Martin Heidegger

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Martin Heidegger
Name: Martin Heidegger
Birth: September 26, 1889 (Meßkirch, Germany)
Death: May 26, 1976 (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany)
School/tradition: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism
Main interests: Ontology, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, technology, art, language, thinking
Notable ideas: Dasein, Gestell, see Heideggerian terminology
Influences: Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Lukacs, Brentano, Husserl, Jaspers
Influenced: Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, Bernard Stiegler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) (pronounced [ˈmaʀ.tɪn ˈhaɪ.də.gɐ]) was an influential German philosopher, best known as the author of Being and Time (1927).

Contents

[edit] Introduction

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy has since Plato misunderstood the nature of being, tending to treat it as a being rather than asking about being itself. Philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of being from which their theories derive, and, in applying those theories universally, have confused our understanding of human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, in the process retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.

Heidegger argues that Plato's fallacies resulted in two evolving but contradictory schools of thought, most readily observed during the Age of Reason as the division between British empiricism and Continental idealism, but traceable to every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we speak to our notions of what "common sense" is, is susceptible to error, because it has evolved from Plato's fundamental mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—reality, logic, God, consciousness, the present, et cetera. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that these errors have profoundly affected the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.

Philosophers are divided in their opinion of Heidegger: some regard him as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, while others view his writing as bombastic nonsense.[1] Nonetheless, his work has exercised a deep influence on philosophy, theology and the humanities, being key to the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and Continental philosophy in general. Heidegger's thought directly informs the works of major philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

Heidegger infamously supported National Socialism. This has provoked fierce debate among and between supporters and detractors: some see it as a personal folly largely irrelevant to his philosophy, while others think it reveals flaws inherent in his thought.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early years

Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Germany. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a Jesuit seminary. After studying theology at the University of Freiburg from 1909 to 1911, he switched to philosophy. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on Psychologism in 1914, and in 1916 finished his venia legendi in Philosophy with a thesis on Duns Scotus. In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent, then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I – working behind a desk and never leaving Germany. After the war, he served as a salaried senior assistant to Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg until 1923. It was during this period that he built his mountain cabin, the Hütte, in Todtnauberg in the nearby Schwarzwald (Black Forest).

[edit] Marburg years

In 1923, he was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the equally reputable but very Protestant University of Marburg. At Marburg his colleagues included Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Friedländer, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp, and his notable students, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Günther Anders as well as his mistress, Hannah Arendt.

[edit] Freiburg years

When Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger, having published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) the previous year, accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers including one from Berlin, the most prestigious German university of the day. Among his students at Freiburg was Herbert Marcuse.

[edit] National Socialism and aftermath

In 1933, after Hitler's rise to power, Heidegger was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg and he subsequently joined the Nazi party. Heidegger's inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede, became notorious. His tenure was, however, unsuccessful, and he resigned his position in 1934 (though he retained his party membership until the end of the war).

After the war, the French Occupation Authority forbade Heidegger to teach in Germany, but this decision was rescinded in 1951, when he became Professor emeritus with all privileges. He then taught regularly from 1951 and 1958 and by invitation until 1967.

Heidegger died on May 26, 1976 and was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.

[edit] Personal and family life

In 1917, Heidegger married Elfriede Petri on March 21 in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend Engelbert Krebs and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son Jorg was born in 1919. According to the recently published correspondence between Martin and Elfiede, Mein liebes Seelchen! Briefe von Martin Heidegger an seine Frau Elfride: 1915-1970 (Dva, 2005), Hermann (born 1920) is the son of Elfriede and Dr. med. Friedel Caesar. Martin Heidegger had extramarital affairs with Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann, both students of Heidegger and both Jewish. He helped them emigrate from Germany prior to World War II and resumed contact with them after the war.[2]

[edit] Philosophy

[edit] Being, time, and Dasein

Heidegger’s philosophy is essentially an attempt to marry two insights.

