Martin Hiedegger was born in Baden, Germany,in the year Wittgenstein was born in Vienna. He lived in Germany all his life and also was an academic all his life.
He was a German Philosopher and philosophical hermeneutics, with a growing influence on Analytic philosophy. According to the IEP, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century."
Heidegger is best known for his contributions to Phenomenology and Existentialism, though as the SEP cautions, "his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification."
His first and best known book,
Being and Time (1927), though unfinished, is one of the central philosophical works of the 20th century. In the first division of the work, Heidegger attempted to turn away from "
ontic" questions about beings to
ontological questions about Being, and recover the most fundamental philosophical question: the question of
Being, of what it means for something to be. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, namely, Human being, which he called
Dasein ("being-there"). Heidegger argued that Dasein is defined by Care, its practically engaged and concernful mode of
Being-in-the-world, in opposition to
Rationalist thinkers like
René Descartes who located the essence of man in our thinking abilities. For Heidegger thinking is thinking
about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more fundamentally structured by its
Temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to
time, existing as a structurally open "possibility-for-being." He emphasized the importance of
Authenticity in human existence, involving a truthful relationship to our
thrownness into a world which we are "always already" concerned with, and to our
Being-towards-death, the Finitude of the time and being we are given, and the closing down of our various possibilities for being through time.
Heidegger also made critical contributions to philosophical conceptions of
truth, arguing that its original meaning was
unconcealment, to philosophical analyses of
art as a site of the revelation of truth, and to philosophical understanding of
language as the "house of being." Heidegger's later work includes criticisms of
technology's instrumentalist understanding in the
Western tradition as "
enframing," treating all of
Nature as a "standing reserve" on call for human purposes. Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for
his affiliation with Nazism, as
Rector of the
University of Freiburg for 11 months prior to his resignation in April 1934, for which he neither apologized nor publicly expressed regret, although in private he called it "the biggest stupidity of his life" (
die größte Dummheit seines Lebens).
Early years
The Mesnerhaus in
Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up
He was born in rural
Meßkirch, Germany. Raised a
Roman Catholic, he was the son of the
sextonof the village church that adhered to the
First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a
Jesuit seminary, though he was turned away within weeks because of the health requirement and what the director and doctor of the seminary described as a
psychosomaticheart condition. Heidegger was short and sinewy, with dark piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being especially proficient at skiing.
In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried
Privatdozent. He served as a soldier during the final year of
World War I, working behind a desk and never leaving Germany. During the 1930s, critics of Heidegger's espousal of a Nazi-style rhetoric of martial manliness noted the unheroic nature of his service in WWI.
Marburg
In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an
extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the
University of Marburg. His colleagues there included
Rudolf Bultmann,
Nicolai Hartmann, and
Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included
Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Hannah Arendt,
Karl Löwith,
Gerhard Krüger,
Leo Strauss,
Jacob Klein,
Gunther (Stern) Anders, and
Hans Jonas. Following on from
Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy: the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete
existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as
Saint Paul,
Augustine of Hippo,
Luther, and
Kierkegaard. He also read the works of
Dilthey,
Husserl, and
Max Scheler.
Freiburg
In 1927, Heidegger published his main work
Sein und Zeit (
Being and Time). When
Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at
Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers, including one from
Humboldt University of Berlin. His students at Freiburg included Arendt,
Günther Anders,
Hans Jonas,
Karl Löwith,
Charles Malik,
Herbert Marcuse and
Ernst Nolte.
Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928
]
According to historian Richard J. Evans, Heidegger was not only a member of the Nazi party, but was enthusiastic about participating. He wanted to position himself as the philosopher of the party, but the highly abstract nature of his work and the opposition of
Alfred Rosenberg, who himself aspired to act in that position, limited Heidegger's role. His resignation from the rectorate owed more to his frustration as an administrator than to any principled opposition to the Nazis.
Post-war
In late 1946, as France engaged in
épuration légale in its
Occupation zone, the French military authorities determined that Heidegger should be blocked from teaching or participating in any university activities because of his association with the Nazi Party. The
denazification procedures against Heidegger continued until March 1949 when he was finally pronounced a
Mitläufer (the second lowest of five categories of "incrimination" by association with the Nazi regime). No punitive measures against him were proposed.This opened the way for his readmission to teaching at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1950–51. He was granted emeritus status and then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.
Personal life
Heidegger's stone-and-tile chalet clustered among others at Todtnauberg
Heidegger married Elfride Petri on 21 March 1917, in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend Engelbert Krebs, and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to Hermann in 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann's biological father but raised him as his son. Hermann became a historian and would later serve as the executor of Heidegger's will.
