Martin Heidegger

gigatos | February 23, 2022

Summary

Martin Heidegger († May 26, 1976 in Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German philosopher. He stood in the tradition of phenomenology, primarily Edmund Husserl, the philosophy of life, especially Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as the existential interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard, which he wanted to overcome in a new ontology. Heidegger”s most important goals were the critique of occidental philosophy and the intellectual foundation for a new understanding of the world.

In 1926 he wrote his first major work Being and Time, which founded the philosophical direction of fundamental ontology (published in 1927).

From the middle of 1930, Heidegger began an overall interpretation of the history of Western philosophy. To this end, he examined the works of major philosophers from phenomenological, hermeneutical, and ontological points of view, thus attempting to expose their “unthinking” presuppositions and prejudices. According to Heidegger, all previous philosophical designs represented a one-sided conception of the world – a one-sidedness that he regarded as a characteristic of all metaphysics.

In Heidegger”s view, this metaphysical conception of the world culminated in modern technology. With this concept he did not only associate a neutral means for achieving ends, as was usually the case. Rather, he tried to show that technology was also accompanied by a changed conception of the world. Thus, according to Heidegger, technology brings the earth into view primarily from the point of view of utilization. Because of its global spread and the relentless “utilization” of natural resources associated with it, Heidegger saw technology as an unavoidable danger.

He contrasted technology with art and, from the late 1930s onward, worked out alternatives to a purely technical view of the world on the basis of Hölderlin”s poetry, among other things. In late texts from 1950 on, he devoted himself increasingly to questions of language. Their historically grown richness of relations should avoid metaphysical one-sidedness. Heidegger tried to think man no longer as the center of the world, but in the overall context of a world he called “Geviert”. Instead of ruling over the earth, man should dwell in it as a mortal guest and spare it.

A broad reception made Heidegger one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the content of his work is controversial. Above all, his National Socialist commitment remains the subject of controversial debates to this day. Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP from 1933 to 1945 and in 1934 was one of the founding members of the Committee for Philosophy of Law of the National Socialist Academy for German Law, headed by Hans Frank. Through the publication of the 2014 Black Notebooks

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Childhood, youth and studies

Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, the first child of Friedrich and Johanna Heidegger (née Kempf from Göggingen) in Meßkirch (Baden). In 1892 his sister Maria was born, in 1894 his brother Friedrich (Fritz). The father was a master cooper and served as sacristan at the local Catholic church. The family lived in simple but well-ordered circumstances. The deeply religious parents made every effort to provide their children with the best possible education, despite their limited financial resources, and also had their sons called to serve as altar boys at an early age. Higher education beyond the parochial school seemed unattainable until the local priest Camillo Brandhuber became aware of Martin”s talent in 1903 and made it possible for him to receive a scholarship for the Konradihaus in Constance, an archdiocesan study home for the education of future clergy, and to attend the Heinrich-Suso-Gymnasium.

From 1906 Heidegger lived at the episcopal seminary in Freiburg and graduated from high school. After graduating from high school, he entered the Jesuit order as a novice in Feldkirch (Vorarlberg) in September 1909, but left the monastery after only a month because of heart trouble. Instead, he became a seminarian and began studying theology and philosophy at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger published his first articles and commentaries. On February 16, 1911, the family physician of the Collegium Borromaeum, Heinrich Gassert, diagnosed nervous heart complaints of an asthmatic nature in the theology student Martin Heidegger, which prompted Gassert to suggest to the director of the convict that Heidegger should be released to his home in order to “have complete rest” for a few weeks. As a result, however, Heidegger was given leave of absence for the entire summer semester of 1911, and was advised to forego the study of theology altogether. Heidegger followed this advice, giving up the study of theology altogether in 1911 and supplementing philosophy with mathematics, history, and the natural sciences. Since Neo-Kantianism and a rejection of pre-Kantian ontology shaped by it predominated at philosophical seminaries during this period, Heidegger”s early educational path was rather atypical due to his attachment to Catholicism.

Two texts influenced Heidegger during this time: Franz Brentano”s essay Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles and Vom Sein. Abriß der Ontologie by the Freiburg dogmatist Carl Braig, whose lectures he attended. From this arose a fruitful relationship of tension with the scholastic tradition. Heidegger later judged that he would not have been set on his path of thought without his theological background.

In the fall of 2014, it was announced that the German Literature Archive Marbach had acquired 572 previously unpublished letters and 36 postcards from the correspondence with his brother Fritz. In the summer of that year, the literary archive had received 70 letters from Heidegger and his wife to his parents from the years 1907 to 1927. Heidegger had already given a large part of his estate to the archive himself.

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Family & Relationships

In 1917, Heidegger married Elfride Petri (on March 21, 1917, Engelbert Krebs married them in the University Chapel of the Freiburg Cathedral according to the Catholic rite, and four days later they married Protestants in Wiesbaden.

In January 1919 the first son Jörg († 2019) was born, in August 1920 Hermann († 2020): His biological father was the physician Friedrich Caesar, a childhood friend of Elfride”s, about which Martin Heidegger was informed, but which only came to light in 2005 with the publication of Martin Heidegger”s letters to his wife. The two apparently lived a so-called open marriage.

Heidegger had an affair with the educator Elisabeth Blochmann, with whom he exchanged letters about her dismissal from her job because of her Jewish background after the Nazi “seizure of power” in 1933. She was a friend and former classmate of Elfride Heidegger.

From February 1925, Heidegger was involved in a love affair with his eighteen-year-old student Hannah Arendt, who was also Jewish. Letters from him to her and her notes about this relationship were found in her estate, while letters from her to him have not survived. His early correspondence with the student reveals his idea of a university-educated woman: “Male questioning learns reverence from simple devotion; one-sided occupation learns worldliness from the original wholeness of womanly being.” On April 24 of the same year, he wrote: “Torness and despair can never produce anything like your servant love in my work.” The relationship was unequal: since Heidegger did not want to jeopardize either his position or his marriage, he determined the place and time of their meetings; the contacts had to take place in secret. Only after both of their deaths did the love affair become known. For the winter semester of 1925

The best connoisseur of Martin Heidegger”s writings and thought processes was his brother Fritz, who was five years younger. He transcribed all the texts published during his brother”s lifetime from the brother”s manuscripts, which were difficult to read, into corresponding typescripts.

