 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) |
|
German philosopher, one of the most controversial and original thinkers of the 20th century. Sein und Zeit (1927, Being and Time), Martin Heidegger's most famous publication, deals with the question of Being. Although Heidegger has been dismissed sometimes as unintelligible, his thoughts have influenced Sartrean existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, Derridean deconstruction, literature criticism, theology, psychotherapy, aesthetics and even environmental and feminist studies. "All research – especially when it moves in the sphere of the central question of being – is an ontic possibility of Da-sein. The being of Da-sein finds its meaning in temporality." (from Being and Time, a revised edition of the Stambaugh translation, translated by Joan Stambaugh, 2010, p. 19) Martin
Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Baden-Württenberg, the
son
of Friedrich Heidegger, a sexton in St. Martin's Church, and Johanna
Heidegger (née
Kempf). The church stood not fifty yards from their house. In his
childhood Heidegger developed an interest in religion. His earliest
writingss appeared in the ultraconservative Catholic journal Der Akademiker. While still at school Heidegger read Franz Brentano's (1838-1917) academic
essay On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle (1862),
which led him to Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations
(1900-01), the founding work of the phenomenological movement.
Heidegger read it again and again in the years to follow. At the age of
twenty Heidegger decided to become a Jesuit, but his noviciate lasted
only two
weeks. He then entered the theological seminary of Freiburg University,
where he studied theology until 1911, then mathematics and philosophy.
Heidegger received his doctorate in 1913 with a thesis on the doctrine
of
judgment in psychologism. Heidegger's habilitation thesis on the philosophy of Duns Scotus appeared in 1915. To his bitter disappointment, he was not appointed to the chair of Catholic philosophy. During WW I Heidegger's career in the army was sporadic, and he was released several times for health reasons. On the Western front he fullfilled his duty as a weatherman in preparing a poison gas attac on U.S. soldiers. ('Reading a Life: Heidegger and hard times' by Thomas Sheehan, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon, 1993, p. 71) In 1917 Heidegger married Thea Elfride Petri, a Protestant, who wanted to have a Catholic wedding. She was his former student. They had two sons and a daughter. By 1919 Heidegger had ended his struggle with Roman Catholic scholastic philosophy. He wrote in a letter to the theologian Engelbert Krebs: "Epistemological insights encroaching upon the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me – but not Christianity and metaphysics (though the latter in a new sense)." ('Leo Strauss and the Fourth Wave of Modernity' by Frederick G. Lawrence, in Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically Revisited, edited by David Novak, 1996, p. 149) At Freiburg, Edmund Husserl made Heidegger his private assistant
(1920-1923). Heidegger was fascinated by Husserl's early writings, but
did not accept his programme of "transcendental phenomenology".
Husserl's critics accused him of ending in solipsism. Karl Jaspers, already a well-known figure in German
intellectual
life, met Heidegger in 1920, and soon felt united with him in their
common opposition to academic rituals. The friendship survived
Heidegger's crushing review of Jaspers's Psychology of Worldviews.
Later Heidegger's engagement with Nazism separated the two
philosophers. In 1922 Heidegger became a teacher of philosophy at the
University of Marburg, where he lectured on Greek, medieval, and German
idealist philosophy. A charismatic and inspiring lecturer, Heidegger attracted students from all over Europe. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), born into an old Jewish family, started in 1924 to attend Heidegger's lectures. "There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like rumor of the hidden king...," Arendt later recalled. ('Martin Heidegger at Eighty' by Hannah Arendt, translated from the German by Albert Hofstadter, The New York Review, October 21, 1971 issue) She became Heidegger's lover, offering him her "unbending devotion." They met in Arendt's attic room in absolute secrecy; the only witness was Arendt's little roommate, a mouse, which she fed. She was also his muse for Being and Time. Heidegger published his major work, Being and Time, at
the
age of thirty-eight. When his mother died in 1927, Heidegger put on her
deathbed his own copy of the book. Gilbert Ryle, reviewing the work in Mind
(1929),
said that Heidegger "shows himself to be a thinker of real importance
