Why is there something rather than nothing? It is the oldest question in philosophy, and one that most thinkers eventually set aside and move on from. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) never did. While others busied themselves building grand philosophical systems, Heidegger kept returning to the most basic question of all: what does it mean for anything to exist? He believed that Western philosophy had buried this question under centuries of abstract theorizing, and that losing sight of it was a sign of something deeply wrong with modern civilization. From his landmark work Being and Time to his later writings on technology and language, everything he wrote circled back to this single problem: not just what things exist, but why existence itself happens, and what that means for us.
That commitment came with a serious cost. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and served as rector of Freiburg University in 1933, a role he never fully disavowed. His recently published private notebooks, known as the Black Notebooks, have deepened concerns about how far his political beliefs infected his philosophy, the glorification of German identity, the distrust of outsiders, the sense that one particular people carried a unique historical destiny. Scholars still disagree about whether these ideas can be separated from his genuine philosophical insights, or whether they run all the way through. This conversation doesn't pretend the question has been settled.
Richard Polt, professor of philosophy at Xavier University, has spent his career making Heidegger's notoriously difficult ideas accessible without watering them down. His book Heidegger: An Introduction is widely regarded as the best place to start with a thinker who can otherwise feel impenetrable, and his translation of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics is praised for its care and precision. But Polt doesn't just write about ideas — he lives them. His book The Typewriter Revolution makes the case that typing on a manual typewriter is more than a nostalgic quirk; it is a small but meaningful act of resistance against a digital culture that turns everything, including human attention, into data to be processed and optimized.
What connects Polt to Heidegger, across a century and vast political differences, is a shared belief that philosophy should disturb rather than reassure, that the most important questions are precisely the ones we tend to avoid. The conversation that follows traces that thread, from Heidegger's remote mountain cabin to Polt's typewriter, and asks what it means to think carefully and honestly in an age that rewards speed above all else.
Charles Carlini: Heidegger is often described as one of the most important and most difficult philosophers of the twentieth century. For someone coming to his work for the first time, how would you explain what he was really after—and why it still matters?
Richard Polt: He often says that he’s asking “the question of being.” A helpful take is that the question is about the difference it makes that there is something instead of nothing. We’re never indifferent to the difference—existence is meaningful. But it’s hard to express that meaning, and our efforts are often distorted by narrow traditions and a reductive tendency that’s built into our existence itself. We tend to think of things as merely present, where presence just means the brute givenness of an object. But we ourselves aren’t such objects! A merely present object couldn’t be sensitive to the meaning of being. We engage with meaning because we’re temporal: we stretch into futurity and pastness, pursuing possible ways to be someone on the basis of who we have been. We don’t have an “identity,” if that means some identical, identifiable set of characteristics; we have our selfhood as a problem. Today, scientific objectification has achieved such impressive theoretical and technical success that we may be more tempted than ever to understand ourselves as just another kind of object. I also think some political maladies stem from our desire for an unquestioned “identity.” Heidegger, at his best, puts all existence, including our own existence, back into question.
CC: When you first encountered Being and Time as a young philosopher, what was your honest reaction? Was it immediate recognition, productive resistance, or something harder to name? And looking back, do you think that first encounter shaped the kind of scholar you became?
RP: I first read the book as a college senior, under the guidance of Charles Guignon. I recall being impressed immediately by the depth and seriousness of the questions Heidegger was asking: this was not going to be anyone whom (in my still-sophomoric arrogance) I could dismiss as buying into unquestioned metaphysical assumptions. I also saw that he was focusing on aspects of human existence that I felt were essential, even though I was far from knowing how to adequately speak of them. It was exciting to find a vocabulary in Heidegger that could describe crucial issues in life—phenomena he calls everydayness, authenticity, guilt, being-towards-death, ecstatic temporality, and so on. I knew that I’d want to study him more deeply, although I also recognized that I had much more to learn about other philosophers. His work presupposes the study of large swaths of the Western canon—so reading Heidegger naturally encourages reading beyond Heidegger.
CC: ”The question of being,” Heidegger once said, “must be taken up anew.” Does this kind of fundamental questioning—refusing to take any ontological ground for granted—resonate with you personally?
RP: Sure. And I suppose that makes me modern: modern philosophy, since Descartes, has constantly sought to establish new foundations and overthrow tradition. But Descartes himself, Heidegger would say, was not fundamental enough: he didn’t recognize tradition as the double-edged condition that it is. We are always indebted to traditions into which we are “thrown,” and we’re always challenged to dismantle our tradition in search of its experiential roots, which received wisdom has misinterpreted or reduced to truisms. And this is not a dismantling that can finish—as if we could ever become ahistorical. Still more importantly, although Descartes is right that I can’t doubt the fact of my own being at this moment, he takes the meaning of being for granted; he even says, in Principles of Philosophy, that it’s so simple it’s not worth mentioning. Hardly!
CC: By the same token, what is your opinion about Heidegger's concept of Gestell—enframing—the idea that modern technology reveals the world as a standing-reserve of orderable resources? Does that analysis translate into a compelling diagnosis of our digital age?
