The Investigations on human beings in Hegel and Heidegger start at self-consciousness. The self-consciousness is originated from Descartes. He found that consciousness was the foundation of knowledge and beings. In fact, the consciousness is the consc...
The Investigations on human beings in Hegel and Heidegger start at self-consciousness. The self-consciousness is originated from Descartes. He found that consciousness was the foundation of knowledge and beings. In fact, the consciousness is the consciousness about self, which is the starting point of the philosophy of Hegel and Heidegger. In that respect, both Hegel and Heidegger developed their philosophy in the circle of modem subjectivism.
Hegel focuses much on the structure of self-consciousness and its necessity. The self-consciousness has the mode of splitting-up and dissolution. Our life is the process that self makes self different form self and get rid of the differences.
The Struggle for recognition is the reason why the process of splitting-up and dissolution is necessary for us. All human beings want to get the positive recognition from others. Everyone does not want to give it to others. To get it from other human beings, we have to fight each other. In the course of the struggle, we have to change ourselves to more powerful ones. The process of the self-changing is one of the splitting-up and dissolution of self-consciousness.
Heidegger grasps the aspect of understanding of being in the self-consciousness. While a man is conscious of his self, he is to understand all beings related to him. A human being is the place where the being-understanding occurs. He is the place of being-understanding. There-being(Dasein).
The There(Da) in There-being is the place of the process of splitting-up and dissolution of life, too. The self-consciousness is the same place of both the being understanding in Heidegger and life process in Hegel.
Heidegger finds the possibility of being-understanding in the self-consciousness. He determines the essence of the human being as There-being(Dasein). However, he does not investigate the ground of Dasein. In Hegel, it would be the struggle for recognition.