Martin Heidegger

"Heidegger" redirects here. For other uses, see Heidegger (disambiguation).

Martin Heidegger
Heidegger in 1960
Born	26 September 1889 Meßkirch, Baden, Germany (German Empire)
Died	26 May 1976(1976-05-26) (aged 86) Meßkirch, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany
Education	Collegium Borromaeum (1909–1911) University of Freiburg (PhD, 1914; Dr. phil. hab. 1916)
Spouse	Elfride Petri (m. 1917)
Partner(s)	Elisabeth Blochmann (1918–1969) Hannah Arendt (1924–1928)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Existentialism Hermeneutics Phenomenology
Institutions	University of Marburg University of Freiburg
Theses	The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-theoretical Contribution to Logic (1914) Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning (1916)
Doctoral advisor	Arthur Schneider (PhD advisor) Heinrich Rickert (Dr. phil. hab. advisor)
Main interests	Art Greek philosophy Language Metaphysics Ontology Poetry Technology
Political party	Nazi Party (1933–1945)
Signature

Martin Heidegger (/ˈhaɪdɛɡər, ˈhaɪdɪɡər/; German: [ˈmaʁtiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century. He has been widely criticized for supporting the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933, and there has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.

In Heidegger's first major text, Being and Time (1927), "Dasein" is introduced as a term for the type of being that humans possess. Heidegger believes that Dasein already has a "pre-ontological" and concrete understanding that shapes how it lives. This is a mode of being he terms "being-in-the-world". "Being-in-the-world" is non-dualistic; Heidegger presents it as the unitary ontological structure on the basis of which oppositions can emerge.

Heidegger uses an analysis of Dasein to approach the question of the meaning of being, that is, the question of how or why entities appear to us as the specific entities they are. In other words, Heidegger's governing "question of being" is "concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings".

Education and professional career

Early years

The Mesnerhaus in Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up.

Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of Johanna (Kempf) and Friedrich Heidegger. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of 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 psychosomatic heart condition. Heidegger was short and sinewy, with dark piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being especially proficient at skiing.

Studying theology at the University of Freiburg while supported by the church, he later switched his field of study to philosophy. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, influenced by Neo-Thomism and Neo-Kantianism, directed by Arthur Schneider. In 1916, he finished his venia legendi with a habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus directed by the Neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert and influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. He attempted to get the (Catholic) philosophy post at the University of Freiburg on 23rd June 1916 but failed despite the support of Heinrich Finke.

In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I; serving "the last ten months of the war" with "the last three of those in a meteorological unit on the western front".

Heidegger taught courses at the University of Freiburg from 1919-1923.

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, Paul Tillich, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Günther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following 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 Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and Søren Kierkegaard. He also read the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Husserl, Max Scheler, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

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 later offers including one from Humboldt University of Berlin. His students at Freiburg included Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Nolte. Karl Rahner likely attended four of his seminars in four semesters from 1934 to 1936. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, as did Jan Patočka in 1933; Patočka in particular was deeply influenced by him.

Heidegger was elected rector of the university on 21 April 1933, and joined the Nazi Party on 1 May. During his time as rector he was a member and an enthusiastic supporter of the party. There is continuing controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his political allegiance to Nazism.

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 withdrawal from his position as rector owed more to his frustration as an administrator than to any principled opposition to the Nazis, according to historians. In his inaugural address as rector on 27 May he expressed his support of a German revolution, and in an article and a speech to the students from the same year he also supported Adolf Hitler. In November 1933, Heidegger signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.

Heidegger resigned from the rectorate in April 1934, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until 1945 even though the Nazis eventually prevented him from publishing. From 1936 to 1940, Heidegger delivered a series of lectures on Nietzsche at Freiburg that presented much of the raw material incorporated in his more established work and thought from this time. Of this series, Heidegger said in his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel: "Everyone who had ears to hear was able to hear in these lectures... a confrontation with National Socialism." Later scholars, however, have come to the opposite conclusion about this material; for example David Farrell Krell, in the introduction to an English translation of the seminar, writes: "The problem is not that Heidegger lacked a political theory and praxis but that he had one."

In the autumn of 1944, Heidegger was drafted into the Volkssturm and assigned to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine.

