1) His Biography:
Some academics believe Martin Heidegger to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. He was born in Messkirch, Germany, in 1889, went to local schools, and briefly thought about becoming a priest. However, he decided to pursue philosophical studies instead, primarily at the university in Freiburg, which is close to his hometown. In 1917, he wed Elfride Petri, and together they raised their two sons.
Following the First World War, Heidegger started to teach in Freiburg and later Marburg, where he attracted the attention of many talented pupils, including Karl Löwith, Jacob Klein, Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. These lectures covered assessments of daily life and experience as well as fresh readings of Aristotle and Augustine. His lectures were published in 1927 in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), his first and still most significant major publication . He released Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in 1929.
In 1923, Heidegger moved to Marburg to teach, but in 1928, he returned to the Freiburg to take over for his mentor and phenomenology pioneer Edmund Husserl. He was named Freiburg’s rector by the Nazi government in 1933, and he later joined the party. After ten months, he resigned from his position as rector, but he continued to be a party member and was friends with many people who provided the regime with intellectual support. Despite continuing to lecture and teach throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the occupying authorities forbade him from doing so after World War II due to his ties to the Nazi party.
In 1951, Heidegger resumed lecturing and teaching while still residing in Germany. His intellectual influence grew in the years following the war, reaching France, the United States, and other countries. He produced a number of collections of essays, writings on identity, technology, and philosophy, as well as lectures he had given on Nietzsche and numerous metaphysical topics. An important source for comprehending existentialism, a philosophical movement that was gaining relevance and notoriety among academics and intellectuals, was Becoming and Time. Heidegger had an impact on existentialist intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Although historians’ and journalists’ perceptions of the extent and nature of this link, as well as how it relates to Heidegger’s ideas, have changed over time, the dispute over Heidegger’s association with the Nazis has never subsided. The interview Heidegger gave to Der Spiegel in 1966, which was later made public after his passing, is where he speaks about this topic in the most detail. Recent evidence, including the infamous “Black Notebooks,” reveals a stronger link than he had previously stated.
Courses that Heidegger taught, manuscripts that he wrote, and notebooks he kept started to be published after his passing in 1976, and this process is still going on now. They provide proof of the inspiration for Being and Time, his original interpretation of influential philosophers of the past, and shifts in the emphasis and focus of his thinking that started in the 1930s.
2) Main Works:
Being and Time:
Through a study of Dasein, or “being-in-the-world,” the book makes an attempt to reinvigorate ontology. It is particularly notable for its use of a variety of neologisms, complicated vocabulary, and a lengthy discussion of “authenticity” as a way to understand and confront each person’s particular and limited potential.
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics:
Immanuel Kant is the subject of the 1929 book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger frequently refers to it as the Kantbuch (Kantbook). Being and Time, Heidegger’s most famous and significant book, is heavily influenced by Kant (1927). The Kantbook can be thought of as an addition to Being and Time’s incomplete second section.
Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”:
The 1942 lecture series by German philosopher Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg was dubbed “The Ister.” It was first released in 1984 as Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe volume 53.
Heidegger selected to give a lecture course in 1942 on “Der Ister,” a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin about the Danube that was written in the midst of World War II and the National Socialist era. The purpose of poetry, the nature of technology, the connection between ancient Greece and contemporary Germany, the substance of politics, and human habitation were all topics covered in the course. A reading of Antigone by Sophocles makes up the middle third of the lecture course.
Heidegger reads Antigone in this context allegedly to better understand the significance of Hölderlin’s poetry, but in reality, he is simply extending and repeating a reading he had already done in 1935. The 1942 lecture course is notable in terms of Heidegger’s body of work since it contains Heidegger’s longest examination of the fundamentals of politics. Only two-thirds of the lecture course’s printed text could be delivered by Heidegger.
Language speaks:
Martin Heidegger once said, “Language speaks.” Heidegger coined the phrase in his lecture “Language” (“Die Sprache”), which was given in honour of Max Kommerell on October 7, 1950, in the Bühlerh.he building. In his 1971 book ‘Poetry, Language, Thought’, Albert Hofstadter included a translation of the lecture in English.
Discourse on Thinking:
Heidegger’s essay Discourse on Thinking, poses issues that must cross our minds whenever we are able to view a familiar situation in a novel way.