  • The first of these is Heidegger’s intuition that, in the course of over two thousand years of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the “world” itself), but has forgotten to ask what “Being” itself is. This is Heidegger’s “question of being,” and it is Heidegger’s fundamental concern throughout his work from the beginning of his career until its end. One crucial source of this insight was Heidegger’s reading of Franz Brentano’s treatise on Aristotle’s manifold uses of the word “being,” a work which provoked Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger opens his magnum opus, Being and Time, with a citation from Plato’s Sophist indicating that Western philosophy has neglected being because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question. Heidegger’s intuition about the question of being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes his concern with the “history of being,” that is, the history of the forgetting of being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive “destruction” of the history of philosophy.
  • The second intuition animating Heidegger’s philosophy derives from the influence of Edmund Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, “to the things themselves”). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended toward something, and is always "about" something; intentionality has been called the "aboutness" of things) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in "care." This is the basis of Heidegger’s “existential analytic,” as he develops it in Being and Time. Heidegger argues that to be able to describe experience properly means finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to “Dasein” (German Da—there/here; Sein—being; Dasein—existence), the being for whom being is a question, a being who is not man but who is nothing other than man. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that Dasein, thrown into the world, is therefore thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one’s own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one’s own existence, is the basis of Heidegger’s notions of authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for Dasein which depend on escaping the “vulgar” temporality of calculation and of public life.

The marriage of these two insights depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that Dasein is an essentially temporal being; it also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, unlike for Husserl, philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology, and thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of Being and Time was thus always only a first step in Heidegger’s philosophy, to be followed by the “destruction” of the history of philosophy, that is, a transformation of its language and meaning, that would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of “limit case” (in the sense in which special relativity is a limit case of general relativity).

That Heidegger did not write this second part of Being and Time, and that the existential analytic was left behind in the course of Heidegger’s subsequent writings on the history of being, might be interpreted as a failure to conjugate his account of individual experience with his account of the vicissitudes of the collective human adventure that he understands the Western philosophical tradition to be. And this would in turn raise the question of whether this failure is due to a flaw in Heidegger’s account of temporality, that is, of whether Heidegger was correct to oppose vulgar and authentic time.[3]

[edit] Being and Time

Main article: Being and Time

Being and Time (German title: Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, is considered by many to be Heidegger's most important work. This epochal book was his first significant academic work, and earned him a professorship at Freiburg University. It investigates the question of Being by asking about the being for whom being is a question. Heidegger names this being Dasein (see above), and the book pursues its investigation through themes such as mortality, anxiety, temporality, and historicity. It was Heidegger's original intention to write a second half of the book, consisting in a "Destruktion" of the history of philosophy, that is, the transformation of philosophy by re-tracing its history, but he never completed this project.

Being and Time influenced many thinkers, including existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre (although Heidegger distanced himself from existentialism—see below).

[edit] Die Kehre

Some have argued that Heidegger's thought after Being and Time exhibits a "turn" in his thinking (die Kehre). He denied this in a letter—published by William J. Richardson in Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963)—which stated that, if there had been a turn at all, it simply went deeper into the same matters. In his later work, Heidegger largely abandons the account of Dasein as a pragmatic, engaged worldly agent, and instead discusses the other elements necessary to an understanding of being, notably language, the earth (as the almost ineffable foundation of world) and the presence of the gods. Nevertheless, Dasein (or "mortals" as he later says) remains a crucial part of the coming-about or event (Ereignis) of being.

[edit] Later works

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 behaviour and in the experience of angst, and more on the way in which behaviour 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.)

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.

In the later writings, two recurring themes are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry as a pre-eminent 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.

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. Indeed, Heidegger described the essence of technology as Gestell, or "enframing." 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, an unmistakable agrarian nostalgia permeates much of his later work.

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

[edit] Influences

Aristotle

Heidegger was influenced at an early age by Aristotle, mediated through Christian theology and Franz Brentano. Heidegger stated that a philosopher should spend 10-15 years studying Aristotle before studying other philosophers.

