Martin Heidegger

Introduction

Martin Heidegger is the German philosopher whose Being and Time (1927) is one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century. The book reframed the central question of Western philosophy as the question of the meaning of being (die Seinsfrage) and developed a systematic phenomenological analysis of human existence (Dasein) as the entry point into that question. His later work pursued the same question through sustained meditation on language, art, technology, and the history of metaphysics.

Heidegger is also one of the most contested figures in modern philosophy, for political as well as philosophical reasons. His support for the Nazi regime (he joined the NSDAP in May 1933 and served as Rector of the University of Freiburg from April 1933 to April 1934 in active support of the regime) and his subsequent failure to address that support adequately have shaped reception of his work for decades. The publication of the Black Notebooks (the private philosophical notebooks Heidegger kept from 1931 onward, published from 2014) revealed antisemitic passages that have intensified scholarly engagement with the political question.

Life

Heidegger was born in 1889 in Meßkirch, in the Black Forest region of southwest Germany, to a modest Catholic family. He attended a Jesuit seminary as a teenager and briefly studied theology before transferring to philosophy. His doctoral dissertation (1913) was on psychologism in logic; his Habilitation (1916) was on Duns Scotus.

From 1919 Heidegger served as assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, at Freiburg. The relationship was intellectually formative but eventually strained; Heidegger's appointment as professor at Marburg in 1923 (and his return to Freiburg as Husserl's successor in 1928) marked his emergence as a major figure in his own right. The Marburg years (1923–1928) saw the composition of Being and Time (1927), the work that established Heidegger's international reputation.

The National Socialist accession to power in January 1933 was the central political and biographical event of Heidegger's life. He joined the NSDAP in May 1933 and was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, serving for one year. His Rectoral Address (The Self-Assertion of the German University) and various speeches during the Rectorate gave public philosophical support to the new regime. Heidegger resigned the Rectorate in April 1934 and his subsequent relation to the Party was more distant, but he did not leave the NSDAP and never publicly repudiated his early support after the war. The denazification proceedings (1945–1949) banned him from teaching for nearly five years; he was eventually allowed to resume teaching in 1949 and continued lecturing and writing until his death in 1976.

The post-war years saw extensive philosophical work — the Letter on Humanism (1947), Holzwege (1950), the Bremen lectures on technology (1949), the Freiburg lectures on Nietzsche (1936–1940, published 1961), and many others. Heidegger died in Meßkirch in 1976 and was buried in the Catholic cemetery of his birthplace.

The problem he worked on

Heidegger's project, across all phases of his work, was the inquiry into the meaning of being (der Sinn des Seins). The question, on Heidegger's reading, is the foundational question of philosophy that Western metaphysics has either forgotten or systematically misposed since at least Plato. Beings are studied (chemistry studies chemical beings, biology studies living beings, sociology studies social beings); being itself — what it means for anything to be at all, what the various modes of being are, how being and time are related — has been left implicit and unexamined.

The approach in Being and Time: take up the question through the analysis of the being that asks the question (the human being, which Heidegger renames Dasein to avoid the philosophical baggage of human, subject, consciousness, etc.). The analysis of Dasein's mode of being (the existential analytic) is meant to provide the foundation for a subsequent investigation of being in general. The subsequent investigation was the projected second part of Being and Time, which Heidegger never completed; the famous turn (Kehre) in his thinking during the 1930s involved partly a shift in how the question of being would be pursued.

The later work approaches the same question through different routes: the history of metaphysics (especially the engagement with Greek thought and with Nietzsche), the analysis of technology as the contemporary mode of revealing being, the meditation on poetry and language as preserving the possibility of a different relation to being. The unity of the project across the two phases is contested; some readers see fundamental continuity, others see a substantial break.

Contributions

Dasein and the existential analytic

The central concept of Being and Time. Dasein (literally being-there) names the human being considered not as a substance with properties but as the entity whose mode of being involves care (Sorge) for its own being. Dasein is structurally the being for whom being is an issue — the being whose existence is something it must take up in one way or another.

The existential analytic is the systematic analysis of the structures of Dasein's being. The fundamental structures include: being-in-the-world (Dasein is not a subject confronting an external world but is essentially situated in a meaningful world from the start); being-with (Mitsein; Dasein is essentially with others); understanding and interpretation as the basic modes of taking up the world; mood (Stimmung) as the fundamental affective attunement; care as the unifying structure of Dasein's being.

The analytic is meant to be ontologically neutral (not assuming any particular metaphysical commitments about the human being) and to provide the foundation for the further investigation of being in general.

Being-toward-death and authenticity

The analysis of authenticity in Being and Time Part II is one of the most influential single sections of the work. Dasein is fundamentally a being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) — its existence is essentially finite, and the recognition of this finitude is what makes Dasein the kind of being it is. Authentic existence is the mode in which Dasein takes up its own being from the recognition of being-toward-death; inauthentic existence is the mode in which Dasein flees this recognition into the comfortable, anxious busy-ness of das Man (the They).

