Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose book Being and Time (1927) is one of the most influential and most difficult works of twentieth-century philosophy. He asked what it means for anything to be, and answered by analysing human existence as a practical, mortal involvement in a shared world. He was also a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 and served as the Nazi-era rector of the University of Freiburg, and private notebooks published since 2014 contain antisemitic passages, so his reputation is bound up with an unresolved debate about the relation between his thought and his politics.

Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in Messkirch, a small Catholic town in Baden in the German Empire, where his father was sexton of the parish church. Intended for the priesthood, he entered a Jesuit novitiate in 1909 but left within weeks on health grounds, and studied theology and then philosophy at the University of Freiburg. Reading Franz Brentano's work on Aristotle's many senses of being, and then Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations, set the direction of his life's work. He took his doctorate in 1913 and his habilitation, on the medieval thinker Duns Scotus, in 1915. In 1917 he married Elfride Petri, a Protestant, and two years later he broke with Catholicism.

After military service in the final years of the First World War, Heidegger became Husserl's assistant at Freiburg from 1919 to 1923, and his lectures quickly gained a reputation among students. In 1923 he moved to the University of Marburg. There he had an affair with his student Hannah Arendt, later a major political theorist; other students of his included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss and Hans Jonas. In 1927 he published Being and Time, dedicated to Husserl, and in 1928 he succeeded Husserl in the chair of philosophy at Freiburg, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

Heidegger held that Western philosophy since Plato had forgotten the question of being: it had studied beings, things that exist, while taking for granted what it means for them to be. To reopen the question he began with the one being for whom its own being is an issue, the human being, which he called Dasein, roughly "being there".

Dasein, he argued, is not a mind looking out at objects, as in the tradition of Descartes, but is always already being-in-the-world, absorbed in practical activity. A hammer is first encountered not as an object with properties but as "ready-to-hand", something we use without noticing, within a web of tasks and purposes; it becomes a mere thing to be examined only when it breaks. Most of the time we live as "the they" (das Man) live, doing what one does and thinking what one thinks. Anxiety, and above all the awareness that each of us must die, can pull us out of this anonymity. Facing death as one's own possibility makes an authentic existence possible, one in which a person takes over their life rather than drifting. Underlying all of this, Heidegger argued, is time: human existence is structured by having been, by projection into the future and by being among things in the present. These ideas drew on Kierkegaard, on Aristotle and on Husserl's method, and the book was left unfinished.

On 21 April 1933, less than three months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg, and on 1 May he joined the Nazi Party. In his inaugural address of 27 May, "The Self-Assertion of the German University", he called on the university to serve the German people's national awakening, and that autumn he publicly urged students and voters to support Hitler. He worked to implement the Nazi "leader principle" in university government. The racial laws of Nazi Germany had already excluded Jewish academics, including Husserl, and Heidegger had cut off personal contact with his former teacher; in 1941, at his publisher's urging, he agreed to drop the dedication to Husserl from a new edition of Being and Time.

Heidegger resigned as rector in April 1934 after clashes with colleagues and officials. He later presented this as a break with the regime, but he remained a party member until 1945, sat on a committee of the Academy for German Law, and in a lecture course of 1935, published in 1953, still spoke of the "inner truth and greatness" of the movement. Party officials, for their part, often distrusted him and his abstract philosophy.

After the Second World War, the French occupation authorities and a university commission investigated him. He was barred from teaching in 1946, classified in 1949 as a "fellow traveller" (Mitläufer), and allowed to resume lecturing as a professor emeritus in 1951. He never publicly apologised for his support of Nazism, and he said almost nothing about the Holocaust. In lectures given in Bremen in 1949 he set mechanised agriculture alongside the production of corpses in gas chambers as expressions of modern technology, a comparison widely condemned. In a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published at his request only after his death, he defended his conduct in 1933.

From 2014 his Black Notebooks, private philosophical journals kept from the early 1930s to the early 1970s, began to appear in his collected works, edited by Peter Trawny. They contain passages that speak of "world Judaism" as a rootless, calculating power and link Jews to the machination of modern technology, as well as remarks on Husserl's Jewish origin. The publication led to fierce debate: the chair of the Martin Heidegger Society in Germany, Günter Figal, resigned in 2015, and many scholars now accept that Heidegger's antisemitism was not only personal prejudice but entered his philosophy of history. Others argue that his central ideas can still be separated from it. The notebooks also contain criticism of Nazi biological racism, which complicates but does not remove the charge.

From the 1930s Heidegger's thinking took a "turn" away from the analysis of human existence towards the history of being itself. He described truth as unconcealment, the Greek aletheia, and wrote on art, on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, on language and on dwelling. In "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954) he argued that modern technology reveals the world as mere stock or resource to be ordered and exploited. His "Letter on Humanism" (1947) distanced him from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had drawn heavily on Being and Time. He died in Freiburg on 26 May 1976 and was buried in Messkirch.

Heidegger's influence on continental philosophy was enormous, shaping existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction and the work of Arendt, Gadamer, Sartre, Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as theology, architecture and environmental thought. Analytic philosophers long dismissed his language as obscure, though some later found his account of practical understanding useful. In Germany and abroad, he remains at once a central figure of modern thought and a standing example of how a great philosopher could commit himself to a criminal regime.