Dilthey

Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life" and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology was influenced in part by his reading of the works of Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger's portrayal of history, historicity, and generation need to be interpreted in this context and, in particular, the correspondence between Dilthey and Paul Yorck von Wartenburg.

Of the influence of Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes the following: "As far as Dilthey is concerned, we all know today what I have known for a long time: namely that it is a mistake to conclude on the basis of the citation in Being and Time that Dilthey was especially influential in the development of Heidegger's thinking in the mid-1920s. This dating of the influence is much too late." He adds that by the fall of 1923 it was plain that Heidegger felt "the clear superiority of Count Yorck over the famous scholar, Dilthey." Gadamer nevertheless makes clear that Dilthey's influence was important in helping the youthful Heidegger "in distancing himself from the systematic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger acknowledges in Being and Time."[4] Based on Heidegger's earliest lecture-courses, in which Heidegger already engages Dilthey's thought prior to the period Gadamer mentions as "too late", recent scholars as diverse as Theodore Kisiel and David Farrell Krell have argued for the importance of Diltheyan concepts and strategies to the formation of Heidegger's thought.[5]

Gadamer's views on Heidegger are criticised in many quarters, but there can be no doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of Hermeneutics in much the same way that Husserl had seized on Brentano's idea that all of reality could be explained in terms of a descriptive psychology. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a gestalt formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.

Husserl

There is disagreement over the degree of influence that Husserl had on Heidegger's philosophical development, just as there is disagreement about the degree to which Heidegger's philosophy is grounded in phenomenology. These disagreements centre around how much of Husserlian phenomenology is contested by Heidegger, and how much this phenomenology in fact informs Heidegger's own understanding.

On the relation between the two figures, Gadamer wrote the following: "When asked about phenomenology, Husserl was quite right to answer as he used to in the period directly after World War I: 'Phenomenology, that is me and Heidegger'." Nevertheless, Gadamer notes that Heidegger was no patient collaborator with Husserl, and that Heidegger's "rash ascent to the top, the incomparable fascination he aroused, and his stormy temperament surely must have made Husserl, the patient one, as suspicious of Heidegger as he always had been of Max Scheler's volcanic fire."[6]

Robert J. Dostal understands the importance of Husserl to be profound:

Heidegger himself, who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, bases his hermeneutics on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl's account in many ways but seems to have been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by Husserl. [...] The differences between Husserl and Heidegger are significant, but if we do not see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach, we will not be able to appreciate the exact nature of Heidegger's project in Being and Time or why he let it unfinished.[7]

Daniel O. Dahlstrom sees Heidegger's presentation of his work as a departure from Husserl as unfairly misrepresenting Husserl's own work. Dahlstrom concludes his consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Husserl as follows:

Heidegger's silence about the stark similarities between his account of temporality and Husserl's investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a misrepresentation of Husserl's account of intentionality. Contrary to the criticisms Heidegger advances in his lectures, intentionality (and, by implication, the meaning of 'to be') in the final analysis is not construed by Husserl as sheer presence (be it the presence of a fact or object, act or event). Yet for all its "dangerous closeness" to what Heidegger understands by temporality, Husserl's account of internal time-consciousness does differ fundamentally. In Husserl's account the structure of protentions is accorded neither the finitude nor the primacy that Heidegger claims are central to the original future of ecstatic-horizonal temporality.[8]

The Greeks

The idea of asking about being may be traced back to Parmenides. Heidegger claimed to have revived the question of being, the question having been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending to the Age of Enlightenment and then to modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of this question, Heidegger spent considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, as well as on the tragic playwright Sophocles.

Kierkegaard

Heidegger was also influenced by Søren Kierkegaard. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world. Nonetheless, it is important to notice the difference between the Danish philosopher, whose thought was both individualistic and Christian, and Heidegger, who conceived of human existence as thoroughly social and sharply distinguished philosophy itself from all personal, scientific, and religious commitments.

