Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was one of the most significant and influential philosophers of the 20th century. The central thematic of his work was the attempt to reorient the Western tradition away from metaphysical and epistemological concerns and toward ontological questions. Ontology is the study of being qua being and Heidegger attempted to re-open the question of being, one that he claimed had been forgotten and concealed. In order to undergo this task, Heidegger used the phenomenological method that he inhereted from his teacher Edmund Husserl. The publication of his magnum opus Being and Time was a watershed event in the 20th century and not only influenced subsequent developments of phenomenology, but also existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and post-modernism.

Biography

Heidegger was born in Messkirk in Boden, a rural Catholic region of Germany. His father was a craftsman and a sexton at the local Catholic church. Attending two Jesuit schools during his high school years, religion and theology played an important role in Heidegger's early education. He finished his theological training at the university in Freiburg in 1909, deciding to pursue studies in mathematics and philosophy instead. He received his doctoral degree in philosophy after completing a dissertation on The Theory of Judgment in Psychologis in 1913 and a habilitation dissertation on the Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus in 1915. From 1916 to 1917 he was an unsalaried Privatdozent before serving as a weatherman on the Ardennes front during the last three months of World War I. In 1917 Heidegger married Elfriede Petri in a Protestant wedding and by 1919 they both converted to Protestantism. Heidegger was employed as an assistant to Edmund Husserl at the university in Freiburg until 1923. During this time, he built a mountain cabin in Todtnauberg in the nearby Black Forest, a retreat that he would use throughout the rest of his life. In 1923 he became a professor at the university in Marburg where he had several notable students including: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Lowith, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. After publishing his magnum opus Being and Time in 1927, he returned to Freiburg to occupy the chair vacated by Husserl's retirement. In 1933 he became a member of the NSDAP (the Nazi party) and was soon after appointed Rector of the university. After World War II, the French Occupation Authority banned him from teaching from 1945 to 1947 because of his involvment in National Socialism but by 1951 he was reinstated as an emeritus professor. He taught regularly from 1951-1958 and by invitation until 1967. He died May 26, 1976 and was buried in his hometown of Messkirch.

Influences

Heidegger was influenced as a teenager by Aristotle mediated through Christian theology. The concept of being, which in the traditional sense can be dated back to Plato, made up his first exposure to an idea that he would later plant at the core of his most famous work Being and Time (1927). Originally, he would have to be called a phenomenologist. The phenomenological approach to philosophy can be briefly sketched as an attempt to perceive experience unmediated by any prior knowledge and thus as a way of trying to reach the thing itself, bypassing every abstract theoretical assumption of it. Edmund Husserl was a founder and major exponent of this philosophical branch, and also Heidegger's teacher and mentor. In spite of some disagreements over method phenomenology no doubt held a special place for Heidegger throughout the evolution of his thinking, even though he became more and more interested in the specific question of being (or what it means to be). He himself characterizes his famous work Being and Time as phenomenological ontology. The idea of being can at the very least be tracked back to Parmenides and has traditionally served as one of the key thoughts of Western philosophy. The question of being was so to speak revived by Heidegger after being eclipsed by the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Descartes, and even more recently during the Enlightenment. Heidegger sought to explain being in terms of time, and thus to discover its real essence or meaning, that is, its intelligibility for us.

In this manner Heidegger began where being began — in ancient Greek thought, resurrecting a lost and under-appreciated issue in contemporary philosophy. Heidegger's great opening was to take Plato seriously again, and at the same time undermine the entire Platonic world by challenging the core of Platonism — treating being not as timeless and transcendent, but instead as embedded in time and history. This is partially why Platonists tend to regard Heidegger as a great thinker, even if they disagree with his analysis of Being and his conception of Platonic thought. Although Heidegger was a supremely creative and original thinker, he at the same time borrowed heavily from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, the latter of whom is mostly referred to in footnotes. Heidegger can be compared to Aristotle, who took Plato's dialogues and systematically presented them as treatises and conceptual structures. Similarly, Heidegger extracted Nietzsche's unpublished fragments and interpreted them as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics. It must be said though that Heidegger's published lectures during 1936 on Nietzsche’s Will to Power as Art are less scholarly commentaries than original philosophical works in their own right. Heidegger's concepts of angst and Da-sein manifestly draw on Kierkegaard's notions of anxiety, furthermore Heidegger is indebted to the way in which Kierkegaard lays out the importance of our subjective relation to the 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. Nonetheless, it is important to notice the difference between a Danish philosopher operating inside the Christian framework and Heidegger, who largely gave his thought free play.