3) Main themes in his writings:
Ontology, or the study of being, was Heidegger’s primary area of concern. He attempted to approach being (Sein) in his foundational ‘work, Being and Time’, by phenomenologically analysing human existence (Dasein) in relation to its temporal and historical nature. Heidegger stressed language as the means by which the existence of the question of being might be revealed following his shift in thought (“the turn”).
He began to analyse historical works, particularly those written by the Presocratic, but also those by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, as well as those on poetry, architecture, technology, and other topics. He attempted to explore a way of thinking that was no longer “metaphysical” rather than seeking a complete explanation of what being meant. He decried the Western philosophical tradition as being nihilistic since, in his view, the question of being as such was eliminated in it.
He emphasised the nihilism of contemporary technology culture as well. He sought to recreate the early Greek experience of being by returning to the Presocratic era of Western thinking in order to help the West escape the trap of nihilism and start over.
4) Being and Time:
German philosopher Martin Heidegger published a philosophical work titled Being and Time in the 20th century. Heidegger makes an attempt to answer the central query of what being means in it. He accomplishes this by methodically examining human existence and its underlying components. Being and Time, which was first published in 1927, had a significant influence on later philosophy.
Although Heidegger would dispute the relationship with existentialism, this classic work on phenomenology had a profoundly formative impact on the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The following manual is based on the 1962 Blackwell publication of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation from the German.
Heidegger attempts to reconsider the philosophical tradition’s position on the subject of “Being,” or the underlying framework of all existence. He does this by appealing to the reader’s direct and everyday feelings rather than using a cold, rational argument. The core of Heidegger’s interest is the individual’s known world—their job, their feelings, and their social life—which philosophy often ignores. He wants to accomplish two goals by using this
strategy. He first wants to transform how we think about philosophy and the real world. He also wants to demonstrate how readers might reclaim their actual identities and achieve what he refers to as “authenticity” through this radical reorientation.
Being and Time is divided into two “divisions,” each with six chapters, and an introduction of two chapters. There are 83 sections with a number to separate the chapters. Heidegger analyses the human being, its various characteristics, and the potential for authentic or inauthentic life through the lens of these sections. Ten analysis sections that roughly correspond to the chapters in the text make up this guide. Chapter 6 of Division 1 is only mentioned indirectly since it addresses topics that have previously been covered or are not crucial to the primary argument. Two chapters are occasionally discussed together in one analysis section.
Heidegger describes the problem of “Being” in the preface and explains why studying the human being, or “Dasein,” is essential to solving this issue. He also talks about the phenomenological approach he’ll take to this work. He goes into greater depth about the nature of Dasein and how his investigation of it varies from previous approaches to understanding human being in Chapters 1 and 2 of Division 1. Heidegger’s discussion of the “equipment world,” in which humans spend the most of their time, is covered in Chapter 3.
He makes a distinction between “things” that are “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand,” which he describes as our main way of interacting with the outside world. Heidegger expands on his examination of the everyday world of tools in Chapter 4 to talk about our relationships with one another. He contends that we are fundamentally related to other Dasein, or “Mitsein,” but that common knowledge ignores this connection. He suggests that one can get lost in “the they’s” (others) public domain.
Heidegger examines the nature of “moods” in Chapter 5 as crucial to our “being-in-theworld” and as constituting it rather than just adding to it. He also looks into the origins of language. The character of Dasein’s lostness in the public sphere is then articulated using his studies of “the they,” moods, and language.
They speak in a tone of idle chatter and curiosity that distances us from our natural connection to the earth. This indicates that, for the most part, inauthenticity taints human beings and their understanding.
Division 2 starts off by posing the question of how we may overcome fakeness and discover our true selves. Heidegger contends that a healthy connection with death will enable this. Unlike other parts of our presence in the world, our death cannot be substituted by another. As a result, it is highly individualised. Heidegger poses the question of how we might actually achieve this possibility of genuine being-towards-death in Chapter 2.
Only a “call of conscience”—a quality in us that is connected to but separate from ordinary conscience and prompts us to remember our particular capacities for being—can accomplish this. Heidegger contends that Dasein is fundamentally time in Chapters 3 and 4. In other words, our existence is both a connection to a yet-to-be-realized future and a release from the past. The first analysis of our being in the world is then reapplied using an analysis of temporality. Heidegger addresses the connection between history and Dasein’s temporality in the final two chapters. He analyses what an actual relationship to history might entail and provides a history of how we came to have the notion of time that we do now.