Contemporary Heideggerians regard Kierkegaard as by far the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts. And although Heidegger was careful to point out the highly technical differences between his own philosophy and the traditional definition of existentialism, he is nonetheless regarded by existentialists as one of the most important existential philosophers, on a par with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers and Sartre.

Hölderlin and Nietzsche

Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or other of these figures, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger read The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.

This is also the case for the lecture courses devoted to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, which became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's work and thought. Heidegger grants to Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem.

[edit] Heidegger and Eastern thought

Some writers on Heidegger see possibilities within it for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. Eastern and Western thought literally and metaphorically don't speak the same language. However, certain elements in Heidegger's later work, particularly the dialogue between A Japanese and an Inquirer, do show an interest in initiating such a dialogue. Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe, Kuki Shuzo and Kyoshi Miki.

Furthermore, it has also been claimed that a number of elements within Heidegger's thought bear a close parallel to Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen, Buddhism and Daoism. An account given by Paul Hsao (in Heidegger and Asian Thought) records a remark by Chang Chung-Yuan claiming that "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands but has intuitively grasped Taoist thought."

[edit] Heidegger and Nazism

Main article: Heidegger and Nazism

[edit] The rectorate

Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. On April 21, 1933, Heidegger was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg, becoming Rector the following day, and on May 1 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Heidegger's inaugural address, delivered May 27, the Rektoratsrede, was entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University," and later became notorious. It culminated in three "Heil Hitlers." His tenure as Rector was, however, fraught from the beginning. He resigned the Rectorship on April 23, 1934, and his resignation was accepted on April 27. Heidegger remained a member of the Nazi party until the end of the war.

Philosophical historian Hans Sluga places Heidegger's embrace of National Socialism in this period within the context of a similar and often even more enthusiastic acceptance of Nazism from many other German philosophers. He characterises Heidegger's stance while rector in the following way:

Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.[9]

In 1945 Heidegger wrote a defense of his term as rector, which he gave to his son Hermann, and which was published in 1983. In it Heidegger referred to his 1933-34 involvement in the following terms:

The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.[10]

[edit] Treatment of Husserl

On April 14, 1933 (thus prior to Heidegger's rectorship), Husserl was given an enforced leave of absence because he was Jewish. It is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that during the rectorate Heidegger denied Husserl access to the university library. He did, however, break off contact with Husserl, other than via a "go-between." Heidegger did not attend his mentor's cremation in 1938, and in 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time (restored in post-war editions).[11]

[edit] Post-rectorate National Socialist period

After the spectacular failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from political activity, without canceling his membership of the NSDAP. Nevertheless, references to National Socialism continued to appear in his work, usually in ambiguous ways.

In the course of his 1935 lectures, Heidegger referred to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement" (die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung), that is, of National Socialism. This phrase remained when the lectures were published in 1953 under the title, An Introduction to Metaphysics; however, Heidegger added a parenthetical qualification, without mentioning this change at the time of publication: "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)".[12]

In the lectures of 1942, published posthumously as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" Heidegger makes the following remark:

Today—if one still reads such books at all—one can scarcely read a treatise or book on the Greeks without everywhere being assured that here, with the Greeks, "everything" is "politically" determined. In the majority of "research results," the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.[13]

Karl Löwith met Heidegger in 1936 while the latter was visiting Rome to lecture on Hölderlin. In an account set down in 1940 and not intended for publication, Löwith recounted an exchange with Heidegger over editorials published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

[I] told him that I did not agree either with the way in which Karl Barth was attacking him or in the way [Emil] Staiger was defending him, because my opinion was that his taking the side of National Socialism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy. Heidegger told me unreservedly that I was right and developed his idea by saying that his idea of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] was the foundation for his political involvement.[14]

Löwith went on to say:

In response to my remark that I could understand many things about his attitude, with one exception, which was that he would permit himself to be seated at the same table with a figure such as Julius Streicher (at the German Academy of Law), he was silent at first. At last he uttered this well-known rationalisation (which Karl Barth saw so clearly), which amounted to saying that "it all would have been much worse if some men of knowledge had not been involved." And with a bitter resentment towards people of culture, he concluded his statement: "If these gentlemen had not considered themselves too refined to become involved, things would have been different, but I had to stay in there alone." To my reply that one did not have to be very refined to refuse to work with a Streicher, he answered that it was useless to discuss Streicher; the Stürmer was nothing more than "pornography." Why didn't Hitler get rid of this sinister individual? He didn't understand it.[15]

For commentators such as Habermas who credit Löwith's account, there are a number of generally shared implications: one is that Heidegger did not turn away from National Socialism per se but became deeply disaffected with the official philosophy and ideology of the party, as embodied by Alfred Bäumler or Alfred Rosenberg, whose biologistic racist doctrines he never accepted.

[edit] Post-war period

Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, occurred some time before Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism, but did not end when she moved to Heidelberg to continue her studies under Karl Jaspers. Arendt later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at these same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt very cautiously resumed their friendship after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt for Heidegger and his political sympathies. The denazification hearings resulted in Heidegger being forbidden to teach between 1945 and 1951. One consequence of his disfavour in Germany was that Heidegger began to engage far more in the French philosophical scene.

In a lecture on technology delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger made the following controversial remark:

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.[16]

This quotation has been the subject of widespread criticism and interpretation. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, described it as "scandalously inadequate."[17]

In 1967 Heidegger had an encounter with the Jewish poet, Paul Celan, who had been interned during the war. On July 24 Celan gave a reading at the University of Freiburg, attended by Heidegger. Heidegger there presented Celan with a copy of What is Called Thinking?, and invited him to visit him at his hut at Todtnauberg, an invitation which Celan accepted. On July 25 Celan visited Heidegger at his retreat, signing the guestbook and spending some time walking and talking with Heidegger. The details of their conversation are not known, but the meeting was the subject of a subsequent poem by Celan, entitled "Todtnauberg" (dated August 1, 1967). The enigmatic poem and the encounter have been discussed by numerous writers on Heidegger and Celan, notably Lacoue-Labarthe.

[edit] Der Spiegel interview

On September 23, 1966, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously (it was published on May 31, 1976). In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with National Socialism in two ways: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach" but stated that he changed his mind about this in 1934, largely prompted by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives.

The Löwith account from 1936 has been cited to contradict the account given in the Spiegel interview in two ways: that there was no decisive break with National Socialism in 1934 and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement. The Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the extermination camps. In fact, the Der Spiegel interviewers were not in possession of much of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies.[18]

[edit] Influence and reception in France

Heidegger was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, and his ideas have penetrated into many areas, but in France there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting his work.

[edit] Existentialism and pre-war influence

Heidegger's influence on French philosophy began in the 1930s, when Being and Time, "What is Metaphysics?" and other Heideggerian texts were read by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, as well as by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille.[19] Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology (the study of the meaning of being) is rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings (Dasein, or being-there), his work has often been associated with existentialism. The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's Being and Nothingness is marked, but Heidegger felt this influence took the form of a misreading, as he argued in later texts such as the "Letter on 'Humanism'." In that text, intended for a French audience, Heidegger explained this misreading in the following terms:

Sartre's key proposition about the priority of existentia over essentia [that is, Sartre's statement that "existence precedes essence"] does, however, justify using the name "existentialism" as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort. But the basic tenet of "existentialism" has nothing at all in common with the statement from Being and Time [that "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"]—apart from the fact that in Being and Time no statement about the relation of essentia and existentia can yet be expressed, since there it is still a question of preparing something precursory.[20]

[edit] Post-war forays into France

After the war, Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period on account of his activities as Rector of Freiburg University. He developed a number of contacts in France, where his work continued to be taught, and a number of French students visited him at Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in Heidegger and "the Jews", which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, one step toward bringing together French and German students). Heidegger subsequently made several visits to France, and made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of correspondence with Jean Beaufret, an early French translator of Heidegger, and with Lucien Braun.

[edit] Derrida and deconstruction

Deconstruction 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 a 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").