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Early creative period

In 1913, Heidegger received his doctorate in philosophy from Artur Schneider with a thesis entitled Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus (The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism). He was very active in the Freiburg Cartel Association of Catholic German Student Associations until he was called up for military service and regularly participated in the weekly meetings. In 1915 he gave a lecture there on the concept of truth in modern philosophy.

Already in 1915 his habilitation followed with Heinrich Finke and Heinrich Rickert as second examiner with the paper Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus and the lecture Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft. In his habilitation thesis, Heidegger referred on the one hand to Duns Scotus” theory of categories, and on the other hand to the writing Grammatica Speculativa – later attributed to Thomas of Erfurt and not to Scotus – a treatise on types of linguistic expression and their corresponding ontological categories. Here, an early interest of Heidegger in the relation between being and language is evident. Heidegger attempts here to make medieval philosophy fruitful for the present with the conceptual and methodological means of modern thought, especially phenomenology.

World War I interrupted his academic career. Heidegger was called up in 1915 and assigned to the postal and weather observation services. He was not fit for combat duty; he was invalided out in 1918.

Edmund Husserl, the leading phenomenologist, arrived at the University of Freiburg in 1916. He succeeded Rickert. Heidegger became his closest confidant from 1919 as assistant (successor to Edith Stein) and private lecturer. Husserl granted him insights into his research, and Heidegger retrospectively emphasized the benefit that this close relationship had for him. From 1920 on, a friendly correspondence with the philosopher Karl Jaspers began. In 1922, in order to be able to obtain an associate professorship in Marburg, Heidegger prepared an outline of an Aristotle book for Paul Natorp, the so-called Natorp Report, which anticipated many thoughts from Being and Time. Heidegger described his philosophy, which was just emerging here, as explicitly atheistic, but at the same time declared in a footnote: A philosophy that understands itself as factual interpretation of life must also know that this means a “raising of hands against God”.

During the Weimar Republic, Heidegger broke with the “system of Catholicism” and devoted himself exclusively to philosophy.

Heidegger was influenced by deep roots in southern German rural life. From Freiburg, he discovered the southern Black Forest for himself. In the landscape between Feldberg and Belchen, he saw intact nature, a healthy climate and idyllic villages. In Todtnauberg, Elfride Heidegger bought a plot of land from her last savings and had a hut built according to her own plans by the master carpenter and farmer Pius Schweitzer. He was able to move into the hut on August 9, 1922 and did not receive an electricity connection until 1931. Heidegger wrote many of his works there. He could not make friends with the hectic big cities throughout his life.

During an associate professorship at the University of Marburg from 1923 to 1927, he became friends with the theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Among the students, Heidegger was already considered an outstanding teacher. His students included Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, and Wilhelm Szilasi. The young Hannah Arendt also heard lectures from him, as did her later first husband Günther Anders and their mutual friend Hans Jonas. She recalled in a 1969 radio broadcast the fascination that then emanated from his teaching: “Heidegger”s fame predates the publication of Being and Time from hand to hand the name traveled throughout Germany like the rumor of the secret king. lured to Freiburg to the Privatdozenten and a little later to Marburg, said that there was one who really achieved the thing that Husserl had proclaimed.”

In 1927, his sensational magnum opus Being and Time was published. The book was published as a separate volume in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung series edited by Edmund Husserl. The early lectures, accessible through the complete edition, make the genesis of Being and Time very comprehensible. It becomes apparent that the basic ideas essential to Being and Time emerge early in Heidegger”s work. In 1928 he succeeded Husserl as professor in Freiburg. His inaugural lecture was on the topic: What is Metaphysics? In addition, his lectures and the Davos disputation with Ernst Cassirer on Immanuel Kant on the occasion of the II International University Courses in 1929 ensured Heidegger”s fame.

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National Socialism

This section deals with historical events during the period of National Socialism. For Heidegger”s relationship to National Socialism, see the article →Martin Heidegger and National Socialism.

After the seizure of power in 1933, Heidegger enthusiastically participated in what he understood to be a National Socialist revolution. On April 21, 1933, he became rector of Freiburg University. He was nominated for the post by his predecessor, Wilhelm von Möllendorff, who had become untenable as a Social Democrat and had resigned the day before, presumably under pressure from the Nazi regime. Heidegger, who had already voted for the NSDAP in 1932, joined it on May 1, 1933 (membership number 3,125,894) and remained a member until the end of the war.

In his rector”s speech of May 27, 1933, entitled Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität (The Self-Assertion of the German University), there was talk of the “greatness and glory of this awakening”. The speech had National Socialist connotations and has caused a great deal of negative stir to this day: in it, Heidegger called for a fundamental renewal of the university. It should, with philosophy as its center, regain its wholeness, similar to the ancient world. The relationship of professors and students should correspond to that of “leaders” and “followers.” Furthermore, he emphasized the need for ties to the so-called “Volksgemeinschaft” and the important role of the university in training cultural leaders of the people.

During his rectorate, Heidegger participated in Nazi propaganda and the equalization policy of the “movement” and gave a speech on the burning of books, which he said he was forbidden to give in Freiburg. During Heidegger”s rectorate, Jewish colleagues at the University of Freiburg, such as the chemist Georg von Hevesy and the classical philologist Eduard Fraenkel, were dismissed, as were Jonas Cohn, Wolfgang Michael, and Heidegger”s assistant Werner Gottfried Brock. According to his own statement, he forbade the hanging of the “Judenplakat” at the university. But he did nothing to curb the growing anti-Semitic resentment at the university. He denounced two colleagues, Eduard Baumgarten, with whom he had had a professional dispute in 1931, and Hermann Staudinger as little convinced National Socialists. In 1933, Heidegger organized a science camp in Todtnauberg for lecturers and assistants who were to be introduced to the “National Socialist upheaval of higher education.” On November 11, 1933, he signed the German Professors” Commitment to Adolf Hitler in Leipzig and gave a keynote speech at the event. He also signed the election appeal Deutsche Wissenschaftler hinter Adolf Hitler of August 19, 1934.