Heidegger's Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and into the early 1970s and first published in 2014, contain several expressions of antisemitic sentiments, which have led to a reevaluation of Heidegger's relation to Nazism. Having analysed the Black Notebooks, Donatella di Cesare asserts in her book Heidegger and the Jews that "metaphysical anti-semitism" and antipathy toward Jews was central to Heidegger's philosophical work. Heidegger, according to di Cesare, considered Jewish people to be agents of modernity disfiguring the spirit of Western civilization; he held the Holocaust to be the logical result of the Jewish acceleration of technology, and thus blamed the Jewish genocide on its victims themselves.

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.

Death

Heidegger died on 26 May 1976 in Meßkirch and was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.

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 August 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann's biological father but raised him as his son. Hermann's biological father, who became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel Caesar. Hermann was told of this at the age of 14; Hermann became a historian and would later serve as the executor of Heidegger's will. Hermann Heidegger died on 13 January 2020.

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 their 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.

Affairs

Heidegger had a four-year affair with Hannah Arendt and a decades-long affair with Elisabeth Blochmann; both women were his students. Arendt was Jewish, and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities.

The 35-year-old Heidegger, who was married with two young sons, began a long romantic relationship with 17-year-old Arendt who later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933. They agreed to keep the details of the relationship a secret, preserving their letters but keeping them unavailable. The relationship was not known until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt appeared in 1982. At the time of publishing, Arendt and Heidegger were deceased and Heidegger's wife, Elfride (1893–1992), was still alive. The affair was not widely known until 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence.

Following his relationship with Hannah Arendt, Blochmann had an extramarital affairs with Heidegger. As has been known since 2005, Heidegger led an open marriage, and his wife Elfriede both knew about his affairs and conducted her own. Elfriede Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann were friends and former classmates. The story is well documented in the 1989 edition of their letters, starting in 1918. Heidegger's letters to his wife contain information about several other affairs of his. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany before the start of World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war.

Early influences

Heidegger was substantially influenced by Augustine of Hippo, and 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, namely, that time was the horizon of being: "time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings."

Aristotle influenced Heidegger from an early age. This influence was 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". 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 lays claim to originality in being an authentic retrieval of the past, a repetition of the possibilities handed down by the tradition.

Wilhelm Dilthey

The works of Wilhelm Dilthey shaped Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life", and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology. Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that Dilthey's influence was important in helping the youthful Heidegger "in distancing himself from the systematic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger himself acknowledges in Being and Time." 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.

Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was Heidegger's teacher and a major influence on his thought. The specific lines of influence, however, remain a matter of scholarly dispute.

Søren Kierkegaard is widely regarded as the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts.0 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.

Philosophy

See also: Heideggerian terminology

View from Heidegger's vacation chalet in Todtnauberg. Heidegger wrote most of Being and Time there.

Fundamental ontology

See also: Fundamental ontology

In Being and Time, "Heidegger drew a sharp distinction between ontical and the ontological -- or beings or entities and "being" as such. He labelled this the "ontological difference." It is from this distinction that he developed his project of "fundamental ontology".

According to Taylor Carman, traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?", whereas Heidegger's fundamental ontology asks "What does it mean for something to be?" Heidegger's ontology "is fundamental relative to traditional ontology in that it concerns what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes, namely, our understanding of that in virtue of which entities are entities".

This line of inquiry is based on the ontological difference is "central to Heidegger's philosophy" He accuses the Western philosophical tradition of incorrectly focusing on the "ontic"—and thus being forgetful of this distinction. This has led to the mistake of understanding being as such as a kind of ultimate entity, for example as idea, energeia, substantia, actualitas, or will to power. Heidegger purportedly modifies "traditional" ontic philosophy by focusing instead on the meaning of being—or what he called "fundamental ontology". This "ontological inquiry", he claims, is required to understand the basis of the sciences.

This inquiry is engaged by studying the human being, or Dasein, according to Heidegger. Heidegger calls the ontological difference "the essence of Dasein". This method works because of Dasein's pre-ontological understanding of being that shapes experience. Dasein's ordinary and even mundane experience of "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the meaning" or "sense of being"; that is, the terms in which "something becomes intelligible as something." Heidegger proposes that this ordinary "prescientific" understanding precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory. This implicit understanding can be made progressively explicit through phenomenology and its methods, but these must be employed using hermeneutics in order to avoid distortions by the forgetfulness of being, according to interpretations of Heidegger. Traditional ontology, Heidegger claims, has prejudicially overlooked this fundamental question of being.

Being-in-the-world

Heidegger introduces the term Dasein to denote a "living being" through its activity of "being there". Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive combination, it is characterized by Heidegger as "being-in-the-world".

Heidegger insists that the 'in' of Dasein's being-in-the-world is an 'in' of involvement or of engagement, not of objective, physical enclosedness. The sense in which Dasein is 'in' the world is the sense of "residing" or "dwelling" in the world. Heidegger provides a few examples: "having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something".

Just as 'being-in' does not denote objective, physical enclosedness, so 'world', as Heidegger uses the term, does not denote a universe of physical objects. The world, in Heidegger's sense, is to be understood according to our sense of our possibilities: things present themselves to us in terms of our projects, the uses to which we can put them. The 'sight' with which we grasp equipment is not a mentalistic intentionality, but what Heidegger calls 'circumspection'. This is to say that equipment reveals itself in terms of its 'towards-which,' in terms of the work it is good for. In our everydayness we are absorbed within the equipmental totality of our work-world.

For example, when I sit down to dinner and pick up my fork, I am not picking up an object with good stabbing properties: I am non-reflectively engaging an 'in-order-to-eat'. When it works as expected, equipment is transparent; when we use it, it is subsumed under the work toward which it is employed. Heidegger calls this structure of practically ordered reference relations the 'worldhood of the world'.

Heidegger presents three primary structural features of being-in-the-world: understanding, attunement, and discourse. Hegel calls these features "existentials" to distinguish their ontological status as distinct from the "categories" of theory.

• Understanding is "our fundamental ability to be someone, to do things, to get around in the world". It is the basic "know-how" in terms of which go about pursuing usually humdrum tasks that make up daily life. Heidegger argues that this mode of understanding is more fundamental than theoretical understanding.
• Attunement is "our way of finding ourselves thrust into the world". It can also be translated as "disposition" or "affectedness". (The standard translation of Macquarrie and Robinson uses "state-of-mind", but this misleadingly suggests a private mental state.) There is no perfect equivalent for Heidegger's Befindlichkeit, which is not even an ordinary German word. What needs to be conveyed, however, is "being found in a situation where things and opinions already matter".
• Discourse (sometimes: talk or telling [de:Rede]) is "the articulation of the world into recognizable, communicable patterns of meaning." It is implicated in both understanding attunement: "The world that is opened up by moods and grasped by understanding gets organized by discourse. Discourse makes language possible." According to Heidegger, "Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility." In its most basic form, this referential whole manifests itself in the way we tell things apart just in the course of using them.

Heidegger unifies these three existential features of Dasein in a composite structure he terms "care":"ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)." What unifies this formula is temporality. Understanding is oriented towards future possibilities, attunement is shaped by the past, and discourse discloses the present in those terms. In this way, the investigation into the being of Dasein leads to time. Much of Division II of Being and Time is devoted to a more fundamental reinterpretation of the findings of Division I in terms of Dasein's more fundamental temporality.

Later works: The Turn

See also: Kehre

Heidegger's Kehre, or "the turn" refers to a change in his work as early as 1930 that became clearly established by the 1940s, according to various commentators. Heidegger rarely used the term. Recurring themes include poetry and technology. Commentators such as William J. Richardson describe, variously, a shift of focus, or a major change in outlook.

Some notable later works are "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), Contributions to Philosophy (1937), "Letter on Humanism" (1946), "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951), "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), and "What Is Called Thinking?" (1954).

The 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics "clearly shows the shift" to an emphasis on language from a previous emphasis on Dasein in Being and Time eight years earlier, according to scholar Brian Bard.

This supposed shift—applied here to cover about thirty years of Heidegger's 40-year writing career—has been described by commentators from widely varied viewpoints; including as a shift in priority from Being and Time to Time and Being—namely, from dwelling (being) in the world to doing (time) in the world. This aspect, in particular the 1951 essay "Building, Dwelling Thinking", influenced serveral architectural theorists.

