Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher whose work was central to the development of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He has had significant impact within subsequent philosophy, social sciences and humanities, and theology.

Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), is widely considered one of the most significant works of modern philosophy. In it, he introduced the concept of Dasein ("being-there") to describe the distinctive character of human existence, arguing that humans possess a "pre-ontological" understanding of being that shapes how they live and act, which he analyzed in terms of the unitary structure of "being-in-the-world". Through his analysis of Dasein, Heidegger sought to reawaken what he called "the question of being": the fundamental inquiry into what makes entities intelligible as the entities they are. In other words, Heidegger's governing "question of being" is concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings. This question, he believed, had been neglected or obscured throughout the history of Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks.

His later work turned increasingly to questions of technology, language, art, and poetry, developing themes of human "dwelling" in the world and critiquing what he saw as the nihilistic trajectory of modern technological civilisation. Thinkers as varied as Jean-Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Richard Rorty were substantially shaped by engagement with his thought, whether in agreement or opposition.

Heidegger's legacy has been complicated and shadowed by his involvement with Nazism. In April 1933, he was elected rector of the University of Freiburg and joined the Nazi Party, a membership he retained until 1945. The nature and extent of his commitment to Nazism, and the question of whether his philosophy is inherently connected to his political choices, remain subjects of significant scholarly controversy. After the war, he was banned from teaching following denazification proceedings, a ban later lifted in 1949, after which he returned to lecturing at the University of Freiburg. During this period of enforced withdrawal, he nevertheless continued to exert influence through private seminars and audiences at his home. His refusal to publicly repudiate his Nazi involvements or express remorse in unambiguous terms has continued to trouble interpreters of his work.

Early life

thumb|left|The Mesnerhaus in [[Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up]]

Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of Johanna (Kempf) and Friedrich Heidegger. His father was the sexton of the village church, and the young Martin was raised Catholic.

In 1903, Heidegger began to train for the priesthood. He entered a Jesuit seminary in 1909, but was discharged within weeks because of heart trouble. It was during this time that he first encountered the work of Franz Brentano. From here he went on to study theology and scholastic philosophy at the University of Freiburg.

In 1911, he broke off training for the priesthood and turned his attention to recent philosophy, in particular, Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. He graduated with a thesis on psychologism, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-theoretical Contribution to Logic, in 1914. The following year, he completed his habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus, which was directed by Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian, and influenced by Husserl's phenomenology. The title has been published in several languages and in English is Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning.

He attempted to get the (Catholic) philosophy post at the University of Freiburg on 23 June 1916 but failed despite the support of . Instead, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I. His service was in the last ten months of the war, most of which he spent in meteorological unit on the western front upon being deemed unfit for combat.

From 1919 to 1923, Heidegger taught courses at the University of Freiburg. At this time he also became an assistant to Edmund Husserl, who had been a professor there since 1916.

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, Helene Weiss, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, 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.

In 1927, Heidegger published his main work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). He was primarily concerned in qualifying to be a full professor. The book, however, did more than this: it raised him to "a position of international intellectual visibility."

Freiburg

When Husserl retired as professor of philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counteroffer by Marburg. The title of his 1929 inaugural lecture was "What is Metaphysics?" In this year he also published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

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. 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; he joined the Nazi Party on 1 May, just three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. 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 vocalized support for 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 and pursued a teaching agenda aligned with Nazi cultural politics until 1945.

In 1935, he gave the talk "The Origin of the Work of Art". The next year, while in Rome, Heidegger gave his first lecture on Friedrich Hölderlin. In the years 19361937, Heidegger wrote what some commentators consider his second greatest work, Contributions to Philosophy; it would not be published, however, until 1989, 13 years after his death.

From 1936 to 1940, Heidegger also delivered a series of lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche at Freiburg that presented much of the raw material incorporated in his more established work and thought from this time. These would appear in published form in 1961. This period also marks the beginning of his interest in the "essence of technology".

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

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. Nevertheless, he presented the talk "What are Poets for?" in memory of Rilke. He also published "On Humanism" in 1947 to clarify his differences with Jean-Paul Sartre and French existentialism. 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.

In 1966, he gave an interview to Der Spiegel attempting to justify his support of the Nazi Party. Per their agreement, it was not published until five days after his death in 1976, under the title "Only a God Can Save Us" after a reference to Hölderlin that Heidegger makes during the interview.

Heidegger's publications during this time were mostly reworked versions of his lectures. In his final days, he also arranged for a complete edition of his works, Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, to be compiled and published. The first volume appeared in 1975. The collection contains 106 volumes and is complete as of October 2025.

