Martin Heidegger

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">
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Martin Heidegger
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Name: Martin Heidegger
Birth: September 26, 1889 (Meßkirch, Germany)

<tr><th style="text-align: right;">Death:</th> <td>May 26, 1976 (Meßkirch, Germany)</td></tr>

School/tradition: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism

<tr><th style="text-align: right;">Main interests:</th> <td>Ontology, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, technology, art, language, thinking</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Notable ideas:</th> <td>Dasein, Gestell, see Heideggerian terminology</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Influences:</th> <td>Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Husserl</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Influenced:</th> <td>Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, Bernard Stiegler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders</td></tr>

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was an influential German philosopher, best known as the author of Being and Time (1927).


Contents

[edit] Introduction

Though Heidegger denied being an existentialist, in Being and Time he articulated views that later became existentialist commonplaces: that everyday and scientific understanding is always derived from more basic, practical ways of being, that these more basic ways of being ultimately derive from our finite existence in time, that most people hide from these facts, and that facing these facts entails an anxious, lonely confrontation with our own mortality. Though Heidegger muted some of these themes in his later works, he consistently criticized western philosophy for making questionable assumptions about the nature of being that distort our understanding of human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted errors, Heidegger believed he had to restart philosophical inquiry in a different way, using a novel vocabulary and undertaking an extended criticism of the history of philosophy.

The radical nature of Heidegger's claims have sharply divided reception of his thought among philosophers: those who find his work persuasive regard him as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, while many others view his works as bombastic nonsense. Nonetheless, his work has exercised a deep influence on philosophy, theology and the humanities, being key to the development of not only existentialism, but also hermeneutics, deconstruction, and postmodernism. Heidegger's thought directly informs the works of philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler and Albert Borgmann.

Heidegger was also a member of the National Socialist Party, publicly writing of the "inner truth and greatness" of Nazism in the 1930s. Heidegger's Nazism has provoked fierce debate, among both supporters and detractors: some see it as a personal error largely irrelevant to his philosophy, while others think it reveals flaws inherent in his thought.

[edit] Biography

Heidegger was born in rural Messkirch, Germany. Raised a Roman Catholic, his father was the sexton of the village church. His family could not afford to send him to university so he entered a Jesuit seminary instead. After studying theology at the University of Freiburg from 1909 to 1911, he switched to philosophy. Heidegger received his Ph.D. in 1914 with a thesis on Psychologism, and the venia legendi in Philosophy with a Habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus in 1916. From 1916 to 1917, he was an unsalaried Privatdozent, then served as a soldier during the last 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. During this time, he built his mountain cabin, the Hütte, in Todtnauberg in the nearby Schwarzwald (Black Forest). In 1923, he was elected to an extraordinary Professorship (full professor but without a Chair) 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 and his mistress, Hannah Arendt.

When Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger having published Sein und Zeit 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.

After Hitler's rise to power, Heidegger became a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), generally known in English as the Nazi Party, in 1933. He was appointed Rector of the University and his inaugural address, his "Rektoratsrede," became notorious. He resigned the Rectorship in 1934, but never resigned from the National Socialist party. From 1945-1947, the French Occupation Authority forbade him to teach because of his Nazi past, a decision rescinded in 1951 when he became Professor emeritus with all privileges. He then taught regularly from 1951 and 1958 and by invitation until 1967. He died May 26, 1976 and was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.

[edit] Personal and family life

In 1917, Heidegger married Elfriede Petri, in a Protestant wedding. She has been blamed for being a negative influence on him because of her strong anti-Semitic and Nazi sympathies. Heidegger had several extramarital affairs, including two very important ones with Jewish women who were his students, Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann, with whom he remained in contact for the rest of his life (except during World War II). Only with the recent publication of the letters between Martin and Elfriede Heidegger in 2005 did it become known that the Heidegger marriage was an "open" one, in that Elfriede likewise had affairs, including one with the family doctor who fathered her first son.