Other interpreters believe "the Kehre" can be overstated or even that it doesn't exist. Looking back of the trajectory of his intellectual career, the interpreters Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall each separately assert that commentators' emphasis on the term "being" is misplaced, and that Heidegger's central focus was never on "being" as such. Sheehan believes this supposed change is "far less dramatic than usually suggested," and entailed a change in focus and method. Sheehan contends that throughout his career, Heidegger never focused on "being", but rather tried to define "[that which] brings about being as a givenness of entities." Mark Wrathall argued that the Kehre isn't found in Heidegger's writings but is simply a misconception. As evidence for this view, Wrathall sees a consistency of purpose in Heidegger's life-long pursuit and refinement of his notion of "unconcealment".

The history of being

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.

In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempted to reconstruct the "history of being" in order to show how the different epochs in the history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of being. His goal is to retrieve the original experience of being present in the early Greek thought that was covered up by later philosophers.

According to W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Heidegger believed "the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides, which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent Western philosophy. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger states, "Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek."

Charles Guignon wrote that Heidegger aimed to correct this misunderstanding by reviving Presocratic notions of 'being' with an emphasis on "understanding the way beings show up in (and as) an unfolding happening or event." Guignon adds that "we might call this alternative outlook 'event ontology.'"

In a 1950 lecture Heidegger 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.

Hölderlin

The poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin 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; for example, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister".

Nietzsche

Heidegger dedicated many of his lectures to both 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.

Michael Allen Gillespie says that Heidegger's theoretical acceptance of "destiny" has much in common with the millenarianism of Marxism. But Marxists believe Heidegger's "theoretical acceptance is antagonistic to practical political activity and implies fascism". Gillespie, however, says "the real danger" from Heidegger isn't quietism but fanaticism. Modernity has cast mankind toward a new goal "on the brink of profound nihilism" that is "so alien it requires the construction of a new tradition to make it comprehensible."

Gillespie extrapolated from Heidegger's writings that humankind may degenerate into scientists, workers, and brutes. According to Gillespie, Heidegger 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.

Heidegger and the Nazi Party

Main article: Heidegger and Nazism

The rectorate

The University of Freiburg, where Heidegger was Rector from 21 April 1933 to 23 April 1934

Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on 21 April 1933, and assumed the position the following day. On May 1, he joined the Nazi Party.

On 27 May 1933, Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede ("The Self-assertion of the German University"), in a hall decorated with swastikas, with members of the Sturmabteilung and prominent Nazi Party officials present.

His tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some Nazi education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation as rector 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.

Philosophical historian Hans Sluga wrote, "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 Heidegger become his successor for the chair in philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928.

On 6 April 1933, the Gauleiter 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 provoked controversy. Hannah 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 occasional increase in the power of Judaism is grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern evolution, offered the point of attachment for the expansion of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative capacity, and these thereby created for themselves an abode in the "spirit" without ever being able, on their own, to grasp the concealed decisive domains. The more originary and inceptual the future decisions and questions become, all the more inaccessible will they remain to this 'race.' (Thus Husserl's step to the phenomenological attitude, taken in explicit opposition to psychological explanation and to the historiological calculation of opinions, will be of lasting importance—and yet this attitude never reaches into the domains of the essential decisions[....].)

This would seem to imply that Heidegger considered Husserl to be philosophically limited by his Jewishness.

Post-rectorate period

After the failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from most political activity, but remained a member of the Nazi Party. In May 1934 he accepted a position on the Committee for the Philosophy of Law in the Academy for German Law, where he remained active until at least 1936. The academy had official consultant status in preparing Nazi legislation such as the Nuremberg racial laws that came into effect in 1935. In addition to Heidegger, such Nazi notables as Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Carl Schmitt, and Alfred Rosenberg belonged to the Academy and served on this committee.

In a 1935 lecture, later published in 1953 as part of the book Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and greatness" of the Nazi movement, but he then adds a qualifying statement in parentheses: "namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity". 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 Nazism 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 Nazism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.

Heidegger rejected the "biologically grounded racism" of the Nazis, replacing it with linguistic-historical heritage.

Post-war period

After the end of World War II, Heidegger was summoned to appear at a denazification hearing. Heidegger's former student and lover Hannah Arendt spoke on his behalf at this hearing, while Karl Jaspers spoke against him. He was charged on four counts, dismissed from the university and declared a "follower" (Mitläufer) of Nazism. 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 rationalization 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. Having corresponded since 1956, 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.