Martin Heidegger died in his sleep on the morning of 26 May 1976 at the age of 86 at his home in Freiburg. He was buried two days later in his birthplace of Meßkirch, West Germany, beside his parents in the village graveyard he had walked past each day on his way to school. His gravestone is inscribed with a single star, which refers to a sentence he wrote in 1947: "To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky." His term for us, in this phenomenological context, is Dasein.

thumb|right|Title page of first edition of Being and Time

This procedure works because Dasein's pre-ontological understanding of being 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. Being and Time is designed to show how this implicit understanding can be made progressively explicit through phenomenology and hermeneutics.

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 people in terms of their projects, the uses to which they can put them. The 'sight' with which people 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 the everyday world, people are absorbed within the equipmental totality of their work-world. Moreover, on Heidegger's analysis, this entails a radical holism. In his own words, "there 'is' no such thing as an equipment".

For example, when someone sits down to dinner and picks up their fork, they are not picking up an object with good stabbing properties: they are non-reflectively engaging an 'in-order-to-eat'. When it works as expected, equipment is transparent; when it is used, 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 calls the mode of being of such entities "ready-to-hand", for they are understood only in being handled. If the fork is made of plastic, however, and it snaps in the course of using it, then it assumes the mode of being that Heidegger calls "present-at-hand." For now the fork needs to be made the object of focal awareness, considering it in terms of its properties. Is it too broken to use? If so, could the diner possibly get by with another utensil or just with their fingers? This kind of equipmental breakdown is not the only way that objects become present-at-hand for us, but Heidegger considers it typical of the way that this shift occurs in the course of ordinary goings-on.

In this way, Heidegger creates a theoretical space for the categories of subject and object, while at the same time denying that they apply to our most basic way of moving about in the world, of which they are instead presented as derivative.

Heidegger presents three primary structural features of being-in-the-world: understanding, attunement, and discourse. He calls these features "existentiales" or "existentialia" (Existenzialien) to distinguish their ontological status, as distinct from the "categories" of metaphysics.

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 Dasein goes about pursuing the 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 [Rede]) is "the articulation of the world into recognizable, communicable patterns of meaning." It is implicated in both understanding and 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 things are told 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 temporality.

Das Man

As implied in the analysis of both attunement and discourse, Dasein is "always already", or a priori, a social being. In Heidegger's technical idiom, Dasein is "Dasein-with" (Mitsein), which he presents as equally primordial with "being-one's self" (Selbstsein).

Heidegger's term for this existential feature of Dasein is das Man, which is a German pronoun, man, that Heidegger turns into a noun. In English it is usually translated as either "the they" or "the one" (sometimes also capitalized); for, as Heidegger puts it, "By 'others' we do not mean everyone else but me.... They are rather those from whom for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too". Quite frequently the term is just left in the German.

According to philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, part of Heidegger's aim is to show that, contrary to Husserl, individuals do not generate an intersubjective world from their separate activities; rather, "these activities presuppose the disclosure of one shared world." This is one way in which Heidegger breaks from the Cartesian tradition of beginning from the perspective of individual subjectivity.

Dreyfus argues that the chapter on das Man is "the most confused" in Being and Time and so is often misinterpreted. The problem, he says, is that Heidegger's presentation conflates two opposing influences. The first is Dilthey's account of the role that public and historical contexts have in the production of significance. The second is Kierkegaard's insistence that truth is never to be found in the crowd.

The Diltheyian dimension of Heidegger's analysis positions das Man as ontologically existential in the same way as understanding, affectedness, and discourse. This dimension of Heidegger's analysis captures the way that a socio-historical "background" makes possible the specific significance that entities and activities can have. Philosopher Charles Taylor expands upon the term: "It is that of which I am not simply unaware... but at the same time I cannot be said to be explicitly or focally aware of it, because that status is already occupied by what it is making intelligible". For this reason, background non-representationally informs and enables engaged agency in the world, but is something that people can never make fully explicit to themselves.

The Kierkegaardian influence on Heidegger's analysis introduces a more existentialist dimension to Being and Time. (Existentialism is a broad philosophical movement largely defined by Jean-Paul Sartre and is not to be confused with Heidegger's technical analysis of the specific existential features of Dasein.) Its central notion is authenticity, which emerges as a problem from the "publicness" built into the existential role of das Man. In Heidegger's own words:

<blockquote>In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking. The 'they', which is nothing definite, and which we all are, through not as the sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.</blockquote>

This "dictatorship of das Man" threatens to undermine Heidegger's entire project of uncovering the meaning of being because it does not seem possible, from such a condition, to even raise the question of being that Heidegger claims to pursue. He responds to this challenge with his account of authenticity.

