Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was the most influential — and most controversial — European philosopher of the twentieth century. His masterpiece, Being and Time (1927), reopened what he called the forgotten question of Western thought: what does it mean to be? To approach it, he analysed the being that asks it — ourselves, which he called Dasein (“being-there”) — not as a mind looking at objects but as being-in-the-world: absorbed in practical concerns, thrown into a history it did not choose, “fallen” into the anonymous “they”, and capable of authenticity only by facing its own death. In later work he turned to technology, language, poetry and “dwelling”, warning that modernity reduces everything — rivers, forests, people — to a “standing reserve” of resources. He shaped existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction and environmental thought. He also joined the Nazi Party in 1933, served as rector of Freiburg University under Hitler, and never publicly apologised; the publication of his Black Notebooks (2014) revealed anti-Semitic passages that have reopened the question of how far his thought is entangled with his politics.

Life

Messkirch: the sexton’s son

Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in Messkirch, a small Catholic town in Baden, south-west Germany, where his father was sexton of the church of St Martin and a master cooper. He grew up ringing the church bells, amid fields, forests and the rhythm of the liturgical year — a rural world he idealised all his life, in essays like “The Pathway” (Der Feldweg).

Destined for the priesthood, he studied at the Jesuit novitiate (dismissed after two weeks with heart trouble) and then theology at the University of Freiburg (1909–11). At seventeen, a priest gave him Franz Brentano’s dissertation On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle (1862) — the book, he later said, that set him on the question of being. He abandoned theology for philosophy and mathematics, wrote a dissertation on psychologism (1913) and a habilitation on Duns Scotus (1915).

Husserl and Marburg

At Freiburg he became the assistant of Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology, who regarded him as his heir: “Phenomenology — that is me and Heidegger.” Heidegger broke with Catholicism in 1919. His lectures on Aristotle, Augustine and Paul made him famous among students long before he published: Hannah Arendt recalled the “rumour of a hidden king” who taught thinking.

At Marburg (1923–28), he taught Hans-Georg Gadamer, Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt, with whom he had a secret love affair (1925). Under pressure to publish to gain a full chair, he rushed out Being and Time in 1927, in Husserl’s Yearbook, dedicated to Husserl. Only two of the six planned divisions appeared; the work remained unfinished.

In 1928 he succeeded Husserl at Freiburg. His inaugural lecture, What Is Metaphysics? (1929), on nothingness and anxiety, provoked Rudolf Carnap’s famous attack: “The nothing nothings” (das Nichts selbst nichtet) was Carnap’s example of a meaningless pseudo-sentence. The same year at Davos he debated the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer on Kant and the nature of human finitude — a debate later seen as the parting of the ways between analytic and continental philosophy.

The rectorate: 1933

On 21 April 1933, three months after Hitler came to power, Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg University. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933 and gave the rectoral address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, calling for the university’s service to the Volk through “labour service, military service and knowledge service”. He promoted the Führerprinzip in the university, praised Hitler in speeches (“The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law”), and denounced colleagues. He resigned the rectorate in April 1934, disillusioned with the party’s direction, but remained a member until 1945.

Husserl, who was Jewish, was barred from the university library under racial laws. Heidegger removed the dedication to Husserl from the 1941 edition of Being and Time (keeping a footnote of thanks) and did not attend his funeral in 1938.

After the war, a denazification committee banned him from teaching (1946–51). He had a breakdown and was treated at a sanatorium. He then resumed lecturing, wrote prolifically and became a guru-like figure. In 1966 he gave an interview to Der Spiegel, published posthumously, defending himself: “Only a god can save us.” He never publicly apologised for the Holocaust; in a lecture of 1949 he compared the “manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers” to mechanised agriculture — a remark many find unforgivable. The Black Notebooks, his private philosophical journals (published 2014 onward), contain passages describing “world Jewry” as a rootless agent of calculative machination.

He died in Messkirch on 26 May 1976 and was buried in the church cemetery, with a Christian funeral. He spent much of his later life in a hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, where in 1967 the poet Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor, visited and wrote in the guestbook his hope for “a word to come from the heart” — a word that never came.

Being and Time

The question of being

Being and Time begins with an epigraph from Plato’s Sophist: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” The question of the meaning of being (Sein) — not what things are, but what it means for anything to be at all — has been forgotten, Heidegger says, since the Greeks. Western philosophy has treated being as the being of a highest entity (God) or as presence (things present before us).

His key distinction is the ontological difference between being (Sein) and beings or entities (Seiendes). Being is not itself an entity; it is that in terms of which beings are understood as beings.

Dasein

To raise the question of being, we must start with the entity that understands being — ourselves. Heidegger calls this entity Dasein (literally “being-there”) (see Dasein), deliberately avoiding “subject”, “consciousness”, “person” or “man”, which carry metaphysical baggage. Dasein’s being is an issue for it: we care about who we are and are to be. Dasein’s essence lies in its existence — its possibilities, not fixed properties.

Being-in-the-world

Dasein is not a mind inside a body looking out at external objects. It is being-in-the-world — a unified phenomenon. We are always already in a world: engaged, absorbed, concerned with tasks.

Heidegger’s most famous analysis concerns the hammer. When we hammer, we do not encounter the hammer as an object with properties; it is ready-to-hand (zuhanden) — transparent equipment, which we see “through” toward the task. Only when it breaks or is missing does it become present-at-hand (vorhanden) — an object to be observed. Traditional philosophy, beginning from detached observation, mistook a derivative mode for the primary one. Equipment belongs to a network of references: the hammer for nails, the nails for the board, the board for the house, the house for shelter — “for-the-sake-of” Dasein.