Jacques Derrida made emphatic efforts to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounted to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion" - literally "destruction" - and "Abbau" - more literally "de-building"). According to Derrida, Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian concerns is overly psychologistic, anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to Dasein in Being and Time. Sartre's reading of Heidegger, which formed the basis of the former's major work Being and Nothingness, was based on 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). Because of his vehement attempts to 'rescue' Heidegger from his existentialist interpreters, Derrida has at times been represented as an ultra-orthodox "French Heidegger," to the extent that he, his colleagues, and his former students are made to go proxy for Heidegger's worst (political) mistakes, despite ample evidence that the reception of Heidegger's work by later practitioners of deconstruction is anything but doctrinaire. 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.

[edit] The Farías debate

In consideration of the contributions of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Lyotard to scholarship on Heidegger and his ties to 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". These included the extent to which specific practitioners of deconstruction could entirely do without Heideggerian deconstruction (as Lyotard in particular may have wished) or were - rather - 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. The latter were precipitated by press attention to the Víctor Farías book "Heidegger et le nazisme" (Farías was an ex-student of Heidegger) and extensive treatments of the Holocaust and its implications. These included 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 "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", or the studies on Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.

[edit] Bernard Stiegler

More recently, Heidegger's thought has considerably influenced the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This is evident even from the title of Stiegler's multi-volume magnum opus, La technique et le temps (volume one translated into English as Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus).[21] Stiegler offers an original reading of Heidegger, arguing that there can be no access to "originary temporality" other than via material, that is, technical, supports, and that Heidegger recognised this in the form of his account of world historicality, yet in the end suppressed that fact. Stiegler understands the existential analytic of Being and Time as an account of psychic individuation, and his later "history of being" as an account of collective individuation. He understands many of the problems of Heidegger's philosophy and politics as the consequence of Heidegger's inability to integrate the two.

[edit] Criticism

Heidegger's influence upon the literature of 20th century continental philosophy is unquestioned, however his thought has been attacked or dismissed by many others, including Theodor Adorno and numerous Anglo-American philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer as well as more modern writers among the Hegelians. Gilbert Ryle's review of Being and Time was, according to one apologist, "negative and dismissive".[22]

Heidegger's contemporaries in neo-Kantian and analytical philosophy generally regarded both the content and the style of his work as examples of the worst possible way of doing philosophy.

For one reason, as Dr. Tom Rockmore said, Being and Time, did not follow the norms of scholarly writing, i.e. defining new terms as they are introduced. Heidegger was fond of introducing new terms and their variations, without defining them, for example, 'ontical,' 'ontico-ontological,' and 'fundamental ontology.' Rockmore and other critics say this was due to an authoritarian style.

The content of Being and Time, according to Husserl (perhaps Heidegger's most able contemporary critic), claimed to deal with Ontology, but only did so in the first few pages of the book. Having nothing further to contribute, Heidegger quickly changed the topic to 'Dasein,' the human being, 'for whom alone Being has significance.' For the rest of his famous book Heidegger presents an abstract portrait of the human being.

To illustrate this particular point, critics [need to cite] have summarized Being and Time using Heidegger's terminology, briefly as follows:

(1) A human being is a Self (Dasein) who interacts in-the-world with four basic moods: fear, boredom, joy and anxiety.

(2) Dasein finds an outside world and interacts in the mode of Care (much or little). Dasein is Here and the world is Yonder. The world consists of Things and Other human beings, or simply, the Other. Dasein interacts with the Other in three modes of Solicitude: catching-up with the Other, suppressing the Other, and authenticity.

(3) As for Things, Heidegger interchanges four terms to describe them: Things, Gear, Ready-at-Hand, and Pragmata. Dasein interacts with Things in the mode of Concern and Directionality. Dasein regards broken Things as Conspicuousness. [needs translation reference/original text]

(4) Dasein Cares for the abstract Other (Them or They) in the modes of Falling, Inauthenticity, Alienation, Scattering. Simply put, 'They' influence Dasein to be inauthentic.