Martin Heidegger had extramarital affairs with
Hannah Arendt and
Elisabeth Blochmann, both students of his. Arendt was
Jewish, and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany prior to World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war. Heidegger's letters to his wife contain information about several other affairs of his.
Heidegger spent much time at his vacation home at
Todtnauberg, on the edge of the
Black Forest. He considered the seclusion provided by the forest to be the best environment in which to engage in philosophical thought.
Heidegger's grave in Meßkirch
A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg university professor and earlier correspondent. The exact nature of the conversation is not known, but what is known is that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated. Heidegger died on 26 May 1976, and was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery, beside his parents and brother.
Philosophy
Being, time, and Dasein
Heidegger's philosophy is founded on the attempt to conjoin what he considers two fundamental insights: the first is his observation that, in the course of over 2,000 years of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the world itself), but has forgotten to ask what Being itself is. Heidegger thought the presence of things for us is not their being, but merely them interpreted as equipment according to a particular system of meaning and purpose. For instance, when a hammer is efficiently used to knock in nails, we cease to be aware of it. This is termed "ready to hand", and Heidegger considers it an authentic mode, saying that the given ("past") has presence in an oversimplified way when reduced to possible future usefulness to us.
Heidegger claimed philosophy and science since ancient Greece had reduced things to their presence, which was a superficial way of understanding them. One crucial source of this insight was Heidegger's reading of
Franz Brentano's treatise on Aristotle's manifold uses of the word "being", a work which provoked Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger opens his magnum opus,
Being and Time, with a citation from
Plato's
Sophist indicating that Western philosophy has neglected Being because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question. Heidegger's intuition about the question of Being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes his concern with the "history of Being", that is, the history of the forgetting of Being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive
destruction of the history of philosophy.
The second intuition animating Heidegger's philosophy derives from the influence of
Edmund Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, "to the things themselves"). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that experience is
always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "
intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended
toward something, and is always "about" something) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in "care". This is the basis of Heidegger's "existential analytic", as he develops it in
Being and Time. Heidegger argues that describing experience properly entails finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to "
Dasein", the being for whom Being is a question.
In
Being and Time, Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject.
Dasein, then, is not intended as a way of conducting a
philosophical anthropology, but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything
like a philosophical anthropology.
Dasein, according to Heidegger,
is care. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that
Dasein, who finds itself
thrown into the world (
Geworfenheit) amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one's own mortality. The need for
Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one's own existence, is the basis of Heidegger's notions of authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for
Dasein which depend on escaping the "vulgar" temporality of calculation and of public life.
The marriage of these two observations depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that Dasein is an essentially temporal being; it also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, unlike for Husserl, philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology, and thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of Being and Time was thus always only a first step in Heidegger's philosophy, to be followed by the "dismantling" (Destruktion) of the history of philosophy, that is, a transformation of its language and meaning, that would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of "limit case" (in the sense in which special relativity is a limit case of general relativity).
That Heidegger did not write this second part of
Being and Time, and that the existential analytic was left behind in the course of Heidegger's subsequent writings on the history of being, might be interpreted as a failure to conjugate his account of
individual experience with his account of the vicissitudes of the
collective human adventure that he understands the Western philosophical tradition to be. And this would in turn raise the question of whether this failure is due to a flaw in Heidegger's account of temporality, that is, of whether Heidegger was correct to oppose vulgar and authentic time. There are also recent critiques in this regard that were directed at Heidegger's focus on time instead of primarily thinking about being in relation to place and space, and to the notion of dwelling, with connections too to
architectural theory as impacted by
phenomenology.
Being and Time
View from Heidegger's vacation chalet in Todtnauberg. Heidegger wrote most of
Being and Time there.
Main article:
Being and Time
Being and Time (German title:
Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, was Heidegger's first academic book. He had been under pressure to publish in order to qualify for Husserl's (to whom he dedicated the work) chair at the
University of Freiburg and the success of this work ensured his appointment to the post.
It investigates the question of
Being by asking about the being for whom Being is a question. Heidegger names this being
Dasein (see above), and the book pursues its investigation through themes such as mortality,
care, anxiety, temporality, and historicity. It was Heidegger's original intention to write a second half of the book, consisting of a "
Destruktion" of the history of philosophy—that is, the transformation of philosophy by re-tracing its history—but he never completed this project.
Being and Time influenced many thinkers, including such existentialist thinkers as
Jean-Paul Sartre (although Heidegger distanced himself from
existentialism—see below).