[edit] Philosophy

Heidegger was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, and his ideas have penetrated into many areas. His discussion of ontology is largely responsible for his reputation as one of the founders of existentialism. His ideas inspired major philosophical works, e.g., Sartre's Being and Nothingness, although Heidegger insisted that Sartre misunderstood him. His philosophical work was taken up throughout Germany, France, and Japan and has gained, since the 1970s, a fair following in North America as well. Heidegger's work was scorned and dismissed, however, by many of his contemporaries, such as the Vienna Circle, Theodor Adorno, the Hegelians, and Anglo-American philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer.

Heidegger's philosophy refused to recognize concepts such as consciousness, subjectivity, ego, the mind or other fact-value distinctions, because he saw them as fundamentally immeasurable, indefinable and easily subject to multiple interpretations. For example: consciousness vs. "what?", Ego as opposed to "what?" He criticises our reliance on modern science and our subjugation to technology, and he did not see the point to include an "ethical" dimension to his theory; he suggested that "ethical" dimensions are purely "subjective" and only result in a fundamental misunderstanding of his holistic unified experience of "being in the world" which he called dasein.

Heidegger's philosophy also has been read as opening up the possibility for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. This is an ambiguous aspect of Heidegger's philosophy, because such notions of his as "language as the house of being" precisely seem to rule out such a possibility. Eastern and Western thought literally and metaphorically do not speak the same language. However, certain elements in Heidegger's later work -- particularly the dialogue between "a Japanese and an Inquirer" in On the Way to Language -- do show an interest in such a dialogue occurring. Heidegger had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals of his time in the Kyoto School. It has been claimed that a number of elements within Heidegger's thought bear a close parallel to Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen Buddhism and Taoism.

[edit] Influences

Heidegger was influenced as a teenager by Aristotle mediated through Christian theology. The concept of being, which in the traditional sense can be dated back to Plato, made up his first exposure to an idea that he would later plant at the core of his most famous work Being and Time (1927).

According to most Encyclopedia accounts, Heidegger originally was a phenomenologist but he was also much influenced by Kantian philosophy. The phenomenological approach to philosophy can briefly be sketched as an attempt to describe experience unmediated by reflective and theoretical knowledge in order to reach "the things themselves," as Husserl put it, bypassing all abstract assumptions concerning them. Edmund Husserl was the founder and major exponent of modern phenomenology and was Heidegger's mentor.

In spite of fundamental disagreements between Husserl and Heidegger over its methodology, Heidegger claimed that phenomenology held a special place for him and is present throughout his thinking. Heidegger's work centred essentially on the question of being (or what it means to be), or ontology, which Husserl never directly addressed. Heidegger characterized his famous work Being and Time as phenomenological ontology.

However, Husserl himself disputed that characterization. According to Husserl, Heidegger, instead of pursuing the idea of ontology as pure being, changed the topic to "Dasein" (the ontology of the being-in-the-world), that being to whom the question of being is important. Husserl mistakenly claimed that Heidegger's work was not about ontology, or phenomenology for that matter, but "philosophical anthropology". In Phenomenology and Anthropology, Husserl criticized Heidegger's claim (without explicitly naming him) that "true philosophy is in...one's concrete-worldly existence". The two philosophers never spoke to each other after the displacement of Husserl during the early Nazi period.

The idea of the primacy of being as a tool of philosophical understanding can at the very least be traced back to Parmenides and has traditionally served as one of the key thoughts of Western philosophy. The question of being was allegedly revived by Heidegger after being eclipsed by the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Descartes, and even more recently in the Age of Enlightenment, modern science, and high technology. Heidegger sought to ground being in time, and thus to discover its real essence or meaning, that is, its intelligibility for us.

In this manner Heidegger began where being began – in ancient Greek thought. He depicts himself as the reviver of a lost and under-appreciated issue in contemporary philosophy. Heidegger's great opening was to take Plato seriously again, and at the same time to undermine the entire Platonic worldview by reversing the core of Platonism: treating being not as timeless and transcendent, but as embedded in time and history. This is why some Platonists tend to regard Heidegger as a great thinker, even if they disagree with his analysis of being and his conception of Platonic thought.

