Martin Heidegger
| Martin Heidegger | |
|---|---|
.jpg)
| |
| Martin Heidegger, German philosopher known for Being and Time | |
| Tradition | Continental philosophy, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Hermeneutics |
| Influenced by | Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aristotle, Meister Eckhart |
| Lifespan | 1889–1976 |
| Notable ideas | Fundamental ontology; Being and Time; Dasein; being-in-the-world; critique of technology; history of Being |
| Occupation | Philosopher, Professor |
| Influenced | Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Post-structuralism |
| Wikidata | Q48301 |
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher who had a profound impact on 20th-century thought by refocusing philosophy on the question of Being. He is best known for his magnum opus Being and Time (1927), an ambitious work of existential phenomenology that asks “What does it mean for something to be?” Heidegger introduced the term Dasein (literally “being-there”) to describe the mode of being peculiar to humans – namely, beings who care about and question their own existence. His analysis of Dasein and its temporal structures (such as being-toward-death and authenticity) revolutionized continental philosophy. Beyond Being and Time, Heidegger’s later work explored how history, language, art, and technology shape the disclosure of being itself. He influenced generations of thinkers – from existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to hermeneutic philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer, to post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida – as well as fields as diverse as theology, psychology, and literary criticism. At the same time, Heidegger was a controversial figure: he publicly supported Nazism in the 1930s and later faced accusations of anti-Semitism, sparking ongoing debates about the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. This article reviews Heidegger’s life and education, his major philosophical works and ideas (especially Being and Time and its ontology), his later thought after “the turn” of the 1930s, his influence and reception, the principal critiques and debates, and his lasting legacy.
Early Life and Education
Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in Meßkirch in southwest Germany to a Catholic family. His father was a church sexton and a craftsman, and the rhythms of rural life in the Black Forest region would later color Heidegger’s thinking. In his youth he prepared for the priesthood and studied theology, but he never completed this path. A turning point came when he read Franz Brentano’s 1874 work On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle. As a teenager, Heidegger later recounted that Brentano’s treatment of the question of Being ignited his lifelong quest for understanding existence. After a stint in a Jesuit seminary (which he left due to health issues in 1909), he entered the University of Freiburg to study philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences. He was drawn to the emerging Husserlian phenomenology of the time and graduated with high praise in 1913 for a dissertation on judgment and psychologism. In 1915, under the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert, he completed a habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus’s theory of categories.
During World War I, Heidegger briefly served in the German army before being discharged for health reasons. In 1919 he became an assistant to Edmund Husserl at Freiburg. Husserl’s phenomenological method deeply influenced him, but Heidegger soon developed his own vision. In the early 1920s, teaching at the University of Marburg, he gained fame for courses that combined existential questions with historical figures like Aristotle and Kant. Among his students were future luminaries such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Rudolf Carnap, and Hannah Arendt (with whom Heidegger had a famous, decades-long affair). In 1927 Heidegger’s first major book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), was published. This dissertation-sized work immediately made him a leading philosopher; he became a full professor at Marburg shortly thereafter. In 1928 he was appointed to the prestigious chair at Freiburg once held by Husserl and Rickert.
Heidegger’s life took a turbulent turn in the 1930s. In 1933, amid the rise of Adolf Hitler, he was elected rector of Freiburg University and promptly joined the Nazi Party. He gave a rectoral address declaring the need for a “German university,” and he signed public statements supporting Hitler’s regime. After less than a year he stepped down as rector (officially frustrated with politics), but he remained a Nazi party member until the end of World War II. After the war, he was banned briefly from teaching during denazification but was later reinstated as a private scholar. He spent his later decades lecturing on thinkers like Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and the pre-Socratics, and publishing numerous essays on technology, language, and art. Heidegger died in Freiburg on May 26, 1976.
Being and Time and Existential Phenomenology
Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) is his most famous and influential work. Its declared aim is “the concrete working-out of the question of the meaning of Being.” Heidegger argued that Western philosophy had long overlooked the basic question of what it means to be. He believed that this question could not be answered by abstract theorizing alone; instead, one must analyze the structure of human existence (what he calls Dasein) to see how an understanding of “being” becomes possible for us. This approach is often called existential or hermeneutic phenomenology: it combines detailed descriptions of everyday experience with a philosophical reflection on the conditions that make those experiences meaningful. Rather than starting from a detached consciousness or a scientific worldview, Heidegger starts with the way we are already “being-in-the-world” – naturally engaged with our surroundings and projects.