Later works: The Turn
Am Feldweg in Meßkirch. Heidegger often went for a walk on the path in this field. See the text
Der Feldweg GA Nr. 13
Heidegger's later works, beginning by 1930 and largely established by the early 1940s, seem to many commentators (e.g.
William J. Richardson) to at least reflect a shift of focus, if not indeed a major change in his philosophical outlook, which is known as "the turn" (
die Kehre).One way this has been understood is as a shift from "doing" to "dwelling" and from
Being and Time to
Time and Being (This aspect had a particular influence on architectural theorists in their focus on place and space in thinking about dwelling. Such is the case with the work of
Christian Norberg-Schulz and the philosopher-architect
Nader El-Bizri.) However, others feel that this is to overstate the difference. For example, in 2011
Mark Wrathall argued that Heidegger pursued and refined the central notion of unconcealment throughout his life as a philosopher. Its importance and continuity in his thinking, Wrathall states, shows that he did not have a "turn". A reviewer of Wrathall's book stated: "An ontology of unconcealment [...] means a description and analysis of the broad contexts in which entities show up as meaningful to us, as well as the conditions under which such contexts, or worlds, emerge and fade."
Heidegger focuses less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior, and more on the way in which behaviour itself depends on a prior "openness to being." The essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. Heidegger contrasts this openness to the "will to power" of the modern human subject, which is one way of forgetting this originary openness.
Heidegger understands the commencement of the history of Western philosophy as a brief period of authentic openness to being, during the time of the
pre-Socratics, especially
Anaximander,
Heraclitus, and
Parmenides. This was followed, according to Heidegger, by a long period increasingly dominated by the forgetting of this initial openness, a period which commences with
Plato, and which occurs in different ways throughout Western history.
Two recurring themes of Heidegger's later writings are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of "revealing." Poetry reveals being in the way in which, if it is genuine poetry, it commences something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals. But with
modern technology a new stage of revealing is reached, in which the subject-object distinction is overcome even in the "material" world of technology. The essence of modern technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" (
Bestand) of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. Heidegger described the essence of modern technology as
Gestell, or "enframing." Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology: while he acknowledges that modern technology contains grave dangers, Heidegger nevertheless also argues that it may constitute a chance for human beings to enter a new epoch in their relation to being. Despite this, some commentators have insisted that an agrarian nostalgia permeates his later work.
In a 1950 lecture he formulated the famous saying
Language speaks, later published in the 1959 essays collection
Unterwegs zur Sprache, and collected in the 1971 English book
Poetry, Language, Thought.
Heidegger's later works include
Vom Wesen der Wahrheit ("On the Essence of Truth", 1930),
Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes ("
The Origin of the Work of Art", 1935),
Einführung in die Metaphysik ("
Introduction to Metaphysics", 1935),
Bauen Wohnen Denken ("Building Dwelling Thinking", 1951), and
Die Frage nach der Technik ("
The Question Concerning Technology", 1954) and
Was heisst Denken? (
What Is Called Thinking? 1954). Also
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)), composed in the years 1936–38 but not published until 1989, on the centennial of Heidegger's birth.
Heidegger and the ground of History
Heidegger believed the Western world to be on a trajectory headed for total war, and on the brink of profound
nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles), which would be the purest and highest revelation of Being itself, offering a horrifying crossroads of either salvation or the end of
metaphysics and
modernity; rendering the West a wasteland populated by tool-using brutes, characterized by an unprecedented ignorance and barbarism in which everything is permitted. He thought the latter possibility would degenerate mankind generally into scientists, workers and brutes; living under the last mantle of one of three ideologies,
Americanism,
Marxism or
Nazism (which he deemed metaphysically identical, as avatars of subjectivity and institutionalized nihilism), and an unfettered totalitarian world technology. Supposedly, this epoch would be ironically celebrated, as the most enlightened and glorious in human history. He envisaged this abyss to be the greatest event in the West's history because it would enable Humanity to comprehend Being more profoundly and primordially than the
Pre-Socratics.
Influences
St. Augustine of Hippo
Recent scholarship has shown that Heidegger was substantially influenced by
St. Augustine of Hippo and that
Being and Time would not have been possible without the influence of Augustine's thought. Augustine's
Confessions was particularly influential in shaping Heidegger's thought.
Augustine viewed time as relative and subjective, and that being and time were bound up together. Heidegger adopted similar views, e.g. that time was the horizon of Being: ' ...time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings.'
