Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher.

Philosophy

Being and Time

Heidegger's most important work is the dense and challenging Being and Time (German Sein und Zeit, 1927). Although the book as published represents only a third of the total project outlined in its introduction, it marked a turning point in continental philosophy. It has been massively influential and remains one of the most discussed works of 20th century philosophy; many subsequent philosophical views and approaches, such as existentialism and deconstruction, have been strongly influenced by Being and Time.

Related Topics:
Being and Time - German - 1927 - Continental philosophy - 20th century - Philosophy - Existentialism - Deconstruction

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In this work, Heidegger takes up the question of the meaning of being: what does it mean to say that an entity is? This is the fundamental question of ontology, defined by Aristotle as the study of being qua (Latin, tr. roughly as 'as', or 'in the capacity of') being. In his approach to this question, Heidegger departs from the tradition of Aristotle and of Kant, both of whom, despite the vast difference between their respective philosophical positions, approach the question of the meaning of being from the perspective of the logic of propositional statements. Implicit in this traditional approach is the thesis that theoretical knowledge represents the most fundamental relation between the human individual and the beings in his surrounding world (including himself).

Related Topics:
Ontology - Aristotle - Kant - Logic

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Explicitly rejecting this thesis, Heidegger instead adopts a version of the phenomenological method, purged of what he regards as the residue of Aristotelian/Kantian cognitivism still present in Husserl's formulation of this method. Like Husserl, Heidegger takes as his starting point the phenomenon of intentionality. Human behavior is intentional insofar as it is directed at some object or end (all building is building of something, all talking is talking about something, etc). Intentionality was an activity termed by Heidegger as "Sorge" (care) and reflected a positive aspect of Angst. Sorge, or caring, as the fundamental concept of the intentional being, presupposed an ontological significance that distinguishes ontological being from mere ontic being (thinghood). Theoretical knowledge represents only one kind of intentional behavior, and Heidegger asserts that it is founded on more fundamental modes of behavior, modes of practical engagement with the surrounding world, rather than being their ultimate foundation. An entity is what it is (i.e., it has being) insofar as it "shows up" within a context of practical engagement (Heidegger calls such a context a 'world'), not because it has certain inherent properties ascertainable by disinterested contemplation. A hammer is a hammer not because it has certain hammer-like properties, but because it is used for hammering.

Related Topics:
Phenomenological - Husserl - Intentionality - Angst

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This also necessitated a rejection of the Cartesian, disembodied 'I': that is, an 'I' as a purely thinking object. Instead, Heidegger insisted that any analysis of human behaviour should begin with the fact that we are in the world (not viewing it in an 'abstract' fashion): therefore the fundamental fact about human existence is our 'being-in-the-world'. Human beings, Heidegger insisted, were embodied beings who acted in the world. He also said that the world was a characteristic of Being in the World, "Da-Sein.". He therefore rejected the 'subject-object' distinction assumed by most philosophers since Descartes. Things are meaningful to us in terms of their use in certain contexts, which are defined by social norms. However, all of these norms are radically contingent. Their contingency is revealed in the fundamental phenomenon of Angst, in which all norms fall away and beings show up as nothing in particular, in their essential meaninglessness. (Contrary to some existentialist interpretations of Heidegger, this does not mean that all existence is absurd; rather, it means that existence always has the potential for absurdity.) The experience of Angst reveals the essential finitude of human being.

Related Topics:
Angst - Existentialist

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The fact that beings can show up, either as meaningful in a context or as meaningless in the experience of Angst, depends on a prior phenomenon: that beings can show up at all. Heidegger calls the showing up of beings' "truth", which he defines as unconcealment rather than correctness. This "truth of beings", their self-revelation, involves a more fundamental kind of truth, the "disclosure of being in which the being of beings is unconcealed." It is this unconcealment of being that defines human existence for Heidegger: the human being is that being for whom being is an issue, that is, for whom being shows up as such (Heidegger's word for such an entity, which could conceivably have non-human instantiations, is Da-sein). This is why Heidegger begins his inquiry into the meaning of being with an inquiry into the essence of human being; the ontology of Da-sein is fundamental ontology. The unconcealment of being is an essentially temporal and historical phenomenon (hence the "time" in Being and Time); what we call past, present, and future correspond originarily to aspects of this unconcealment and not to three mutually exclusive regions of the homogeneous time that clocks measure (although clock-time is derivative from the originary time of unconcealment, as Heidegger attempts to show in the book's difficult final chapters).

