.

A human being can therefore never be exhausted by a description of what he or she already is. Human existence also stands in relation to what it can become.

Schelling receives considerably less attention in these lectures than Fichte and Hegel. This reflects Heidegger’s own priorities and does not mean that Schelling is unimportant. Rather, he serves as a shorter intermediate stage in the movement from Fichte’s I towards the Hegelian attempt to think the whole.

And it is precisely this whole that Heidegger increasingly comes to question.

Finitude

In Hegel, Heidegger encounters one of the most ambitious attempts in the history of philosophy to think the whole. Oppositions between subject and object, thought and reality, the finite and the infinite are not simply to remain unresolved. They enter into a movement towards a more comprehensive understanding.

Heidegger takes another path. He holds fast to human finitude.

We cannot step outside history and contemplate it as a completed whole. Nor can we step outside our own lives. We understand from where we find ourselves, with the history we carry, the experiences we have had, and possibilities we do not yet know.

Finitude, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate deficiency in human knowledge. It is a fundamental condition of human understanding.

For practical philosophy, this has profound consequences. The professional may know more than the other person about legislation, theory, diagnosis, or method. But the professional never possesses the whole truth about the human being sitting on the other side of the table. Expertise does not abolish finitude. On the contrary, recognizing our finitude ought to be part of what it means to be an expert.

A Human Being Is More Than a Case

I worked in child welfare for many years before I entered the university. There I learned something that later became a philosophical question for me.

A case may have been thoroughly investigated. The information may be correct. The law may be clear. The professional assessment may be well founded. Yet one question remains: What does all this mean for the human being who is actually sitting in front of me?

There is a space between knowledge of a situation and action within that situation.

It is in this space that judgement operates.

I have since come to think that this is one of the reasons professional social work can never be reduced to applied theory. Theory can help us to see. But it can also cause us to see only what the theory has already taught us to look for.

A diagnosis may be correct without telling us who the person is. A risk assessment may be necessary without exhausting the situation. A case record may contain a hundred true statements and still fail to capture something essential about the human being it concerns.

Perhaps practical philosophy begins with the recognition of this space.

From Knowledge to Judgement

Here Aristotle’s concept of phronesis – practical wisdom – becomes relevant. But its connection with Heidegger is not accidental. Already in his lectures of the early 1920s, Heidegger engaged intensively with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. His interpretation of phronesis became important in the development of his own understanding of the human being’s practical and situated involvement in the world, and traces of it can be found in concepts developed in Being and Time.

Phronesis does not mean rejecting general knowledge. It concerns something more difficult: understanding what that knowledge means in the concrete situation.

This is precisely why professional judgement is not the same as mere opinion. Judgement does not stand in opposition to knowledge. It presupposes knowledge, while at the same time recognizing that knowledge can never contain in advance the whole situation in which one must act.

The rule may be general.

The situation is always concrete.

And the human being is never merely an instance of the rule.

Our Own Gegenwart

This brings me back to the word printed on the cover of the book in front of me: Gegenwart.

The present. Our time. Presence.

Heidegger used Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to investigate the philosophical problem-situation of 1929. The obvious question, then, is: What is our philosophical problem-situation in 2026?

We live in a time in which more and more aspects of the human being can be transformed into data. The body can be measured, behaviour recorded, risk calculated, and diagnoses classified. Algorithms can identify patterns in quantities of data that no human being could survey unaided. Artificial intelligence can write, analyse, compare, and propose decisions.

All of this can be useful. But Heidegger’s question does not disappear as a result. If anything, it becomes more pressing:

What conception of the human being is presupposed when the human being is made calculable?

This may be one of the most important philosophical problems of our time.

The danger does not necessarily lie in the technology itself. It lies in the possibility that one particular way of understanding the human being may become so self-evident that we no longer recognize it as an interpretation. What can be measured easily becomes what is real, while what cannot be recorded risks becoming invisible.

Thinking Practically

For me, practical philosophy therefore does not primarily mean a philosophy that provides practical recipes. It does something more fundamental. It examines what happens before the recipe is applied: how we understand the situation, how we see the other person, which concepts we bring with us, and what we have already decided the problem is.

Heidegger’s GA 28 is still lying on the table. I can close the book. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel disappear once again between its covers, together with a lecture hall in Freiburg in the summer of 1929.

But the question printed on the cover cannot be closed away with them:

die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart.

The philosophical problem-situation of the present.

Heidegger read the past in order to understand his own time. We can read Heidegger in the same way – not in order to find ready-made answers to our problems in a philosopher from the previous century, but to allow his questions to make our own assumptions visible.

Perhaps this is precisely what practical philosophy can do.

The book can be closed.

The question remains on the table.