by the immense sublety and searhingness of his examination of
conscousness, by the boldness and originality of his methods and
conclusions, unflagging energy with which he tries to
think beyond the stock categories of orthodox psychology and
philosophy." (Collected Papers: Volume 1 by Gilbert Ryle, 2009, p. 222) Oswald
Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918-22) and Being and Time can he hailed as intellectual monuments to the crumbling Weimar State. When Spengler dealt with the life and death of
civilizations, Heidegger focused on the Being of human beings, and
death. Spengler's book prompted a lot of discussion in Germany, but the
ideas of Being and Time
were understandable only for a limited group of people. It never became
a basic Nazi reading textbook. However, this
"barely decipherable" work, as one critic said, established Heidegger's
fame as a major European philosopher. In France his thoughts
contributed to phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and Sartre's
existentialism. Heidegger succeeded Edmund Husserl as Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg. His inaugural lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik' (1929), written in poetic prose, was his first major essay. The style became Heidegger's postwar trademark At the end of the essay there is philosophucal cliffhanger, the fundamental question: "Why are there beings at all, why not rather nothing," echoing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's famous "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Rudolf Carnap – as a kind of killjoy – dismissed Heidegger's "Das Nichts nichtet" as strictly meaningless in his essay 'Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache' (1929, Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language). Heidegger never published the second part of his magnum opus, dealing with the history of ontology, Kant, Descartes' cogito ergo sum, and Aristotle, but Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) and lectures on Cartesian ontology and the Aristotelian conception of time mostly covered the rest of his writing plan. The clash between idealist cultural philosophy and
revolutionary
existentialism become evident in the legendary discussion in Davos in
1929 between Ernst Cassirer, champion of the
republic and humanist tradition, and Heidegger, who was famous for
rejecting all social conventions. The place had also been the scene of
Thomas Mann's novel Magic Mountain (1924), which depicted a
fight between liberal and conservative values, the enlightened
civilized world and non-rational beliefs. Herbert Marcuse, who became Heidegger's assistant in 1928,
attempted to synthesize Heidegger's thought with Marxism. Whether
Heidegger himself ever really studied Marx, is an open question. In the
Letter on Humanism,
published after the war, he said that Marx's view of history excels all
other history. Heidegger's own airtight philosophy of Dasein was far from reality and
historical concreteness of Das
Kapital, and its call for liberation. In 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and cut off his relations with all his Jewish colleagues, including Husserl. It has been said, that by taking this step, Heidegger made it plain, that the German Idealism has come to an end. As Herbert Marcuse quotes Heidegger's statement from November 1933 in an interview in 1977: "Let not principles and ideas rule your being. Today, and in the future, only the Führer himself is German reality and its law." (Heideggerian Marxism by Herbert Marcuse, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, 2005, p. 170) Marcuse continued: "this is actually the betrayal of philosophy as such, and everything philosophy stands for." (Ibid., p. 171) Marcuse saw Heidegger again after the war. They had a talk but there was no reconciliation between the two philosophers separated by their stance toward Nazism. (The Essential Marcuse, edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss, 2007, pp. 116-121) When Being and Time
was reprinted in 1937, its dedication to Husserl was omitted. Arendt,
who was arrested for eight days, left Germany for Paris and eventually
settled in the United States. She renewed her contacts with Heidegger
after the fall of the Third Reich. Arendt respected Heidegger as a
great philosopher, and ignored his dark political side. Heidegger
himself said once to Ernst Jünger that he would only apologize for his
Nazi past if Hitler could be brought back to apologize to him. (The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla, 2003, pp. 29-30) From April 1933 to February 1934 Heidegger was Rector of
Freiburg,
adding to his letters and speeches the standard "Sieg Heil!"
Heidegger's infamous rectorial address about a "new intellectual and
spiritual world for the German nation" was reported all over the world.
