Martin Heidegger
Taking up again the question of the meaning of being, which metaphysics had in his view forgotten, starting from everyday existence, which already understands it without thinking it.
German · 1889 – 1976
A pupil and then the successor of at Freiburg, he turned into an inquiry into the meaning of being, conducted through the analysis of human existence, which he calls . (1927), left unfinished, renewed twentieth-century philosophy; from the 1930s the "turn" led him toward the history of being, the poetry of Hölderlin and, after the war, toward a meditation on technology (, a 1953 lecture). A member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945 and rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933-1934, he was barred from teaching after the war as part of denazification and could teach again only in 1951. The publication from 2014 of the , which contain antisemitic passages, reopened the debate over the links between his thought and that commitment. His influence runs through , , , , the hermeneutics of , the deconstruction of and the , as well as the criticism of his own pupils, and .
Death is not an event that will happen one day among others: it is each person's ownmost possibility, and it is by anticipating it that existence tears itself away from the anonymous " dies" and becomes its own.
What threatens in technology is not the machine but a mode of revealing, , which lets nothing appear any longer, the human included, except as standing-reserve.
The work of art is neither an object of pleasure nor a copy: it opens up a world, and truth happens in it in an eminent way, alongside thinking and poetic speech.
Science grasps of the real only what its prior projection allows it to objectify: by its own means alone it cannot question the being of what it studies, and the work of art and poetic speech give a more originary access to it.
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Justification
In , modern science becomes "research": it marks out its domain by constituting phenomena as objects according to a prior projection, nature as a calculable ensemble of motions. notes that it wants to know nothing of the nothing, and that it does not think, in the sense he gives the word: not as a failing, but because it does not determine, by its own procedures alone, the ontological presuppositions that constitute its domain. Against this monopoly, and the commentaries on Hölderlin make the work and poetic speech ways of access to being. This widening does not hold for every method or every kind of knowledge: it favours thinking and poetry.
Science does not think.What Is Called Thinking?, lectures 1951-1952
The Age of the World Picture (lecture 1938, publ. 1950) · What Is Metaphysics? (1929) · What Is Called Thinking? (lectures 1951-1952, publ. 1954)
Justification
refuses to assign thinking a use: in 1966 he declares that philosophy will not be able to bring about any immediate change in the present state of the world, and the states that thinking "acts insofar as it thinks". To think is to answer the call of being, not to transform the world or heal the soul. It is in this sense that he stands on the side of understanding, with one reservation: this thinking is not a systematic knowledge of the order of things.
Letter on Humanism (written 1946, publ. 1947) · Der Spiegel interview (1966, publ. 1976)
Justification
Division Two of opens with a problem: how can existence be grasped as a whole, when it is never complete as long as it lasts? The analysis of answers without waiting for an end, as one would wait for the end of an object. Everything turns on an ordinary phrase: "one dies". The "" speaks truly, everyone will die, but it turns death into a fact that concerns everybody and never me. Yet one can die for another, not take away another's own dying: death is the ownmost possibility, certain and indefinite as to its moment. Anxiety reveals what idle talk tranquillizes, and anticipation of this possibility, joined to the resoluteness that answers the call of conscience, lets one own one's choices, in the light of their finitude: that is existence.
Being and Time, §46-53 · Being and Time, §40 (anxiety)
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Justification
The analysis of everydayness describes idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity as modes of a falling in which existence scatters and flees from itself (§35-38); this agitation is a flight in the face of death, which the "" tranquillizes (§51). In 1955 diagnoses a "flight from thinking": busy calculative thinking never pauses for meditative thinking, which asks us to dwell on what is near. This is not a theory of diversion, but his answer is to gather one's attention on what matters rather than be distracted from it.
Being and Time, §35-38, §51 · Discourse on Thinking ("Memorial Address", 1955, publ. 1959)
In §9 of Being and Time, "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"; but the Letter on Humanism rejects Sartre's formula, "existence precedes essence", a mere reversal that in his view remains captive to metaphysics. Ek-sistence, standing out of oneself into the openness of being, is neither a given essence nor a self-invention.
Freedom is not a property of the will, the object of the debate between free will and determinism: it is first "letting beings be" (On the Essence of Truth, lecture 1930, publ. 1943); man does not possess freedom, freedom possesses man.
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Justification
A dated position: the rectorial address (1933) places the university within an order of leading and following (Führung, Gefolgschaft) and subjects it to the three "services" of labour, defence and knowledge. In 1966 still says he is "not convinced" that democracy is the regime suited to the technological age. He builds no philosophy of the state: for him the political remains subordinate to the history of being.
The Self-Assertion of the German University (1933) · Der Spiegel interview (1966, publ. 1976)
Justification
Existence is historical and stands within the heritage of a people: thinks the shared destiny of a community (§74), and the texts of the 1930s bind thinking to the native soil and to the German language, which he holds, with Greek, to be the most fit for thinking. These texts leave no room for cosmopolitanism. In the , homelessness receives a sense tied to the remoteness of being, which is not reducible to the loss of a national territory.
Being and Time, §74 · Why Do I Stay in the Provinces? (1934) · Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures 1935, publ. 1953) · Letter on Humanism (written 1946, publ. 1947)
Justification
starts from the current definition, technology as a means in the service of human ends, and calls it "correct" but not "true": it misses the essence, which rules out instrumentalism from the start. Modern technology is a mode of revealing that no longer lets things come forth, as craftsmanly poiesis did, but "challenges" them (herausfordern): the Rhine is ordered to deliver its energy to the power plant, the forest its cellulose, everything becomes standing-reserve (Bestand), a stock always on call. The human being is itself requisitioned by this challenging and threatened with understanding itself only in terms of availability. The gathering of all these ways of ordering, (Gestell), is the supreme danger, for it risks closing off every other relation to being. Heidegger nonetheless refuses to curse the apparatus: he quotes Hölderlin (where danger is, grows the saving power also) and recommends, in the 1955 speech collected in , a "yes and no" to technical objects: his critique targets the essence, not the instruments.