A few of the key ideas from Being and Time illustrate Heidegger’s approach. Dasein literally means “being-there,” and for Heidegger it designates the kind of being that humans have. Dasein is not just a subject or a thinking mind; it always finds itself thrown into a world of practical and social relations. Heidegger breaks down the concept of Dasein in a phenomenological analysis to reveal its basic structures:
- Being-in-the-world: Heidegger overturns the Cartesian picture of an isolated subject. He insists that Dasein is always already in a context of relationships – concerned with work, tools, other people, ideas, and tasks. For instance, when a carpenter uses a hammer, the hammer is “ready-to-hand”: it is simply part of the activity, not an object detachedly examined. Only if the hammer breaks does it become “present-at-hand,” an object of theoretical observation. This example shows how Dasein’s primary mode is practical engagement, not passive looking. In this way, notions like world, care, and equipment become fundamental. Heidegger famously translates the German phrases Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) and Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) for these modes of encountering things.
- Thrownness and Ekstases: Dasein always finds itself “thrown” (Geworfenheit) into conditions not of its own choosing: a family, a culture, a time period, and even a body and temperament. These facts of birth and society shape the possibilities available to us. Meanwhile, Dasein also projects itself toward the future, choosing among possibilities and shaping its own development. Heidegger terms this forward projection “existence” (Existenz) – not to be confused with mere fact of life, but the actual doing of choosing and caring about one’s possibilities. Together, being-thrown (reflecting the past, facts already given) and projecting (the future possibilities we move toward) define Dasein’s temporality, or fundamental experience of time. In an everyday moment (present), we draw on our thrown past and projected future together. Thus, Dasein’s basic way of being is temporal, from which subjectivity and historicity emerge. In Heidegger’s view, authentic existence involves “taking over” (Eigentlichung) this temporal unity, whereas inauthentic existence is not fully owning up to one’s temporal freedom, but instead drifting along with the crowd (“das Man”, the They).
- Authenticity and Anxiety: A person normally lives in idle “everydayness,” absorbed in routine social norms and petty concerns. Heidegger calls this mode of being inauthentic or simply das Man. In it, one ignores the deeper question of existence and avoids confronting mortality. In contrast, when Dasein faces its own finitude – especially when confronted with death – it can become authentic. Anxiety (Angst) plays a critical role: in an anxious mood, the usual meanings of things can lose their hold, revealing instead the “nothingness” or groundlessness behind them. Experiencing anxiety about one’s being (for example, realizing that death is not some far-off event but an ever-present possibility) can jolt Dasein into a more honest confrontation with its own existence. Heidegger’s famous motif is “being-toward-death.” He argues that when we accept the inevitability of our own demise, we recognize that each choice we make is an irrevocable appropriation of our single lifetime. This realization can free Dasein to shape its life based on its ownmost potentialities rather than society’s bland defaults. Thus, an authentic Dasein resolutely chooses itself, acknowledging past influences (thrownness) but owning them in a personal story, and facing the future without fleeing back into anonymity.
These analyses in Being and Time are aimed at answering the “Seinsfrage” (the question of Being): what does “is” mean in general? Heidegger eventually concludes that Being itself (das Sein) is not an entity or a substance, but the ontological difference between any being and the act of “be-ing” that enables it to appear. In other words, when we say “snow is white” or “socrates is wise,” the word “is” denotes a basic context or intelligibility that makes the subject and predicate relate. Heidegger argues that Western thought has forgotten this difference and treated “being” just as another being. To recover it, Heidegger says, one must first reveal how Being becomes meaningful through Dasein’s understanding.
A comment on method: Heidegger’s phenomenology differs markedly from that of his teacher Husserl. While Husserl aimed for a “bracketing” of the natural world to describe pure acts of consciousness, Heidegger “brackets” in a different sense. He too avoids assumptions, but instead of setting aside ordinary existence, he illuminates it in detail. He examines ordinary moods (boredom, anxiety), equipment, and speech to show how they disclose the world. This makes his method more hermeneutic (interpretive) than Husserl’s. Heidegger saw phenomenology as a way for the question of Being to emerge from Dasein’s lived experience, rather than from detached reflection. In short, Heidegger took up phenomenology as a tool to unveil ontology (the study of being) through descriptions of existence.