The analysis shaped existentialist philosophy substantially. Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) is deeply indebted to it, though Sartre's engagement is also a substantial reworking. The contemporary literature on authenticity, mortality, and finitude continues to engage Heidegger.

The history of metaphysics

Heidegger's later work (especially the Nietzsche lectures of 1936–1940 and the various essays of the 1940s and 1950s) develops an interpretive reading of the entire Western metaphysical tradition as a history of being — a sequence of different ways being has been understood, from the Pre-Socratic physis through Platonic idea, Aristotelian energeia, medieval esse, Cartesian res cogitans, through to the contemporary technological understanding of being as standing-reserve (Bestand).

The history is presented as a decline from a more original Greek experience of being, with each subsequent epoch losing further contact with the foundational question. The reading is interpretively controversial and historically contested, but it has been substantially influential in continental philosophy.

The question concerning technology

The 1949–1953 essay The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik) is Heidegger's most-engaged single late work. Modern technology, on Heidegger's analysis, is not merely a tool or a set of practices; it is a mode of revealing being in which beings show up as standing-reserve — as resources available for ordering, extraction, and use. The technological mode of revealing has become so pervasive that it threatens to occlude any other way of being's showing up.

The analysis is not technophobic in the simple sense; Heidegger is not arguing that we should stop using technology. The argument is that the technological mode of revealing is a particular historical configuration, that it is not the only way being could show up, and that recovering other modes (especially through poetry and contemplative thinking) is part of the philosophical task.

Key works

• Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). The major work of the early period.
• Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). The major engagement with Kant.
• The Self-Assertion of the German University (1933). The Rectoral Address.
• Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures 1935, published 1953). One of the major works of the middle period.
• Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (composed 1936–1938; published 1989). The major unpublished work of the turn period.
• Letter on Humanism (1947). Major post-war statement.
• Holzwege (1950). Collection including The Origin of the Work of Art.
• The Question Concerning Technology (1953).
• What Is Called Thinking? (1954).
• Nietzsche (lectures 1936–1940; published 1961). The major engagement with Nietzsche.
• Black Notebooks (composed 1931 onward; published 2014–). The private philosophical notebooks containing politically incendiary material.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Husserl (his teacher, the founder of phenomenology); Aristotle (whose Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics Heidegger studied intensively in the 1920s); Kierkegaard (whose analysis of anxiety, despair, and the existing individual shaped the existential analytic); Nietzsche (the major engagement of the middle period); the Pre-Socratics (especially Parmenides and Heraclitus); Hölderlin (the German Romantic poet whose work Heidegger read as preserving a different relation to being).

Influenced: virtually all subsequent continental philosophy. Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) is partly a transformation of Being and Time; Hannah Arendt (Heidegger's student and lover) developed the political dimensions in her own direction; Hans-Georg Gadamer (another student) developed philosophical hermeneutics from Heideggerian roots; the French reception through Levinas, Derrida, and Foucault was substantial; phenomenology of mind and embodiment through Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary practitioners; analytic philosophy of mind through the work of Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall; environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology.

Reception

Heidegger's reception in his lifetime was substantial in German philosophy and increasingly international through the 1930s and 1940s. The political compromise of 1933–1945 shaped reception substantially: the post-war French existentialist reception (Sartre, Beauvoir) treated Heidegger as a major philosophical resource largely while bracketing or condemning the political record; the German reception was more divided.

The post-war international reception has been one of the most extensive and contested of any twentieth-century philosopher. The French reception through Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and many others made Heidegger central to post-war continental philosophy; the analytic engagement (especially through Hubert Dreyfus's work from the 1970s onward) brought Heidegger into anglophone philosophical conversation in significant ways.

The political question has been continuously renewed. Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism (1987) generated a major round of debate; the publication of the Black Notebooks from 2014 has produced another round, with new evidence of antisemitic commitments that complicates any reading of the work that would separate the philosophy from the politics. The contemporary scholarly literature is increasingly engaged with the question of how to read Heidegger given what is now known about his political and ideological positions.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Hubert Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World (1991), Mark Wrathall's Heidegger and Unconcealment (2011), Stephen Mulhall's Heidegger and Being and Time (1996), the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Charles Guignon, ed., 2006), and Peter Trawny's work on the Black Notebooks. The new translations by Joan Stambaugh (revised by Dennis Schmidt) of Being and Time (Stambaugh translation, revised 2010) and the substantial translation projects of the Collected Edition (Gesamtausgabe) continue to make Heidegger available in English. The major journals include Heidegger Studies and the broader continental philosophy literature. Active scholarly debates concern the unity of the early and later work, the relation between the philosophy and the political commitments, the proper interpretation of being-toward-death and authenticity, and the contemporary applicability of Heideggerian analyses of technology.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition
• Being and Time — the major work
• Sartre — the philosopher most consequently influenced by Being and Time
• Kierkegaard — the existentialist predecessor
• Authenticity — the central existential value
• Nietzsche — the major engagement of the middle period

The German philosopher whose Being and Time reframed the central question of Western philosophy as the question of the meaning of being.