On April 27, 1934, Heidegger resigned from the office of rector because his university policy did not find sufficient support either at the university or from the party. The reason was not (as he himself later stated) that he did not want to support the National Socialist university policy, but rather that it did not go far enough for him: Heidegger planned a central lecturers” academy in Berlin. All future German university teachers were to receive philosophical training at this academy. The National Socialist psychologist from Marburg, Erich Jaensch, wrote an expert opinion on the subject, in which he described Martin Heidegger as “one of the greatest muddleheads and most eccentric mavericks we have in university life.” Heidegger”s ambitious plans failed, and he withdrew from National Socialist university politics. A lecture, which had been planned under the title Der Staat und die Wissenschaft (The State and Science) and to which leading party members had arrived with some expectation, was summarily canceled. Heidegger to the auditorium, “I read logic.” In addition, Heidegger reported that he had been monitored by the party after his resignation from the Rectorate, and that some of his writings were no longer available in stores or were only sold under the counter without a title page.

In May 1934, Heidegger was a founding member, along with Carl August Emge and Alfred Rosenberg, of the Committee for Philosophy of Law at the National Socialist Academy for German Law, headed by Hans Frank, and served on the committee until at least 1936.

From 1935 to 1942, Heidegger was a member of the Scientific Committee of the Nietzsche Archive. However, he resigned in 1942 without giving any reasons. His criticism of the Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, which he should have supervised there, he later clearly stated in his two-volume Nietzsche book.

In November 1944 he was drafted for entrenchment work as part of the Volkssturm, but due to the intervention of the university he was already released in December. After bombing raids on Meßkirch, Heidegger brought his manuscripts to Bietingen. The philosophy faculty of Freiburg University was temporarily relocated to Wildenstein Castle, where Heidegger lived to see the end of the war.

In September 1945, as part of the denazification procedure, the philosophical faculty of the University of Freiburg had prepared an expert opinion in favor of Heidegger”s emeritus status with limited teaching authorization. Adolf Lampe, a member of the purification commission, protested against this, and Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm also raised objections, which is why the case was reopened on December 1, 1945. Heidegger then requested an expert opinion from Karl Jaspers, which the latter wrote in letter form on December 22, 1945. Jaspers, however, considered Heidegger unacceptable as part of the teaching staff due to his involvement in National Socialism and suggested “suspension from the teaching post for several years.” On January 19, 1946, the Senate decided on this basis and on that of the new commission report of the chairman Constantin von Dietze to withdraw the teaching license. On October 5, 1946, the French military government also made it clear that Heidegger was not allowed to teach or participate in any events at the university.

The teaching ban ended on September 26, 1951, with Heidegger”s retirement. The reception of Heidegger”s works, however, is still heavily burdened today by his Nazi past, by his later silence about it, and by various anti-Semitic statements in the Black Notebooks.

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Late years

In 1946, Heidegger suffered a physical and mental breakdown and was treated by Victor Freiherr von Gebsattel. After he had recovered, Jean Beaufret contacted him by letter. In it, he asked Heidegger how the word humanism could still be given meaning after the events of World War II. Heidegger responded with the letter on “Humanism,” which met with a great response: Heidegger was back on the philosophical stage. Ernst Jünger, whose book Der Arbeiter (The Worker) had strongly influenced Heidegger (he adopted the concept of “total mobilization” in the contributions), came to visit Todtnauberg in 1949.

With his retirement, Heidegger regained his rights as a professor. He immediately announced a lecture and read for the first time again in the winter semester at the University of Freiburg. His lectures were very popular and, like his writings, met with a wide response. Along the way, he gave lectures on a smaller scale, for example in 1950 at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences on “The Thing” and in 1951 at the Darmstadt Talks of the Deutscher Werkbund on “Building – Living – Thinking.” In 1953, Heidegger posed the “Question of Technology” before the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1955 he gave the lecture “Gelassenheit” (Serenity) at the Conradin Kreutzer Celebration in Meßkirch.

In 1947 Heidegger was contacted by the Zurich psychotherapist Medard Boss, from which a lifelong friendship grew. He held the “Zollikon Seminars” at Medard Boss”s home from 1959 to 1969, from which the Swiss psychiatrist developed an analysis of Dasein based on Heidegger”s analytics of Dasein.

René Char met the German philosopher in Paris in 1955. René Char invited Heidegger to travel to Provence several times. Thus came the seminars in Le Thor in 1966, 1968, 1969 and in Zähringen in 1973, an exchange of poets and thinkers.

On his 70th birthday on September 26, 1959, he was granted honorary citizenship in his native town of Meßkirch. On May 10, 1960, Heidegger received the Johann Peter Hebel Prize in Hausen im Wiesental. He had been a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 1958.

Heidegger”s thought had a worldwide impact. The numerous translations of Being and Time, among others into Japanese, are to be mentioned in this context. Heidegger also left a lasting impact on Far Eastern philosophers. Hannah Arendt supported the publication of his work in the United States. For the 500th anniversary of the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg in 1957, he gave the ceremonial lecture “The Theorem of Identity.” In addition to an interview for the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1966, he also gave occasional television interviews, such as Richard Wisser in 1969.

Significant for him were the two trips to Greece in 1962 and 1967, whose impressions he recorded in the stays, the trips to Italy in 1952 and 1963 with Medard Boss, as well as his repeated vacations in Lenzerheide with the latter. In 1967 Heidegger met the poet Paul Celan, whom he held in high esteem, in Freiburg, where he was there for a reading. The explosive nature of the meeting arose from Celan”s biography, whose parents had been murdered as Jews by the National Socialists and who therefore apparently expected an explanation from Heidegger for his behavior in the period after 1933, which he did not receive. Nevertheless, the two went together to Todtnauberg, where Celan signed the guest book. Later, he sent Heidegger the poem Todtnauberg, in which he “gave expression to a hope, today …” expressed “… for one who thinks

Heidegger himself had prepared the publication of his complete edition, the first volume of which appeared in 1975. Heidegger died in Freiburg on May 26, 1976. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in his birthplace, Meßkirch, on May 28, 1976. At his funeral, his son Hermann Heidegger read poems by Hölderlin that his father had selected. The eulogy was given by one of his philosophical descendants, Bernhard Welte.

