Heidegger, Martin

Heidegger, Martin (mär`tēn hī`dĕger), 1889–1976, German philosopher. As a student at Freiburg, Heidegger was influenced by the neo-Kantianism of Heinrich Rickert and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In 1923 he became professor at Marburg, where he wrote and published the only completed part of his major work, Sein und Zeit (1927; tr. Being and Time, 1962). On the basis of this work Heidegger was called (1928) to Freiburg to succeed Husserl in the chair of philosophy, which he occupied until his retirement in 1951. He actively supported Adolf Hitler during the dictator's first years in power, and after World War II was banned from teaching and publishing for five years.

Although generally considered a founder of existentialism, Heidegger vehemently rejected the association, just as he came to reject Husserl's phenomenology. Heidegger's fundamental concern, as announced in Sein und Zeit and developed in his subsequent works, is the problem of being. In Sein und Zeit, being is shown to be intimately linked with temporality; the relationship between them is investigated by means of an analysis of human existence. Strongly influenced by Sören Kierkegaard, Heidegger delineated various aspects of human existence, such as "care," "moods," and the individual's relationship to death, and related the authenticity of being, as well as the anguish of modern society, to the individual's confrontation with his own temporality. It was this work and its influence upon Jean-Paul Sartre that have led many critics to consider Heidegger an existentialist. In addition to its influence on Sartre, Heidegger's thought influenced both modern Protestant theology (through Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann) and the work of Jacques Derrida and other advocates of deconstruction.

The ontological aspect of Heidegger's thought assumed greater prominence in his later writings, which included studies of poetry and of dehumanization in modern society. Heidegger considered himself the first thinker in the history of Western philosophy to have raised explicitly the question concerning the "sense of being," and he located the crisis of Western civilization in mass "forgetfulness of being." Among his other works are Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929, tr. 1962), What Is Metaphysics? (1929, tr. 1949), An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953, tr. 1959), What Is Philosophy? (1956, tr. 1958), and The End of Philosophy (1956, tr. 1973).

Bibliography

See studies by T. Langan (1959), M. King (1964), J. M. Demske (1963, tr. 1970), L. M. Vail (1972), S. L. Binderman (1981), H. G. Wolz (1981), R. Wolin (199O; ed., 1993; and 2001), K. Lowith (tr. 1995), and R. Safranski (1998); E. Ettinger, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger (1995) and D. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (1995).

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Heidegger, Martin

Martin Heidegger.

(credit: Camera Press)

(born Sept. 26, 1889, Messkirch, Schwarzwald, Ger.—died May 26, 1976, Messkirch, W.Ger.) German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Marburg (1923–27) and Freiburg (1927–44). In 1927 he published his magnum opus, Being and Time. It strongly influenced Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, and, despite Heidegger's protestations, he was classed as the leading atheistic existentialist. His declared purpose in the work was to raise anew the question of the meaning of being. His preliminary analysis of human existence (Dasein, or “being-there”) employed the method of phenomenology. In the early 1930s his thought underwent a Kehre (“turning around”), which some have seen as an abandonment of the problem of Being and Time. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and supported Hitler's policies as rector of Freiburg (1933–34) and less actively through the end of the war. His complicity with the Nazis, which he never publicly disavowed, has prompted debates about whether his philosophy is inherently “totalitarian.” Heidegger's work strongly influenced hermeneutics and poststructuralism.