Being and Time

Main article: Being and Time

Being and Time (German title: Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, is Heidegger's most influential work. This epochal book was his first significant academic work, and earned him a professorship at Freiburg University. He subsequently changed his views on several points made in the book. It is a touchstone of Continental philosophy, a groundbreaking investigation of the concepts of Being & Da-sein (literally "existence" and, often translated by its components, "being-there"), as these relate to ontology and phenomenology. Although Heidegger distanced himself from existentialism, Being and Time strongly influenced existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre.

Later works

Although Heidegger claimed that all of his writings concerned a single question, the question of being, in the years after the publication of Being and Time the focus of his work gradually changed. This change is often referred to as Heidegger's Kehre (turn). In his later works, Heidegger turns from "doing" to "dwelling." He focuses less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior and in the experience of Angst, and more on the way in which behavior itself depends on a prior "openness to being." The essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. (The difference between Heidegger's early and late works is more a difference of emphasis than a radical break like that between the early and late works of Wittgenstein, but it is important enough to justify a division of the Heideggerian corpus into "early" (roughly, pre-1930) and "late" writings.)

Heidegger opposes this openness to the "will to power" of the modern human subject, who subordinates beings to his own ends rather than letting them "be what they are." Heidegger interprets the history of western philosophy as a brief period of authentic openness to being in the time of the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, followed by a long period increasingly dominated by nihilistic subjectivity, initiated by Plato and culminating in Nietzsche.

In the later writings, two recurring themes are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry as a preeminent way in which beings are revealed "in their being." The play of poetic language (which is, for Heidegger, the essence of language itself) reveals the play of presence and absence that is being itself. Heidegger focuses especially on the poetry of Hölderlin.

Against the revealing power of poetry, Heidegger sets the force of technology. The essence of technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" (Bestand) of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. The standing reserve represents the most extreme nihilism, since the being of beings is totally subordinated to the will of the human subject. Indeed, Heidegger described the essence of technology as Gestell, or enframing. Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology; he believes that its increasing dominance might make it possible for humanity to return to its authentic task of the stewardship of being. Nevertheless, an unmistakable agrarian nostalgia permeates much of his later work.

Heidegger's important later works include Vom Wesen der Wahrheit ("On the Essence of Truth," 1930), Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes ("The Origin of the Work of Art," 1935), Bauen Wohnen Denken ("Building Dwelling Thinking," 1951), and Die Frage nach der Technik ("The Question of Technology," 1953) and Was heisst Denken? ("What Is Called Thinking?" 1954).

Heidegger and Eastern thought

Heidegger's philosophy has been read as opening up the possibility for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, paticularly East Asian thinking. This is an ambigous aspect of Heidegger's philosophy, insofar as his notions such as "language as the house of being" seem precisely to rule out such a possiblity. Eastern and Western thought literally and metaphorically don't speak the same language. However certain elements in Heidegger's latter work, particularly the dialogue between A Japanese and an Inquirer, do show an interest in such a dialogue occurring. Heidegger himself had contact with an number of leading Japanese intellectuals of his time in the Kyoto School. Further more it has also claimed that a number of elements within Heidegger's thought bear a close parallel to Eastern philosophical ideas, paticularly with Zen Buddhism and Daoism

Influences and difficulties of French reception

Heidegger, like Husserl, is an explicitly acknowledged influence on existentialism, despite his explicit disavowal and objection, in texts such as the "Letter on Humanism," of the importation of key elements of his work into existentialist contexts. While Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period shortly after the war on account of his activities as Rector of Freiburg, he developed a number of contacts in France who continued to teach his work and brought their students to visit him in Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in "Heidegger and 'the Jews': A Conference in Vienna and Freiburg," which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, a first step in bringing together French and German students after the War). Heidegger subsequently made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of recommendations from Jean Beaufret, who was an early French translator, and Lucien Braun.