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 Nazism revealed flaws inherent in his thought.

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. ("Only a God Can Save Us" was published five days after his death, on 31 May 1976.) In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with Nazism 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 Nazism. However, Heidegger asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement wasn't praise for the Nazi Party. 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 eyewitness account of Löwith from 1940 contradicts the account given in the Der Spiegel interview in two ways: that he did not make any decisive break with Nazism 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. Furthermore, Der Spiegel journalist Georg Wolff had been an SS-Hauptsturmführer with the Sicherheitsdienst, stationed in Oslo during World War II, and had been writing articles with antisemitic and racist overtones in Der Spiegel since the end of the war.

The Farías debate

Jacques Derrida, Philippe 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."

Reception

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 criticised this as reducing phenomenology to "philosophical anthropology" and offering an abstract and incorrect portrait of the human being.

In 1929 the Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger engaged in an influential debate, during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs in Davos, 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.

European reception

Although Heidegger is considered by many observers to be one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, aspects of his work have been criticized by those who nevertheless acknowledge this influence. 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 (Emmanuel Levinas), the body (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), sexual difference (Luce Irigaray), and space (Peter Sloterdijk).

Hegelian-Marxist thinkers, especially György Lukács and the Frankfurt School, associated the style and content of Heidegger's thought with irrationalism and criticized its political implications. Although Heidegger's student Herbert Marcuse (1928–1932), who became associated with the Frankfurt School, initially strove for a synthesis between Hegelian Marxism and Heidegger's phenomenology, he later rejected Heidegger's thought for its "false concreteness" and "revolutionary conservatism". Theodor Adorno wrote an extended critique of the ideological character of Heidegger's early and later use of language in the Jargon of Authenticity. Jürgen Habermas admonishes the influence of Heidegger on recent French philosophy in his polemic against "postmodernism" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

In France, there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting Heidegger's work. Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology is sometimes interpreted as rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings (Dasein), his work has often been associated with existentialism. The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness is marked. Heidegger, however, argued that Sartre had misread his work. Derrida agrees and argues that 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.

Also, according to Derrida, 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").

In addition to these philosophical matters, the major issue of Heidegger's participation in the Nazi party has always loomed especially large in Europe.

Reception by analytic and Anglo-American philosophy

The reception of Heidegger's philosophy by Anglo-American analytic philosophy, beginning with the logical positivists, was almost uniformly negative. 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". A. J. Ayer objected that Heidegger proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence that were completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis.

Bertrand Russell considered Heidegger an obscurantist, writing, "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." According to Richard Polt, this quote expresses the sentiments of many 20th-century analytic philosophers concerning Heidegger.

East Asian 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. The scholar Chang Chung-Yuan stated, "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands Tao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well." Philosopher Reinhard May sees great influence of Taoism and Japanese scholars in Heidegger's work, although this influence is not acknowledged by the author. He asserts it can be show that Heidegger sometimes "appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics." To this he adds, "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

Heidegger has been influential in research on the relationship between Western philosophy and the history of ideas in Islam, particularly for some scholars interested in Arabic philosophical medieval sources. The impact of Heidegger in Iran can be seen in thinkers such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Ahmad Fardid, and Fardid's student Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who have been closely associated with the philosophical thought about Muslim theological legacy in modern Iran. This included the construction of the ideological foundations of the Iranian Revolution and modern political Islam in its connections with theology.

In film

• Being in the World draws on Heidegger's work to explore what it means to be human in a technological age. A number of Heidegger scholars are interviewed, including Hubert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, Albert Borgmann, John Haugeland, and Taylor Carman.
• The Ister (2004) is a film based on Heidegger's 1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin, and features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.
• The film director Terrence Malick translated Heidegger's 1929 essay Vom Wesen des Grundes into English. It was published under the title The Essence of Reasons (1969). It is also frequently said of Malick that his cinema has Heideggerian sensibilities.
• The 2006 experimental short Die Entnazifizierung des MH by James T. Hong imagines Heidegger's denazification proceedings.
• In the 2012 film Hannah Arendt, Heidegger is portrayed by actor Klaus Pohl.