Aristotle and the Greeks
Heidegger was influenced at an early age by Aristotle, mediated through Catholic
theology,
medieval philosophy and
Franz Brentano. Aristotle's ethical, logical, and metaphysical works were crucial to the development of his thought in the crucial period of the 1920s. Although he later worked less on Aristotle, Heidegger recommended postponing reading Nietzsche, and to "first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years."
[67] In reading Aristotle, Heidegger increasingly contested the traditional Latin translation and scholastic interpretation of his thought. Particularly important (not least for its influence upon others, both in their interpretation of Aristotle and in rehabilitating a neo-Aristotelian "practical philosophy") was his radical reinterpretation of Book Six of Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics and several books of the
Metaphysics. Both informed the argument of
Being and Time. Heidegger's thought is original in being an authentic retrieval of the past, a repetition of the possibilities handed down by the tradition.
The idea of asking about
being may be traced back via Aristotle to
Parmenides. Heidegger claimed to have revived the question of being, the question having been largely forgotten by the
metaphysical tradition extending from
Plato to
Descartes, a forgetfulness extending to the
Age of Enlightenment and then to modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of this question, Heidegger spent considerable time reflecting on
ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato,
Parmenides,
Heraclitus, and Anaximander, as well as on the tragic playwright
Sophocles.
Dilthey
Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of
factical life" and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology was influenced in part by his reading of the works of
Wilhelm Dilthey.
Of the influence of Dilthey,
Hans-Georg Gadamer writes the following: "As far as Dilthey is concerned, we all know today what I have known for a long time: namely that it is a mistake to conclude on the basis of the citation in
Being and Time that Dilthey was especially influential in the development of Heidegger's thinking in the mid-1920s. This dating of the influence is much too late." He adds that by the fall of 1923 it was plain that Heidegger felt "the clear superiority of
Count Yorck over the famous scholar, Dilthey." Gadamer nevertheless makes clear that Dilthey's influence was important in helping the youthful Heidegger "in distancing himself from the systematic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger acknowledges in
Being and Time." Based on Heidegger's earliest lecture courses, in which Heidegger already engages Dilthey's thought prior to the period Gadamer mentions as "too late", scholars as diverse as
Theodore Kisiel and
David Farrell Krell have argued for the importance of Diltheyan concepts and strategies in the formation of Heidegger's thought.
Even though Gadamer's interpretation of Heidegger has been questioned, there is little doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a
gestalt formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the
hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.
Husserl
There is disagreement over the degree of influence that
Husserl had on Heidegger's philosophical development, just as there is disagreement about the degree to which Heidegger's philosophy is grounded in phenomenology. These disagreements centre upon how much of Husserlian phenomenology is contested by Heidegger, and how much this phenomenology in fact informs Heidegger's own understanding.
On the relation between the two figures, Gadamer wrote: "When asked about phenomenology, Husserl was quite right to answer as he used to in the period directly after World War I: 'Phenomenology, that is me and Heidegger'." Nevertheless, Gadamer noted that Heidegger was no patient collaborator with Husserl, and that Heidegger's "rash ascent to the top, the incomparable fascination he aroused, and his stormy temperament surely must have made Husserl, the patient one, as suspicious of Heidegger as he always had been of
Max Scheler's volcanic fire."
Robert J. Dostal understood the importance of Husserl to be profound:
Heidegger himself, who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, bases his hermeneutics on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl's account in many ways but seems to have been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by Husserl.... The differences between Husserl and Heidegger are significant, but if we do not see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach, we will not be able to appreciate the exact nature of Heidegger's project in Being and Time or why he left it unfinished.
Daniel O. Dahlstrom saw Heidegger's presentation of his work as a departure from Husserl as unfairly misrepresenting Husserl's own work. Dahlstrom concluded his consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Husserl as follows:
Heidegger's silence about the stark similarities between his account of temporality and Husserl's investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a misrepresentation of Husserl's account of intentionality. Contrary to the criticisms Heidegger advances in his lectures, intentionality (and, by implication, the meaning of 'to be') in the final analysis is not construed by Husserl as sheer presence (be it the presence of a fact or object, act or event). Yet for all its "dangerous closeness" to what Heidegger understands by temporality, Husserl's account of internal time-consciousness does differ fundamentally. In Husserl's account the structure of protentions is accorded neither the finitude nor the primacy that Heidegger claims are central to the original future of ecstatic-horizonal temporality.
Kierkegaard
Heideggerians regarded
Søren Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts.Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (
Angst) and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual
being-in-the-world.
