Background
Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in Messkirch, Germany, to a church sexton Friedrich and Johanna Heidegger (née Kempf). His sister Marie was born three years later and his brother Fritz two years after that.
1933
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), German philosopher born in Messkirch (Germany). (Photo by adoc-photos/Corbis)
1960
Martin Heidegger. Foto: Paul Swiridoff. (Photo by Würth GmbH/Swiridoff/ullstein bild)
1964
Martin Heidegger (Photo by Fritz Eschen/ullstein bild)
1964
Martin Heidegger (Photo by Fritz Eschen/ullstein bild)
1964
Martin Heidegger (Photo by Fritz Eschen/ullstein bild)
Fahnenbergplatz, 79085 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
In 1909, Heidegger began studying for the priesthood at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg (now University of Freiburg), where he focused on philosophy and moral and natural sciences.
Hirzbergstraße 12, 79102 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
In 1906 Martin Heidegger transferred to Berthold's gymnasium in Freiburg.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
(Poetry, Language, Thought collects Martin Heidegger's piv...)
Poetry, Language, Thought collects Martin Heidegger's pivotal writings on art, its role in human life and culture, and its relationship to thinking and truth.
https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Language-Thought-Harper-Perennial/dp/0060937289/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=Martin+Heidegger&qid=1591172441&sr=8-6
1971
Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in Messkirch, Germany, to a church sexton Friedrich and Johanna Heidegger (née Kempf). His sister Marie was born three years later and his brother Fritz two years after that.
In 1903 Heidegger won a scholarship to the Jesuit gymnasium in Konstanz and stayed, with other scholarship children from similarly poor Catholic families, in a local Catholic boarding house. Here he prepared for a clerical career.
In 1906 he transferred to Berthold's gymnasium in Freiburg, boarding at the archiepiscopal seminary of St. Georg, where the church gave him free board and lodging. While there he received a copy of Franz Brentano's Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (translated as "On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle") from Doctor Conrad Gröber, a paternal friend. Heidegger later claimed that his interest in philosophy was first aroused on studying Brentano's book, which then led him to Carl Braig's On Being: An Outline of Ontology (1896), in which he discovered excerpts from Aristotle and commentaries from Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic fathers.
In 1909 he became a novice of the Society of Jesus at Tisis near Feldkirch in Austria; but on October 13 at the end of two weeks of candidature, he left, having been turned down for health reasons and possibly doubts about his spiritual vocation.
In the winter semester, Heidegger began studying for the priesthood at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg (now University of Freiburg), where he focused on philosophy and moral and natural sciences. His introduction to contemporary philosophy came when he borrowed a library copy of Edmund Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (translated as Logical Investigations). Husserl later became a key influence in the development of Heidegger's most important publication, Sein und Zeit.
In 1910 Heidegger gave his first lecture, on the court preacher Abraham a Santa Clara (1644-1709), in Hausen im Tal, near his home town, Messkirch. He again lectured on Abraham in his birthplace, Kreenheinstetten, on the occasion of the unveiling of a monument for Abraham in the town of his birth. At this time he began to publish articles, reviews, and poems in Der Akademiker, the journal of the German Association of Catholic Graduates.
In 1911 he spent the summer semester at home because of asthma and heart problems and abandoned the theological seminary on the advice of his superiors. He changed his studies to mathematics and philosophy, now concentrating on problems of logic in the history of modern metaphysics. He continued to publish reviews and poems. In 1912 he published his last articles in Der Akademiker and wrote two articles for philosophy journals, which have since been published in revised versions in the Gesamtausgabe as part of the Frühe Schriften, "Das Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie" ("The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy") and "Neuere Forschungen über Logik" ("New Investigations of Logic").
Heidegger graduated on July 26, 1913, after his doctoral examination and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy, summa cum laude, on the basis of his dissertation, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus (The Doctrine of Judgement in Psychologism). Here the influence of Husserl is evident in Heidegger's criticism of attempts to analyze the logical notion of judgment from the perspective of human psychology. His main claim is that logic cannot be reduced to psychological processes and is marked by a developing emphasis on subjective aspects of everyday experience as well as on history and metaphysics. This is an early indication of Heidegger's development toward the key notion of the everyday and resulted two years later in what is now recognized as a breakthrough on the way to the philosophy presented in Sein und Zeit. By 1913 his intention to "articulate the whole region of 'being' in its various modes of reality" had been made clear and the combined resources of scholasticism, phenomenology and neo-Kantianism harnessed toward this end.
In 1915 Heidegger completed his Habilitation Dissertation, Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (The Doctrine of Categories and Signification in Duns Scotus), which earned him the license to teach philosophy at the Philosophical Faculty at Freiburg. He began by assisting Father Englebert Krebs, lecturing theology students in philosophy.
