Heidegger on BYU Humanities

Similar to Dewey, Heidegger was interested in how the individual can find his place in the context of society. Heidegger referred to this as "Being-in-the-world," and spends a great portion of his masterwork, Being and Time, discussing exactly what this entails. To summarize him within the scope of this page, I'm going to list his basic ideas; keep in mind that there are many others, and do not necessarily sequentially follow from each other, regardless of how they are presented.

Heidegger asked, "what does it mean to be?", a question from which sprung the rest of his philosophy. His answer, in part, is that to be is to care. Humans are the being for whom things matter, and that care is exhibited, among other ways, in art. Art is truth's "setting-itself-to-work," and enables the observer to reach a place whereby they can discover truth for themselves. Note that art does not purport to be truth, only that it enables one to find it.

On a different, yet related topic: We are responsible for the state of things in the world. There is no other nebulous world, like Kant believed. Our actions change the potentialities of things around us. We seek to find conscience (an echo of Kierkegaard's authenticity), and must fight to avoid "falling-in-with-the-One."

With this in mind, a good social website, then, unifies its users by inspiring them to draw on their common potentialities in discussion and action, and then exploring the new possibilities thereby achieved. We are all individuals, concerned with others, seeking to take authentic action; if a social website can present a means to that end, then it will be successful.

The full scope of a Heideggerian approach is probably beyond the scope of the BYU Humanities website. It's not Facebook; it's going to be difficult for it to incite conversation between its users. The closest it can get to that isa probably through the presentation of events where visitors of the site would be interested in going to and welcomed upon their arrival. In this, it succeeds: it has no shortage of events and announcements on its front page. My only concern, again, is that it may be difficult to tell who a particular event is aimed at, which is why I suggested drop down menus for the different categories of visitors to the site. Giving each category their own page, i.e., "Students," "Faculty," etc., is a step in the right direction, but that needs to somehow be implemented into the homepage for it to truly be effective. As an example why, ask yourself the last time you ever went onto the second page of Google results. We have especially short attention spans in this day and age, and unfortunately, the BYU Humanities website fails to cater to that. Yes, it's unfortunate that it's become necessary to present information in this way, but the fact of the matter is that there are rules a website has to follow if it wants to be successful, and effective communication is a major one.


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