Heidegger was convinced that the “understanding appropriation” of a work of thought has to take place in its content – the person of the thinker thus recedes into the background. Therefore, autobiographical data are extremely sparse, and much can only be inferred from letters or reports by contemporaries. The little importance Heidegger attached to the biography of a thinker can be seen in the words with which he once opened a lecture on Aristotle: “Aristotle was born, worked and died. Let us turn, then, to his thought.”

Questions, not answers

In the 1969 text “Martin Heidegger is eighty years old,” Hannah Arendt took a stand in favor of Heidegger”s philosophy. Politically, like Plato, he had belonged to the group of philosophers who trusted tyrants or leaders. She summed up his life”s work: “For it is not Heidegger”s philosophy – of which one can rightly ask whether it exists at all – but Heidegger”s thinking that has so decisively helped to determine the intellectual physiognomy of the century. This thinking has a probing quality peculiar only to him, which, if one wanted to grasp and prove it linguistically, lies in the transitive use of the verb ”to think”. Heidegger never thinks ”about” anything; he thinks something.”

Arendt”s quotation makes clear what Heidegger was concerned with in philosophy: Thinking itself is already Vollzug, is praxis, and it is less a matter of providing answers to questions than of keeping the questioning itself awake. Heidegger therefore rejected both historical and systematic “philosophy scholarship.” Rather, the task of philosophy is to keep these questions open; philosophy does not offer certainty and security, but “the original motive of philosophy from the disquieting of one”s own existence.”

The central position of questioning in Heidegger”s work has its reason in the fact that he interpreted the history of philosophy above all as a history of the concealment of the fundamental questions. In doing so, he argues, philosophy has forgotten not only the fundamental questions – the question of being – but also the fact that it has forgotten. Thus, the goal of questioning is not to get an answer, but to uncover through questioning what would continue to be forgotten without it. Thus, for Heidegger, questioning became the essence of thinking: “Questioning is the piety of thinking.”

Access to the work and language barriers

Nevertheless, despite this openness inherent in the questions, access to Heidegger”s work remains exceedingly difficult. This is not least due to Heidegger”s peculiar, word-creative language – a diction that is particularly easy to parody due to its inimitability. A “Spiegel” journalist wrote ironically after a lecture in 1950 that Heidegger had “the annoying habit of speaking German”.

Heidegger”s language – especially in Being and Time – is characterized by neologisms, and he also invented verbs such as nichten, lichten, wesen. Constructions such as “das Nichts nichtet” (in: Was ist Metaphysik?), which are due to Heidegger”s attempts to think of things as themselves, caused offence: it is the nothing itself that nichtet. No metaphysical concept is to be invoked for explanation. Through such violent semantic doublings Heidegger wanted to overcome the theoretically distanced view of philosophy and to jump onto the ground on which we – even if we do not see it – always already stand in our concrete life.

In his late work, Heidegger turned away from neologisms, but instead semantically loaded words from everyday language to the point of incomprehensibility, so that their meaning can only be understood in the overall context of his treatises. Heidegger was sharply attacked for his handling of language: Most prominent among these is Theodor W. Adorno”s polemical essay Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. However, Heidegger did not use this jargon for its own sake, but he wanted to break away from the philosophical tradition that language and content were inseparably connected.

For the reader, this means that he must first acquire the Heideggerian vocabulary, indeed become an inhabitant of this discourse, if he subsequently wishes to engage with Heideggerian thought from within, as it were. Dolf Sternberger criticized precisely this: One can only respond to Heidegger”s terminology by means of Heideggerian terms. In order to comprehend Heidegger”s thought, a middle course suggests itself: to take his language seriously and at the same time avoid merely parroting a jargon. Heidegger himself has thus repeatedly stressed the importance of not “understanding his statements as what is written in the newspaper.” Instead, his terms are meant to open up a new realm by pointing to what is always already there, but always overlooked: What they formally indicate, ultimately everyone should be able to find in their own immediate experience. “The meaning content of these terms does not directly mean or say what it refers to; it only gives an indication, a hint, that the understander is called upon by this conceptual context to carry out a transformation of himself into Dasein.”

Ways, not works

What is striking about Heidegger”s writings is the rather small number of large and closed treatises. Instead, there are mainly small texts and lectures – a form that probably seemed more suitable to him to convey his thinking, especially since it gets in the way of an interpretation of this thinking as a philosophical system.

The fact that, for Heidegger, thinking and philosophizing take place in a movement and cover a path in the process can be seen in the titles of works such as Wegmarken, Holzwege, and Unterwegs zur Sprache. Thinking thus becomes a path and a movement, which is why Otto Pöggeler also speaks of Heidegger”s path of thought. Heidegger”s thinking is not so much to be understood as a canon of opinions, but offers different approaches to the “essential questions”. In notes left behind for a preface to the Gesamtausgabe of his writings, which was no longer completed, Heidegger therefore noted: “The Gesamtausgabe is intended to show in various ways: an onward journey in the path field of the changing questions of the ambiguous question of being. The Gesamtausgabe should thereby guide to take up the question, to ask along with it, and above all then to ask it more questioningly.”

After a rather conventional dissertation and habilitation, Heidegger”s confidence in the school philosophy of the time was shaken above all by thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dilthey. These opposed metaphysics and its search for a supra-temporal truth to history with its coincidences and the changeability of moral values and systems of reference. Heidegger turned his back on purely theoretical philosophical concepts. He was more interested in how concrete life can be described phenomenologically, as life that is given in its historically grown factuality, but did not necessarily have to become so. With this approach, called the phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity, Heidegger attempts to show, not explain, life contexts and experiences. The goal of this phenomenological approach is not to make one”s life an object and thus conceive of it as a thing, but to push through to the fullness of life. Heidegger explains this exemplarily in 1920

After the First World War, Heidegger, as Husserl”s assistant, became particularly intensively involved with Husserl”s phenomenological method. Husserl granted him insights into not yet published writings and hoped to have found in Heidegger a student and crown prince. Heidegger, however, pursued his own interests, and Husserl also noted that Heidegger was “already in Eigenart , when he studied my writings.” Above all, it was Dilthey”s assumption of the historical Gewordenheit and contingency of every world- and self-relation that led Heidegger to reject Husserl”s concept of absolutely valid essences of consciousness: “Life is historical; not fragmentation into elements of essence, but coherence.” Based on this view of life as consummation, Heidegger rejected Husserl”s phenomenological reduction to a transcendental ego that would face the world merely apperceptively. These early reflections, together with suggestions from Kierkegaard”s existential philosophy, culminated in Heidegger”s first major work, Being and Time.