(5) These, then, are the facts of life, or Facticity of Dasein. We are thrown into this world, and this is our Thrownness. The aim of the life of Dasein is to resist the forces of 'They' and strive to be Authentic.

Historically, criticism of Heidggers philosophy has come from the analytic faction of contemporary philosophy. One particularly scathing critic, of Heideggers philosophy was the British analytic philosopher, A.J. Ayer. In a chapter of Ayer's work, "The Meaning of Life", he espouses the existence of two trends of philosophy, which he calls laymen and pontiffs. The laymen were considered the workers of philosophy, who were content to chip away at the totality of knowledge rather than make claims to have knowledge of complete unifying systems. The pontiffs were philosophers who, according to Ayer, proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence, which are completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis. For Ayer, this sort of philosophy was no more than a toxic strain of modern thought and he considered Heidegger to be the "arch-pontiff" of the classification, because of Heidegger's repudiation of the importance of reason and his references to invented theories which could not possibly be verified by reality. Therefore, Ayer believed that such pontiffication was entirely useless.

For Ayer, journeymen represented the ideal contemporary philosophers. The journeymen were the philosophers of the early twentieth century who had resigned themselves to the understanding that questioning into the questions which philosophy had historically asked; such as questions regarding ontological nature, the existence of deities, and universal systems of morality, were inherently futile and chose, rather to invest their philosophical inquiry towards answerable questions. For the journeymen, answerable questions were ones which could proven with the use of reason which, for the journeymen, meant either the application of logical analysis, or empirical observation in order to reach a conclusion in the form of a truth function. Any method of philosophy which was not able to create such truth functions was, for Ayer and the journeymen, considered to be an invalid and useless form of philosophy

The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, even though it is not entirely clear whether clarity is valuable or possible, whereas Heidegger explicitly stated, in opposition to this trend, that "those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by 'facts,' ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize 'facts' never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness."[23] Apart from the charge of obscurantism, some of the more conservative analytic philosophers [cite] generally considered the actual content of Heidegger's work to be either faulty and frivolous, unpalatably subjective or uninteresting.

Others have accused Heidegger of having an 'illusory' ontology and have decried his influence on subsequent philosophy. Carnap, for example, accused him of committing the fallacy of reification and for his dismissing of the logical treatment of language. Of which, Carnap said, led Heidegger to write nonsensical pseudo-propositions (See his "Elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language"). His reputation within English-language philosophy has improved slightly [need to provide historical context] (at least in philosophical terms) in some part through the efforts of Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty. Rorty claims that Heidegger's approach to philosophy in the first half of his career has much in common with that of the latter-day Wittgenstein, one of the giants of analytical philosophy.

[edit] Cinema

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Gesamtausgabe

Heidegger's collected works are published by Vittorio Klostermann. The Gesamtausgabe was begun during Heidegger's lifetime. He defined the order of publication and controversially dictated that the principle of editing should be "ways not works." Publication has not yet been completed.

The contents are listed here: Gesamtausgabe.

[edit] Selected works

A complete list of English translations of Heidegger's work is available here.

Year Original German English Translation
1926 Sein und Zeit, Gesamtausgabe Volume 2 Being and Time, trans. by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962)
1929 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe Volume 3 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics trans. by Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
1935 Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, published 1953), Gesamtausgabe Volume 40 An Introduction to Metaphysics trans. by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
1936-8 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936-1938, published 1989), Gesamtausgabe Volume 65 Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
1949 'Die Frage nach der Technik', in Gesamtausgabe Volume 7 "The Question Concerning Technology" [1] in Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993)
1950 Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Volume 5. This collection includes 'Der Ursprung der Kunstwerkes' (1935-1936) Off the Beaten Track This collection includes 'The Origin of the Work of Art', more accessibly collected in Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993)
1955-56 Der Satz vom Grund, Gesamtausgabe Volume 10 The Principle of Reason
1955-57 Identität und Differenz, Gesamtausgabe Volume 11 Identity and Difference, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969)
1959 Gelassenheit, in Gesamtausgabe Volume 16 Discourse On Thinking
1959 Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe Volume 12 On the Way To Language published without the essay Die Sprache (Language) by arrangement with Heidegger.
Academic Genealogy
Notable teachers Notable students
Edmund Husserl
Nicolai Hartmann
Heinrich Rickert		 Hannah Arendt
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans Jonas
Karl Löwith
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Strauss

