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Heidegger

Contemporary philosophy

Heidegger (1889-1976) was a 20^th-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 took different directions: this was the turning point (Die Kehre), which led him to take an interest in language, poetry and the works of the pre-Socratics.

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Heidegger's works summarised on this site

Introduction to Phenomenological Research

An in-depth critique of the directions given to phenomenology by Husserl, which leads Heidegger to examine the thought of Descartes...

Being and Time

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

Anecdotes

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.

Recommended videos

Interviews, lectures, radio programmes... here are 10 videos that will help you better understand Martin Heidegger's thought.

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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 background.

He studies at the seminary in Constance, then in Freiburg; it is there that he reads On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle, a dissertation by Brentano that resonates with him like a revelation. It was this work, analysing the famous Aristotelian idea that being is said in several ways, that he considered his first guide through Greek philosophy.

A fundamental question then appeared to him: If being is said in diverse guises, what then is the one of this diverse? Heidegger would devote more than twenty years of his life to reflecting on this problem, the question of being: these reflections would form the material of his work Being and Time.

Two years after discovering Brentano, Heidegger immerses himself in Husserl's Logical Investigations. He intended to become a priest, but health problems led him to postpone this project. While convalescing, he realised that it was philosophy that interested him above all other subjects and devoted himself fully to it, abandoning religion and theology.

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

The professor

He was authorised to teach at the University of Freiburg after writing his habilitation thesis Duns Scotus's doctrine of categories and meaning. He met Husserl and became his personal assistant. He admired him but soon became detached from him, his thoughts taking a different direction, starting from that common ground that is phenomenology.

He married, and from this union, two children were born.

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

In 1926, he took over from Husserl at the University of Freiburg, where he remained until his retirement, turning down numerous offers of positions at more prestigious universities, such as Berlin. In 1927, Being and Time was published.

The turning point

Then began his compromise with Nazism: in the 1932 elections, he voted for the Nazi party and joined in 1933. He became rector of the university and declared in his 1933 Appeal to Students that Only the Führer himself is the reality and the law of the Germany of today and tomorrow. Autodafés of Jewish and Marxist books were organised at the university he was in charge of.

However, only a year later he resigned from his post: was this an act of resistance, or an implicit condemnation of Nazism? He continued to teach until the end of the war.

From a spiritual point of view, this long period (1932-1944) can be considered, even if this point is debated, as a turning point (Kehre), during which Heidegger's thought takes a direction fundamentally distinct from that which could be found at work in Being and Time. He became interested in language, poetry (in particular Hölderlin), the pre-Socratics, and went in search of a fundamental intuition in the works of the latter that had been lost, that of Being.

After liberation, he was banned from teaching until 1951.

He took advantage of this period of inactivity to write his Letter on Humanism, in response to the reading that certain French philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, were making of his work.

End of life: travel and seminars

When he resumed teaching, he gave seminars that have remained famous, such as What Is Called Thinking?, What Is a Thing? or The Question Concerning Technology. He saw technology as a symptom of the nihilism in which metaphysics, as conceived since Aristotle, had trapped 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, reiterating some of the classic anti-Semitic 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