Deconstruction as it is generally understood (i.e., as French and Anglo-American phenomena profoundly rooted in Heidegger's work, with limited general exposure in a German context until the 1980s) came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of Jacques Derrida's work (Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. (There was discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this did not happen.) Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of 29 September 1967 and 16 May 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as a philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see Penser à Strasbourg, Jacques Derrida, et al, which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida").

One feature that garnered initial interest in a French context (which propagated rather quickly to scholars of French literature and philosophy working in American universities) was Derrida's efforts to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounts in part to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion" - literally "destruction" - and "Abbau" - more literally "de-building"), whereas Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian terms is overly psychologistic and (ironically) anthropocentric, consisting of a radical misconception of the limited number of Heidegger's texts commonly studied in France up to that point (namely Being and Time, What is Metaphysics?, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). Derrida, on the other hand, is at times presented as an ultra-orthodox "French Heidegger," to the extent that he, his colleagues, and his former students are made to go proxy for Heidegger's worst (political) mistakes, despite ample evidence that the reception of Heidegger's work by later practitioners of deconstruction is anything but doctrinaire. The work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe may be taken as exemplary in this regard and was often commended as such by Derrida, who further contrasted Lacoue-Labarthe's extended work on Heidegger with Foucault's silence.

Having earlier mentioned the contributions of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Lyotard to scholarship on Heidegger and National Socialism, it is worth noting that Heidegger's relation to the Holocaust and Nazism was the subject of great and occasionally fractious debate across various "deconstructions". These included the extent to which specific practitioners of deconstruction could entirely do without Heideggerian deconstruction (as Lyotard in particular may have wished) or were - rather - obliged to further (and in the cases of many mis- and uninformed criticisms, recall) already extensive criticisms of Heidegger which considerably predated (in the case of Derrida, by decades) the broad recognition of Heidegger's activities as a National Socialist. The latter were precipitated by press attention to the Víctor Farías book "Heidegger et le nazisme" (Farias was an ex-student of Heidegger) and extensive treatments of the Holocaust and its implications. These included for example, the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'Homme" (the essay from which that title was taken), Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", or the studies on Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.

Criticism

Heidegger's importance to the world of continental philosophy (a subject he is even said by some to have created, although there was some distinction between continental and analytic philosophy before him, the origins of continental philosophy being traceable to romanticism and analytic philosophy to utiliterianism), is probably unsurpassed. His reception among analytic philosophers, however, is quite another story. Saving a moderately favorable review in Mind by a young Gilbert Ryle of Being and Time shortly after its publication, Heidegger's analytic contemporaries (a field still young, but already quite sharply delineated from other branches of philosophy) generally regarded both the content, if any, and the style in which he delivered it, as examples of the worst possible way of doing philosophy.

The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, whereas Heidegger thought that "making itself intelligible was suicide for philosophy." Apart from the charge of obscurantism, analytic philosophers generally considered the actual content that could be gleaned from Heidegger's work to be either faulty and frivolous, unpalatably subjective or uninteresting. This view has largely survived, and Heidegger is still derided by most analytical philosophers, who deem his work to have been disastrous for philosophy, in that a clear line can be traced from it to most varieties of postmodern thinking. Others have accused Heidegger of having an 'illusory' ontology and have decried his influence on subsequent philosophy^{[citation needed]}.

His reputation has improved slightly through the impact of Richard Rorty's philosophy on the English-speaking world; Rorty even claims that Heidegger's approach to philosophy in the second half of his career has much in common with that of the latter-day Wittgenstein - one of the giants of analytical philosophy.

Heidegger and Nazi Germany

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, before being appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg. He resigned the Rectorship in April 1934. However, he remained a member of the Nazi party until the end of the war. During his time as Rector, Freiburg denied Heidegger's former teacher Husserl, born a Jew and an adult Lutheran convert, access of the university library, invoking the Nazi racial cleansing laws. Heidegger also removed the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time when it was reissued in 1941, later claiming he did so because of pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer. Additionally, when Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics (based on lectures given in 1935) was published in 1953, he declined to remove a reference to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement [die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung]," i.e. National Socialism. Instead of deleting or altering the text, he added the parenthetical gloss, "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich [die] Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)." Many readers, notably Jürgen Habermas, came to interpret this ambiguous remark as evidence of his continued commitment to National Socialism.

Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, while she was his doctoral student at the University of Marburg. This affair took place in the 1920s, some time before Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, but it did not end when she moved to Heidelberg to continue with Karl Jaspers. She later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at these same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt very cautiously resumed their friendship after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt for Heidegger and his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden to teach for some years.

Der Spiegel interview

Some years later, hoping to quiet controversy, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously. It should be noted that Heidegger extensively edited, at his insistance, the published version of the interview. In that interview, Heidegger's defense of his Nazi involvement runs in two tracks: 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 saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach". After 1934, he said, he would (should?) have been more critical of the Nazi government. Heidegger's answers to some questions are evasive. For example, when he talks about a "national and social approach" of national socialism, he links this to Friedrich Naumann. But Naumann's "national-sozialer Verein" was not at all national socialist, but liberal. Heidegger seems to have deliberately created this confusion. Also, he alternates quickly between his two lines of arguments, overlooking any contradictions. And his statements often tend to take the form "others were much more Nazi than me" and "the Nazis did bad things to me, too" which, while true, miss the point.

The Der Spiegel interviewers also did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation where he compares engineered food production to the Holocaust ("essentially the same.") While Heidegger's defenders have attempted to account for this "similarity of essence" by reference to his essay "On the Essence of Truth," this account of the technological frame that now infects human nourishment and human mortality is not a conventional reaction to genocide. Moreover, many of those who align themselves with Heidegger philosophically have pointed out that in his own work on being-towards-death, we can recognize a much more salient criticism of what was wrong with the mass-produced murder of a people. Thinkers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler have made this point sympathetically. Commentators differ on whether this philosophical shorthand is evidence of a profound disregard for the Jews or simply the astygmatism of an old man concerned more with his own legacy than with that of the Holocaust.

In fact, the Der Spiegel interviewers were not in possession of most of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies. For more on this notorious interview and its aftermath, see "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger (1966) and Jürgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective." translated by John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 431-56.

Obligations and unsplendid silence: Celan at "Todtnauberg"

Shortly after giving the Spiegel interview and following Celan's lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger hosted Paul Celan at his chalet at Todtnauberg. The two walked in the woods. Celan impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany (also evident in his poetry), and Heidegger is thought to have spoken about elements of his press interview. Celan signed Heidegger's guest book.

In his Poetry as Experience, Lacoue-Labarthe advanced the argument that, although Celan's poetry was deeply informed by Heidegger's philosophy, Celan was long aware of Heidegger's association with the Nazi party and therefore fundamentally circumspect toward the man and transformative in his reception of his work. Celan was nonetheless willing to meet Heidegger (although he may not have been willing to be photographed with him or to contribute to Festschriften honoring Heidegger's work). Heidegger was a professed admirer of Celan's writing, although he did not attend to it as Hölderlin or Trakl (neither did he attend to Celan as a Jewish poet working within that German tradition). "Todtnauberg", however, seems to hold out the unrealized possibility of a profound rapprochement between their work, albeit on the condition that Heidegger break a silence that virtually blanketed his work to the end (Lacoue-Labarthe has commented on the insufficiency of Heidegger's one known remark about the gas chambers, made in 1949). In this respect Heidegger's work was perhaps redeemable for Celan, even if that redemption or what need was had for it was never transacted between the two men. Lest one implicitly take this as Celan simply demanding an apology of Heidegger (such a scenario seems simplistic, the more so given that neither was given to simplism), there are reasonable grounds to argue that it was (and still is) at least as important to specify how the Nazi period is das Unheil (disaster, calamity) (which is to say: specificity as to a great deal more than counting the dead). What compelled Heidegger to write about poetry, technology, and truth ought to have compelled him to write about the German disaster, all the more so because, on the basis of his thought, Heidegger attributed an "inner greatness" to the movement that brought about that disaster.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida have both commented extensively on Heidegger's corpus, and both have identified an idiomatically Heideggerian National Socialism that persisted until the end. It is perhaps of greater importance that Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, following Celan to a degree, also believed Heidegger capable of a profound criticism of Nazism and the horrors it brought forth. They consider Heidegger's greatest failure not to be his involvement in the National Socialist movement but his "silence on the extermination" (Lacoue-Labarthe) and his refusal to engage in a thorough deconstruction of Nazism beyond laying out certain of his considerable objections to party orthodoxies and (particularly in the case of Lacoue-Labarthe) their passage through Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Richard Wagner, all taken to be susceptible to Nazi appropriation. It would be reasonable to say that both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida regarded Heidegger as capable of confronting Nazism in this more radical fashion and have themselves undertaken such work on the basis of this. (One ought to note in due course the questions Derrida raised in "Desistance," calling attention to Lacoue-Labarthe's parenthetical comment: "(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)").