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The question of being

The theme of the work, published in 1927, is the question of the meaning of being. This question had already occupied Plato. Heidegger quoted him at the beginning of the investigation: “For obviously you have long been familiar with what you actually mean when you use the expression ”being,” but we once thought we understood it, but now we have become embarrassed.” Even after two thousand years, according to Heidegger, this question is still unanswered: “Do we today have an answer to the question of what we actually mean by the word ”being”?” Not at all. And so, then, the question of the meaning of being must be asked again.”

Heidegger asked about being. If he at the same time searched for its meaning, then he presupposes that the world is not a formless mass, but that there are meaningful relations in it. Being is thus structured and possesses a certain unity in its multiplicity. For example, there is a sensible relation between hammer and nail – but how can this be understood? “From where, that is, from what given horizon do we understand such things as Being?” Heidegger”s answer to this was, “The horizon from which the like of Being becomes intelligible at all is time.” According to Heidegger, the importance of time for Being has been ignored in all previous philosophy.

Criticism of the traditional doctrine of being

According to Heidegger, the occidental theory of being has given different answers in its tradition to what it understands by “being”. However, it has never posed the question of being in such a way that it inquired into its meaning, that is, it investigated the relations inscribed in being. Heidegger criticized the previous understanding that Being had always been characterized as something individually existing, something present, that is, in the temporal mode of the present. Viewed as something merely presently existent, however, Vorhanden was stripped of all temporal and sensuous relations to the world: From the statement that something is, it cannot be understood what something is.

With a determination of being as, for example, substance or matter, being is presented only in relation to the present: That which exists is present, but without having references to past and future. In the course of the investigation, Heidegger attempted to show that, in contrast, time is an essential condition for an understanding of Being, since, to put it simply, it represents a horizon of understanding within the framework of which things in the world can only form meaningful relations between one another. For example, the hammer serves to hammer nails into boards in order to build a house that offers protection from coming storms. It can be understood therefore only in the total context of a world with temporal references, what the hammer is apart from an existing piece of wood and iron.

The way out chosen by the philosophical tradition for the determination of what something is, the ontological reductionism, represented for Heidegger likewise a failure, if it tries to trace back all being to an original principle or a unique being. This approach, criticized by Heidegger, enables onto-theology, for example, to assume a highest being within a linear order of being and to equate this with God.

Ontological difference

This mistake of the previous philosophical thinking, not to bring into view the importance of time for the understanding of being, was to be corrected by a fundamental ontological investigation. Thus, in Being and Time, Heidegger wanted to place ontology on a new foundation. The starting point of his critique of traditional positions of ontology was what he called the ontological difference between being and being.

In Being and Time, Heidegger roughly described being as the horizon of understanding on the basis of which one encounters being in the inner world. Every understanding relation to inner-worldly being has to move in such a contextual horizon, in which the being becomes first apparent. Thus, if we encounter something, then we always understand this only through its meaning in a world. This reference is what makes up its being. Every single being is therefore always already transcended, i.e. transcended and as a single thing put in relation to the whole, from where it receives its significance. The being of a being is therefore that which is given in the “transcendence”: “Being is the transcendens par excellence. Every development of being as the transcendens is transcendental cognition.”

If one starts from the ontological difference, then also every single being is no longer understood merely as presently existing. It is rather transcended in relation to a whole: In the prospect of something future and in its origin from the past, its being is essentially determined temporally.

Language difficulties

Being as such a temporal horizon of understanding is therefore the always unthematic precondition for the fact that single being can meet. Just as in the given the giving and the giving are not contained, but remain unthematized, the being itself never becomes explicit.

However, being is always the being of a being, which is why there is a difference between being and being, but both can never appear separately from each other. Thus, being shows itself as the next, because it is always already preceding and going along in dealing with the world. As a horizon of understanding, however, it is actually unthematizable – because a horizon can never be reached. If, in spite of everything, being is linguistically raised to a topic, it is missed at the same time. For since most terms in everyday language and also in philosophy refer solely to things in the world, Heidegger faced a linguistic hurdle in Being and Time. This is evident in the nounization “Das Sein,” which presents Sein as an inner-worldly being. In order not to have to link to metaphysically preloaded terms, Heidegger formed many neologisms in Being and Time.

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Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Heidegger thus assumes that being can neither be determined as an existing thing nor as a structureless and incoherent mass. Rather, the world in which we live represents a network of relations made up of sensible references. Now, for Heidegger, inquiry could not simply begin with a paradigm if it is to be a truly phenomenological one, for phenomenology seeks to demonstrate states of affairs, not to explain them deductively. Thus, since he always already lives in a world, man cannot go back behind this given horizon of understanding, he can only try to understand it and point out individual moments. Therefore, Heidegger chose a hermeneutic approach.

The Hermeneutic Circle in Being and Time

According to Heidegger, in order to be able to understand the meaningful references in the world, a hermeneutic circle must be traversed, which brings to light a better understanding with each pass. The movement of this circle proceeds in such a way that the individual can be understood only in relation to the whole, and the whole reveals itself only in the individual. If the process of understanding is only possible by passing through a circle, it is nevertheless questionable where this circle should begin. Heidegger”s answer to this: the point of application is the human being himself, because it is obviously he who asks the question about the meaning of being.