Hölderlin and Nietzsche
Friedrich Hölderlin and
Friedrich Nietzsche were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title
The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger read
The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.
The fundamental differences between the philosophical delineations of Heidegger and
Adorno can be found in their contrasting views of Hölderlin's poetical works and to a lesser extent in their divergent views on
German romanticism in general. For Heidegger, Hölderlin expressed the intuitive necessity of metaphysical concepts as a guide for ethical paradigms, devoid of reflection. Adorno, on the other hand, pointed to the dialectic reflection of historical situations, the sociological interpretations of future outcomes, and therefore opposed the liberating principles of intuitive concepts because they negatively surpassed the perception of societal realities. Nevertheless, it was Heidegger's rationalization and later work on Hölderlin's poems as well as on
Parmenides ("For to be aware and to be are the same". B 3) and his consistent understanding of Nietzsche's thought that formed the foundation of
postmodern existentialism.
This is also the case for the lecture courses devoted to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, which became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's work and thought. Heidegger grants to Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem (see, for example,
Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister").
Heidegger and Eastern thought
Some writers on Heidegger's work see possibilities within it for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. Despite perceived differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, some of Heidegger's later work, particularly "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer", does show an interest in initiating such a dialogue.Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the
Kyoto School, notably
Hajime Tanabe and
Kuki Shūzō. It has also been claimed that a number of elements within Heidegger's thought bear a close parallel to Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly
Zen Buddhism and
Taoism. Reinhard May records Chang Chung-Yuan saying that "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands but has intuitively grasped Taoist thought." May sees great influence of Taoism and Japanese scholars in Heidegger's work, although this influence is not acknowledged by the author. He asserts: "The investigation concludes that Heidegger’s work was significantly influenced by East Asian sources. It can be shown, moreover, that in particular instances Heidegger even appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. This clandestine textual appropriation of non-Western spirituality, the extent of which has gone undiscovered for so long, seems quite unparalleled, with far-reaching implications for our future interpretation of Heidegger’s work."
Islam
Research has been done on the relationships between Western philosophy and the history of ideas in
Islam. Some of these scholars interested in Arabic philosophical medieval sources are influenced by Heidegger's work, including numerous recent academic studies by the Lebanese philosopher and architectural theorist
Nader El-Bizri, who besides his focus on the critique of the history of metaphysics (as an 'Arab Heideggerian')
Nader El-Bizri also moves towards rethinking the notion of dwelling in the epoch of the modern unfolding of the essence of technology and
Gestell, and realizing what can be described as a "confluence of Western and Eastern thought" as well. It is claimed the works of counter-enlightenment philosophers such as Heidegger, along with
Friedrich Nietzsche and
Joseph de Maistre, influenced Iran's
Shia Islamists, notably
Ali Shariati, and the thinkers
Ahmad Fardid and
Reza Davari Ardakani. This included the construction of the ideological foundations of the
Iranian Revolution and modern political Islam in its connections with theology.
Heidegger and Architecture
Heidegger's thought influenced some architectural theorists in a direct manner, or through an impact via his reflections on 'dwelling', the 'origin of the work of art', 'the essence of technology', and the unfolding of a broad interest in
phenomenology within the contemporary circles of
architectural theory. This is for instance evident in the works and profiles of theorists such as
Christian Norberg-Schulz,
Dalibor Vesely,
Nader El-Bizri,
Karsten Harries,
Neil Leach, Adam Sharr, etc., within what is known as Architectural
phenomenology and in contemporary
architectural theory in general.
The Heidegger controversy
The rectorate
Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede, on "Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität" ("The Self-assertion of the German University") on 27 May.
His tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some National Socialist education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow National Socialists also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation on 23 April 1934, and it was accepted on 27 April. Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war.
Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.
In 1945, Heidegger wrote of his term as rector, giving the writing to his son Hermann; it was published in 1983:
The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.
Treatment of Husserl
Beginning in 1917, German-Jewish philosopher
Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg.
On 6 April 1933, the
Reichskommissar of
Baden Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger's predecessor as Rector formally notified Husserl of his "enforced leave of absence" on 14 April 1933.
Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg on 22 April 1933. The following week the national Reich law of 28 April 1933, replaced Reichskommissar Wagner's decree. The Reich law required the firing of Jewish professors from German universities, including those, such as Husserl, who had converted to Christianity. The termination of the retired professor Husserl's academic privileges thus did not involve any specific action on Heidegger's part.
Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl, other than through intermediaries. Heidegger later claimed that his relationship with Husserl had already become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with Heidegger and
Max Scheler in the early 1930s.
Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in 1938. In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, Heidegger agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time (restored in post-war editions).
Heidegger's behavior towards Husserl has evoked controversy. Arendt initially suggested that Heidegger's behavior precipitated Husserl's death. She called Heidegger a "potential murderer." However, she later recanted her accusation.
In 1939, only a year after Husserl's death, Heidegger wrote in his
Black Notebooks: "The more original and inceptive the coming decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible will they remain to this [Jewish] 'race'. (Thus, Husserl’s step toward phenomenological observation, and his rejection of psychological explanations and historiological reckoning of opinions, are of enduring importance—yet it never reaches into the domains of essential decisions", seeming to imply that Husserl's philosophy was limited purely because he was Jewish.
Post-rectorate period
After the failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from most political activity, without canceling his membership in the NSDAP (Nazi Party). References to National Socialism continued to appear in his work.
The most controversial such reference occurred during a 1935 lecture which was published in 1953 as part of the book
Introduction to Metaphysics. In the published version, Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and greatness" of the National Socialist movement (
die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung), but he then adds a qualifying statement in parentheses: "namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity" (
nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen). However, it subsequently transpired that this qualification had not been made during the original lecture, although Heidegger claimed that it had been. This has led scholars to argue that Heidegger still supported the Nazi party in 1935 but that he did not want to admit this after the war, and so he attempted to silently correct his earlier statement.
In private notes written in 1939, Heidegger took a strongly critical view of Hitler's ideology;however, in public lectures, he seems to have continued to make ambiguous comments which, if they expressed criticism of the regime, did so only in the context of praising its ideals. For instance, in a 1942 lecture, published posthumously, Heidegger said of recent German classics scholarship:
In the majority of "research results," the Greeks appear as pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.
An important witness to Heidegger's continued allegiance to National Socialism during the post-rectorship period is his former student
Karl Löwith, who met Heidegger in 1936 while Heidegger was visiting Rome. In an account set down in 1940 (though not intended for publication), Löwith recalled that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, though Heidegger knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith also recalled that Heidegger "left no doubt about his faith in
Hitler", and stated that his support for National Socialism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.
Post-war period
After the end of World War II, Heidegger was summoned to appear at a
denazification hearing. Heidegger's former lover
Arendt spoke on his behalf at this hearing, while
Jaspers spoke against him. The result of the hearings was that Heidegger was forbidden to teach between 1945 and 1951. One consequence of this teaching ban was that Heidegger began to engage far more in the French philosophical scene.
In his postwar thinking, Heidegger distanced himself from Nazism, but his critical comments about Nazism seem "scandalous" to some since they tend to equate the Nazi war atrocities with other inhumane practices related to
rationalisation and
industrialisation, including the treatment of animals by
factory farming. For instance in a lecture delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger said: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."
In 1967 Heidegger met with the Jewish poet
Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor. Celan visited Heidegger at his country retreat and wrote an enigmatic poem about the meeting, which some interpret as Celan's wish for Heidegger to apologize for his behavior during the Nazi era.
Der Spiegel interview
On 23 September 1966, Heidegger was interviewed by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for
Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously. (It was published five days after his death, on 31 May 1976.) In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with National Socialism in two ways: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an "awakening" (
Aufbruch) which might help to find a "new national and social approach," but said that he changed his mind about this in 1934, largely prompted by the violence of the
Night of the Long Knives.
In his interview Heidegger defended as
double-speak his 1935 lecture describing the "inner truth and greatness of this movement." He affirmed that Nazi informants who observed his lectures would understand that by "movement" he meant National Socialism. However, Heidegger asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement was no eulogy for the NSDAP. Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification later added to
Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), namely, "the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity."
The Löwith account from 1936 has been cited to contradict the account given in the Der Spiegel interview in two ways: that he did not make any decisive break with National Socialism in 1934, and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement. The Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the extermination camps. In fact, the interviewers were not in possession of much of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies.
Influence and reception in France
Heidegger was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, and his ideas have penetrated into many areas, but in France there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting his work which in itself resulted in deepening the impact of his thought in Continental Philosophy. His influence is clear on
Jean Beaufret,
François Fédier,
Dominique Janicaud,
Jean-Luc Marion,
Jean-François Courtine, etc. -- one cannot even read
Derrida or
Levinas without taking into account their critiques of Heidegger that run deep at the basis of their thinking.
