Martin Heidegger

Biography

Early life and education

Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of Johanna (née Kempf) and Friedrich Heidegger. His father was the sexton of the village church, and the young Martin was raised Catholic.

In 1903, Heidegger began to train for the priesthood. He entered a Jesuit seminary in 1909, but was discharged within weeks because of heart trouble. It was during this time that he first encountered the work of Franz Brentano, the work of whom is credited as first sparking Heidegger's interest in the question of Being, specifically in regard to Brentano's thesis On the Manifold Sense of Being according to Aristotle. From here he went on to study theology and scholastic philosophy at the University of Freiburg.

In 1911, he broke off training for the priesthood and turned his attention to recent philosophy, in particular, Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. He graduated with a thesis on psychologism, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-theoretical Contribution to Logic, in 1914. The following year, he completed his habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus, which was directed by Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian, and influenced by Husserl's phenomenology. The title has been published in several languages and in English is Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning.

He attempted to get the (Catholic) philosophy post at the University of Freiburg on 23 June 1916 but failed despite the support of Heinrich Finke. Instead, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I. His service was in the last ten months of the war, most of which he spent in a meteorological unit on the western front upon being deemed unfit for combat.

Professorship

From 1919 to 1923, Heidegger taught courses at the University of Freiburg. At this time he also became an assistant to Edmund Husserl, who had been a professor there since 1916.

In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary professorship in philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann, Paul Tillich, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Helene Weiss, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Günther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy: the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and Søren Kierkegaard. He also read the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Husserl, Max Scheler, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1927, Heidegger published his main work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). He was primarily concerned in qualifying to be a full professor. The book, however, did more than this: it raised him to "a position of international intellectual visibility."

When Husserl retired as professor of philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counteroffer by Marburg. The title of his 1929 inaugural lecture was "What is Metaphysics?" In this year he also published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

Heidegger remained at Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining later offers, including one from Humboldt University of Berlin. His students at Freiburg included Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, as did Jan Patočka in 1933; Patočka, in particular, was deeply influenced by him.

Heidegger was elected rector of the university on 21 April 1933; he joined the Nazi Party on 1 May, just three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. During his time as rector he was a member and an enthusiastic supporter of the party. There is continuing controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his political allegiance to Nazism. He wanted to position himself as the philosopher of the party, but the highly abstract nature of his work and the opposition of Alfred Rosenberg, who himself aspired to act in that position, limited Heidegger's role. His withdrawal from his position as rector owed more to his frustration as an administrator than to any principled opposition to the Nazis, according to historians. In his inaugural address as rector on 27 May he expressed his support of a German revolution, and in an article and a speech to the students from the same year he also vocalized support for Adolf Hitler. In November 1933, Heidegger signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. Heidegger resigned from the rectorate in April 1934 and pursued a teaching agenda aligned with Nazi cultural politics until 1945.

Post-war

In late 1946, as France engaged in épuration légale in its occupation zone, the French military authorities determined that Heidegger should be blocked from teaching or participating in any university activities because of his association with the Nazi Party. Nevertheless, he presented the talk "What are Poets for?" in memory of Rilke. He also published "On Humanism" in 1947 to clarify his differences with Jean-Paul Sartre and French existentialism. The denazification procedures against Heidegger continued until March 1949 when he was finally pronounced a Mitläufer (the second lowest of five categories of "incrimination" by association with the Nazi regime). No punitive measures against him were proposed. This opened the way for his readmission to teaching at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1950–51. He was granted emeritus status and then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.

In 1966, he gave an interview to Der Spiegel attempting to justify his support of the Nazi Party. Per their agreement, it was not published until five days after his death in 1976, under the title "Only a God Can Save Us" after a reference to Hölderlin that Heidegger makes during the interview.

Heidegger's publications during this time were mostly reworked versions of his lectures. In his final days, he also arranged for a complete edition of his works, Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, to be compiled and published. The first volume appeared in 1975. The collection contains 106 volumes and is complete as of October 2025.

Martin Heidegger died in his sleep on the morning of 26 May 1976 at the age of 86 at his home in Freiburg. He was buried two days later in his birthplace of Meßkirch, West Germany, beside his parents in the village graveyard he had walked past each day on his way to school. His gravestone is inscribed with a single star, which refers to a sentence he wrote in 1947: "To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky."

