These guys, Malvacias and two other performers, have done their metaphysical homework, and rarely has a philosophical idea – Heidegger’s Dasein (roughly representing human existence) – been wrapped in pillowcases and demanded your attention so insistently.

Heidegger transformed the philosophical scene and became a celebrity overnight when in 1943 he published his magnum opus, Being in Time – which I won’t summarise here. What I will say is that Malvacias, like many others, has found in Heidegger a thinker for whom philosophy meant more than intellectual exercises concerned with artificial problems. Heidegger went straight to the heart of the matter and famously asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He was not everyone’s cup of tea though; his unshakable atheism spurred him to call Christianity nothing but Platonism for the people. Faith, he said, makes you unable to question things, and necessarily shuts you off from truth. One important truth, he claimed, was that human existence was bounded off from death by a horizon of time. And beyond the horizon was not heaven, not nirvana, but just plain nothingness.

¶ 4:01 PM