In 1915 Husserl took up a post at Freiburg and in 1919 Heidegger became his assistant. Heidegger spent a period teaching at the University of Marburg (1923-1928), but then returned to Freiburg to take up the chair vacated by Husserl on his retirement. Out of such influences, explorations, and critical engagements, Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) was born. Although Heidegger's academic and intellectual relationship with his Freiburg predecessor was complicated and occasionally strained, Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl, "in friendship and admiration."
Published in 1927, Being and Time is standardly hailed as one of the most significant texts in the canon of contemporary European Philosophy. It catapulted Heidegger to a position of international intellectual visibility and provided the philosophical impetus for a number of later programmes and ideas in the contemporary European tradition, including Sartre's existentialism, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, and Derrida's notion of "deconstruction." Moreover, Being and Time, and indeed Heidegger's philosophy in general, has been presented and engaged with by thinkers such as Dreyfus and Rorty who work somewhere near the interface between the contemporary European and the analytic traditions.
In 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and was elected Rector of Freiburg University, where, depending on whose account one believes, he either enthusiastically implemented the Nazi policy of bringing university education into line with Hitler's nauseating political programme or he allowed that policy to be officially implemented while conducting a partially underground campaign of resistance to some of its details, especially its anti-Semitism. During the short period of his rectorship - he resigned in 1934 - Heidegger gave a number of public speeches in which Nazi images plus occasional declarations of support for Hitler are integrated with the philosophical language of Being and Time. After 1934 Heidegger became increasingly distanced from Nazi politics. Although he didn't leave the Nazi party, he did attract some unwelcome attention from its enthusiasts. After the war, however, a university denazification committee at Freiburg investigated Heidegger and banned him from teaching, a right which he did not get back until 1949. One year later he was made professor Emeritus. Against this background of contrary information, one will search in vain through Heidegger's later writings for the sort of total and unambiguous repudiation of National Socialism that one might hope to find. The philosophical character of Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is discussed later in this article.
After Being and Time there is a reorienting shift in Heidegger's philosophy known as "the turn" (die Kehre). Exactly when this occurs is a matter of debate, although it is probably safe to say that it is in progress by 1930 and largely established by the early 1940s. If dating the turn has its problems, saying exactly what it involves is altogether more challenging. Indeed, Heidegger himself characterized it not as a turn in his own thinking (or at least in his thinking alone) but as a turn in Being. As he later put it in a preface he wrote to Richardson's ground-breaking text on his work, the "Kehre is at work within the issue [that is named by the titles 'Being and Time'/'Time and Being.']... It is not something that I did, nor does it pertain to my thinking only." The core elements of the turn are indicated in what is now considered by many commentators to be Heidegger's second greatest work, Contributions to Philosophy. This uncompromising text was written in 1936-1937, but was not published in German until 1989 and not in English translation until 1999.
Heidegger died in Freiburg on May 26, 1976.
(Poetry, Language, Thought collects Martin Heidegger's piv...)
1971Heidegger's study of classical Protestant texts by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others led to a spiritual crisis, the result of which was his rejection of the religion of his youth, Roman Catholicism. He completed his break with Catholicism by marrying a Lutheran, Elfride Petri.
In the months after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany in January 1933, German universities came under increasing pressure to support the "national revolution" and to eliminate Jewish scholars and the teaching of "Jewish" doctrines, such as the theory of relativity. In April 1933 Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg by the university's teaching staff. One month later he became a member of the Nazi Party; until he resigned as rector in April 1934, he helped to institute Nazi educational and cultural programs at Freiburg and vigorously promoted the domestic and foreign policies of the Nazi regime. Already during the late 1920s, he had criticized the dissolute nature of the German university system, where specialization and the ideology of academic freedom precluded the attainment of a higher unity. In a letter of 1929, he bemoaned the progressive "Jewification" (Verjudung) of the German spirit. In his inaugural address, "Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität" ("The Self-Assertion of the German University"), he called for reorganizing the university along the lines of the Nazi Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, and celebrated the fact that university life would thereafter be merged with the state and the needs of the German Volk. During the first month of his rectorship, he sent a telegram to Hitler urging him to postpone an upcoming meeting of university rectors until Gleichschaltung - the Nazi euphemism for the elimination of political opponents - had been completed. In the fall of 1933, Heidegger began a speaking tour on behalf of Hitler's national referendum to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations. As he proclaimed in one speech: "Let not doctrines and ideas be your guide. The Führer is Germany's only reality and law." Heidegger continued to support Hitler in the years after his rectorship, though with somewhat less enthusiasm than he had shown in 1933-1934.
At the end of the war in 1945, a favorably disposed university de-Nazification commission found Heidegger guilty of having "consciously placed the great prestige of his scholarly reputation... in the service of the National Socialist Revolution," and he was banned from further teaching until 1950. In later years, despite pleas from friends and associates to disavow publicly his Nazi past, Heidegger declined to do so. Instead, in his own defense, he preferred to cite a maxim from the French poet Paul Valéry: "He who thinks greatly must err greatly." In his book Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1953, Heidegger retrospectively praised "the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism."