Authenticity

Heidegger's term Eigentlichkeit is a neologism, in which Heidegger stresses the root eigen, meaning "own." So this word, usually translated "authenticity", could just as well be translated "ownedness" or "being one's own". Authenticity, according to Heidegger, is a matter of taking responsibility for being, that is, the stand that people take with respect to their ultimate projects. It is, in his terms, a matter of taking a properly "resolute" stand on "for-the-sake-of-which". Put differently, the "self" to which one is true in authenticity is not something just "there" to be discovered, but instead is a matter of "on-going narrative construction".

Scholars Somogy Varga and Charles Guignon describe three ways by which Dasein might attain an authentic relation to itself from out of its "fallen" condition as "they"-self. First, a powerful mood such as anxiety can disclose Dasein to itself as an ultimately isolated individual. Second, direct confrontation with Dasein's "ownmost" potential for death can similarly disclose to Dasein its own irreducible finitude. Third, experiencing "the call of conscience" can disclose to Dasein its own "guilt" (Schuld) as the debt it has to itself in virtue of having taken over pre-given possibilities that it is now Dasein's own responsibility to maintain.

Philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman describes authenticity as "resolving to accept the openness which, paradoxically, one already is". He emphasizes that this is a matter, not of "intellectual comprehension", but of "hard-won insight". Authenticity is ultimately a matter of allowing the ego to be "eclipsed by the manifestation of one's finitude".

Although the term "authenticity" disappears from Heidegger's writing after Being and Time, Zimmerman argues that it is supplanted in his later thought by the less subjective or voluntaristic notion of Ereignis. This ordinary German term for "event" or "happening" is theorized by Heidegger as the appropriation of Dasein into a cosmic play of concealment and appearance.

Later works: The Turn

Heidegger's "Turn", which is sometimes referred to by the German die Kehre, refers to a change in his work as early as 1930 that became clearly established by the 1940s, according to some commentators, who variously describe a shift of focus or a major change in outlook.

Heidegger himself frequently used the term to refer to the shift announced at the end of Being and Time from "being and time" to "time and being". However, he rejected the existence of the "sharp 'about turn posited by some interpreters. Scholar Michael Inwood also calls attention to the fact that many of the ideas from Being and Time are retained in a different vocabulary in his later work—and also that, in other cases, a word or expression common throughout his career comes to acquire a different meaning in the later works.

This supposed shift—applied here to cover about 30 years of Heidegger's 40-year writing career—has been described by commentators from widely varied viewpoints, for instance, from dwelling (being) in the world to doing (temporality) in the world. This aspect, in particular the 1951 essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", has influenced several architectural theorists.

Other interpreters believe the Turn can be overstated or does not exist at all. For instance, Thomas Sheehan believes this supposed change is "far less dramatic than usually suggested", and entails merely a change in focus and method. Mark Wrathall argued that the Turn is not found in Heidegger's writings, but is simply a misconception.

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 history of being

The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claims to revive this question of being that had been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending into the Age of Enlightenment, as well as modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of the question, Heidegger spends considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander.

In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempts 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 writes that Heidegger aims 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.

Language

In Being and Time, language is presented as logically secondary to Dasein's understanding of the world and its significance. On this conception of worldhood, language can develop from prelinguistic significance.

Post-turn, Heidegger refines his position to present some basic words (e.g., phusis, the Greek term that roughly translates to "nature") as world-disclosive, that is, as establishing the foundational parameters in terms of which Dasein's understanding can occur in the specific ways that it does. It is in this context that Heidegger proclaims that "Language is the house of being."

In the present age, he says, the language of "technology", or instrumental reason, flatten the significance of our world. For salvation, he turns to poetry.

Heidegger rejected the notion of language being purely a means of communication. Language construed as such, he believed, would form the basis of an age of technology, the digital thought processes of which would only use language to organise and communicate the coverage of that which exists. Thinking in terms of calculation and digital processing would put man at odds with language, at the centre of everything that exists. If man would believe that they would have language at their disposal, that they would be the one to use it, then, Heidegger believed, man would completely miss the core tenet of language itself: "It is language that speaks, not man. Man only speaks if they neatly correspond to language." In this way, Heidegger wanted to point out that man is only a participant of language that they have not themselves created. Man is bound within a sort of process of transfer and may only act with respect to anything the language conveys.

In this, however, Heidegger does not think in terms of philosophy of culture: The tautology of the formulation "language speaks" (originally in German "die Sprache spricht") is his way of trying to prevent the phenomenon of language to be used with respect to anything else than language itself. In line with his unique thinking, he is seeking to avoid having to justify the language by anything else. In this way, language could for instance never be explained by the sheer transmission of acoustic sounds, or speaking. According to Heidegger, language is rather difficult to fathom because we are too close to it, hence we need to speak about that which usually remains unmentioned because it is just too close to us. His work "Unterwegs zur Sprache" (On the way to language) is an attempt to reach "a place we already are in."