Bibliography

Gesamtausgabe

Heidegger's collected writings are published by Vittorio Klostermann. The Gesamtausgabe was begun during Heidegger's lifetime. He defined the order of publication and dictated that the principle of editing should be "ways not works". Publication has not yet been completed. The current executor of Martin Heidegger's Literary Estate is his grandson and a lawyer, Arnulf Heidegger (1969- ).

Works cited

For ease of reference, citations of Being and Time should always cite to the pagination of the standard German edition, which is included in the margins of both of the English translations, each of which has its virtues.

Primary sources

• Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Harper Collins.
• Heidegger, Martin (1971a). "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer". On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. Harper & Row.
• Heidegger, Martin (1971b). Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Albert Hofstadter.
• Heidegger, Martin (1976). What is Called Thinking?. Translated by J. Glenn Gray. Harper Perennial.
• Heidegger, Martin (1990). "Der Spiegel Interview". In Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (ed.). Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers. Paragon House.
• Heidegger, Martin (1991). David Farrell Krell (ed.). Nietzsche. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi. HarperOne. ISBN 0-06-063841-9. OCLC 22492313.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: translators list (link)
• Heidegger, Martin (1996a). Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Press.
• Heidegger, Martin (1996b). Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister". Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Indiana University Press.
• Heidegger, Martin (1998). "Letter on Humanism". In William McNeil (ed.). Pathmarks. Translated by William McNeil. Cambridge University Press.
• Heidegger, Martin (2002). "Time and Being". On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-32375-7.
• Heidegger, Martin (2014). Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (2nd ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-18612-3.
• Heidegger, Martin (2016). Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Heidegger, Martin (2017). Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253029317.

Secondary sources

• Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. MIT Press.
• Gillespie, Michael Allen (1984). Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226293769.
• Horrigan-Kelly, Marcella; Millar, Michelle; Dowling, Maura (2016). "Understanding the Key Tenets of Heidegger's Philosophy for Interpretive Phenomenological Research". International Journal of Qualitative Methods. 15 (January–December 2016: 1–8). doi:10.1177/1609406916680634. S2CID 152252826.
• Inwood, Michael (1999). A Heidegger Dictionary. Blackwell.
• Kisiel, Theodore (1993). The Genesis of Being and Time. California University Press.
• Korab-Karpowicz, W. J. Martin Heidegger (1889—1976). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Polt, Richard F. H. (1999). Heidegger: An Introduction. Cornell University Press.
• Safranski, Rüdiger (1998). Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Translated by Ewald Osers. Harvard University Press.
• Schalow, Frank; Denker, Alfred (2010). Historical Dictionary of Heidegger's Philosophy. Scarecrow Press.
• Wheeler, Michael (2020). Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Martin Heidegger. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

See also

• Daseinsanalysis
• Heidegger and Nazism
• Heidegger Gesamtausgabe
• Hermeneutic idealism
• Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"
• Khôra
• List of Nazi ideologues
• Object-oriented ontology
• Sous rature

External links

Archival collections

• Original Heidegger manuscripts are kept at the Loyola University Chicago archives. See also "The transcripts and photocopies of Martin Heidegger's writings were given to Barbara Fiand, SNDdeN, Ph.D., by Fritz Heidegger in 1978".
• Martin Heidegger Collection, ca. 1918-1976
• Guide to the Student Notes from Lectures by Martin Heidegger. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
• Works by Heidegger and on Heidegger (categorization)
• Publications by and about Martin Heidegger in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• Majority of Heidegger Archives. Online: Deutsches Literaturarchiv in the town of Marbach am Neckar, Germany. Also known as: DLA - German Literature Archive. Most of Martin Heidegger's manuscripts are in the DLA's collection. Search for Heidegger in their Manuscript collections is online here.

General information

• Political Texts – Rectoral Addresses
• W.J. Korab-Karpowicz, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Karl Löwith, My Last Meeting with Heidegger, Rome 1936
• German Heidegger Society (in German)
• Arne D. Naess, Jr., Martin Heidegger in Encyclopædia Britannica
• Martin Heidegger, Der Spiegel Interview by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, 23 September 1966; published May 31 1976
• Heidegger's Notebooks Renew Focus on Anti-Semitism
• Newspaper clippings about Martin Heidegger in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Works by Heidegger

• English translations of Heidegger's works
• Works by or about Martin Heidegger at the Internet Archive