Philosopher
Martin Heidegger
1889–1976
German philosopher whose Being and Time asked what it means to be, and shaped existentialism, phenomenology and much of later European thought.
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Martin Heidegger taught at the University of Freiburg, where in 1919 he became the assistant of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. His magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), asks the question of the meaning of being, approaching it through an analysis of human existence (Dasein) as always already engaged in a world, facing death, and living authentically or inauthentically. It deeply influenced Sartre’s existentialism, Beauvoir’s feminism, Merleau-Ponty and others.
In 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University and joined the Nazi Party. He resigned the rectorship a year later but remained a party member until the end of the regime. The significance of this engagement, and of his well-documented antisemitism, for his philosophy is hotly disputed. His later work turned to the history of being and the dangers of modern technology.
Key ideas
- The question of being
- Heidegger’s driving question was the meaning of being. He held that there are several distinct kinds of being, and that our understanding of being is structured by time.
- Dasein and being-in-the-world
- Heidegger called human beings Dasein, the entities that have an understanding of being. We are not detached minds but beings-in-the-world, constituted by our practical and social involvements.
- Ready-to-hand
- We first encounter most things as “available” (ready-to-hand), usable for some task, like a hammer, rather than as objects to be observed. Even the sun shows up first as something to tell the time by, and to light and warm us.
- “The anyone”
- Our everyday understanding of the world is shaped by shared social norms, aims and tastes. Heidegger calls this das Man, “the anyone”, because in following it we act as anyone would.
- Technology
- In the technological age, everything, humans included, shows up as “stock”, a resource held in reserve and valued for being replaceable.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Freiburg, Germany
- Schools
- Phenomenology
- Period
- Contemporary
Influences
Influenced by
- Aristotle384–322 BCE
- René Descartes1596–1650
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804
- Søren Kierkegaard1813–1855
- Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900
Martin Heidegger1889–1976
Influenced
Influenced by
- Aristotle384–322 BCE
- René Descartes1596–1650
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804
- Søren Kierkegaard1813–1855
- Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900
Martin Heidegger1889–1976
Influenced
Key works
- Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), 1927
Sources
- Mark Wrathall, Martin Heidegger, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy