Martin Heidegger
What is Being? We have forgotten the question.
Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976, Germany) : phenomenology. Heidegger starts from a question he thinks has been forgotten: what does "being" mean? In his view, philosophy has always talked about what exists (beings: things, living creatures, ideas) without asking what the very fact of being is. On AskPhilosophy: 3 reconstructed arguments, 7 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 4 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
Being and Time (1927) changed 20th-century philosophy. Sartre, Arendt, Levinas, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault and the Kyoto School start from him, to follow him or to oppose him. He also left a mark on psychology, theology, architecture and the reflection on technology. His vocabulary (Dasein, being-in-the-world, anxiety, authenticity) has become common. He is also one of the hardest authors to read: that is why this page gives each passage with its context.
His times
He was born in Meßkirch (southern Germany) into a modest Catholic family, first studied theology, then philosophy, and became the assistant of Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Being and Time came out in 1927; he succeeded Husserl at Freiburg in 1928. He taught at Freiburg almost all his life, with a teaching ban after the war, lifted in 1951. He died in 1976.
Box: the Nazi commitment, the rectorate, the Black Notebooks
The established facts. Heidegger joined the Nazi party (NSDAP) on 1 May 1933. He was rector of the University of Freiburg from April 1933 to April 1934, and gave his rectoral address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University", on 27 May 1933. He remained a party member until 1945. After the war he went through a denazification procedure, was banned from teaching (1946), then reinstated in 1951. His Black Notebooks (notes from 1931 to the 1970s), published from 2014 in the edition of his collected works, contain antisemitic passages: their existence is not disputed, neither by the editors nor by scholars. According to historians, he never made a real public reckoning about those years; he presented his rectorate as an attempt to protect the university (notably in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published after his death, in 1976), a version most historians reject. None of these facts is in the texts of our corpus: they come from historical research.
Should the work be read in the light of this commitment?
Specialists disagree, and we do not settle it. First position: the link is deep. For Emmanuel Faye (Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, 2005), Nazism entered Heidegger's very philosophy, to the point that his writings should be shelved with the archives of Nazism rather than with works of philosophy. Peter Trawny, the editor of the Black Notebooks, speaks (2014) of an antisemitism inscribed in the "history of being", not a mere private opinion. Second position: the man and the work can be separated, or at least the work should not be reduced to the commitment. The analyses of Being and Time on anxiety, death or language can be discussed on their arguments, as Sartre, Arendt, Levinas and many others did (Levinas said it was hard to forgive Heidegger, and kept reading him). François Fédier and others answered Faye's book (2007). An intermediate position: read the work keeping the commitment in mind, and look, argument by argument, for what is tied to it and what does not depend on it. Note finally that the Letter on Humanism (1946), written after the war, criticises nationalism (see its quotations), without speaking of the years 1933-1945. Judge for yourself.
Mind the translations and the texts
The same words are translated in very different ways: Dasein is almost never translated; Man becomes "On" (Martineau), "they" (Macquarrie and Robinson); Gestell becomes "Enframing" (Lovitt); Seiendes becomes "be-ing" in Groth. We quote Being and Time and What Is Metaphysics? in German, with French (Martineau, for Being and Time) and English alongside; the German text is an unproofread scan, and Macquarrie and Robinson's English is noisy (we quote isolated sentences). Groth's English translation is very literal, and its alignment with the 1929 German is approximate. For the Letter on Humanism and The Question Concerning Technology, we do not have the German text: we quote the English (Capuzzi; Lovitt) and, for the Letter, Munier's French.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe writes himself that his description of the human being decides nothing about the existence of God, or his non-being, and he rejects the label of atheist. Readers disagree: some see a methodological caution, others a de facto atheism, others a religious thought without the God of metaphysics.
The empiricism-or-rationalism question does not concern him in that form: he refuses to start from a subject facing objects. He starts from the understanding of being, already present in existence.
He does not look for a certainty in Descartes' way. He thinks truth is first an opening (the fact that beings show themselves), and that the question of being comes before the question of certainty. Scepticism does not occupy him.
He sets aside the opposition between mind and matter: for him the human being is neither a soul in a body nor an organism. He is Dasein, a being that exists by understanding its being. He defines the human being by existence, not by a "what" as Aristotle or Descartes do.
Anxiety reveals Dasein as free "for the freedom of choosing and taking hold of itself". But this freedom is "thrown": Dasein did not choose to be there, nor the situation it finds itself in. His freedom is thus less absolute than the one Sartre will later describe.
He does not treat the question of moral realism. For him, thinking "in values" is even a mistake: putting a price on things reduces them to objects of human estimation (Letter on Humanism).
He rejects both irrationalism and "logic" as supreme judge: to think against logic, he says, is not to defend the illogical, but to look for the origin of logos. For his critics (Carnap), this amounts to escaping the rules of meaning.
He asks about the meaning of being, not the meaning of life. Dasein is handed over to itself, "thrown", with no given ground. But Heidegger says neither that life is absurd nor that it has a given meaning.
He refuses to define the human being by a nature (rational animal, God's creature, subject). The essence of the human being is to exist, to be open to being. The "they" and "falling" are not, he says, a moral sin.
No developed political theory in our corpus. In Being and Time, the "they" criticises banality and conformism, but says nothing about a regime. In 1946, in the Letter, he writes that every nationalism is an anthropologism and a subjectivism. For the 1933-1945 commitment, see the box above: it is not in our texts.
He proposes neither a rule of duty, nor a calculation of consequences, nor a virtue ethics. In the Letter on Humanism he writes that "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" are not a moral distinction: they name a relation of the human being to being. He speaks of an "ethos" more original than ethics, without writing it as a morality. Some see a moral void, others a deeper ethics.