Death

Heidegger died on 26 May 1976 in Freiburg. A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg University professor and earlier correspondent. Heidegger was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.

Philosophy

Fundamental ontology

According to scholar Taylor Carman, traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?", whereas Heidegger's fundamental ontology asks "What does it mean for something to be?" Heidegger's ontology "is fundamental relative to traditional ontology in that it concerns what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes, namely, our understanding of that by virtue of which entities are entities".

This line of inquiry is "central to Heidegger's philosophy". He accuses the Western philosophical tradition of mistakenly trying to understand being as such as if it were an ultimate entity. Heidegger modifies traditional ontology by focusing instead on the meaning of being. This kind of ontological inquiry, he claims, is required to understand the basis of our understanding, scientific and otherwise.

In short, before asking what exists, Heidegger contends that people must first examine what "to exist" even means.

Being and Time

In his first major work, Being and Time, Heidegger pursues this ontological inquiry by way of an analysis of the kind of being that people have, namely, that humans are the sort of beings able to pose the question of the meaning of being. According to Canadian philosopher Sean McGrath, Heidegger was probably influenced by Scotus in this approach. His term for us, in this phenomenological context, is Dasein.

This procedure works because Dasein's pre-ontological understanding of being shapes experience. Dasein's ordinary and even mundane experience of "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the meaning" or "sense of being"; that is, the terms in which "something becomes intelligible as something". Heidegger proposes that this ordinary "prescientific" understanding precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory. Being and Time is designed to show how this implicit understanding can be made progressively explicit through phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Heidegger introduces the term Dasein to denote a "living being" through its activity of "being there". Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive combination, it is characterized by Heidegger as "being-in-the-world".

Heidegger insists that the 'in' of Dasein's being-in-the-world is an 'in' of involvement or of engagement, not of objective, physical enclosedness. The sense in which Dasein is 'in' the world is the sense of "residing" or "dwelling" in the world. Heidegger provides a few examples: "having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something".

Just as 'being-in' does not denote objective, physical enclosedness, so 'world', as Heidegger uses the term, does not denote a universe of physical objects. The world, in Heidegger's sense, is to be understood according to our sense of our possibilities: things present themselves to people in terms of their projects, the uses to which they can put them. The 'sight' with which people grasp equipment is not a mentalistic intentionality, but what Heidegger calls 'circumspection'. This is to say that equipment reveals itself in terms of its 'towards-which', in terms of the work it is good for. In the everyday world, people are absorbed within the equipmental totality of their work-world. Moreover, on Heidegger's analysis, this entails a radical holism. In his own words, "there 'is' no such thing as an equipment".

Later works: The Turn

Heidegger's "Turn", which is sometimes referred to by the German die Kehre, refers to a change in his work as early as 1930 that became clearly established by the 1940s, according to some commentators, who variously describe a shift of focus or a major change in outlook.

Heidegger himself frequently used the term to refer to the shift announced at the end of Being and Time from "being and time" to "time and being". However, he rejected the existence of the "sharp 'about turn'" posited by some interpreters. Scholar Michael Inwood also calls attention to the fact that many of the ideas from Being and Time are retained in a different vocabulary in his later work—and also that, in other cases, a word or expression common throughout his career comes to acquire a different meaning in the later works.

This supposed shift—applied here to cover about 30 years of Heidegger's 40-year writing career—has been described by commentators from widely varied viewpoints, for instance, from dwelling (being) in the world to doing (temporality) in the world. This aspect, in particular the 1951 essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", has influenced several architectural theorists.

Other interpreters believe the Turn can be overstated or does not exist at all. For instance, Thomas Sheehan believes this supposed change is "far less dramatic than usually suggested", and entails merely a change in focus and method. Mark Wrathall argued that the Turn is not found in Heidegger's writings, but is simply a misconception.

Some notable later works are "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), Contributions to Philosophy (1937), "Letter on Humanism" (1946), "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951), "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), and "What Is Called Thinking?" (1954).

The history of being

The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claims to revive this question of being that had been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending into the Age of Enlightenment, as well as modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of the question, Heidegger spends considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander.