The “they”

In everyday life, Dasein is not itself but das Man — “the they”, “the one”, anonymous public opinion. “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature and art as they see and judge.” The they levels everything down to averageness, relieving us of responsibility. Everyday Dasein is fallen (verfallen) into the they, characterised by idle talk (Gerede), curiosity and ambiguity.

Thrownness, projection and care

Dasein is thrown (geworfen) into a world it did not choose — a time, place, language, body, history. It finds itself always already in a mood (Stimmung); moods disclose how things are with us. And Dasein is projection (Entwurf), always pressing ahead into possibilities. The unity of thrownness, projection and fallenness is care (Sorge), the being of Dasein.

Anxiety

Fear is of something definite; anxiety (Angst) (see Anxiety) is of nothing in particular — of being-in-the-world as such. In anxiety, the familiar world of the they slips away; everything loses significance; Dasein feels uncanny (unheimlich, “not-at-home”). Anxiety individualises: it reveals Dasein as thrown and free, facing its own possibilities.

Being-towards-death

The deepest possibility of Dasein is death (see Death): its “ownmost, non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped possibility”. No one can die my death for me. The they tranquillises us: “one dies” — someday, but not yet, not me. Authentic being-towards-death means anticipating death — not brooding on it, but letting it show the finitude of all one’s possibilities, freeing Dasein from the they and for its own life.

Conscience, guilt and resoluteness

The call of conscience summons Dasein from the they to itself — calling in silence, saying nothing. Dasein is always guilty (schuldig) — not of particular wrongs, but because it is thrown and must choose some possibilities at the expense of others. Resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is the authentic response: choosing one’s own possibilities in the light of one’s finitude.

Temporality and historicality

The meaning of care is temporality. Authentic temporality is not a sequence of nows but a unity of future (anticipation of death), past (taking over one’s thrownness) and present (the moment of vision, Augenblick). Dasein is historical: it inherits possibilities from its heritage and chooses its hero. (This language of fate and destiny of a people, critics note, would resonate with his politics.)

The unfinished part of the book was to show that time is the horizon of the understanding of being as such.

The turn: later Heidegger

In the 1930s, Heidegger’s thought underwent the Turn (die Kehre): from the analysis of Dasein toward the history of being itself, language, art and poetry.

The history of being

Western metaphysics, from Plato to Nietzsche, is the history of the forgetting of being — treating being as presence, idea, substance, subject, will. Friedrich Nietzsche‘s will to power is metaphysics’ completion. Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche at length (1936–46), and turned back to the Pre-Socratics (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides) as thinkers who still experienced being as aletheia — the Greek word for truth, which he read as “un-concealment”.

The work of art

In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36), he argued that art is not representation but the happening of truth. A Greek temple “opens up a world” for a people while setting up the “earth” — the material that withdraws. Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes reveals the world of the peasant woman — her toil, the field, the bread, her anxiety about bread. (The art historian Meyer Schapiro later pointed out the shoes were probably Van Gogh’s own.)

Technology

In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), he argued that the essence of modern technology is not machines but a way of revealing — enframing (Gestell) — that reveals everything as standing reserve (Bestand): resources to be ordered, stored and optimised. The Rhine, once a river celebrated in Hölderlin’s hymn, becomes a power supplier to a hydroelectric plant. Human beings become “human resources”. The danger is that we forget any other way of revealing. And yet, quoting Hölderlin: “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”

Language, poetry and dwelling

“Language is the house of being” (Letter on Humanism, 1946). Poets — above all Hölderlin, but also Trakl, Rilke and George — are the guardians of this house. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951), he described authentic dwelling as caring for the fourfold — earth, sky, divinities and mortals. Against the will to master, he urged Gelassenheit, “releasement” or “letting-be”.

Influence

• Existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre built Being and Nothingness from Heidegger (whom Heidegger rejected in the Letter on Humanism).
• Hermeneutics: Gadamer’s Truth and Method.
• Deconstruction: Derrida’s “deconstruction” translates Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics.
• Political theory: Arendt, Marcuse, Strauss, Jonas, all his students.
• Psychiatry: Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss’s Daseinsanalysis.
• Theology: Bultmann and Rahner.
• Cognitive science and AI: Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of AI (What Computers Can’t Do, 1972) drew on Heidegger’s account of practical coping, and influenced “embodied cognition”.
• Environmental philosophy: deep ecology drew on his critique of technology.
• Eastern thought: dialogues with Japanese philosophers of the Kyoto School and interest in Daoism (Laozi).

Critics

• Carnap and logical positivists: meaningless verbiage.
• Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964): mystified language serving reaction.
• Levinas: ontology neglects the ethical priority of the Other.
• The politics: Victor Farías (1987), Emmanuel Faye (2005), and the Black Notebooks debate whether Nazism is woven into the thought itself.

Key terms

Dasein

"Being-there" — the human being as the entity whose being is an issue for it.

Being-in-the-world

Our unified existence as engaged in a world.

Ready-to-hand / present-at-hand

Equipment in use versus objects observed.

Das Man

"The they" — anonymous everyday conformity.

Thrownness

Being delivered into a situation we did not choose.

Using Heidegger in conversation

• On conformity: “the they” — we enjoy ourselves as they enjoy themselves.
• On mortality: being-towards-death frees us from the they.
• On tools: the hammer is invisible until it breaks.
• On technology: the river becomes a power supply; we become standing reserve.