Heidegger

Contemporary philosophy

Heidegger (1889-1976) was a twentieth-century German philosopher. A pupil of Husserl, he gave phenomenology a radically different orientation, consisting of an existential analysis of man understood as Dasein, i.e. "being-there" or "that through which being arises". After writing his fundamental work, Being and Time, he compromised with the Nazi regime. His thinking then took a new direction — the turning point (Die Kehre) — which led him towards language, poetry and the works of the pre-Socratics.

Heidegger's Works Summarised on This Site

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Being and Time

Heidegger's masterwork: what is being? How can we rethink this original question afresh, and on what basis?

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Anecdotes

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Correspondence with Karl Jaspers

From 1920 to 1963, Heidegger and Jaspers maintained a correspondence. But the paths of these two thinkers ended up diverging... This is the story of this broken friendship.

Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you wish to better understand the thought of this author:

Inwood, Michael (2019). Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction (2nd, ebook ed.). Oxford University Press
Carman, Taylor (2003). Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge University Press.
Charles Guignon (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge University Press
Georgakis, Tziovanis; Ennis, Paul J. (2015). Heidegger in the Twenty-First Century. Springer.
Holland, Nancy J. (2018). Heidegger and the Problem of Consciousness. Indiana University Press.

Biography: Life of Heidegger

Youth

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a German town near the Danube and Lake Constance, into a Catholic family.

He studied at the seminary in Constance, then in Freiburg, where he came across On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle, a dissertation by Brentano that struck him as a revelation. It was this work — analysing the famous Aristotelian idea that being is said in several ways — that he later called his first guide through Greek philosophy.

A fundamental question then presented itself to him: If being is said in diverse guises, what then is the unity underlying this diversity? Heidegger would devote more than twenty years of his life to this problem, the question of being — reflections that would form the substance of Being and Time.

Two years after discovering Brentano, he immersed himself in Husserl's Logical Investigations. He had intended to become a priest, but health problems led him to set this plan aside. During his convalescence, he realised that philosophy was his true calling, and he devoted himself to it entirely, leaving behind religion and theology.

In 1913, he completed his doctoral thesis: The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism.

The Professor

He qualified to teach at the University of Freiburg after completing his habilitation thesis, Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning. He met Husserl and became his personal assistant. He admired him deeply, but gradually distanced himself, his thinking taking a different direction from that common starting point of phenomenology.

He married, and the union produced two children.

In 1923, he was appointed professor at the University of Marburg, then a hotbed of neo-Kantianism. He exerted a profound influence on most of his students, among them Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss and Hans Jonas.

In 1926, he succeeded Husserl at the University of Freiburg, where he remained until his retirement, turning down numerous offers from more prestigious institutions, including Berlin. In 1927, Being and Time was published.

The Turning Point

It was then that his entanglement with Nazism began: in the 1932 elections he voted for the Nazi party and joined it in 1933. He became rector of the university and declared in his Appeal to Students that year: Only the Führer himself is the reality and the law of the Germany of today and tomorrow. Book-burnings of Jewish and Marxist works were organised at the university under his charge.

Only a year later, however, he resigned from his post — whether as an act of resistance or as an implicit rejection of Nazism remains debated. He continued to teach until the end of the war.

From an intellectual standpoint, this long period (1932–1944) is widely regarded — though the point is contested — as a turning point (Kehre), during which Heidegger's thought moved in a direction fundamentally distinct from that of Being and Time. He turned to language, poetry (above all Hölderlin) and the pre-Socratics, searching in their work for a primal intuition of Being that had since been lost.

After the Liberation, he was banned from teaching until 1951.

He used this enforced pause to write his Letter on Humanism, in response to the readings that certain French philosophers — Jean-Paul Sartre among them — had been making of his work.

Later Years: Travel and Seminars

When he resumed teaching, he gave seminars that have remained celebrated, among them What Is Called Thinking?, What Is a Thing? and The Question Concerning Technology. He saw technology as a symptom of the nihilism into which metaphysics, as conceived since Aristotle, had led the Western mind.

At the invitation of Jean Beaufret and the poet René Char, he gave a number of seminars in France. He died in 1976 in Freiburg im Breisgau, leaving behind more than a hundred works, gradually published and translated.

In 2014, the posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks, which reiterated a number of classic antisemitic themes, caused a scandal.

Main Works

The Phenomenology of Religious Life
Being and Time
An Introduction to Metaphysics
Explanations of Hölderlin's Poetry
Questions I and II
Letter on Humanism