Heidegger calls the being of man Dasein, the investigation of this Dasein fundamental ontology. The question about the meaning of Being can only be answered by Dasein, because this alone has a pre-understanding, as it is a necessary precondition for every hermeneutic investigation. Heidegger calls this pre-understanding of Being an understanding of Being. It comes to all human beings when they understand the various modes of being of things: Thus we do not try to talk to mountains, we deal with animals differently than with inanimate nature, we do not try to touch the sun, and so on. All these self-evident behaviors are based on interpretations of how and what things are. Since Dasein has this fundamental property, that is, since man is always already embedded in a pre-reflexive horizon of understanding, Heidegger consequently addresses his questioning to Dasein.

Through this fundamentally hermeneutic orientation, he no longer assumes a cognizing subject, which (as with Kant, for example) mainly perceives bodies in space and time. Dasein is rather an understanding one that is always already involved in a world. Heidegger did not choose a particular Dasein as the point of entry into the circle, but Dasein in its everydayness. His aim was to bring philosophy from transcendental speculations back to the ground of the common world of experience. In doing so, the ground itself, as “groundedness” and “groundlessness”, together with concepts such as “rootedness” and the “uprooted” existence of “man”, came to have a meaning which, however, could not be quite clearly grasped epistemologically, which triggered a debate about it which lasted for many years.

According to Heidegger, two steps of the hermeneutic circle are necessary for this: In the first one, it is to be examined how the sense references in the world present themselves for Dasein. Accordingly, the world is described phenomenologically. Heidegger did this on the basis of the sense relation of tools, such as the hammer mentioned above. In the second step, an “existential analysis of Dasein” takes place, i.e., the investigation of the structures that constitute Dasein such as language, states of mind, understanding, and the finitude of Dasein. Once the relationship between Dasein and the world is adequately understood in this way, it must, if being is to be determined, be grasped ontologically at the same time.

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Fundamental Ontology

On the way to a new ontology

In order to advance the overcoming of the modern ontology based on the subject-object schema, Heidegger introduced the concept of being-in-the-world. It was meant to indicate the fundamental togetherness of Dasein and world. In this context, world does not denote something like the sum of everything that exists, but a meaningful totality, a wholeness of meaning in which things relate to each other in a meaningful way. While Kant”s transcendental philosophy assumed a self-sufficient subject at rest in itself, whose connection to the external world had to be established first, Heidegger”s world is always already given to Dasein on the one hand, and on the other hand world is only for Dasein at all. The concept of being-in-the-world summarizes both aspects. Now, for Heidegger, the world is not a thing, but a temporal network of relations. He calls this happening of world the worldliness of the world. It can only be understood in connection with Dasein. Thus, what the hammer is as a hammer can only be understood in relation to Dasein, which uses it. Being is thus inscribed with meaning, and “meaning is that in which the intelligibility of something is held.” The sense of Being and Dasein condition each other: “Only as long as Dasein is, that is, the ontic possibility of understanding Being, ”there is” Being.” Thus Heidegger represented neither a metaphysical realism (“things exist as they are, even without us”) nor an idealism (“mind produces things as they are”).

Thus, the analysis of Dasein is to provide the foundation for a new ontology beyond realism and idealism. In Being and Time, Heidegger highlights various structures that determine Dasein in its existence, that is, in its life-fulfillment. He called these existentials: understanding, state of mind, speech are fundamental ways in which Dasein relates to itself and the world. The existentials are moments of a structural whole, which Heidegger defined as concern. Thus, the being of Dasein proves to be Sorge: man is Sorge. However, Heidegger wants to keep this determination of human being as worry free from secondary meanings such as “concern” and “tribulation”.

If the existence of Dasein proves to be a concern, then the world can be understood from here: The hammer and other tools serve to build a house. The various tools are connected by an um-to that ultimately results in the um-will of Dasein, which worries about things because it worries about itself and its fellow human beings. For Heidegger, the scientific comprehension of the world and the understanding of nature also ultimately arise from Dasein as concern.

Temporality and existence

Since Dasein as concern is obviously always determined from a past and directed towards the future, the second part of Being and Time is followed by a renewed interpretation of the existentials under the aspect of time. For Heidegger, time initially proves to be not an objective-physical process, but the temporality inscribed in Dasein, which is closely related to concern. The close relationship between time and worry is evident, for example, in everyday language statements of time such as “until then it is a walk.” According to Heidegger, the time tied to worry is the ontologically primary one. Only out of everyday dealings with time does Dasein develop an objective (scientific) time with which it can calculate and plan and which can be determined by clocks. However, all planning and calculating remains bound to worry.

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Turning away from “being and time

For various reasons, Being and Time remained a fragment, of which only the first half is available. Although Heidegger was able to overcome many problems of the traditional ontology with the new ontological thinking based on the relation between Dasein and Being, his approach led only to relatively limited possibilities of philosophical understanding. This was mainly due to the structure of concern and the temporality inscribed in Dasein. Thus, there was a danger that all aspects of human life would be interpreted only from these points of view. Heidegger himself warned against an overestimation of temporality, but this was not convincing.

Moreover, in Being and Time Heidegger had linked his concept of truth to Dasein: the world is always already made accessible to Dasein in its practical dealings with it. With this formulation he wanted to assign an ontological dimension to his understanding of truth: Only for Dasein does the world clear, only for it is the world, and from here it is also determined what being is. Thereby it becomes clear how strongly the care structure centers the world and things in terms of time and content around the um-zu and um-will, that is, around the practical needs of Dasein. From this point of view, historical upheavals of the understanding of self and world and the passivity of man in the course of history are difficult to understand. In addition, there was the difficulty of distinguishing oneself from the language of metaphysics, as Heidegger wrote retrospectively in 1946 in the letter on “Humanism”.

The aforementioned reasons finally led Heidegger to turn away from the fundamental ontological approach. Thus, “the path through Being and Time was an unavoidable but nevertheless a wooden path – a path that suddenly stops.” This was followed by a rethinking for Heidegger, which he called a Kehre.