Overall, Being and Time dramatically shifts attention from objects to human being itself. Its core lies in the claim that the meaning of Being is found only in our engagement with the world and our self-conception as historical, finite beings. The book ends (incompletely) with an account of authentic temporality and historicity, leaving the reader with the sense that human existence is the gateway to the question of Being, even if the question ultimately exceeds any final answer.
Later Philosophy: The Turn to Language, Art, and Technology
After the 1930s, Heidegger’s thought underwent what he later called “die Kehre” (the turn). He continued to concern himself with the question of Being, but shifted the focus from the existential analysis of Dasein to an investigation of how history, art, language, and technology affect the disclosure of Being. He became increasingly interested in how epochs of thought shape our understanding of reality. In this later phase, Heidegger emphasized that Being is not a static ground but unfolds through historical “worlds” of meaning.
A key theme in his later work is the history of Being. Heidegger argued that Western civilization has passed through successive ontological eras: a Greek age, a Christian age, the modern age (science and subjectivity), and now a technological age. In each period, different forces shape how Being is unconcealed. For instance, he thought ancient Greek thinkers experienced aletheia (truth understood as “unconcealment”) directly, whereas modern science has reduced truth to calculable correctness. In lectures on Nietzsche and the Presocratics, Heidegger explored how philosophy lost the early open experience of Being and slid into metaphysics – the idea that Being is a fixed foundation (as in Plato’s ideas or Descartes’ cogito). Heidegger portrays Western metaphysics as a “forgetfulness of Being,” gradually forgetting the simple wonder of beings showing themselves. His goal became to reawaken a sense that Being itself – not just beings – has a history and an openness worthy of contemplation.
Several specific topics stand out in his later work:
- Language and Poetry: Heidegger famously declared that “language is the house of Being.” To him, language is not just a tool for communication but a fundamental way in which the world is disclosed. He studied poets (especially Friedrich Hölderlin) and ancient Greek sayings to show that poetic language can reveal aspects of Being that scientific discourse cannot. In his essay “The Way to Language,” he emphasized that each word embodies a way of understanding the world — different “homes” of Being for different cultures. Later readers debate exactly what he meant, but his point is that thoughtful attention to language can open up new possibilities for thinking beyond conventional, literal meanings.
- Technology: Perhaps his most famous later essay is “The Question Concerning Technology” (published 1954). Heidegger was critical of modern technology not because of its machines per se, but because of the mindset it represents. He argued that technological thinking treats everything, including people, as a resource or “standing reserve” (Bestand) to be used and controlled. For example, a waterfall is no longer simply admired for its beauty; it is harnessed to produce hydroelectric power. Under Enframing (Gestell), nature no longer appears in its own right but only through a lens of calculation and utility. This, Heidegger warned, can obscure other ways of relating to the world: it blocks a more original experience of Being-as-glory or mystery. His critique of technology was not anti-science, but it was deeply skeptical of a one-sided, instrumental view of reality. It remains influential today in discussions of environmental philosophy and the critique of modernity.
- Art and Dwelling: In essays like “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935) and later “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951), Heidegger explored how art and architecture disclose Being in their own ways. He suggested that a work of art has the power to reveal the elemental truths of a culture and its relation to nature. The idea of dwelling was central: humans are vocally called (by the word “vocation” from the Latin vox, voice) to relate to the world poetically. Heidegger envisioned “poetic dwelling” as an alternative to technological enframing: engaging with our homes and landscapes with a reverence that lets being show through, rather than solely mastering nature. Although many of these later essays are dense and aphoristic, they continue the earlier theme that to retrieve the question of Being we must attend to language, art, and even silence.
During this period Heidegger often gave lecture courses on philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the Presocratics) and poets (Hölderlin, Rilke), interpreting them for signs of how they grasped Being. He maintained that his question of Being never really changed – “nothing of what I have done in later years is severed from my early work,” he said. Nonetheless, the style of his later writing is quite different: less systematic and more poetic. Scholars still debate how best to understand his later project, but it is generally seen as an attempt to move “beyond metaphysics” without abandoning that original question.
