Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger begins from a refusal that reshapes the entire philosophical landscape. He refuses to treat the human being as a thing, a substance, or a stable inner self. Instead, he asks what it means to be the kind of being for whom existence itself is a question.
His answer is Dasein – not a personality or identity, but a way of being. Dasein does not first exist and then encounter the world; it is always already being-in-the-world. Meaning, language, tools, norms, and expectations are not added later. They form the medium in which life unfolds from the start.
“Being-in-the-world is a basic state of Dasein.”
(Being and Time)
This immediately dissolves the fantasy of a neutral beginning. There is no blank slate. Each life begins thrown – into a body, a language, a culture, a historical moment, and a web of meanings not of its own choosing. Heidegger calls this condition thrownness. It is not a flaw to be corrected, but the ground from which any individuality must emerge.
Yet existence is not merely determined by what has already been given. Dasein is equally defined by projection – by the way it is always oriented toward possibilities, futures, and ways of being that are not yet realised. To exist is not to possess a fixed essence, but to stand open to what one might become.
“The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.”
(Being and Time)
This is why Heidegger insists that the self is never a finished object. Existence is a task rather than a possession. One must continually take up the conditions into which one has been thrown and decide how to live them.
What most often prevents this taking-up is not ignorance or immorality, but everydayness. Heidegger’s most unsettling insight is that most lives are not lived by anyone in particular. They are lived according to what “one” does, thinks, values, and avoids. He names this anonymous authority das Man – the They.
In the They, responsibility is diffused. Opinions circulate without ownership. Judgements arrive pre-formed. Life becomes easier, lighter, and flatter, precisely because no one has to stand fully behind it.
“We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge as they see and judge.”
(Being and Time)
Here Heidegger’s ontological analysis quietly converges with an earlier psychological observation. In The Crowd, Gustave Le Bon describes how the individual, once absorbed into a collective, experiences anonymity and the absence of singular responsibility. The burden of authorship dissolves into the comfort of belonging. What no one owns, no one must answer for.
Heidegger’s das Man is not a physical crowd, but the same phenomenon at a deeper level. It is the condition in which existence is lived without a centre, without a first-person stance, without the weight of “this is my life”. The crowd offers cover; the They offers legitimacy. Both relieve the individual of the necessity to stand alone in their choices.
Authenticity, for Heidegger, is not self-expression or sincerity. It is the act of reclaiming one’s existence from this anonymous drift. It is the willingness to stand in one’s own life as one’s own, rather than as a role performed under the cover of collective approval.
The decisive moment in this reclamation is the confrontation with finitude. Heidegger does not treat death as a future event, but as a structural feature of existence. To live is to be being-toward-death – to exist under the horizon of an end that cannot be delegated, postponed, or shared.
“Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.”
(Being and Time)
Far from being morbid, this recognition gives life its weight. Only a finite existence can matter. Only a life that will end can demand decision. Death strips away the illusion of endless postponement and forces the question of what is worth taking responsibility for now.
Heidegger provides the ontological ground beneath Individua. His analysis explains why individuality cannot be reduced to personality, preference, or identity. The self is not something to be discovered, but something to be taken up.
Thrownness names the conditions Individua refuses to deny. Projection names the capacity for authorship within those conditions. Das Man names the levelling forces Individua is designed to counteract – the quiet erosion of responsibility through conformity, distraction, and inherited scripts.
Individua does not promise fulfilment or optimisation. It insists on ownership. In this sense, it is not a lifestyle project but an ontological response: a framework for moving from anonymous existence to authored life, from drift to presence, from borrowed meaning to lived necessity.
Heidegger does not tell us what to choose. He shows why choosing at all is unavoidable.