RP: It does, if you add an analysis of our typical behavior when we use digital technology—and here, Being and Time’s analysis of “fallen” everydayness is helpful. Heidegger’s characterizations of everyday life and the technical worldview are very high-altitude generalizations, but as technology drives on, following a seemingly unstoppable Cartesian logic, his description keeps becoming truer. The Earth looks more and more like “a gigantic gas station,” as he puts it, and it’s literally infested and encircled by swarms of devices that generate mountains of data about beings while arguably distracting us from the question of being. I’m currently completing a book, The Task of Time, that includes a chapter on “cyberbeing.” I argue that our idolatry of “information” is a form of the ontology of presence that Heidegger critiqued, and that our absorption in online environments is often a way to avoid existential responsibility. Then there’s generative AI, which raises all sorts of new questions; I mainly speculate about its impact on the culture of the future.
CC: Heidegger had several provocative formulations: “Language is the house of being,” “Only a god can save us,” and "We are too late for the gods and too early for Being." What do you think of this kind of aphoristic, almost oracular writing style?
RP: I enjoy it, when it works. We know from his posthumous texts that he filled notebook after notebook with such efforts, then selected a few felicitous sentences for publication. (Nietzsche operated in much the same way. I myself am working on another book, about the past and memory, that collects would-be pithy formulations from my own journals.) Philosophers who object in principle to aphoristic language may subscribe to an unrealistic ideal of total explicitness and clarity. It’s impossible for a text to state all the context for all its statements; utterances always rely on a broader, unspoken field of meaning. I should add that most of Heidegger’s publications and lecture courses are not aphoristic; he does a lot of patient work setting up problems and investigating their histories before he springs his one-liners on us.
Martin Heidegger
CC: Heidegger drew heavily on his own rootedness in the Black Forest, his hut at Todtnauberg, and his sense of a lost, authentic German peasant world. Is it important for a philosopher to rely on such personal, place-based experience? Does a reader relate more to this kind of concrete, situated thinking than to abstract universalism?
RP: Yes, he does insist that his thought grows from his concrete existence—despite the fact that it often looks like highly abstract speculation. He rarely uses the first-person singular in the work he published during his lifetime, although the Black Notebooks (his philosophical journals) sometimes get more personal. I think that if abstractions are deeply rooted in experience, even if they don’t concretely describe that experience, they have the potential to speak to readers in their singularity—as long as readers bring their own experience to bear on them. The epitaph that Kierkegaard wanted for himself is both the most abstract and the most intimate: “That Single Individual.” Those three words are potentially far more moving than a catalog of biographical facts could ever be. But feeling that impact requires imagination, which is sometimes undervalued in philosophy: moving from the universal to the particular and back again is imaginative work.
CC: How much of your own philosophical work is drawn from your personal experience—for example, your engagement with typewriters as a material practice against digital enframing?
RP: All of it. I don’t see philosophy as a game, a technical discipline, or an occasion to entertain intellectual “worries” that don’t deeply concern you. My philosophical publications aren’t autobiographical in some obvious way—cringy disclosures of personal facts. It’s just that they grow from life as I’ve lived it—including my lived encounters with philosophy books. In The Typewriter Revolution, which is more journalistic, I do report on my own experiences, but the point is not to say “look at me”; it’s to inspire others to find some possibilities that may be akin to ones I’ve found meaningful.
CC: Being and Time and the later essays, like “The Question Concerning Technology,” are canonical. But do you have your own favorite Heidegger work—perhaps one that is less well known but more revealing?
RP: I’d choose a pretty famous one: the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, which I translated with Gregory Fried. Heidegger himself chose to publish it first among all his lecture courses. It’s dramatic, unpredictable, brilliant, dubious, experimental—quite an adventure. It also includes a notorious reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Heidegger’s politics in the mid-1930s dreamed of transforming society through a rebirth of “rootedness.” I don’t endorse or excuse his behavior, but everyone who wants to think through Heidegger needs to grapple with his political thought (and thoughtlessness), and this lecture course is a good place to begin. My critical analysis of his politics can be found in Time and Trauma.
CC: Another of Heidegger's famous quotes is: “Every questioning about being is itself a way of being of the questioner.” So here's a question: Is a Heideggerian philosopher born or made?
RP: Nobody can affect anybody spiritually or intellectually unless there is already an inner affinity that can respond to a provocation. One can be moved to look for the most important things only if one is movable. So I’ll pick “born.” But I consider myself a “Heideggerian” only in the sense that I share his questions and find some of his approaches promising, not that I subscribe to some supposed system of Heideggerian philosophy. He always denied that he had such a thing. There’s an anecdote that when one of his seminar students started to spout his jargon, he said, “We’ll have no heideggerizing here!”
CC: Finally, and perhaps most practically: how does a young philosopher develop an authentic relationship to the question of being without simply performing Heideggerian jargon? What does that kind of genuine philosophical formation actually look like?
RP: We need words to think, and we ought to draw those words from deep sources, one of which can be Heidegger. I agree that it would be a mistake to stay within his language, though. There is no neutral, ahistorical vocabulary, but there are other deep sources. Philosophers young and old should read Lao Tzu, Aristotle, Hegel, Emerson … learn to think with great thinkers and, when necessary, against them; learn their logics (there is no universal logic of philosophy as such); read fiction and poetry; keep speaking, keep writing, and eventually, with luck and practice, find the words that resonate best with what they themselves need to say.
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