Influence and Reception
Heidegger’s vision reshaped philosophy and beyond. In academia, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century in the Continental tradition. His existential phenomenology inspired an entire generation of existentialist and phenomenological philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, drew on Heidegger’s notion of facticity (thrownness) in developing his own philosophy of freedom. Maurice Merleau-Ponty followed Heidegger in analyzing perception as embodied and world-involving. Hans-Georg Gadamer built his theory of hermeneutics (philosophical interpretation) on Heidegger’s insights about historical understanding and the historical role of language.
Heidegger also had a profound impact on political and social thought. Hannah Arendt, his former student, used Heidegger’s ideas about authenticity and history in her works on totalitarianism and the nature of the public sphere. The Frankfurt School of critical theory found in Heidegger a powerful critique of technological society, influencing thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse. Later thinkers went further: Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction engaged with Heideggerian themes like the “transcendental signified” and the instability of binaries, while Michel Foucault found in Heidegger’s history of Being a model (though not always endorsed) for analyzing the genealogy of knowledge and power. In North America, philosophical scholars like Hubert Dreyfus applied Heidegger to concrete issues such as artificial intelligence and ethics, arguing that his account of skillful coping anticipates challenges to computational models of cognition. Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty also grappled with Heidegger’s legacy in debates about truth and communication.
Beyond philosophy, Heidegger’s thought appeared in many other fields. Theologians (e.g. Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner) used his existential analytics to reframe ideas about religion and faith. Anthropologists and sociologists considered his insights on technology and culture when thinking about modernity and dehumanization. Literary critics examined his writings on language and poetry to explore how literature can disclose truth. Even outside the humanities and social sciences, Heidegger’s ideas seeped into cognitive science and management studies – for instance, concepts like “being-in-the-world” and “authentic leadership” (though the latter often loosely co-opts his terms).
Overall reception of Heidegger is mixed but massive. Admirers praise his challenge to unreflective objectivity and his return of depth to metaphysics. His conceptions of authenticity and anxiety have entered everyday vocabulary (often without the philosophical precision he gave them). Critics from the analytic tradition, by contrast, often find Heidegger’s language obscure and his claims metaphysically speculative. Nevertheless, courses on Heidegger are standard in university philosophy departments worldwide, and Being and Time is commonly considered a 20th-century classic. His emphasis on the human side of existence – that thinking cannot be abstracted from lived life – opened new directions for existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and relational approaches in ethics and politics.
Critiques and Controversies
Heidegger’s work has generated significant debate, both for its difficult style and its content. One frequent critique is that Being and Time (and much of his later writing) is intentionally obscure. Heidegger avoided traditional philosophical terminology by inventing or repurposing German words (he created or emphasized terms like Dasein, Geworfenheit [thrownness], Sorge [care], Vor-schein [presencing], Enframing). While this was meant to break free of cliché, it also makes his writing notoriously dense. Some scholars argue that Heidegger sometimes plays on words or uses poetic imagery in ways that defy clear paraphrase. Consequently, readers and translators have often found Being and Time challenging. (Notably, one translator quipped that each page contains maybe seven new main ideas.) Defenders of Heidegger respond that the difficulty reflects a deliberate attempt to force readers to rethink basic assumptions about language and being, rather than lazily reusing familiar philosophical jargon.
Substantively, critics have questioned some of Heidegger’s analyses. For example, his claim that Dasein has a pre-ontological understanding of being (a “pre-understanding”) has been critiqued as vague: what exactly is this understanding, if not an assumption? Also, some argue that Being and Time ultimately fails to give a positive account of Being; it mostly describes human modes of existence without fully answering the question it raises. Philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre adapted Heidegger’s ideas in new directions (turning Dasein’s thrownness into a radically free consciousness in Being and Nothingness), or interpreted his authenticity as subjectivity in different terms (Sartre complained Heidegger still seemed subtly deterministic). Others have debated technical points, such as the relation between Being and time: is Heidegger introducing a radical new concept of time, or simply reframing existing ones?
The biggest controversies surround Heidegger’s political and personal life. His enthusiastic support for Hitler’s regime in the early 1930s shocked many. Critics highlight his August 1933 rectoral address where he spoke approvingly of National Socialism’s aims (albeit in oblique language), and his public statements praising Hitler as a force for national rebirth. After World War II, Heidegger never wrote a clear apology or renunciation of Nazism; he claimed later that his brief involvement was a mistake and largely a matter of administrative expediency. However, private comments in his lectures and recently published Black Notebooks (personal journals written during the Nazi era) contain blatantly anti-Semitic and nationalist remarks. This has led some scholars to insist that Nazism seeps into his ontology – for instance, if Heidegger’s idea of rootedness in “soil and blood” echoes Nazi ideology of racial rootedness. Hannah Arendt, after facing criticism herself for staying connected to Heidegger, described him as someone who “never sincerely absolved himself.”