In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempts to reconstruct the "history of being" in order to show how the different epochs in the history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of being. His goal is to retrieve the original experience of being present in the early Greek thought that was covered up by later philosophers.

According to W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Heidegger believed "the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides, which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent Western philosophy. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger states, "Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek."

Charles Guignon writes that Heidegger aims to correct this misunderstanding by reviving Presocratic notions of being with an emphasis on "understanding the way beings show up in (and as) an unfolding happening or event." Guignon adds that "we might call this alternative outlook 'event ontology.'"

Language

In Being and Time, language is presented as logically secondary to Dasein's understanding of the world and its significance. On this conception of worldhood, language can develop from prelinguistic significance.

Post-turn, Heidegger refines his position to present some basic words (e.g., phusis, the Greek term that roughly translates to "nature") as world-disclosive, that is, as establishing the foundational parameters in terms of which Dasein's understanding can occur in the specific ways that it does. It is in this context that Heidegger proclaims that "Language is the house of being."

In the present age, he says, the language of "technology", or instrumental reason, flatten the significance of our world. For salvation, he turns to poetry.

Heidegger rejected the notion of language being purely a means of communication. Language construed as such, he believed, would form the basis of an age of technology, the digital thought processes of which would only use language to organise and communicate the coverage of that which exists. Thinking in terms of calculation and digital processing would put man at odds with language, at the centre of everything that exists. If man would believe that they would have language at their disposal, that they would be the one to use it, then, Heidegger believed, man would completely miss the core tenet of language itself: "It is language that speaks, not man. Man only speaks if they neatly correspond to language." In this way, Heidegger wanted to point out that man is only a participant of language that they have not themselves created. Man is bound within a sort of process of transfer and may only act with respect to anything the language conveys.

In this, however, Heidegger does not think in terms of philosophy of culture: The tautology of the formulation "language speaks" (originally in German "die Sprache spricht") is his way of trying to prevent the phenomenon of language to be used with respect to anything else than language itself. In line with his unique thinking, he is seeking to avoid having to justify the language by anything else. In this way, language could for instance never be explained by the sheer transmission of acoustic sounds, or speaking. According to Heidegger, language is rather difficult to fathom because we are too close to it, hence we need to speak about that which usually remains unmentioned because it is just too close to us. His work "Unterwegs zur Sprache" (On the way to language) is an attempt to reach "a place we already are in."

Influences

Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was Heidegger's teacher and a major influence on his thought. While the specific lines of influence remain a matter of scholarly dispute, one thing is clear: Heidegger's early work on Being and Time moved away from Husserl's theory of intentionality to focus on the pre-theoretical conditions that enable consciousness to grasp objects.

Aristotle influenced Heidegger from an early age. This influence was mediated through Catholic theology, medieval philosophy, and Franz Brentano.

According to scholar Michael Wheeler, it is by way of a "radical rethinking" of Aristotle's Metaphysics that Heidegger supplants Husserl's notion of intentionality with his unitary notion of being-in-the-world. According to this reinterpretation, the various modes of being are united in more basic capacity of taking-as or making-present-to.

The works of Wilhelm Dilthey shaped Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life", and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology. There is little doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a gestalt formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.

Søren Kierkegaard contributed much to Heidegger's treatment of the existentialist aspects of his thought located in Division II of Being and Time. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger reads The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.

Reception

Heidegger is often considered to be among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century by many observers. American Philosopher Richard Rorty has ranked Heidegger as among the most important philosophers along with John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Simon Critchley has praised Heidegger as the "most important and influential philosopher in the continental tradition in the 20th century".

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has referred to Heidegger as a "great philosopher" and rejected the notion that his alleged anti-semitism against him tainted his philosophy. While he acknowledges and criticizes the ways Nazism permeated Heidegger's work and his life, Žižek contends that these influences are neither essential to describing Heideggerian philosophy nor sufficient in dismantling it. Instead, Žižek finds that a blatant dismissal deprives opportunities to investigate the contradiction between Heidegger's principles and practices, as well as to "confront the uneasy questions he raised against such basic tenets of modernity as 'humanism', 'democracy', 'progress', etc." Žižek adds that the greatness he perceives in Heidegger's work is the extent to which its core ideas can survive as it is abstracted from historical context and reimagined in later eras.

