Is Being fundamentally a state, or an act? Is humanhood something we are, or that we do? For Heidegger, we only exist as relational creatures, embedded in a web of connections, and it is through our attempt to comprehend the nature of those relations that we arrive at a full understanding of ourselves as Beings. His was a philosophy against alienation, against the obliteration of individuals into mass society which he deemed a “dictatorship of the ‘they.’” Writing in Weimar Germany, he was frightened by the onrush of crowds and consumer goods, of images in entertainment and mass media, of a state defined by competition and envy. He feared that Being was being destroyed.
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