Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art, religion, and language.
In April 1933, Heidegger was elected as rector at the University of Freiburg and has been widely criticized for his membership and support for the Nazi Party during his tenure. After World War II, he was dismissed from Freiburg and banned from teaching after denazification hearings at Freiburg. There has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.
In Heidegger's first major text, Being and Time, Dasein is introduced as a term for the type of being that humans possess. Heidegger believed that Dasein already has a "pre-ontological" and concrete understanding that shapes how it lives, which he analyzed in terms of the unitary structure of "being-in-the-world". Heidegger used this analysis to approach the question of the meaning of being; that is, the question of how entities appear as the specific entities they are. In other words, Heidegger's governing "question of being" is concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings.
Early life
Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of Johanna 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 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 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. He was primarily concerned to qualify 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 counter-offer 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 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 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. 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 last days, he also arranged for a complete edition of his works to be compiled and published. Its first volume appeared in 1975. As of 2019, the edition is almost complete at over 100 volumes.
Early influences
, the founder of phenomenology, was Heidegger's teacher and a major influence on his thought. While the specific lines of influence remain a matter of scholarly dispute, one thing is clear: Heidegger's early work on Being and Time moved away from Husserl's theory of intentionality to focus on the pre-theoretical conditions that enable consciousness to grasp objects.Aristotle influenced Heidegger from an early age. This influence was mediated through Catholic theology, medieval philosophy, and Franz Brentano.
According to scholar Michael Wheeler, it is by way of a "radical rethinking" of Aristotle's Metaphysics that Heidegger supplants Husserl's notion of intentionality with his unitary notion of being-in-the-world. According to this reinterpretation, the various modes of being are united in more basic capacity of taking-as or making-present-to.
The works of Wilhelm Dilthey shaped Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life", and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology. 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.
Søren Kierkegaard contributed much to Heidegger's treatment of the existentialist aspects of his thought located in Division II of Being and Time. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety 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.