So said a friend and reader of my once-daily, now-weekly-ish emailings.
She was right, sort of.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is proudly name-dropped on my opt-in page and in the cryptic profiles I’ve seeded around the internet to capture search engine and AI traffic.
But I don’t talk about the man or his ideas much in the emails.
I am certainly not coming in here chatting on about the book-throwing “mthrfker!” moments of insight happening while going deep into writings like “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Letter on Humanism”.
All that goes into private journals. This isn’t the place for it. Y’all would be lost.
Philosophers like Heidegger scare outsiders because they use unfamiliar language, and use it to challenge beliefs that are so basic you probably never think to ask about them.
Heidegger’s a double threat on that front as he deliberately aims at the heart of everything we call philosophy, going all the way back to its misty origins in the ancient Greek world of myth and magic.
He wants to destroy all the “common sense” accumulated over the last 2500 years, more or less since Plato, by showing that the philosophers, however well-intended, have only managed to build an ugly mansion of confusion that we’re all locked inside.
There’s a secret I learned in grad school, for myself and when teaching my students, that makes even the most difficult writer accessible. Most all of them have only one big idea. The jargon-filled books and essays are ways of exploring that one big idea. Discovering the big idea is like finding a key that unlocks all the doors in the giant mansion.
Understanding doesn’t get easy, mind you, but the task transforms from total discombobulated disorientation to achievable.
Heidegger’s big idea can be put in a pithy sentence:
Being is not presence.
That’s it. I’ve explained the whole thing to you. Everything he ever wrote is exploring that one thought.
I’ll wager bad money that this one sentence confuses you more than it clarifies.
Presence? As in, what is present? The present moment? The presentation of things as present before us?
Yes. All of the above. And more.
Try this one:
The realness of real things is no real thing.
Same big idea, many ways to put it, with many different consequences.
I doubt you know this, but everything I’ve recently written about health, fitness, strength, nutrition, et cetera, is infused with Heidegger’s key idea.
More important yet:
Everything I’ve done for my body in the past 18 months, getting down to a weight I haven’t weighed since 2001, before the Great Fattening, with the bio-impedance scale showing sub-11% body fat, and getting there without giving away all my muscle mass and big-boy lifts, was indirectly informed by the influence of Heidegger’s thought.
That big idea was already behind the cybernetics, chaos-math, and complexity-theory thinking that informed the meditations on stress, fatigue, and recovery in Squat Every Day way back in 2012, although at the time I had no idea of such.
None of this will help you a lick if you’re hung up on tips, tactics, and techniques, which are the currency of the online health and fitness sewer.
I don’t do tips and tactics. Dr. Matt is the Big Picture guy. How you understand yourself as a human being in a world of things, including other people. Why you believe what you believe about those things. How easy it is to get sucked into systems of belief without consciously realizing you’re doing it.
A person isn’t stupid for what they believe. Stupidity is about why a person believes, and why they hold on to beliefs.
I gave up on the materialist worldview long ago. I don’t much care what The Science™ (PBUH) has to say about this or that Big New Finding. These create their own belief-cages which are near-impossible for the prisoners to see.
Most everything worth caring about in a life is found by personal experimentation and personal experience.
It’s the belief in our beliefs that makes the problem.
Understanding that we live in an indeterminate world, about which we know very little and have little grip on anything stable and enduring, and recognizing that we are such limited creatures that most all of our beliefs are illusions — not least the self-deceiving beliefs about ourselves — that is knowledge that liberates.
Liberation is terrifying.
The horrific truth about being human is that we are free to make ourselves who we are, and cursed to run from that freedom. Most of us happily settle into the hypnotic rhythm of life, doing and being whatever we were brought up to do and be, forgetful and glad for the amnesia. Of those that wake up, most run screaming to the first authority figure that makes it all go away, or blindly walk out of one jail to settle into another.
It’s the belief in our beliefs that makes the problem.
This AI fad of the moment is a case study. Thinking machinery may be the worst invention we ever made, and even fully aware of the risks, we can’t involve it in our lives fast enough. It’s so convenient not to think or decide for yourself. Humans couldn’t not build and use a wonder like that. The great masses of Everybody are so bedazzled that they can’t even think of an alternative.
The worst thing is that, even aware of all this, the sirens’ song of forgetting still tempts.
That’s all Heidegger.
My friend was right, in a way, but entirely wrong. Everything I talk about, and the way I talk about it, owes a great deal to Heidegger and to the thinkers in his orbit.
Writing all that out makes it hard to sincerely express interest in the how-tos of body transformation or nutrition or strength workouts. The great irony is that my own results are as good or better for all that I’ve let go of the obsessive interest. Makes me wonder how I ever got sucked into it as obsessively as I did.
Which is the punchline to the whole story.
Matt Perryman