[edit] Further reading

[edit] On Being and Time

  • Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I
  • Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time
  • Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time

[edit] Heidegger's Later Philosophy

  • Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education
  • Julian Young, Heidegger's Later Philosophy

[edit] Heidegger's Philosophy of Art

  • Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art

[edit] Biographies

  • Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (a disputed and controversial biography; see, for instance, Pierre Joris here)
  • Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life
  • Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

[edit] Politics and Nazism

[edit] Other secondary literature

[edit] Reception in France

  • Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger, 4 vols.
  • Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols.
  • Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich
  • Jean Beaufret, Dialogue with Heidegger, I

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Peter Singer, on the back cover of Paul Edwards, Heidegger's Confusions.
  2. ^ Martin Heidegger — Elisabeth Blochmann. Briefwechsel 1918–1969. Joachim W. Storck, ed. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsches Literatur-Archiv, 1989, 2nd edn. 1990.
  3. ^ Cf. Bernard Stiegler, "Technics of Decision: An Interview," Angelaki 8 (2003), pp. 154–67, and cf. the discussion of Stiegler's reading of Heidegger in the sub-section "Bernard Stiegler" below.
  4. ^ Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Martin Heidegger's One Path," in Theodore Kisiel & John van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 22–4.
  5. ^ Kisiel designates the first version of the project that culminates in Being and Time "the Dilthey draft" in The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 313. Krell comments in Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 313 that “Heidegger’s project sprouts (in part, but in good part) from the soil of Dilthey’s philosophy of factical-historical life”, p. 324.
  6. ^ Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Martin Heidegger—75 Years," Heidegger's Ways (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 18.
  7. ^ Robert J. Dostal, "Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger," in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 142.
  8. ^ Daniel O. Dahlstrom, "Heidegger's Critique of Husserl," in Theodore Kisiel & John van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 244.
  9. ^ Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 149.
  10. ^ Heidegger, "The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts," in Günther Neske & Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 29.
  11. ^ Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass., & London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 253-8.
  12. ^ Rainer Marten, letter to Jürgen Habermas, January 28, 1988, cited by Habermas in "Work and Weltanschauung: the Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective," Critical Inquiry 15:2 (Winter 1989), pp. 452-254
  13. ^ Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 79-80.
  14. ^ Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 57, translated by Paula Wissing as cited by Maurice Blanchot in "Thinking the Apocalypse: a Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David," in Critical Inquiry 15:2, pp. 476-477.
  15. ^ ibid, p. 477
  16. ^ Cited in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 34.
  17. ^ Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 34.
  18. ^ For critical readings of the interview (published in 1966 as "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel), see the "Special Feature on Heidegger and Nazism" in Critical Inquiry 15:2 (Winter 1989), particularly the contributions by Jürgen Habermas and Blanchot. The issue includes partial translations of Derrida's Of Spirit and Lacoue-Labarthe's Of Spirit and Heidegger, Art, and Politics: the Fiction of the Political.
  19. ^ On the history of the French translation of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics?," and on its importance to the French intellectual scene, cf. Denis Hollier, "Plenty of Nothing," in Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 894–900.
  20. ^ Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism'," Pathmarks (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 250–1.
  21. ^ Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), part 2.
  22. ^ C.G. Prado "A House Divided", p.9.
  23. ^ Martin Heidegger "Contributions to Philosophy from Enowning", p.307.

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Heidegger, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 26 September 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Meßkirch, Germany
DATE OF DEATH 26 May 1976
PLACE OF DEATH Meßkirch, Germany
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../m/a/r/Martin_Heidegger_eabc.html"