Martin Heidegger

German philosopher
Martin HeideggerGerman philosopher

September 26, 1889

Messkirch, Germany


May 26, 1976

Messkirch, Germany

Martin Heidegger,  (born Sept. 26, 1889, Messkirch, Schwarzwald, Ger.—died May 26, 1976, Messkirch, W.Ger.), German philosopher, counted among the main exponents of existentialism. His groundbreaking work in ontology (the philosophical study of being, or existence) and metaphysics determined the course of 20th-century philosophy on the European continent and exerted an enormous influence in virtually every other humanistic discipline, including literary criticism, hermeneutics, psychology, and theology.

Background and early career

Heidegger was the son of a sexton of the local Roman Catholic church in Messkirch. Although he grew up in humble circumstances, his obvious intellectual gifts earned him a religious scholarship to pursue his secondary education in the neighbouring town of Konstanz.

While in his 20s Heidegger studied at the University of Freiburg under Heinrich Rickert and Edmund Husserl. He received a doctorate in philosophy in 1913 with a dissertation on psychologism, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus: Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik (“The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-Positive Contribution to Logic”). In 1915 he completed his habilitation thesis (a requirement for teaching at the university level in Germany) on the Scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus.

In the following year Heidegger’s study of classical Protestant texts by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others led to a spiritual crisis, the result of which was his rejection of the religion of his youth, Roman Catholicism. He completed his break with Catholicism by marrying a Lutheran, Elfride Petri, in 1917.

As a lecturer at Freiburg starting in 1919, Heidegger became heir apparent to leadership of the movement that Husserl had founded, phenomenology. The goal of phenomenology was to describe as exactly as possible the phenomena and structures of conscious experience without appeal to philosophical or scientific preconceptions about their nature, origin, or cause. From Husserl, Heidegger learned the method of “phenomenological reduction,” by which the inherited preconceptions of conscious phenomena are pared away in order to reveal their essence, or primordial truth. It was a method that Heidegger would put to good use in his self-described “dismantling” of the traditional approaches of Western metaphysics, almost all of which he found inadequate to the task of genuine philosophical inquiry.

In 1923 Heidegger was appointed associate professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg. Although he published very little in the early 1920s, his mesmerizing podium presence created for him a legendary reputation among young students of philosophy in Germany. In a later tribute, Hannah Arendt (1906–75), a former student of Heidegger and one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, described Heidegger’s subterranean renown as being like a “rumour of a hidden king.”

According to Heidegger’s later account, his interest in philosophy was inspired by his reading in 1907 of Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862; On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle), by the German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Subsequent stages of Heidegger’s early philosophical development were illuminated for scholars in the late 20th century by the publication of transcripts of lectures he delivered in the 1920s. They show the influence of a number of thinkers and themes, including the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s concern with the irreducible uniqueness of the individual, which was important in Heidegger’s early existentialism; Aristotle’s conception of phronēsis, or practical wisdom, which helped Heidegger to define the peculiar “Being” of the human individual in terms of a set of worldly involvements and commitments; and the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of “historicity,” of being historically situated and determined, which became crucial in Heidegger’s view of time and history as essential facets of human Being.

Being and Time

The publication of Heidegger’s masterpiece, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in 1927 generated a level of excitement that few other works of philosophy have matched. Despite its nearly impenetrable obscurity, the work earned Heidegger promotion to full professorship at Marburg and recognition as one the world’s leading philosophers. The extreme density of the text was due in part to Heidegger’s avoidance of traditional philosophical terminology in favour of neologisms derived from colloquial German, most notably Dasein (literally, “being-there”). Heidegger used this technique to further his goal of dismantling traditional philosophical theories and perspectives.

