Time spent with familiar things has a special significance: such occasions offer a respite from the frenzied world of technology that increasingly dominates our lives. Heidegger teaches us to embrace the meditative side of our lives and recommends that we each practice attuning ourselves to a distinctively philosophical call: to take your time in the midst of the most familiar.

In a memorial address delivered in his hometown of Meskirch in 1955, the philosopher Martin Heidegger invited his audience to ‘dwell upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here, on this patch of home ground, and now, in the present hour of history’.

Heidegger thinks that the ‘now’ of our present hour of history is marked by a distinctive loss of rootedness, the accelerating deracination of our lives from any ‘patch of home ground’, an uprooting from any definite ‘here’. He thinks of what is happening here as caught up in a changeover in our most basic ways of understanding the world and the significance of our lives. In what he calls ‘a revolution in leading concepts’, it concerns a changeover from a conceptual formation that he regards as ‘traditional’ to one that he calls ‘technological’.  What is, then, Heidegger’s conception of this changed condition, and what are his recommendations for those caught up in it?

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Our ‘patch of home ground’ is no longer a place where we dwell together.

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The revolution Heidegger has in view ‘developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe’; but today, Heidegger suggests, it has grown worldwide and now ‘rules the whole earth’. And this revolution, the most fundamental revolution inside what we perhaps too casually call ‘the industrial revolution’, is not over. As we shall see, something newly new is ‘beginning’ in our time that relates not just to technological modes of industrial production but the formation of our social existence.

Heidegger’s view of the history of the (globalising) European world is that, from its inception in classical Greek antiquity, it is characterised by the growth of a world-understanding which has encouraged and sustained the development of a distinctively technological-scientific way of revealing everything that is.

The claim here is not simply that scientific advances and new technological devices play an increasingly important part of daily life, but that our thinking more generally is increasingly characterised by a way of understanding everything that is which, in its most basic terms, takes measurability, calculability and orderability (being under orders, or at our disposal) as criteria for what counts as ‘objectively real’.

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The language of roots – and a corresponding anxiety regarding up-rootedness in the technological age – dominates Heidegger’s reflections.

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In these conditions, our ‘patch of home ground’ is no longer a place where we dwell together but is increasingly disclosed as little more than a world-space fragment that provides a satisfactory location for efficient eating and sleeping, and, if one is lucky, provides a convenient starting point for access to entertainment and work – life elements which may now be immediately available at any time in the very same ‘home’ location, without ‘going out’. In this newly prevailing set-up, the world-understanding that had belonged to what Heidegger calls ‘the old rootedness’ in a place is being lost.