Martin Heidegger

Born: 1889

Died: 1976, at the age of 87

Country of origin: Germany

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• Areas of focus:       Existentialism, Phenomenology, Ontology, Being, Absolute Existence, Angst.
  
  
• Some of Heidegger's influences:       Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Brentano, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl
  
  
• Contemporary Philosophers:       Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
  
  
• Major Books written by Heidegger:
  
  
  • "Being and Time" (1927)
    
  • "What is Metaphysics?" (1929)
    
  
  
• Cocktail summary of Heidegger's main ideas:
  
  
  Heidegger represents one of the 3 main currents of Existentialism in the 20th century, with the other 2 currents being represented by Jean-Paul Sartre in France and Karl Jaspers in Switzerland. They both asked many of the same questions, but came to somewhat different conclusions.
  
  Martin was interested in the biggest of the big ideas: Ontology. Existence itself. "Being" with a capital "B". The very stage of reality itself, that within which all of everything is. But he asked questions about Being with regards to how it is experienced directly by individuals, not abstractly as he is sometimes portrayed. His focus was on the nature of Existence and the Dread and Angst that people feel when trying to apprehend Being in all of its vastness. All other issues in Philosophy pale in puny tininess in comparison to its immensity.
  
  Heidegger followed in the footsteps of his elder contemporary Edmund Husserl, who preached an approach to Philosophy called "Phenomenology". Heidegger flocked to the ideas of Phenomenology like a moth to a flame. He was troubled by the modern, scientific age and its impersonal and mechanical manipulation of the world. The Phenomenology of Husserl was almost like a spiritual discipline that could be used to gaze at the larger horizon above and beyond the short-range gaze of science.
  
  While Heidegger maintained some religious/spiritual overtones to his ideas for a while, he omitted them after World War I, when he abandoned his religious faith. Specifically, he omitted Absolute Consciousness and Husserl's so-called "Transcendental Ego" from his concerns, considering the idea of a collective Ego as an illusion, and focused instead on "just" Being itself, the grand hall of existence. As he said, he preferred to study "the subject which experiences the world": individual consciousness, as opposed to Consciousness with a capital "C". He used the same "bracketing" technique of Husserl's, but bracketed out Consciousness itself in the process to look behind it.
  
  Martin recognized that talking about stuff like this all sounded very confusing and reached beyond the puny techniques of science, with the words of ordinary language inadequate to communicate such lofty ideas clearly. So he decided to create new words to communicate them, to make them even more confusing.
  
  He actually tried to create words that were clear, such as stringing-words-together-into-big-long-words. He also coined new words, like "Dasein" which means "there-being" and refers to individual human experience of reality. But the effect on the layman reader was like trying to drive through a thick fog. But this was beneath Martin's concern: he was on a mission, and if you couldn't keep up with his thinking then that wasn't his problem. (Most great philosophers don't like to be bothered by the slow-thinking masses).
  
  For all of his adult life, Heidegger worked on trying to "bracket out" all particulars from his thinking, and then asking questions about Absolute Being, like why does anything exist at all? What would it mean to not exist? He was the original person to ask what the definition of "is" is, making Bill Clinton's presidency a Heideggerian one.
  
  Martin argued that questions of Being had long been neglected in Philosophy, and it was all Socrates' fault. When Martin read the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, like Heraclitus and Parmenides, he saw people who were asking universal questions about Absolute Being. But then rogues like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had to come and ruin everything.
  
  These boobs reduced Philosophy from the really big questions to little questions, distracting great minds from universal questions to particulars, like science and ethics and other such trivialities. (Even Plato's Forms are argued to be Particulars). From the time of Socrates to his own day, Martin saw the history of Philosophy as one long slide from clarity of perception to confusion and distraction from the truly important questions. And it was up to Martin to point us back in the right direction. Whether he succeeded in this is debatable, since his writings are so famously difficult to follow.
  
  Heidegger considered Art as a unique bridge between 2 forms of Being. He viewed Art as a struggle between "World" and "Earth". "World" refers to Human Culture, and "Earth" refers to the natural world. He argued that Art is not useful in the World in the sense that a hammer is useful, but it's also not part of the Earth in the sense that a rock is. Art exists in the middle of both realms, straddling the 2 spheres.
  
  
• Heidegger praised & criticized:
  
  
  • His ideas are either considered a deep and profound perception into the reality of existence "freed" from the guidelines of any religious tradition and allowing "existents" (humans) to take responsibility for their own actions, or his ideas are shrugged of as little more than a semantic mysticism, depending on who you ask. Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply inspired by him, but Carl Jung thought he was neurotic. Take your pick...
  
  
• Notable Facts about Martin Heidegger:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    Religion was alien to Heidegger's interests. He was nominally religious when he was younger, but the devastation of World War I caused him to join so many other intellectuals at the time in casting aside his religious faith. Many have seen his ideas as a sort of secular religion, since his descriptions of Absolute Being sound suspiciously like God. But Heidegger considered God, or any ideas about God, as Particulars within the greater Universal of Being, and therefore simply an idea to be "bracketed" out of the bigger picture.
    
    
  • Probably most famous for introducing the term "Angst" into Philosophy, which refers to the dread and anxiety humans feel when pondering Absolute Existence.
    
    
  • Considered all of Philosophy since Plato a "fall" from questions of Being, resulting in a kind of "alienation" of humanity from the really big questions of Existence.
    