The Question Concerning Technology (lecture 1953, publ. 1954) · Discourse on Thinking ("Memorial Address", 1955, publ. 1959)
Justification
In , the work is neither an object of enjoyment nor the copy of a thing: it is a "setting-into-work of truth". Heidegger interprets the shoes painted by Van Gogh as giving access to the world of a peasant woman, a reading the art historian Meyer Schapiro contested; the Greek temple, which represents nothing, opens up a world (the horizon of meaning of a historical people) and lets the earth appear (what withdraws and bears that world). Against aesthetics, which in his view reduces art to lived experience and pleasure, art is an eminent mode of as unconcealment.
The Origin of the Work of Art (written 1935-1936, publ. 1950)
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Justification
Attunement (Befindlichkeit) is not a disturbance that would colour a neutral cognition after the fact: it has "always already disclosed as a whole" (§29), equiprimordial with understanding. Anxiety reveals the nothing and the bareness of existence; profound boredom discloses beings as a whole. Theoretical knowledge, too, presupposes an affective disclosure of the world. This is not a primacy of feeling over reason, but a refusal to treat affect as an obstacle to truth.
Being and Time, §29-30, §40 · What Is Metaphysics? (1929)
Justification
In , mortals dwell by "saving" the earth, which spells out: to leave it to its own being, to spare it, not to master it or subjugate it, which is only one step from boundless exploitation. The likewise takes from the human being the rank of lord of beings and assigns it a guardianship, that of being. This guardianship is not the moral responsibility of ecological management: it is a relation of letting-be set against technological , which ecological readings of Heidegger have taken up under that name. It does not make the human one living being among others, since he maintains an abyss between human existence and the animal, "poor in world".
Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.Letter on Humanism (1946)
Building Dwelling Thinking (lecture 1951, publ. 1954) · Letter on Humanism (written 1946, publ. 1947) · The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (lectures 1929-1930), §42-63
Justification
rejects the idea that the work reproduces a particular being: the temple represents nothing, it brings a world about. Yet this is not the invention of genius: decentres the artist in favour of the work, which "founds" a truth. Creation, for him, is an event of coming-to-pass rather than a making.
The Origin of the Work of Art (written 1935-1936, publ. 1950)
Being and Time deconstructs the Cartesian split between thinking thing and extended thing (§19-21) and makes "reality" one mode of being among others (§43): materialism, idealism and dualism share the presuppositions he contests.
Facing your own death to return to yourselfExerciseDeath
For , fleeing the thought of death means letting yourself live the way "one" lives, diluted in habits and the expectations of others. Anticipating your own death, the one death no one can take on in your place, singles you out and returns you to what you truly want: this is . Today this exercise is an antidote to autopilot, a way to take back the reins of an life rather than one merely endured.
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Meditative thinking: dwelling on what is nearExerciseAttention and diversion
Say yes and no to technical objects at the same time.
In his 1955 speech collected in , distinguishes two ways of thinking: calculative thinking, which plans, counts and never stops, and meditative thinking, which takes the time to dwell on what is near and to question its meaning. He gives no protocol; this exercise, inspired by that text, suggests making room for such time regularly, without giving up our tools, saying "yes and no" to them at once.
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Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- ReinterpretsAristotleHeidegger's lecture courses of the 1920s are to a large extent readings of Aristotle: he rereads phronesis as an understanding of existence in its situation and ousia as presence, materials that Being and Time transfo…Read
- ReinterpretsRomanticismHeidegger takes up from Romanticism its critique of the world-as-machine and of calculative reason, its listening to nature and its privileging of the poetic as access to being.Read
- ReinterpretsKierkegaardHeidegger takes from Kierkegaard anxiety, the moment and existence as a task, detaching them from their Christian horizon: the notes of Being and Time acknowledge the debt while judging Kierkegaard's analysis to have …Read
- ReinterpretsNietzscheHeidegger devotes extensive lecture courses to Nietzsche, whom he reads as the last great metaphysician: the will to power and nihilism become the completion and the destiny of Western metaphysics.Read
- ReinterpretsHusserlHusserl's assistant and then successor, Heidegger shifts phenomenology from transcendental consciousness toward the question of being: no longer describing lived experiences, but existence as being-in-the-world.Read
↓ Influence exerted
- reinterpreted byKyoto SchoolTanabe, Nishitani and Kuki Shūzō studied with Heidegger in Freiburg.Read
- reinterpreted byMerleau-PontyMerleau-Ponty takes up Heidegger's being-in-the-world and the pre-theoretical world, but redirects them to the perceiving body: it is the flesh, not the analytic of being, that originally opens the world.Read
- reinterpreted byHannah ArendtHeidegger's student, Arendt shifts his analysis of existence toward the political: against the primacy of death, she thinks natality, the capacity to begin, and concerted action among human beings as the proper site o…Read
- reinterpreted bySartreSartre existentialises Heidegger's analyses, being-in-the-world, facticity, anxiety, within a framework centred on freedom and project, which Heidegger would reject as a humanist misreading.Read
- challenged byJonasA pupil of Heidegger, Jonas breaks with his existentialism, indifferent to nature, to found an ontology of the living and an ethics of responsibility toward future generations.Read
- challenged byEmmanuel LevinasLevinas builds his thought in close contestation of Heidegger: against the primacy of ontology, he posits ethics as first philosophy, the face of the other preceding any understanding of being.Read