In France, there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting Heidegger's work. Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology is sometimes interpreted as rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings (Dasein), his work has often been associated with existentialism. Derrida sees deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion"—literally "destruction"—and "Abbau"—more literally "de-building"). The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness is marked. Heidegger himself, however, argued that Sartre had misread his work.

Hubert Dreyfus introduced Heidegger's notion of "being-in-the-world" to research in Artificial intelligence. According to Dreyfus, long-standing research questions such as the Frame problem can be only dissolved within an Heideggerian framework. Heidegger also profoundly influenced Enactivism and Situated robotics.

Some writers on Heidegger's work see possibilities within it for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. Despite perceived differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, some of Heidegger's later work, particularly "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer", does show an interest in initiating such a dialogue. Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe and Kuki Shūzō. The scholar Chang Chung-Yuan stated, "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands Tao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well." Philosopher Reinhard May sees great influence of Taoism and Japanese scholars in Heidegger's work, although this influence is not acknowledged by the author. He asserts it can be shown that Heidegger sometimes "appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics." To this he adds, "This clandestine textual appropriation of non-Western spirituality, the extent of which has gone undiscovered for so long, seems quite unparalleled, with far-reaching implications for our future interpretation of Heidegger's work."

Personal life

Heidegger married Elfride Petri on 21 March 1917 in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend Engelbert Krebs, and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to Hermann in August 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann's biological father, but raised him as his son. Hermann's biological father, who became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel Caesar. Hermann was told of this at the age of 14; Hermann grew up to become a historian and would later serve as the executor of Heidegger's will.

In the same year that he married his wife, Heidegger began a decades-long correspondence with her friend Elisabeth Blochmann. They were romantically involved in the summer of 1929. Blochmann was Jewish, which raises questions in light of Heidegger's later membership in the Nazi Party.

In 1925, a 35-year-old Heidegger began what would be a four-year affair with Hannah Arendt, who was then 19 years old and his student. Like Blochmann, Arendt was Jewish. Heidegger and Arendt agreed to keep the details of the relationship a secret, preserving their letters, but keeping them unavailable.

Heidegger had an active social life and interacted with numerous influential philosophers, authors, and academics. During his career he established relationships with Karl Jaspers, Ernst Jünger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Hannah Arendt. He corresponded with Carl Schmitt, who like Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and they served together in the Academy for German Law.

Heidegger and the Nazi Party

Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on 21 April 1933, and assumed the position the following day. On 1 May, he joined the Nazi Party.

Beginning in February 1933 Heidegger was active, alongside Ernst Krieck, in an organization known as the Cultural-Political Working Group of German University Instructors (Kulturpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Hochschullehrer). The group met privately in the Spring of 1933 to plan the Nazification of the German university system.

On 27 May 1933, Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede (titled "The Self-assertion of the German University"), in a hall decorated with swastikas, with members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and prominent Nazi Party officials present.

That summer he delivered a lecture on a fragment of Heraclitus (usually translated in English: "War is the father of all"). His notes on this lecture appear under the heading "Struggle as the essence of Beings." In this lecture he suggests that if an enemy cannot be found for the people then one must be invented, and once conceptualized and identified, then the 'beings' who have discovered or invented this enemy must strive for the total annihilation of the enemy.

His tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some Nazi education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation as rector on 23 April 1934, and it was accepted on 27 April. Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war.

Philosophical historian Hans Sluga wrote, "Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism."

In 1945, Heidegger wrote of his term as rector, giving the writing to his son Hermann; it was published in 1983:

In popular culture

Der Zauberer von Meßkirch (1989) is a German TV documentary about Heidegger, co-directed by Ulrich Boehm and Rüdiger Safranski.

The film director Terrence Malick translated Heidegger's 1929 essay Vom Wesen des Grundes into English. It was published under the title The Essence of Reasons (1969). It is also frequently said of Malick that his cinema has Heideggerian sensibilities.

The Ister (2004) is a film based on Heidegger's 1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin, and features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

Being in the World (2010) draws on Heidegger's work to explore what it means to be human in a technological age. A number of Heidegger scholars are interviewed, including Hubert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, Albert Borgmann, John Haugeland, and Taylor Carman.