The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century. He attended a Jesuit seminary, then earned (1914) his doctorate from the University of Freiburg, where he became the assistant to Edmund Husserl. Heidegger was affiliated with the University of Freiburg throughout his career except for a brief period as a professor at the University of Marburg.
As rector of the university from 1933 to 1934, he was a vocal supporter of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, and he remained a member of the party until 1945. Because of this, an attempt was made to remove him from the faculty after World War II, but he managed to retain his teaching post.
Heidegger's chief concern was ontology, or the study of being. His most important work, Being and Time, united two philosophical approaches - the Existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Phenomenology of Husserl - in an inquiry into being, specifically, human being.
Although sometimes considered gloomy and nihilistic because of his emphasis on anguish and death in Being and Time, Heidegger was concerned with these negative aspects of human existence because they shed light on the nature of being. Being is revealed most dramatically by experiences that show the gap between nonbeing and being. The most profound such experience is reflection of the prospect of one's own nonbeing, that is, death, because this "possibility of impossibility" reveals the finitude of human being as both a limitation and an incentive to living in the world. Indeed, the prospect of death, functioning as a radical condition for the possibility of human experience, gives authenticity to human beings.
Beginning in the mid-1930s, Heidegger's thought changed in several important respects. He thus abandoned his original intention to write a second part to the ontological inquiry that he began with Being and Time. His later works, however, may be considered this second part, because in them Heidegger works from the notion of being to the more familiar notion of human existence, reversing the direction of Being and Time, in which he moved from human experience to the nature of being.
In his later works Heidegger stresses the decadence of the modern world, arguing that humanity has "fallen out of being." He traces this fall back to Greek philosophy. In the thought of the pre-Socratics, particularly Parmenides, he finds the only real understanding of being. By the time of Aristotle, that understanding was lost in the emphasis on human beings as rational creatures. Heidegger placed particular emphasis on language as the vehicle through which human beings can reencounter being and on the special role poetry plays in the development and function of language.
The importance he attaches to poetry can be seen in his respect for the work of the German poet Friedrich Holderlin and in his invention of words with multiple meanings derived from their etymological roots. Heidegger's idiosyncratic use of language and sometimes quasi-mystical tone are often regarded as barriers to understanding his philosophy. Nevertheless, many concepts introduced by Heidegger are now common, for example, the necessity of achieving an authentic existence in the face of the downward drag of the anonymous crowd; the importance of intense, significance disclosing experiences; and the elusiveness of the basic features of human existence.
The role of theology in Heidegger's philosophy is obscure, but his work has greatly influenced such contemporary theologians as Paul Tillich. Heidegger himself sometimes seems to imply that being - the quest of the philosopher - and the holy - the quest of the poet - may ultimately be the same.
Translations of Heidegger's works include What Is Metaphysics? (1929; Eng. trans., 1949); An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953; Eng. trans., 1959); What Is Called Thinking? (1954; Eng. trans., 1968); What Is Philosophy? (1956; Eng. trans., 1958); and On the Way to Language (1959; Eng. trans., 1971). |
