While Being and Time is approaching its hundredth anniversary, there is still a reason why most scientists, and especially AI researchers, continue to think in a Cartesian mindset rather than in terms of how we actually experience the world. The reason has less to do with Heidegger’s difficulty and more to do with the way philosophy itself became polarized in the twentieth century.
Philosophy split into two major branches in the late nineteenth century. One branch followed Nietzsche into what came to be known as Continental Philosophy. The other followed Frege into what became Analytic Philosophy. To see the divergence, you could just look at the titles of their respective works: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an allegorical narrative that overturns inherited traditions, while Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic is a rigorous attempt to ground mathematics in logic. The contrast is stark, mythic poetry versus logical science.
The philosophical split can also be seen in what happens to their theories of truth. For the Continental tradition, truth is self-oriented, temporal, and disclosive, it emerges in the lived unfolding of existence. For the Analytic tradition, truth is objective, eternal, and absolute, it can be captured in a proposition and tested against reality. While Nietzsche and his heirs were busy dismantling the Western tradition through critique, Frege and his followers were working to bring that same tradition to its logical conclusion in the form of a foundational science.
These differences were not only theoretical but personal. They reflected deep divergences in how one sees the world. Here we find the parallel to American politics. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, political polarization sorts citizens according to underlying moral and ideological preferences. Democrats and Republicans can be presented with the same facts yet arrive at opposing conclusions because they are already oriented differently toward the world.
The same kind of sorting took place in philosophy departments. Professors tended to hire those who shared their outlook. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the McCarthy-era Red Scare provided cover to purge departments of Continental thinkers, who were often seen as politically suspect. As John McCumber documents in The Philosophy Scare, this had a lasting effect, i.e., most American philosophy departments today are dominated by Analytic philosophy, with the major exception being Catholic universities, which, as private universities, were largely untouched by McCarthyism.
In my own experience as a student, this meant that I first encountered Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida not in philosophy classes but in courses outside the department such as literature, humanities, and religious studies. This imbalance helps explain why Heidegger has had little influence on cognitive science, despite the fact that his essay The Question Concerning Technology is widely cited.
It is this long history of polarization that makes me feel somewhat alone in advocating for a Heideggerian understanding of world, even though Hubert Dreyfus showed decades ago how crucial it is for understanding AI. That Heidegger still remains on the margins of cognitive science is not because his ideas lack relevance, but because the institutional and intellectual history of philosophy in America has left us unprepared to receive them.