To his brother Fritz he sent Hitler's Mein
Kampf for Christmas reading. Disappointed with real life politics, Heidegger resigned his post, and devoted himself to lecturing. In the summer semester of 1934 he lectured on "Logic", and in the following semerter Heidegger gave his first Hölderlin lecture. And in 1936, he began the Nietzsche lectures. In between, he gradually lost his faith in the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism. The political authorities had reservations about his philosophy and he was under surveillance by the Gestapo for some years. (Heidegger was aware of this.) In 1936 he spoke in Rome at the Germanic Institute to a large audience on 'Hölderlin and the Nature of Poetry'. ". . . our job is to fight for philosophy in a quiet, unobtrusive way," he wrote in a letter to Jaspers. (Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil by Rüdiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers, 1999, p. 322) During the war Heidegger resigned in protest from the committee charged with editing the work of Nietzsche – he did not accept the order to remove those passages in which Nietzsche speaks contemptuously of anti-Semitism. In the late 1944 Heidegger served in a Volksturm (People's Militia) detachment. His stay in the work brigade was short and he returned to Freiburg. In 1945 Jaspers testified before a de-Nazification commission,
that
Heidegger's manner of thinking is in its "essence unfree, dictatorial,
and incapable of communication, would today be in its pedagogical
effects disastrous." (In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 by Jeffrey K. Olick, 2005, p. 294) Between 1945 and 1951 Heidegger was prohibited
from teaching under the de-Nazification rules of the Allied
authorities. In the spring of 1946, Heidegger had a physical and mental
breakdown. The visit of Jean Beaufret inspired his essay 'On Humanism,'
in which asks what is thinking and states that "for a long time, for
much too long, thinking has been out of its element." When Heidegger
was
reappointed Professor in 1951 at Freiburg, where he lectured to limited
classes, he received a package of wine from Bremen as it was the custom. Expressing his delight in a letter, Heidegger said,
"The wine from Bremen, an excellent libation, arrived here at noon
before the lecture – an appropriate time." (Encounters and Dialogues with Martin
Heidegger, 1929-1976 by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, 1993, pp. 62-63)
Heidegger's extremely complex later philosophy revolved
increasingly around language. In 'Letter on Humanism' (1949) he stated
that
"language is the house of being", and in Was ist das – die Philosophie?
(1956) he said that the "Greek language and it alone is logos." Poetry
was for Heidegger more important than the other arts. He was especially
fascinated by the works of Hölderlin. "Poetry proper is never merely a
higher mode (melos) of everyday language," Heidegger wrote in
his essay 'Language', dealing with Georg Trakl's poem 'A Winter
Evening.' "It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten
and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any
longer." ('Philosophy and Literature: Friends of the Earth?' by Roger A. Shiner, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost, 2015, p. 28) After the war Heidegger distanced himself from his "philosophical anthropology," seeing that it described human nature instead of approaching the nature of things. Like many other thinkers, he argued that technology has grown beyond control and warned of a technological understanding of being. Instead of saying "yes" or "no" to technology he offered a new ideal of letting-be or open-handedness (Gelassenheit); his answer was "yes" and "no": "We let the technical devices enter our daily life, and, at the same time, leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent on something higher. I would call this compartment toward technology which expresses 'yes' and at the same time 'no' by an old word – releasement toward things". (Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil by Rüdiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers, 1999, p. 400) In a lecture delivered in December 1949 Heidegger argued that the modern mechanized agriculture is "in essence the same as the
manufacturing of
corpses in gas chambers and extemination camps, the same as the
starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." (Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism by Julian Young, 1997, p. 172)
This formulation – an appalling parallel construction + rhetoric nonsense – has become a much quoted evidence that Heidegger
never comprehended the Holocaust. The Jewish poet and a former concentration camp inmate Paul Celan
in 1967 visited Heidegger's famous cabin in Todnauberg, but what they
talked about is unknown. Todnauberg had been Heidegger's mountain
retreat since the 1920s, a place where Nietzsche's Zarathustra would
have felt comfortable. Celan's entry in the logbook was ambiguous:
"Into the cabin logbook, with a view toward the Brunnenstern, with hope
of a coming word in the heart." (Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil by Rüdiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers, 1999, p. 423) In the 1960s Heidegger visited Delos
several times and participated in seminars in Provence. He continued to
write and lecture until his death on 26 May 1976. He was buried in
Messkitch in the local graveyard. Der Spiegel's interview "Nur ein Gott kann uns noch
retten" made in 1966, was published soon after
Heidegger's death, on May 31, 1976. He stated: "Everything is
functioning. This is exactly what is so uncanny, that everything is
functioning and that the functioning drives us more and more even
further functioning, and that technology tears men loose from the earth
and uproots them. I do not know whether you were frightened, but I at