The announced second part of Being and Time was to begin with Kant”s concept of time, and after the publication of the first part Heidegger immediately turned to an examination of Kant. At first it took place through the lectures of the winter semester 1927

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The Phenomenological Interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason

In the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes the first and objective from the second and subjective part of the transcendental deduction and, according to Heidegger, “just thereby fails to recognize the inner connection of the objective side of the deduction with the subjective – even more: he fails to recognize that just the radical execution of the subjective side of the task of the deduction accomplishes the objective task as well.” Heidegger adds the corresponding claim to this interpretation in the Marburg Lectures, stating, “Kant does not take this radical path here.” This announces a pattern of interpretation to which he still returns in Kant”s book, where it says: “The transcendental deduction is in itself necessarily objective-subjective at the same time. For it is revelation of transcendence, which, after all, constitutes the essential turning to an objectivity for a finite subjectivity in the first place.” But since Kant avoided “the vastness of a complete theory” of the analysis of the “three subjective forces of cognition,” for him “the subjectivity of the subject in the constitution and characteristic offered to him by traditional anthropology and psychology remains guiding.” Heidegger, on the other hand, sees in the Kantian transcendental imaginative power first of all “the central function (…) in making experience possible,” finally also the “unified root (…) for Anschauung and thinking,” which forms the “universal time horizon.”

The unique mention of time as a form that the mind sets for itself, inserted in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (B 68), is then given a central role in Heidegger”s interpretation of the self as a “pure self-affection” of time: “The original temporality is that in which the primordial action of the self and its self-attachment is founded, and it is this same temporality that makes possible a self-identification of the self at all times.” This raises Heidegger”s objection that Kant understands this identification “solely from the present,” “in the sense that the I can identify itself as the same in every now.” Thus, he argues, it remains only with an essentially “time-free, punctual I” that must be overcome by an “ontological interpretation of the wholeness of Dasein,” by “being-before” and “being-capable.”

Although Heidegger admits in the Marburg Lectures that “Kant neither sees the original unified character of the productive imagination with regard to receptivity and spontaneity”, “nor even takes the further radical step, to recognize this productive imagination as the original ecstatic temporality”, he interprets it in a philologically quite doubtful way as “ecstatic basic constitution of the subject, of Dasein itself”, which “releases pure time from itself, thus contains it in itself according to possibility”. The Kantian transcendental imagination is thus the “original temporality and therefore the radical faculty of ontological cognition.” With the reduction to the self-affection of time and the imagination determined by it as the one “root” of cognition, however, Heidegger”s interpretation altogether departs from Kantian dualism and rather approaches the solipsism that followed Kant with Fichte.

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The Kant Book and Finitude

In Being and Time, in the Marburg Kant Lectures, and also in the Kant Book, Heidegger cited the Critique of Pure Reason as a reference for his thinking in the sense of a “confirmation of the correctness of the path on which I was searching.” Nevertheless, he had noted in Kant “the absence of a thematic ontology of Dasein,” that is, of a “prior ontological analytics of the subjectivity of the subject.” Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, in which the three lectures of Riga and Davos were summarized and extended by a fourth chapter, was supposed to remedy this and to interpret the Schematism chapter and from there the Kantian doctrine of time” by a “destruction at the guideline” of the “problem of temporality (…). In doing so, it seemed necessary to Heidegger to bring the “question of finitude to light in intention of a grounding of metaphysics,” because: “Finitude and the peculiarity of the question about it decide only from the ground up the inner form of a transcendental ”analytics” of the subjectivity of the subject.”

On the finiteness of existence

Since the Davos lectures, the finitude of man as a thematic field at all moves into the foreground of Heidegger”s thought: “Finitude, in fact, had not been mentioned once in the introduction to Being and Time, and it remained discreetly in the background even in the lectures preceding Being and Time, before it will become the all-determining theme at the end of the twenties.” In the second of the three Davos lectures on Kant”s Critique of Pure Reason and the Task of a Grundlegung of Metaphysics given in the spring of 1929, in which Heidegger had “presented the train of thought of the first three sections of Kant”s book, which was still being published at the end of the same year,” he singles out “the nature of finite knowledge in general and the basic characters of finitude” as crucial for “understanding the implementation of the Grundlegung” of metaphysics. Put in his own words, Heidegger thus asks, “What is the inner structure of Dasein itself, is it finite or infinite?”

Thereby, he sees not only the question about being, but already the question about the “inner possibility of the understanding of being”, thus also about “the possibility of the concept of being”, as a prerequisite for deciding the other question, which had not been clarified by the ancient philosophy of being either, namely, “whether and in which way the problem of being carries with it an inner reference to finitude in man”. Still in a thoroughly Kantian sequence of thoughts, Heidegger presupposes that existence means “dependence on being”, but this itself is “finiteness as a kind of being in itself and as this only possible on the basis of the understanding of being. Such things as being exist only and must exist where finiteness has become existent. (…) More original than man is the finiteness of Dasein in him.”

Finiteness as a problem base of the KrV

As Heidegger himself admits, the foundation of man”s finitude as the “problem basis” of Kant”s main work is precisely “not an explicit theme” there – literally, the term “finitude” is not mentioned in the KrV – and thus this accentuation belongs to the “overinterpretation of Kant” in which “the Critique of Pure Reason was interpreted in the context of the questioning of ”Being and Time”, but in truth a questioning alien to Kant”s questioning, albeit one that conditioned it, was subordinated to it. ” Finitude is for Heidegger “primarily not that of cognition, but that is only an essential consequence of thrownness.” Rather, “ontology is an index of finitude. God does not have it. And that man has the exhibitio is the sharpest argument of his finitude. For ontology needs only a finite being.” In relation to the possibility of cognition and the question of truth, Heidegger, in the Davos Disputation with Cassirer, already hints at the “meeting of the contradictory” that exists (…) in this finitude, as later set forth in Being of Human Freedom: “On the basis of the finitude of man”s being-in-the-truth, there exists at the same time a being-in-the-untruth. Untruth belongs to the innermost core of the structure of existence. (…) But I would say that this intersubjectivity of truth, this breaking out of truth over the individual himself as being-in-the-truth, already means to be delivered to the being itself, to be placed in the possibility to form it oneself.”