5) Nazism and Heidegger:
German universities came under growing pressure to embrace the “national revolution” and get rid of Jewish professors and the teaching of “Jewish” theories like the theory of relativity in the months after Adolf Hitler’s inauguration as chancellor of Germany in January 1933.
Heidegger was chosen as Freiburg’s rector in April 1933 by the university’s faculty. He joined the Nazi Party one month later, and from then on, up until his resignation as rector in April 1934, he actively supported the internal and foreign objectives of the Nazi government while also assisting in the establishment of Nazi educational and cultural initiatives at Freiburg.
He had already condemned the German university system’s shambolic nature in the late 1920s, when specialisation and the doctrine of academic freedom prevented the achievement of a higher unity. He lamented the gradual “Jewification” (Verjudung) of the German spirit in a letter from 1929. He called for reorganising the university along the lines of the Nazi Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, in his inaugural speech, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”) and celebrated the fact that university life would subsequently be merged with the needs of the state and the German Volk.
He wrote Hitler a telegraph within the first month of his tenure asking him to put off a gathering of university rectors until Gleichschaltung, the Nazi term for the extermination of political opponents, was finished. Heidegger launched a speaking tour in the fall of 1933 in support of Hitler’s national vote to exclude Germany from the League of Nations. “Let not doctrines and ideas be your guide. The Führer is Germany’s only reality and law.” he said in one speech . In the years following his rectorship, Heidegger continued to support Hitler, albeit with considerably less fervour than he did in 1933–1934.
6) His influence on our times:
Even though Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), Heidegger’s best-known work, is famously challenging and complex, it is generally regarded as the most significant philosophical work of the 20th century. Heidegger’s work continues to have a significant impact on many different areas of thought more than 40 years after his passing. He is not simply the most controversial thinker in modernity, but also its most influential philosopher.
Many consider Heidegger to be a trailblazing thinker whose contributions to ontology and metaphysics shaped 20th century philosophy and had a significant impact on the growth of modern thought in fields like theology, architectural theory, psychology, literary criticism, cognitive science, and political theory.
Over the past 30 years, Heidegger has garnered the most interest on a global scale. The controversy surrounding his political views and Nazi affiliations in the 1930s, when he served as the rector of the University of Freiburg, is also a factor in this. Heidegger contributed to what is now known as the “Heidegger Affair” by being silent after World War II concerning the Holocaust and by giving an evasive interview to Der Spiegel in 1966 that was published posthumously. But Heidegger and Nazism by Victor Farias set off a wave of Heideggerrelated essays, journal special issues, and volumes. Many of Heidegger’s detractors attempted to connect the Nazi affiliation of Heidegger with the ontological tenets of Being and Time.
All of this critique was based on a single, well-known statement made by Heidegger in which he compared the threat of nuclear war and mechanised agriculture to the reality of concentration camps. Heidegger asserts that “Agriculture is today a motorised food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of countries, the same as the manufacture of atomic bombs.” Heidegger’s discovery of his underlying lack of moral judgement is alarming.
According to George Steiner, “Like so many other intellectuals, Heidegger was plainly caught up in the harsh, celebratory inebriation which swept across Germany after about 15 years of national humiliation and sorrow. He was drafting a notably mendacious postmortem apologia for his own role in the 1930s and 1940s, as we know from the Spiegel interview.
However, the hypothetical speaker found nothing to say about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. The fact that Heidegger said nothing about Auschwitz was an indication of a dreadful truth that he never attempted to express in his phenomenology of the existential.
Many philosophers have noted that Heidegger’s ontology overlooks or ignores the ethical relationship between dasein (the state of being) and the other, including Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. Additionally, we might reference Hannah Arendt’s assessment of Heidegger as a philosopher who was inherently unpolitical and whose post-rectorial career was characterised by complete seclusion from the public sphere.
Although many may not view Heidegger as an ethical person, his theory nonetheless has the spiritual potential to cause us to ponder the future of mankind and the entire planet. Some commentators still see him as a prophet who can lead us away from the problems of modernity.