Free At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell Page A

published in Husserl’s own phenomenological Yearbook series in 1927. The first page contained an innocuous-seeming quotation from Plato’s dialogue The Sophist :
For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’ . We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.
    Of all the perplexing things about ‘ being ’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realise that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything is? Most philosophers had neglected the question; one of the few to raise it was Gottfried von Leibniz, who in 1714 put it this way:why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’ It was this that led the critic George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’.
    As a fresh starting point for philosophy, this ‘wow!’ is itself a kind of a Big Bang. It’s also a big snub for Husserl. We are meant to understand that he and his followers are foremost among the people who fail to be astonished at being, because they have retreated into their navel-gazing inwardness. They have forgotten the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes.Heidegger’s book politelypraises Husserl’s phenomenological methods, and acknowledges him with a dedication ‘in friendship and admiration’. But he also clearly implies that Husserl and his crew have lost themselves in their own heads, which is the very place of uncertainty and isolation from which intentionality had been supposed to rescue them. Wake up, phenomenologists! Remember being — out there, in here, under you, above you, pressing in upon you. Remember the things themselves, and remember your own being!
    Oddly, Heidegger was first inspired to set off down this route by reading Franz Brentano — not Brentano’s paragraph on intentionality, but his doctoral thesis, which concerned different meanings of the word ‘being’ in the works of Aristotle. The philosopher who led Heidegger to notice being was the same who led Husserl to intentionality, and thus to the inward turn.
    Heidegger discoveredBrentano’s thesis when he was eighteen, living in his home town of Messkirch, not far from Freiburg but in the Upper Danube region of Swabia. It is a quiet Catholic town, dominated by a wildly over-the-top baroque church in the local style. Its interior, a riot of white-and-gold excess, with saints and angels and flying cherubs by the cloud, comes as a cheering surprise after the stern exterior and the solemn, dark forests around the town.
    Martin, born on 26 September 1889, was the eldest child, with a younger sister, Marie, and a brother, Fritz. Their father, Friedrich, was the sexton of the church, and the family lived just opposite it: their steep-roofed house, the plain central one in a group of three, is still there. Martin and Fritz helped out with church duties from an early age, picking flowers for decoration and climbing the tower steps to ring its sevenbells in the mornings. Each Christmas they began extraearly. After drinking milky coffee and eating cakes beside the Christmas tree at home, they would cross the little square to the church before 4 a.m. and began the Schrecke-läuten (fright-ringing) that woke all the townspeople. At Easter they stilled the bells and instead turned a