Like Derrida after him, Heidegger treated philosophy as literature calling for commentary and dialogue. The clearest example of this approach is his multi-volume work based on his lectures on Nietzsche. The lectures were originally given in the 1930s and early 1940s and focus significantly on fragments posthumously published under the title The Will to Power and not Nietzsche's published works. Yet Heidegger read The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics. Heidegger's Nietzsche is as much about Heidegger's own thinking as it is about Nietzsche's. It thus constitutes a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers, as opposed to either scholarship or systematic argument.

Although Heidegger was creative and original to the point of rethinking the established ways of reasoning about man and his world, he did draw from the immediate philosophical tradition and its insights, most notably Søren Kierkegaard. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and Dasein 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.

[edit] Division of Work

Heidegger's philosophy is traditionally divided into 'earlier' and 'later' thought, the former consisting most prominently of Being and Time and lectures such as 'What is Metaphysics?', while his later thought is said to begin around 1935, circa 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. Scholarly interpretation differs as to what degree of continuity exists between Heidegger's later philosophy and the earlier. While there is a clear change, Heidegger himself talking of the 'Kehre', or 'turn', there exist certain similarities, and thus some interpretations see the 'earlier' philosophy as a 'mistaken path', taken by Heidegger, through which he saw his error; or, one can interpret Being and Time as a nascent version of Heidegger's philosophy, which then develops appropriately into a more wide-ranging survey of 'the question of Being'. It is worth mentioning that it is also possible to hold the opinion that it is only Heidegger's Being and Time that has any real value, and that his subsequent output represents a lapse into mysticism and obscurantism.

[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 is a touchstone of Continental philosophy, a groundbreaking investigation of the concepts of Being & Da-sein (literally "existence" and, often translated by its components, "being-there"), as these relate to ontology and phenomenology. Being and Time strongly influenced existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, although Heidegger distanced himself from existentialism.

[edit] Later works

Although Heidegger claimed that all of his writings concerned a single question, the question of being, the focus of his work gradually changed in the years after the publication of Being and Time. 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 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] Heidegger and Eastern thought

Heidegger's philosophy has been read as opening up the possibility for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. This is an ambiguous aspect of Heidegger's philosophy, insofar as his notions such as "language as the house of being" seem precisely to rule out such a possibility. 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 such a dialogue occurring. Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals in his time, 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. While there is no evidence that Heidegger visited Japan or any other East Asian country, his philosophy does appear to hold out the possibility of a dialogue between eastern and western thought. An account given by Paul Hsao, (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.' This may be an exaggerated reading, but it is still an aspect of Heidegger's thought that should be taken seriously.

[edit] Influences and difficulties of French reception

Heidegger, like Husserl, is explicitly acknowledged as an influence on existentialism--despite his explicit disavowal and objection in such texts as the "Letter on 'Humanism'"--and key elements of his work are seen as having been imported 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.

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, (ironically) anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to Dasein in Being and Time (hence the 'Time' part of the title). 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.

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". 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 Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.

More recently, Heidegger's influence has been considerable on the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, as is already evident from the title of his important multi-volume magnum opus, Le technique et le temps (volume one translated into English as Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus). 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, and 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 importance to the world of continental philosophy is probably unsurpassed. Continental philosophy is a subject he is even said by some to have created, although the "Dichotomy of analytic and continental philosophy" may have already began with Husserl and Frege. His reception among analytic philosophers, however, is quite another story. Saving a moderately favourable review in Mind by a young Gilbert Ryle of Being and Time shortly after its publication, Heidegger's analytic contemporaries (a field still young, but already quite sharply delineated from other branches of philosophy) generally regarded both the content and the style in which he delivered it, as examples of the worst possible way of doing philosophy.

The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, whereas Heidegger thought that "making itself intelligible was suicide for philosophy." Apart from the charge of obscurantism, some of the more conservative analytic philosophers 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 for committing the fallacy of reification and for his dismissing of the logical treatment of language, which, Carnap said, lead 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 at least in philosophical term through the efforts of Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty; Rorty even 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] Heidegger and Nazism

Main article: Heidegger and Nazism

Heidegger joined to the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP) on May 1, 1933, nearly three weeks after being appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg. He resigned the Rectorship about one year later, in April 1934, though he remained a member of the Nazi party until the end of World War II. His first act as Rector was to eliminate all democratic structures, including those that had elected him Rector. There were three book burnings on his campus.

