Martin Heidegger

Lore & Background

Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of a sexton, and was raised Catholic. He began training for the priesthood in 1903, entered a Jesuit seminary in 1909, but was discharged within weeks due to heart trouble. During this time, he first encountered the work of Franz Brentano, which sparked his interest in the question of Being. He studied theology and scholastic philosophy at the University of Freiburg, then broke off priestly training in 1911 to focus on recent philosophy, particularly Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. He graduated with a thesis on psychologism in 1914 and completed his habilitation on Duns Scotus in 1915. After serving in a meteorological unit during the final year of World War I, he taught at Freiburg from 1919 to 1923 as an assistant to Husserl. In 1923, he became an extraordinary professor at the University of Marburg, where his students included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Löwith. He published Being and Time in 1927, which raised him to international intellectual visibility. In 1928, he succeeded Husserl as professor of philosophy at Freiburg, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Reader's Guide

Heidegger's significance lies in his reorientation of philosophy toward the question of being, which he argued had been neglected since the ancient Greeks. In Being and Time, he analyzed human existence as Dasein, or 'being-there,' emphasizing the unitary structure of 'being-in-the-world' and a pre-ontological understanding of being. His later work turned to technology, language, art, and poetry, critiquing the nihilistic trajectory of modern technological civilization. His legacy, however, is deeply complicated by his involvement with Nazism. He was elected rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, joined the Nazi Party in May 1933, and retained membership until 1945. He expressed support for Adolf Hitler and signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors. After the war, he was banned from teaching following denazification proceedings, a ban lifted in 1949. He never publicly repudiated his Nazi involvements or expressed remorse in unambiguous terms, and the question of whether his philosophy is inherently connected to his political choices remains a subject of significant scholarly controversy.

Did You Know?

• Heidegger's interest in the question of Being was first sparked by reading Franz Brentano's thesis On the Manifold Sense of Being according to Aristotle.
• He served in a meteorological unit on the western front during the final year of World War I after being deemed unfit for combat.
• He was drafted into the Volkssturm in autumn 1944 and assigned to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine.
• His work Contributions to Philosophy, considered by some his second greatest, was not published until 1989, 13 years after his death.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"The grandeur of man is measured according to what he seeks and according to the urgency by which he remains a seeker." — Martin Heidegger "The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous." — Martin Heidegger "Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage." — Martin Heidegger "Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question." — Martin Heidegger