Influences

Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin 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 reads 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 is not 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 extrapolates 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 history of the West because it might enable humanity to comprehend being more profoundly and primordially than the Presocratics.

The poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's later work and thought. Heidegger grants 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 more generally. 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".

Heidegger and the Nazi Party

The rectorate

thumb|left|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 1 May, he joined the Nazi Party.

Beginning in February 1933 Heidegger was active, alongside Ernst Krieck, in an organization known as the Cultural-Political Working Group of German University Instructors (Kulturpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Hochschullehrer). The group met privately in the Spring of 1933 to plan the Nazification of the German university system. In this lecture he suggests that if an enemy cannot be found for the people then one must be invented, and once conceptualized and identified, then the 'beings' who have discovered or invented this enemy must strive for the total annihilation of the enemy.

In 1967 Heidegger met with the Jewish poet Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor. Having kept in correspondence with each other 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 Georg Wolff, a former Nazi, and Rudolf Augstein 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 claimed that there was no alternative, saying that with his acceptance of the position of rector of the University of Freiburg 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, when he refused, under threat of dismissal, to remove from the position of dean of the faculty those who were not acceptable to the Nazi party, and he consequently decided to resign as rector.

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 was not 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 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 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.

The Black Notebooks

In 2014, Heidegger's Black Notebooks were published. Written between 1931 and the early 1970s, the notebooks contain several examples of anti-Semitic sentiments, which led to a reevaluation of Heidegger's relation to Nazism. In another instance, Heidegger wrote "by living according to the principle of race [Jews] had themselves promoted the very reasoning by which they were now being attacked and so they had no right to complain when it was being used against them by the Germans promoting their own racial purity". However, the notebooks also contain instances of Heidegger writing critically of biological racism and biological oppression.

A notable entry in the notebooks are his writings about his mentor and former friend Edmund Husserl, specifically relating to Husserl's Jewish heritage. In 1939, only a year after Husserl's death, Heidegger wrote in his Black Notebooks:

<blockquote>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[....].)</blockquote>

For Donatella Di Cesare, this seemed to imply that Heidegger considered Husserl to be philosophically limited by his Jewishness. Recent research confirms the deep connection between Heidegger's philosophy and völkisch antisemitism in the Black Notebooks.

Heidegger had an active social life and interacted with numerous influential philosophers, authors, and academics. During his career he established relationships with Karl Jaspers, Ernst Jünger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Hannah Arendt. He corresponded with Carl Schmitt whom like Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and served together on the Academy for German Law.

Death

thumb|upright|Heidegger's grave in MeßkirchHeidegger died on 26 May 1976 in Freiburg. Simon Critchley has praised Heidegger as the "most important and influential philosopher in the continental tradition in the 20th century".

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has referred to Heidegger as a "great philosopher" and rejected the notion that his alleged anti-semitism against him tainted his philosophy. While he acknowledges and criticizes the ways Nazism permeated Heidegger's work and his life, Žižek contends that these influences are neither essential to describing Heideggerian philosophy nor sufficient in dismantling it. Instead, Žižek finds that a blatant dismissal deprives opportunities to investigate the contradiction between Heidegger's principles and practices, as well as to "confront the uneasy questions he raised against such basic tenets of modernity as 'humanism', 'democracy', 'progress', etc." Žižek adds that the greatness he perceives in Heidegger's work is the extent to which its core ideas can survive as it is abstracted from historical context and reimagined in later eras.

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. Derrida sees 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"). The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness is marked. Heidegger himself, however, argued that Sartre had misread his work.

Hubert Dreyfus introduced Heidegger's notion of "being-in-the-world" to research in Artificial intelligence. According to Dreyfus, long-standing research questions such as the Frame problem can be only dissolved within an Heideggerian framework. Heidegger also profoundly influenced Enactivism and Situated robotics.

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 shown 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."

Notable figures known to be influenced by Heidegger's work today include Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent Russian far-right political philosopher.

Criticism

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. Aspects of his work have been criticized by those who acknowledge his 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). A. J. Ayer objected that Heidegger proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence that were completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis.

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.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".

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. For instance, Theodor Adorno wrote an extended critique of the ideological character of Heidegger's early and later use of language in the Jargon of Authenticity, and Jürgen Habermas admonishes the influence of Heidegger on recent French philosophy in his polemic against "postmodernism" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

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.

In film

Der Zauberer von Meßkirch (1989) is a German TV documentary about Heidegger, co-directed by Ulrich Boehm and Rüdiger Safranski.
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 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.
Being in the World (2010) 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.

Notes

Bibliography

References

Works cited

For ease of reference, citations of Being and Time 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.

Heidegger's collected writings are published by . The Heidegger 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.

Footnotes

Primary sources

Secondary sources