During his time as Rector, the University denied Heidegger's former teacher Edmund Husserl, born a Jew and an adult Lutheran convert, access to the university library, invoking the Nazi racial cleansing laws. Heidegger also removed the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time when it was reissued in 1941, later claiming he did so because of pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer. Additionally, when Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics (based on lectures given in 1935) was published in 1953, he declined to remove a reference to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement [[die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung]]," i.e. National Socialism. Instead of deleting or altering the text, he added the parenthetical gloss, "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)."

Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, while she was his doctoral student at the University of Marburg. This affair took place in the 1920s, some time before Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism, but it did not end when she moved to Heidelberg to continue her studies under Karl Jaspers. She 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, and despite his being forbidden to teach from 1945-1951<ref name=Steiner>George Steıner, Heıdegger, 1978</ref> .

[edit] The Der Spiegel interview

Some years later, hoping to quiet controversy, 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 should be noted that Heidegger extensively edited, at his insistence, the published version of the interview. In that interview, Heidegger's defence of his Nazi involvement runs in two tracks: 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 saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach". After 1934, he said, he would (should?) have been more critical of the Nazi government. Heidegger's answers to some questions are evasive. For example, when he talks about a "national and social approach" of national socialism, he links this to Friedrich Naumann. But Naumann's "national-sozialer Verein" was not at all national socialist, but liberal. Heidegger seems to have deliberately created this confusion. Also, he alternates quickly between his two lines of arguments, overlooking any contradictions. Furthermore, his defence often tends to take the form of pointing to the greater extremism of other educators and thinkers, as to minimize his own Nazi sympathies by comparison.

The Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation where he calls engineered food production and the Holocaust "essentially the same." While Heidegger's defenders have attempted to account for this "similarity of essence" by reference to his essay "On the Essence of Truth," this account of the technological 'frame' that now infects human nourishment and human mortality is not a conventional reaction to genocide. Moreover, many of those who align themselves with Heidegger philosophically have pointed out that in his own work on being-towards-death, we can recognize a much more salient criticism of what was wrong with the mass-produced murder of a people. Thinkers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler have made this point sympathetically. Commentators differ on whether this philosophical shorthand is evidence of a profound disregard for the Jews or simply the astigmatism of an old man concerned more with his own legacy than with that of the Holocaust.

In fact, the Der Spiegel interviewers were not in possession of most of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies. For more on this interview and its aftermath, see "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger (1966) and Jürgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective." translated by John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 431-56.

[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
1927 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 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 '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</br>Nicolai Hartmann Hannah Arendt</br>Hans-Georg Gadamer

[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
  • Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy.

[edit] Biographies

[edit] Heidegger's politics

[edit] Other secondary literature

[edit] Heidegger's reception in France

[edit] See also

[edit] References

<references/>

[edit] External links

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
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
ar:مارتن هايدغر

bg:Мартин Хайдегер bn:মার্টিন হাইডেগার ca:Martin Heidegger cs:Martin Heidegger da:Martin Heidegger de:Martin Heidegger et:Martin Heidegger es:Martin Heidegger eo:Martin Heidegger fa:مارتین هایدگر fr:Martin Heidegger gl:Martin Heidegger hr:Martin Heidegger io:Martin Heidegger id:Martin Heidegger is:Martin Heidegger it:Martin Heidegger he:מרטין היידגר ka:ჰაიდეგერი, მარტინ la:Martinus Heidegger lt:Martinas Haidegeris hu:Martin Heidegger nl:Martin Heidegger ja:マルティン・ハイデッガー no:Martin Heidegger pl:Martin Heidegger pt:Martin Heidegger ro:Martin Heidegger ru:Хайдеггер, Мартин sk:Martin Heidegger sl:Martin Heidegger fi:Martin Heidegger sv:Martin Heidegger tr:Martin Heidegger uk:Гайдеґґер Мартін zh:马丁·海德格尔

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