Being and Time began with a traditional ontological question, which Heidegger formulated as the Seinsfrage, or the “question of Being.” In an essay first published in 1963, “My Way to Phenomenology”, Heidegger put the Seinsfrage as follows: “If Being is predicated in manifold meanings, then what is its leading fundamental meaning? What does Being mean?” If, in other words, there are many kinds of Being, or many senses in which existence may be predicated of a thing, what is the most fundamental kind of Being, the kind that may be predicated of all things? In order to address this question properly, Heidegger found it necessary to undertake a preliminary phenomenological investigation of the Being of the human individual, which he called Dasein. In this endeavour he ventured onto philosophical ground that was entirely untrodden.

Since at least the time of René Descartes (1596–1650), one of the basic problems of Western philosophy had been to establish a secure foundation for the individual human’s presumed knowledge of the world around him on the basis of phenomena or experiences about which he could be certain (see epistemology). This approach presupposed a conception of the individual as a mere thinking subject (or “thinking substance”) who is radically distinct from the world and therefore cognitively isolated from it. Heidegger stood this approach on its head. For Heidegger, the very Being of the individual involves engagement with the world. The fundamental character of Dasein is a condition of already “Being-in-the-world”—of already being caught up in, involved with, or committed to other individuals and things. Dasein’s practical involvements and commitments, therefore, are ontologically more basic than the thinking subject and all other Cartesian abstractions. Accordingly, Being and Time gives pride of place to ontological concepts such as “world,” “everydayness,” and “Being-with-others.”

Yet the framework of Being and Time is also suffused by a sensibility—derived from secularized Protestantism—that stresses the paramountcy of original sin. Emotionally laden concepts such as “angst,” “guilt,” and “falling” suggest that worldliness and the human condition in general are essentially a curse. Heidegger, it seems, had implicitly adopted the critique of “mass society” set forth by 19th-century thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, a perspective that was well established within Germany’s largely illiberal professoriate in the early 20th century. This theme is illustrated in Being and Time’s treatment of “authenticity,” one of the central concepts of the work. Heidegger’s view seemed to be that the majority of human beings lead an existence that is inauthentic. Rather than facing up to their own finitude—represented above all by the inevitability of death—they seek distraction and escape in inauthentic modalities such as “curiosity,” “ambiguity,” and “idle talk.” Heidegger characterized such conformity in terms of the notion of the anonymous das Man—“the They.” Conversely, the possibility of authentic Being-in-the-world seemed to portend the emergence of a new spiritual aristocracy. Such individuals would be capable of heeding the “call of conscience” to fulfill their potential for Being-a-self.

Another distinguishing feature of Being and Time is its treatment of temporality (Zeitlichkeit). Heidegger believed that traditional Western ontology from Plato to Immanuel Kant had adopted a static and inadequate understanding of what it means to be human. For the most part, previous thinkers had conceived of the Being of humans in terms of the properties and modalities of “thinghood,” of that which is “present-at-hand.” In Being and Time, Heidegger conversely stressed Being-in-the-world as Existenz—a form of being that is “ecstatically,” rather than passively, oriented toward its own possibilities. From this standpoint one of the distinctive features of inauthentic Dasein is that it fails to actualize its Being. Its existential passivity becomes indistinguishable from the nonecstatic, inert being of things.

The problem of historicity, as discussed in Division II of Being and Time, is one of the most poorly understood sections of the work. Being and Time is usually interpreted as favouring the standpoint of an individual Dasein: social and historical concerns are intrinsically foreign to the basic approach of the work. Nevertheless, with the concept of historicity Heidegger indicated that historical questions and themes are legitimate topics of ontological inquiry. The concept of historicity suggests that Dasein always “temporalizes,” or acts in time, as part of a larger social and historical collectivity—as part of a people or Volk. As such, Dasein possesses a heritage on which it must act. Historicity thus means making a decision about how to actualize (or act upon) salient elements of a collective past. Heidegger stresses that Dasein is future-oriented: it responds to the past, in the context of the present, for the sake of the future. His treatment of historicity thus constitutes a polemical response to the traditional historicism of Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, and Wilhelm Dilthey, which viewed human life as “historical” in a sense that was passive and devoid of intentionality (the quality of being about or directed toward something else). This kind of historicism failed to understand history as a project that humans consciously undertake in order to respond to their collective past for the sake of their future.