Existentialism and pre-war influence
Heidegger's influence on French philosophy began in the 1930s, when
Being and Time, "What is Metaphysics?" and other Heideggerian texts were read by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, as well as by thinkers such as
Alexandre Kojève,
Georges Bataille and
Emmanuel Levinas. Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology (the study of being) is rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings (
Da-sein, or there-being), his work has often been associated with existentialism. The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's
Being and Nothingness is marked, but Heidegger felt that Sartre had misread his work, as he argued in later texts such as the "Letter on Humanism'." In that text, intended for a French audience, Heidegger explained this misreading in the following terms:
Sartre's key proposition about the priority of existentia over essentia [that is, Sartre's statement that "existence precedes essence"] does, however, justify using the name "existentialism" as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort. But the basic tenet of "existentialism" has nothing at all in common with the statement from Being and Time [that "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"]—apart from the fact that in Being and Time no statement about the relation of essentia andexistentia can yet be expressed, since there it is still a question of preparing something precursory.
"Letter on Humanism'" is often seen as a direct response to Sartre's 1945 lecture
"Existentialism is a Humanism." Aside from merely disputing readings of his own work, however, in "Letter on Humanism,'" Heidegger asserts that "Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one." Heidegger's largest issue with Sartre's existential humanism is that, while it does make a humanistic 'move' in privileging existence over essence, "the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement." From this point onward in his thought, Heidegger attempted to think beyond metaphysics to a place where the articulation of the fundamental questions of ontology were fundamentally possible: only from this point can we restore (that is, re-give [redonner]) any possible meaning to the word "humanism".
Post-war forays into France
After the war, Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period on account of his activities as Rector of Freiburg University. He developed a number of contacts in France, where his work continued to be taught, and a number of French students visited him at
Todtnauberg (see, for example,
Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in
Heidegger and "the Jews", which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, one step toward bringing together French and German students). Heidegger subsequently made several visits to France, and made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of correspondence with
Jean Beaufret, an early French translator of Heidegger, and with Lucien Braun.
Derrida and deconstruction
Deconstruction came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of
Jacques Derrida's work (
Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. There was discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this failed to take place. Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of September 29, 1967 and May 16, 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of
Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as a philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see
Penser à Strasbourg, Jacques Derrida, et al., which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida").
Derrida attempted to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounted to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of
Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion"—literally "destruction"—and "Abbau"—more literally "de-building"). According to Derrida, Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian concerns is overly psychologistic, anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to
Dasein in
Being and Time.
The Farías debate
Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and
Jean-François Lyotard, among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazi politics. These debates included the question of whether it was possible to do without Heidegger's philosophy, a position which Derrida in particular rejected. Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on
Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.
When in 1987
Víctor Farías published his book
Heidegger et le nazisme, this debate was taken up by many others, some of whom were inclined to disparage so-called "deconstructionists" for their association with Heidegger's philosophy. Derrida and others not only continued to defend the importance of reading Heidegger, but attacked Farías on the grounds of poor scholarship and for what they saw as the sensationalism of his approach. Not all scholars agreed with this negative assessment:
Richard Rorty, for example, declared that "[Farías'] book includes more concrete information relevant to Heidegger's relations with the Nazis than anything else available, and it is an excellent antidote to the evasive apologetics that are still being published."
Bernard Stiegler
More recently, Heidegger's thought has considerably influenced the work of the French philosopher
Bernard Stiegler. This is evident even from the title of Stiegler's multi-volume
magnum opus,
La technique et le temps (volume one translated into English as
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus). Stiegler offers an original reading of Heidegger, arguing that there can be no access to "originary temporality" other than via material, that is, technical, supports, and that Heidegger recognised this in the form of his account of world historicality, yet in the end suppressed that fact. Stiegler understands the existential analytic of
Being and Time as an account of psychic
individuation, and his later "history of being" as an account of collective individuation. He understands many of the problems of Heidegger's philosophy and politics as the consequence of Heidegger's inability to integrate the two.
Giorgio Agamben
Heidegger has been very influential on the work of Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben. Agamben attended seminars in France led by Heidegger in the late 1960s.
Criticism
Heidegger's influence upon 20th century
continental philosophy is unquestioned and has produced a variety of critical responses.
Early criticisms
According to Husserl, Being and Time claimed to deal with ontology but only did so in the first few pages of the book. Having nothing further to contribute to an ontology independent of human existence, Heidegger changed the topic to Dasein. Whereas Heidegger argued that the question of human existence is central to the pursuit of the question of being, Husserl criticized this as reducing phenomenology to "philosophical anthropology" and offering an abstract and incorrect portrait of the human being.