Related Topics:
Angst - Da-sein - Ontology

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The total understanding of being results from an explication of the implicit knowledge of being that inheres in all human behavior. Philosophy thus becomes a form of interpretation; this is why Heidegger's technique in Being and Time is often referred to as hermeneutical phenomenology. Being and Time, being incomplete, contains Heidegger's statement of this project and his interpretation of human existence and its temporal horizon, but does not contain the working out of the meaning of being as such on the basis of this interpretation. This ambitious task is taken up in a different way in his later works (see below).

Related Topics:
Hermeneutical - Phenomenology

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As part of his ontological project, Heidegger undertakes a reinterpretation of previous Western philosophy. He wants to explain why and how theoretical knowledge came to seem like the most fundamental relation to being. This explanation takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition, an interpretive strategy that reveals the fundamental experience of being at the base of previous philosophies. In Being and Time he briefly destructures the philosophy of Descartes; in later works he uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Plato, among others. This technique exerted a profound influence on Derrida's deconstructive approach, although there are very important differences between the two methods.

Related Topics:
Ontological - Descartes - Aristotle - Kant - Hegel - Plato - Derrida - Deconstructive

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Being and Time is the towering achievement of Heidegger's early career, but there are other important works from this period, including Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1927), Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), and "Was ist Metaphysik?" ("What Is Metaphysics?", 1929).

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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.)

Related Topics:
Being and Time - Angst - Wittgenstein

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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.

Related Topics:
Parmenides - Heraclitus - Anaximander - Nihilistic - Plato - Nietzsche

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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.

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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. 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, many of Heidegger's later works are characterized by an unmistakable agrarian nostalgia.

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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 Concerning Technology," 1953) and Was heisst Denken? ("What Is Called Thinking?" 1954).

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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.

Related Topics:
Jean-François Lyotard's - Jean Beaufret - Lucien Braun

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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 the 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").

Related Topics:
Deconstruction - Lucien Braun's - Jacques Derrida's - Hans-Georg Gadamer - Michel Foucault

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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 prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounts in part to rejecting almost wholesale the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term translate language from Heidegger), and 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," so much so that he, his colleagues, and his former students are made to go proxy for Heidegger's worst mistakes, despite ample evidence that the reception of Heidegger's work by later practitioners of deconstruction is anything but doctrinaire "Heideggerianism" (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).

Related Topics:
Jean-Paul Sartre - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

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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, whose stakes included the extent to which specific practitioners of deconstruction could entirely do without Heideggerian deconstruction (as Lyotard in particular may have wished) or were therefore 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 precipitated by press attention to the Farias book and extensive treatments of the Holocaust and its implications (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 Cinders and "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing," 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). On so many of these matters, please see Avital Ronell's "The Differends of Man" in Finitude's Score. Particularly given that the ways in which various deconstructions have more or less self-consciously inherited from Heidegger is often used to find them complicit in his most reprehensible politics by implication, one ought to review at least the above readings before indulging such a line of argument or when otherwise wishing to understand what filiation has been taken to mean in a philosophical context.

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Criticism

Heidegger's importance to the world of continental philosophy (which he largely created, there being no distinction between analytical and continental philosophy prior to him) is probably unsurpassed. His reception amongst philosophers of the analytic school, however, is quite another story. Saving a somewhat favorable review by Gilbert Ryle in the journal Mind of Being and Time at the time of its publication, Heidegger's contemporaries from the analytic tradition (which was still young, but already quite sharply delineated from other branches of philosophy) generally regarded both the content, insofar as they believed there to be any at all, and the style by which he delivered it, as evidence of the worst possible way of doing philosophy.

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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 trivially false, non-verifiable or uninteresting. This view has largely survived, and Heidegger is still spoken of with derision in most quarters of analytical philosophy, and his influence is considered to have been disastrous for philosophy, in that a clear line can be traced from it to most varieties of postmodern philosophical thinking.

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