    
  • Martin changed his thinking in the 1930's. Prior to this he analyzed the questions of Being from the perspective of humanity. After this he reversed his approach, and assumed the question of Being was adequately answered, and instead analyzed individual human existence from the perspective of Being. The Early Heidegger pondered "Being" from the perspective of "being", whereas the Later Heidegger pondered "being" from the perspective of "Being". (A subtle difference, but a significant one).
    
    
  • Considered a giant of Existentialism, but did not consider himself an Existentialist.
    
    
  • When Husserl retired from teaching in 1928, Heidegger was appointed to fill his post as professor of Philosophy.
    
    
  • Heidegger will always be famous for joining the Nazi party in 1933, and helping destroy the career of his mentor Husserl, who was Jewish and therefore inconvenient as a friend at the time. He was clearly a sell-out and an opportunist, since his public denunciation of Jews was at odds with his personal interaction with them. For instance, when he arranged for Husserl's dismissal he asked his wife to secretly send him flowers as a condolence. He had also had an affair years earlier with a Jewish woman, Hannah Arendt, with whom he still wrote letters in the 1930's. In his letters to her he insisted that he wasn't anti-Semitic personally, but he still supported the Nazi's efforts to root out the "growing Judaization of Germany's spiritual life".
    
    He later resigned his post prior to the war, and later claimed he gradually lost faith in the Führer whom he had once believed in. (Philosophy and Politics is a dangerous cohabitation) But as long as he lived, he never issued any apology for, nor denouncement of, his former Nazi sympathies. He once said, "He who thinks greatly must err greatly".
    
    His ideas will always be analyzed for clues to his actions during this time, when he sold out wholesale to the Nazis in order to secure his career. His so-called "bracketing" technique appears to have been applied to real life, bracketing out any sense of ethics or altruism in his actions, while pursuing lofty thoughts in his writings. There are those who argue that the actions of a great mind are distinct from their great thoughts, but this will always be a hard-sell to those who suffer as a result.
    
    
  • After the war he was banned from teaching from 1945 to 1951, due to his involvements with the Nazis. He thought this was rippingly unfair, and said so loudly, but without ever admitting any fault.
    
    
  • Ironically, Heidegger's Jewish former mistress Hannah Arendt resumed her friendship with him after the war, (this time platonically) in the 1950's. She was by this time a philosopher in her own right in America (with her ideas arguing that evil actions could be reduced by more thinking), and actually spoke in favor publicly of the former Nazi, while at the same time being involved in the prosecution of former top-Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel. Presumably great minds can transcend offensive behavior.
    
    
  • Also ironically, one of Heidegger's most influential admirers was a Philosopher from one of those lesser languages based on the death of Latin, Jean-Paul Sartre. He too, presumably, looked beyond Heidegger's linguistic prejudices and found value in his ideas.
    
    
  • Heidegger refused to apply any kind of Ethic to his ideas. He was concerned with Pure Theory.
    
    
  • Heidegger liked to dress in peasant clothes while lecturing, as part of his image as resisting the encroaching mechanization of the modern world. The people of the Land were romanticized in Germany at the time, and Martin liked the image of a down-home regular sort of guy who chopped his own wood and milked his own cows (even if he didn't really do either of these 2 things). This "Volk" image was very much in vogue at the time.
    
    
  • Famous for his hut, that he built in the forests of Germany. He called it "Todtnauberg", and spent a lot of time writing in it. The hut came to symbolize the romance of all things German and the rural way of life lived by the "Volk" of the forests, which were romanticized by the Nazis in the 1930's. (Yet, ominously, the name of the hut contains the German word for "death"...)
    
    
  • Herr Heidegger looked down his Teutonic nose at a lot of the trappings of Modernism, particularly the trivialities of fads and Popular Culture. He sniffed disapprovingly of Jazz, of Charlie Chaplin, and of paperback books (especially paperback books about Philosophy, the ultimate indignity). Modern humanity is hypnotized by novelty and banal trivialities, instead of pursuing Truth, he argued. (Heidegger would have blown a gasket over Reality Television)
    
    
  • Heidegger had very strong opinions regarding language, and about which language was clearly superior to all others. He argued that Philosophy was best conducted in a "living language". This ruled out Latin, which no one spoke anymore and was therefore dead. But it also ruled out any language based on Latin, like French or Spanish or Italian. These languages had supposedly inherited the death of its mother-tongue, and dead languages supposedly breed dead thoughts. Most of the other European languages were derivatives of German, like English and the Scandinavian languages. German was the one, true, living language and was therefore the purest and the most appropriate for thinking great thoughts. He once said "Only from the Germans can world-historical meditation come - provided that they find and defend what is German".
    
    
  • Heidegger died of #######
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "My philosophy is one long wait for God".
    
    
  • "Alas, our generation walks in night, dwells as in Hades, without the Divine...
    
    
  • "Philosophy remains latent in every human existence and need not be first added to it from somewhere else".
    
    
  • "Why is there being at all, and why not rather nothing?"
    
    
  • "We must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism". (That's like Paris Hilton encouraging women to not be shallow...)
    
    
  • "We have seen that the world, Dasein-with, and existence are equiprimordially disclosed, and state of mind is a basic existential species of their disclosedness, because this disclosedness itself is essentially being-in-the-world". (Got that? Simple...)
    
    
  • Some of his pro-Nazi sentiments, which he never renounced:
    
    
    • "The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility."
      
      
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• Other stuff going on during Heidegger's life:
  
  
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