The
Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger engaged in an influential debate located in
Davos in 1929, concerning the significance of Kantian notions of freedom and rationality. Whereas Cassirer defended the role of rationality in
Kant, Heidegger argued for the priority of the imagination. Dilthey's student
Georg Misch wrote the first extended critical appropriation of Heidegger in
Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl, Leipzig 1930 (3. ed. Stuttgart 1964).
Left-Hegelianism and critical theory
Hegel-influenced Marxist thinkers, especially
György Lukács and the
Frankfurt School, associated the style and content of Heidegger's thought with German irrationalism and criticized its political implications.
Initially members of the Frankfurt School were positively disposed to Heidegger, becoming more critical at the beginning of the 1930s. Heidegger's student Herbert Marcuse became associated with the Frankfurt School. Initially striving for a synthesis between Hegelian Marxism and Heidegger's phenomenology, Marcuse later rejected Heidegger's thought for its "false concreteness" and "revolutionary conservativism."
Theodor Adorno wrote an extended critique of the ideological character of Heidegger's early and later use of language in the
Jargon of Authenticity. Contemporary social theorists associated with the Frankfurt School have remained largely critical of Heidegger's works and influence. In particular,
Jürgen Habermas admonishes the influence of Heidegger on recent French philosophy in his polemic against "postmodernism" in
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). However, recent work by philosopher and critical theorist
Nikolas Kompridis tries to show that Heidegger's insights into
world disclosure are badly misunderstood and mishandled by Habermas, and are of vital importance for critical theory, offering an important way of
renewing that tradition.
Reception by analytic and Anglo-American philosophy
Criticism of Heidegger's philosophy has also come from
analytic philosophy, beginning with
logical positivism. In "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" (1932),
Rudolf Carnap accused Heidegger of offering an "illusory" ontology, criticizing him for committing the fallacy of
reification and for wrongly dismissing the logical treatment of language which, according to Carnap, can only lead to writing "nonsensical pseudo-propositions."
The British logical positivist
A. J. Ayer was strongly critical of Heidegger's philosophy. In Ayer's view, Heidegger proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence, which are completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis. For Ayer, this sort of philosophy was a poisonous strain in modern thought. He considered Heidegger to be the worst example of such philosophy, which Ayer believed to be entirely useless.
Bertrand Russell commented, expressing the sentiments of many mid-20th-century analytic philosophers, that:
Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.
Roger Scruton stated that: "His major work
Being and Time is formidably difficult—unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it".
The analytic tradition values clarity of expression. Heidegger, however, has on occasion appeared to take an opposing view, stating for example:
those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.
Apart from the charge of
obscurantism, other analytic philosophers considered the actual content of Heidegger's work to be either faulty and meaningless, vapid or uninteresting. However, not all analytic philosophers have been as hostile.
Gilbert Ryle wrote a critical yet positive review of
Being and Time.
Ludwig Wittgenstein made a remark recorded by
Friedrich Waismann: "To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety" which has been construed by some commentators as sympathetic to Heidegger's philosophical approach. These positive and negative analytic evaluations have been collected in Michael Murray (ed.),
Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (Yale University Press, 1978). Heidegger's reputation within English-language philosophy has slightly improved in philosophical terms in some part through the efforts of
Hubert Dreyfus,
Richard Rorty, and a recent generation of analytically oriented phenomenology scholars. Pragmatist Rorty claimed that Heidegger's approach to philosophy in the first half of his career has much in common with that of the latter-day Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, Rorty asserted that what Heidegger had constructed in his writings was a myth of being rather than an account of it.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that Heidegger's writing is "notoriously difficult", possibly because his thinking was "original" and clearly on obscure and innovative topics.
Contemporary European reception
Even though Heidegger is considered by many observers to be the most influential philosopher of the 20th century in continental philosophy, aspects of his work have been criticised by those who nevertheless acknowledge this influence, such as
Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Jacques Derrida. Some questions raised about Heidegger's philosophy include the priority of ontology, the status of animals, the nature of the religious, Heidegger's supposed neglect of ethics (Levinas), the body (
Maurice Merleau-Ponty), sexual difference (
Luce Irigaray), or space (
Peter Sloterdijk).
Levinas was deeply influenced by Heidegger, and yet became one of his fiercest critics, contrasting the infinity of the good beyond being with the immanence and totality of ontology. Levinas also condemned Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, stating: "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."
Heidegger's defenders, notably Arendt, see his support for Nazism as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics). Defenders think this error was irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics such as Levinas,
Karl Löwith, and Theodor Adorno claim that Heidegger's support for National Socialism revealed flaws inherent in his though
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