Beginning in the 1980s, there was considerable controversy among Heidegger scholars regarding the alleged connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his political views in the 1930s and '40s. Were there affinities between Heidegger's philosophical thought, or his style of philosophizing, and the totalitarian ideals and racist ideology of the Nazis? Supporters of Heidegger, repeating a view prominent in the first decades after the war, argued that there was nothing inherently fascistic or racist in his philosophy and that claims to the contrary grossly distorted his work. Opponents, on the other hand, cited parallels between the critical treatment in Being and Time of notions such as "publicness," "everydayness," "idle talk," and "curiosity" and fascist-oriented critiques of the vapidity and dissoluteness of bourgeois liberalism. They also pointed to more-specific similarities evident in Division II of Being and Time, in which Heidegger emphasizes the centrality of the German Volk as a historical actor and the importance of "choosing a hero," an idea widely promoted among the German right as the Führerprinzip. For those scholars Heidegger's philosophical critique of the condition of humanity in modern technological society allowed him to regard the Nazi revolution as a deliverance that would make the world "safe for Being." Among those who shared that assessment of Heidegger was the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, who wrote in a letter to the head of the de-Nazification commission that "Heidegger's manner of thinking, which to me seems in its essence unfree, dictatorial, and incapable of communication, would today be disastrous in its pedagogical effects."
Further controversy was generated in 2014 by the publication in Germany of the first three volumes of Heidegger's so-called black notebooks, in which he had recorded his private philosophical and political reflections in entries written from 1931 to the early 1970s. The published volumes, covering the years 1931-1941, contain several overtly anti-Semitic passages, including some that rehearse crude Jewish stereotypes in a philosophical context. Some scholars regarded such passages as conclusive evidence that racism, and in particular anti-Semitism, was inseparable from Heidegger's philosophy.
Heidegger strongly opposes the view that technology is "a means to an end" or "a human activity." These two approaches, which Heidegger calls, respectively, the "instrumental" and "anthropological" definitions, are indeed "correct," but do not go deep enough; as he says, they are not yet "true." Unquestionably, Heidegger points out, technological objects are means for ends, and are built and operated by human beings, but the essence of technology is something else entirely. Just as the essence of a tree is not itself a tree, Heidegger points out, so the essence of technology is not anything technological.
Technology, according to Heidegger must be understood as "a way of revealing". "Revealing" is one of the terms Heidegger developed himself in order to make it possible to think what, according to him, is not thought anymore. It is his translation of the Greek word alètheuein, which means "to discover" - to uncover what was covered over. Related to this verb is the independent noun alètheia, which is usually translated as "truth," though Heidegger insists that a more adequate translation would be "un-concealment."
"Reality," according to Heidegger, is not given the same way in all times and all cultures. "Reality" is not something absolute that human beings can ever know once and for all; it is relative in the most literal sense of the word - it exists only in relations. Reality "in itself," therefore, is inaccessible for human beings. As soon as people perceive or try to understand it, it is not "in itself" anymore, but "reality for them."
This means that everything humans perceive or think of or interact with "emerges out of concealment into unconcealment," in Heidegger's words. By entering into a particular relation with reality, reality is "revealed" in a specific way. And this is where technology comes in. Technology embodies a specific way of revealing the world, a revealing in which humans take power over reality. While the ancient Greeks experienced the "making" of something as "helping something to come into being" - as Heidegger explains by analyzing classical texts and words - modern technology is rather a "forcing into being." Technology reveals the world as raw material, available for production and manipulation.
According to Heidegger, there is something wrong with the modern, technological culture. In the "age of technology" reality can only be present as a raw material (as a "standing reserve"). This state of affairs has not been brought about by humans; the technological way of revealing was not chosen by humans. Rather, human's understanding of the world - human's understanding of 'being,' of what it means 'to be' - develops through the ages. In current time "being" has the character of a technological "framework," from which humans approach the world in a controlling and dominating way.
This technological understanding of "being," according to Heidegger, is to be seen as the ultimate danger. First of all, there is the danger that humans will also interpret themselves as raw materials. But most importantly, the technological will to power leaves no escape. If humans want to move towards a new interpretation of being, this would itself be a technological intervention: they would manipulate their manipulation, exerting power over their way of exerting power. And this would only reconfirm the technological interpretation of being. Every attempt to climb out of technology throws humans back in. The only way out for Heidegger is "the will not to will." Humans need to open up the possibility of relying on technologies while not becoming enslaved to them and seeing them as manifestations of an understanding of being.
Quotations:
"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought."
"Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a being."
"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."
"Language is the house of the truth of Being."
"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact, language remains the master of man."
"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."
In 1917 Martin Heidegger married Elfride Petri. The couple had two sons: Jörg and Hermann. Heidegger had never parted from Elfride, although his affair with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, his student at Marburg in the 1920s, is well-known.