Conclusion

Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi movement, and his failure to regret or apologize for having done so, complicated many of his friendships and continues to complicate the reception of his work. It is debatable whether Heidegger was antisemitic or whether he was taken in by charismatic Nazi propaganda; nevertheless, he clearly sympathized with certain elements of Nazism. Whether this in any way resulted from his philosophy is still contested. Still, the mere possibility that Heidegger's affiliation with the Nazi party might have been an unfortunate consequence of his philosophical thinking appears sufficient for some people to discredit him as a philosopher. As Jean-François Lyotard remarked, the formula becomes "if a Nazi, then not a great thinker" or, on the other hand, "if a great thinker, then not a Nazi". This may well be a great over simpilification and deep misjudgement though. It is certainly used by many who don't like his philosophy as an excuse to easily disregard or discredit him.

Bibliography

Gesamtausgabe

Heidegger's collected works are published by Vittorio Klostermann, Heidegger's house press, in Frankfurt am Main. It was started already by Heidegger himself and is not completed yet. There are four series, (I) Publications, (II) Lectures, and (III) Unpublished material, lectures, and notes, and (IV), Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen.

Selected works

Sein und Zeit (1927). Translated as Being and Time.
Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929). Translated as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, published 1953). Translated as Introduction to Metaphysics.
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936-1938, published 1989). Translated as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).
Holzwege (1950). Translated as Off the Beaten Track.
Der Satz vom Grund (1955-56). Translated as The Principle of Reason.
Identität und Differenz (1955-57). Translated as Identity and Difference.
Gelassenheit (1959). Translated as Discourse On Thinking.
Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959). Translated as On the Way To Language with the omission of the essay Die Sprache (Language) by arrangement with Herr Heidegger.
Question Concerning Technology [1]

Cinema

A 2004 film, The Ister, is based on Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin, and features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Juergen Syberberg. * Official site
A 1979 film, Being There, is based upon a political, satirical 1971 novel by Jerzy Kosiński, and is a comedic spoof of Heidegger's notions of Dasein (Being There) and getting back to one's roots (our forgetfulness of Being). The film stars Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden, Richard A. Dysart and Richard Basehart.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Martin Heidegger

Be there... Act out Heidegger's concept of time.
Translating Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Twenty-Two Translators of "Being and Time" in: Studia Phaenomenologica V (2005)
phainomena.de Heidegger-Blog (German) – Literature, activities and news about Hermeneutical Phenomenology
"Martin Heidegger" [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] - Informative article, summarizing Heidegger's philosophy, including his theories on Angst, and criticisms from other philosophers such as Husserl.
"Kaufmann, Heidegger, and Nazism" by Denis Dutton, Philosophy and Literature 12 (1988): 325-36. A positive review of Walter Kaufmann's and George Steiner's negative treatments of Heidegger
Hearing Heidegger and Saussure by Elmer G. Wiens.
The Early Heidegger in Studia Phaenomenologica I 3-4/2001
"Viewing Power in Heidegger and Levinas" by Mitchell Cowen Verter
"Heideggerians response to Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger and nazism" In French.
"Nazi fundations of Heidegger's Work" by Emmanuel Faye, with a discussion. In French.
"For the opening of Heidegger's Archives" by Emmanuel Faye. In French.

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