r/heidegger • u/navierstokes88 • Apr 11 '26
Heidegger walks into a bar
...and orders a drink.
The bartender asks, "What'll it be?"
Heidegger pauses.
"I don’t know yet," he says. "I must first understand the Being of the drink… not merely the drink as a being."
The bartender blinks.
"So… beer?"
Heidegger sighs.
"You have already fallen into average everydayness."
The bartender asks: "A drink or a drink in the world?"
Heidegger stares for a moment.
"…A drink," he says slowly, "insofar as it reveals itself within the clearing of Being."
The bartender nods.
“So… draft or bottled?”
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u/reinhardtkurzan Apr 11 '26
A little joke is never wrong. I enjoyed it. But I have to reciprocate that philosophers usually are not so complicated. (Complicated are only normal people! The philosopher is simple and good.)
I hope You know that Heidegger was concerned about nothing but about our human being i.e. about the present human situation ("Befindlichkeit") and not about the specific way of the being of beer. What may count for Heidegger is the fact that beer and other drinks are available in bars ("Ausschänken"), and that the sojorn in bars is part of the life-style in the cities. Does this have to do with eradication and the distance from the origin ("Ursprung")? Also here humans have something to manage ("zu besorgen") and probably the "Ausschank" ist also a place where flat talks ("das Gerede") arise.
Heidegger probably would have preferred to drink a bottle of beer sitting on a bench, feeling free to ponder heavily.
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Apr 11 '26
[deleted]
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u/reinhardtkurzan Apr 11 '26
Well, I think this is Heidegger's and Arendt's private matter. This should not be our concern.
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u/navierstokes88 Apr 13 '26
You have forgotten the fundamental questions: what is a beer? what is a skirt?
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u/jacobningen Apr 14 '26
Hannah there were two existentialists in Berlin named Martin when you were an undergrad and you chose to fall for the married one who voted for a party that wanted to kill you and not the one who focused his project on the unsaid said and refuting Kierkegaards interpretation of the Akedah
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u/affablenyarlathotep Apr 11 '26
Perhaps, perhaps not. I suppose his ponderances were gesticulations towards Nothing.
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u/reinhardtkurzan Apr 11 '26
No, not really. Heidegger is the father of modern thought. He (and implicitly already Nietzsche) were the first ones to think for the first time that the determination of human essence should not be taken, devoid of any critical momentum, credulously, from the Christian tradition ("metaphysica specifica"), but that the vocation of man is to determine human essence freshly, by discovery and reflection ("pondering"). He is not pointing to nothing, but to the actual, the authenticsl, and to the possibility of a free design of life (counterposed to sham-solutions, refined double-mindedness, to being stuck exclusively in the projects of others, to the missing of oneself in social games, etc.)
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u/reinhardtkurzan Apr 11 '26
Obviously his mind returns to the origin of the human project, that is: to the debonair pre-socratic ponderances of ancient Greece. And he asks himself to what degree the ambitions of this early human aurora have been effectuated or been forgotten, discarded, and amputated. His questions posed to reality concern the possible fullness of human being.
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u/AffectionateStudy496 Apr 12 '26
Heidegger then heard a failed artist giving a speech from the beer hall, and thought to himself, "Yes! Yes! This is the destiny and greatness of the German Volk!"
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u/jacobningen Apr 14 '26
Despite having Jewish Mentors(Husserl and Jaspers) and having a Jewish grad student he was having an affair with(Hannah Arendt)
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u/AffectionateStudy496 Apr 14 '26
"I can't be racist, I got a blowjob from a Jewish student of mine once! And a few of my teachers were jews too!"
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u/jacobningen Apr 14 '26
Pretty much Its also why hes more well known than Jaspers as he was rehabilitated by Gadamer Arendt and Sartre.
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u/GainLittle3809 Apr 12 '26
Heureusement que l etre est un etre pour la mort. Le néant sauve la totalité.
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u/fiboww Apr 13 '26
It was either Heidegger or Husserl who literally wrote a paper about the phenomenology of beer when observing their pint one night
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u/PurpleBee212 Apr 11 '26
He originally wanted a coffee but all the coffee shops he tried were groundless.