Later philosophy








Heidegger and Nazism

In the months after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany in January 1933, German universities came under increasing pressure to support the “national revolution” and to eliminate Jewish scholars and the teaching of “Jewish” doctrines, such as the theory of relativity. In April 1933, Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg by the university’s teaching staff. One month later he became a member of the Nazi Party; until he resigned as rector in April 1934, he helped to institute Nazi educational and cultural programs at Freiburg and vigorously promoted the domestic and foreign policies of the Nazi regime. Already during the late 1920s he had criticized the dissolute nature of the German university system, where “specialization” and the ideology of “academic freedom” precluded the attainment of a higher unity. In a letter of 1929 he bemoaned the progressive “Jewification” (Verjudung) of the German spirit. In his inaugural address, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”), he called for reorganizing the university along the lines of the Nazi Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, and celebrated the fact that university life would thereafter be merged with the state and the needs of the German Volk. During the first month of his rectorship, he sent a telegram to Hitler urging him to postpone an upcoming meeting of university rectors until Gleichschaltung—the Nazi euphemism for the elimination of political opponents—had been completed. In the fall of 1933, Heidegger began a speaking tour on behalf of Hitler’s national referendum to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations. As he proclaimed in one speech: “Let not doctrines and ideas be your guide. The Führer is Germany’s only reality and law.” Heidegger continued to support Hitler in the years after his rectorship, though with somewhat less enthusiasm than he had shown in 1933–34.

At the end of the war in 1945, a favourably disposed university de-Nazification commission found Heidegger guilty of having “consciously placed the great prestige of his scholarly reputation … in the service of the National Socialist Revolution,” and he was banned from further teaching. (The ban was lifted in 1950.) In later years, despite pleas from friends and associates to disavow publicly his Nazi past, Heidegger declined to do so. Instead, in his own defense he preferred to cite a maxim from the French poet Paul Valéry: “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.” In his book Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1953, Heidegger retrospectively praised “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”

Beginning in the 1980s, there was considerable controversy among Heidegger scholars regarding the alleged connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political views in the 1930s and ’40s. Were there affinities between Heidegger’s philosophical thought, or his style of philosophizing, and the totalitarian ideals of the Nazis? Supporters of Heidegger, repeating a view prominent in the first decades after the war, argued that there was nothing inherently fascistic in his philosophy and that claims to the contrary grossly distorted his work. Opponents, on the other hand, cited parallels between the critical treatment in Being and Time of notions such as “publicness,” “everydayness,” “idle talk,” and “curiosity” and fascist-oriented critiques of the vapidity and dissoluteness of bourgeois liberalism. They also pointed to more specific similarities evident in Division II of Being and Time, in which Heidegger emphasizes the centrality of the Volk as a historical actor and the importance of “choosing a hero,” an idea widely promoted among the German right as the Führerprinzip. For these scholars, Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the condition of man in modern technological society allowed him to regard the Nazi revolution as a deliverance that would make the world “safe for Being.” Among those who shared this view were the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, who wrote in a letter to the head of the de-Nazification commission that “Heidegger’s manner of thinking, which to me seems in its essence unfree, dictatorial, and incapable of communication, would today be disastrous in its pedagogical effects.”


Heidegger’s thought has been faulted on other grounds as well. Some have suggested that his phenomenological method rests on a grandiose illusion and that the search for “thinking Being” is merely a disguised quest for a kind of belief in God. In the same vein, others have charged that Heidegger’s abstruse terminology is only a mask disguising and mystifying a more traditional approach to philosophy. Such negative evaluations, if joined with a sincere attempt to follow Heidegger’s own path through his writings, would not be incompatible with his thought. After all, he asks—or rather, provokes—his readers to question, not to listen to answers. It is, therefore, misleading to present Heidegger’s philosophy as a set of clearly understandable results. His metaphors must remain, rather than be translated into the usual philosophical terminology that he rejected.

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