Supporters argue that his philosophical inquiries stand apart from his politics. They note that he began criticizing the Nazi regime by 1934 (when he resigned the rectorship) and that he reportedly helped Jewish friends escape persecution. They point out that themes in Being and Time – such as individual authenticity and the insignificance of race or nation in fundamental being – do not obviously align with Nazi thought. Many allege that his political missteps were misguided or opportunistic rather than a consistent ideology. The debate remains unsettled: some see Heidegger as irredeemably tainted, while others believe his philosophical legacy should be judged on its own merits, albeit without ignoring moral failings. In any case, discussions of Heidegger’s work invariably address this issue, and it continues to affect how scholars read his writings.
Legacy
Martin Heidegger’s legacy is both vast and complex. On the one hand, he opened up new dimensions of thought about existence, meaning, and truth that continue to resonate. Concepts he introduced (Dasein, authenticity, worldhood) have entered philosophical lexicons worldwide. Contemporary existential and phenomenological thinkers still grapple with his insights. In recent decades, there has been renewed interest in Heidegger’s views on technology amid concerns about artificial intelligence and the environment, as well as a revival of interest in the early Greek and literary references he prized. Many universities hold seminars and conferences on Heidegger; scholarly works about his philosophy are regularly published, and his collected writings span dozens of volumes. In 2005 the Martin Heidegger Journal was founded in Germany, illustrating ongoing academic engagement.
At the same time, debate continues over how to interpret Heidegger. Some question whether his dense style and broad claims can yield definitive answers. The controversies over his politics mean that his work often evokes a mixed response: for instance, Hannah Arendt continued to respect his ideas but severed personal ties after the Nazi years. In popular culture and non-academic circles, references to Heidegger sometimes appear in discussions of technology or authenticity (e.g. critics of “techno-culture” occasionally cite The Question Concerning Technology). His warning that modern life risks becoming trapped in a narrow, scientific mindset has been taken up by thinkers in ecology and media studies.
One enduring point is that Heidegger “changed the ground” of philosophy. Before him, many thinkers assumed a fixed reality or clear-cut definitions; Heidegger insisted on questioning even the meaning of existence itself, and showed that our own being is inseparable from that question. Whether one agrees or not, his contention that we must understand being through human existence has shaped the direction of continental philosophy. In sum, Heidegger remains a towering and singular figure: philosopher, poet, and provocateur, whose work still challenges readers to think differently about what it means “to be.”
Selected Works
- Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) – Heidegger’s first and most famous work, introducing Dasein and existential ontology. - Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 1929) – Lecture course elaborating on themes from Being and Time. - Was ist Metaphysik? (“What Is Metaphysics?”, 1929) – a lecture where he introduces the idea of “the nothingness” and fundamental moods like anxiety. - Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929) – Heidegger’s famous analysis of how Immanuel Kant’s thought relates to the history of Being. - Einführung in die Metaphysik (Introduction to Metaphysics, lectures of 1935, published 1953) – Investigation of the pre-Socratic roots of philosophy and the question of Being. - Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (On the Essence of Truth, published 1930) – Essay developing Heidegger’s notion of truth as unconcealment. - What Are Poets For? (lecture, 1946; translated 1959) – Explores the role of poetry in revealing truth. - Brief über den \"Humanismus\" (Letter on Humanism, 1946) – A letter in which Heidegger rethinks some ideas from Being and Time and distances himself from existentialist labels. - Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question Concerning Technology, 1954) – Essay critiquing modern technology as a mode of revealing the world. - Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language, 1959) – Lectures on language and its essential role in articulating Being. - Vorträge und Aufsätze (Poetry, Language, Thought, 1950–1971) – A collection of essays on art, poetry, technology, and thinking. - Der Satz vom Grund (1973) – His final lecture course on the principle of sufficient reason (Principle of Reason), delving into logic and grounding.
Each of these works is generally available in English translation. Heidegger’s collected works have been published in German as the Gesamtausgabe, spanning dozens of volumes of his lectures and writings from 1910 onward. The above are among his most cited works in English.