any rate was frightened when I saw pictures coming from the moon to the
earth." ('"Only a god can save us"': Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Heidegger, translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin, 1993, p. 105) Heidegger's past has never been forgotten, and the debate
about the
relationship between his philosophy and Nazism still continues. Mark
Lilla argued in The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2003) that Heidegger "was
never able to confront the issue of philosophy's relation to politics,
of philosophical passion to political passion. For him, this was not
the issue; he simply had been fooled into thinking that the Nazis'
resolve to found a new nation was compatible with his private and
loftier resolution to refound the entire traditon of Western thought,
and thereby Western existence." (Ibid., p. 29) Elzbieta Ettinger said
in Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995):
"His romantic predisposition seems to have led him both to a passionate
attachment to Hannah Arendt and to a fascination with the Nazi vision
of the rebirth of Germany." (Ibid., p. 8)
Hans-Georg Gadamer defended
Heidegger in his essay 'Züruck von Syrakus?' (1988, Back From
Syracuse?) and its expanded version 'On the Political Incompetence of
Philosophy' (1993). "There is a tendency, above all, to underestimate
the universally human inclination to conformism, which continually
finds new ways and means for self-deception." ('Back From Syracuse?', translated by John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15, Winter 1989) To avoid misleading implications, Heidegger invented in Being and Time a new, meticulous vocabulary, which has made his works somewhat cryptic for a number of his readers, such as Günter Grass, who parodied Heidegger's terminology in the novel Dog Years (1963). Theodor Adorno attacked Heidegger's use of language, which he labelled as pedantic and which according to Adorno "transforms a bad empirical reality into transcendence." (The Jargon of Authenticity by Theodor Adorno, 1973, p. 116) The central term in Sein und Zeit is Dasein, the German word for "existence" or "being-there". The meaning of Dasein is temporality; thus the "Time" in the title of Being and Time. Dasein is not homo sapiens, but in German usage the term does tend to refer to human beings. Heidegger was constantly aware that in his task he is a being whose ways of being are the subject of his work. Dasein implies not only presence but involvement in the world. In the hermeneutic circle every interpretation is itself based on interpretation. After provisional conclusions, based on presuppositions, one returns to the starting point, to continue the inquiry into deeper understanding in the circular process of interpretation. The phenomenon of philosophical phenomenology is the being of beings or entities (das Sein des Seinden). The being of Dasein is such that Dasein understands its own being, and at the same time its pre-theoretical understanding makes it possible to understand the being of entities other than itself. From Heidegger the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre derived his notion of "authenticity". Heidegger himself denied that he was an existentialist. "My philosophical tendencies," he wrote in a letter, "cannot be classified as existentialist; the question which principally concerns me is not that of man's Existenz; it is Being in its totality and as such." Authenticity in Heidegger was grounded in the idea, that absolutely all Dasein is characterized by mimesis. Authentic existence begins from self-understanding and authentic life is possible if our being-toward-death is resolutely confronted: "Once one has grasped the finiteness of one's existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one – those of comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly – and brings Dasein in to the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein's primordial historicism which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen." Heidegger writes much about such Dasein moods as irritation, boredom, and fear; anxiety is at the center of Dasein's life, but it is noteworthy that he doesn't analyze love or sexuality as fundamental aspects of human existence. For further reading: Heidegger and Classical Thought, edited by Aaron Turner (2024); Heidegger Before the Environmental Question: the Immanence of Life by Enrique Leff; translated by Arí Bartra (2024); Heideggerian Existential Therapy: Philosophical Ideas in Practice by Mo Mandić (2024); Heidegger's Ecological Turn: Community and Practice for Future Generations by Frank Schalow (2022); Heidegger and Music, edited by Casey Rentmeester and Jeff R. Warren (2021); Heidegger's Life and Thhought: A Tarnished Legacy by Mahon O'Brien (2020); Martin Heidegger: eine politische Biographie by Thomas Rohkrämer (2020); Heidegger in the Islamicate World, edited by Kata Moser, Urs Gösken, and Josh Hayes (2019); Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, edited by Walter Homolka & Arnulf Heidegger (2016); Martin Heidegger by Timothy Clark (2011); Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970 by James K. Lyon (2006); The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla (2001); Heidegger's Children by Richard Wolin (2001); Martin Heidegger by Rüdiger Safranski (1998); Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism by Karl Löwith, Richard Wolin and Gary Steiner (1998); Heidegger and Being and Time by Stephen Mulhall (1996); The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. by C. Guignon (1993); Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida by Allan Megill (1987); Heideggers Wege by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1983); Heidegger by George Steiner (1978); The Jargon of Authenticity by Theodor Adorno (1973) Selected works:
|