The accentuation of finitude as a mode of being of Dasein already provoked the critical question at the Davos Disputation how in it the “transition to mundus intelligibilis” was possible, namely in the realm of mathematical truths as in that of the ought. Cassirer asked whether Heidegger wanted to “renounce all this objectivity, this form of absoluteness, which Kant had advocated in the Ethical, the Theoretical, and the Critique of Judgment:” “Does he want to withdraw completely to finite being, or, if not, where is the breakthrough to this sphere for him?” Heidegger”s answer of a “finitude of ethics” and a finite freedom in which man is placed before nothingness and philosophy has the task of “making the nothingness of his existence evident to him with all his freedom” is regarded in retrospect as “a sign of the weakness in which Heidegger finds himself after Being and Time, because he is unable to carry out his fundamental ontological project.”

Heidegger concludes the Kant book with some twenty mostly rhetorical questions naming the subject areas of subjectivity, finitude, and the transcendental essence of truth. Thus he asks whether the transcendental dialectic of KrV is not “concentrated in the problem of finitude” and whether the “transcendental untruth cannot be positively justified in terms of its original unity with transcendental truth from the innermost essence of finitude in Dasein,” adding, “What is the transcendental essence of truth in the first place?” In the Kant book, Heidegger is left with the answers, but with the questions he sketches the outline of his studies in the following years.

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The change in the understanding of truth

Between 1930 and 1938, Martin Heidegger”s way of thinking underwent a rethinking, which he himself called a turn. He turned away from his fundamental ontological thinking and toward an approach to the history of being. After the Kehre, he was no longer concerned with the meaning of Being or its transcendental horizon of interpretation (time), but related the talk of Being as such to how Being both unveils and conceals itself from itself. Heidegger was concerned with a new, non-objectifying relationship of man to Being, which he describes in the “Humanismusbrief” with the expression “Shepherd of Being.” Thereby he also became the forerunner of a new ecological thinking.

Of the essence of truth …

Being and Time was determined by existential truth: Dasein has always already somehow discovered the referential context of the inner-worldly in the pre-reflexive reference to the world that arises in practical dealings with things; moreover, it has an understanding of itself and the inevitability of having to make decisions, i.e., of having to lead its life, that exists before thinking. This affiliation of truth and Dasein, necessary for existence, is what Heidegger called the truth of existence. With the Kehre, he shifted this emphasis. In his view, for an understanding of the relationship between world and self, it is not only the structure of our existence that is important, but also how the world, Being, shows itself to us from itself. Therefore, it also needs an engagement with the open of unconcealedness. Heidegger accomplished this expansion of his concept of truth in 1930 in the lecture “On the Essence of Truth”. Although he still understood truth – as in Being and Time – as unconcealedness, it now became clear to Heidegger that man cannot produce this unconcealedness by himself.

… to the truth of the being

Being reveals itself to man not only in relation to his existence, but in manifold forms. For example, truth can happen through art, which Heidegger described in his 1935 lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art.” If a work of art makes explicit what was previously unthematic or hidden and raises it to consciousness, then truth reveals itself as a process: truth happens. In order to grasp this linguistically, the necessity arose for Heidegger to say: truth west; for since it is in the happening of truth as uncovering that what is first shows itself, one cannot say, “truth is.” The essence of truth, then, is its being as process. If, after the turn, truth is now no longer rigidly bound to the always already existing determination of world and self by Dasein, this means two things: truth becomes processual, and it can include determinations that cannot be understood from the pragmatically existing Dasein. This shift of emphasis is expressed in the inversion: The essence of truth becomes the truth of essence. Heidegger called his own rethinking a Kehre:

A-letheia: Concealment and Disconcealment of Being

So that now the being shows itself in its unconcealedness from itself, it still needs the human being as “clearing”: What is, shows itself to him in different light (e.g. “everything is spirit”).

Heidegger”s speech of unconcealment and concealment, however, is not to be confused with perspectivist conceptions of truth. For on the one hand, unconcealment does not refer to single being, which, due to perspective, could only be seen from a certain side. On the other hand, Heidegger also does not want to tie truth to sensual modes of cognition, such as that of seeing. Truth is rather an overarching context of meaning, and thus the talk of the unconcealedness of being means a whole, that is, a world as a totality of meaning that opens up to man.

If Heidegger now thought the process of unconcealment from being itself, then for him a concealment was always connected with it. This means that whenever Being shows itself as determinate (e.g. “everything is matter”), it simultaneously conceals another aspect. The hidden, however, is not a concrete other determination of being (“everything is spirit”), but what is hidden is the fact that being has unhidden itself. The human being therefore mostly dwells only at the unconcealed being, but forgets how this determination of being has only happened itself. He corresponds only to the already unconcealed and takes from it the measure for his acting and worrying.

This omission of the question of the “meaning of being” and the mere dwelling on the existing was already called being-forgetfulness by Heidegger before Being and Time. Because of the fundamental coherence of concealing and unconcealing, this forgetting of being after the turn no longer proves to be a lapse on the part of man, but belongs to the fate of being itself. Heidegger therefore also spoke of the abandonment of being. Now, however, the human being is dependent on keeping to the being that is hidden from him, because he can only orientate himself according to that which is. With this dependence of the human being on the being, a first determination of the being of the human being is indicated. However, the dwelling at the being mostly keeps the human being from experiencing a more original access to his own being as belonging to the unconcealing.

Despite this shift of emphasis between Being and Time and Heidegger”s thinking after the Kehre, it is an exaggerated, distorted picture to speak of a heroic activism of Dasein in early Heidegger and, in contrast, of a human being condemned to passivity in relation to Being in late Heidegger. Such a comparison is based on only two aspects that are forcibly separated from the whole work and do not occur in their isolation in Heidegger”s work.

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Twisting the metaphysics

Decline into the Ground of Metaphysics

In Being and Time, Heidegger wanted to lead ontology back to its foundation. In doing so, he remained as far as possible within the realm of classical metaphysics, since he himself understood his efforts as a reform and continuation of ontology. After the about-face, Heidegger abandoned plans to find a new ground of ontology. Instead, in What is Metaphysics? he devoted himself to the question of the ground of metaphysics: How is it that metaphysics attempts to determine being only from the existing and towards the existing. by ever positing a final or highest ground for the determination of all existing? With this question, Heidegger thus did not try to give a determination of being again himself (this is, after all, the procedure of metaphysics), but he examined metaphysics as metaphysics and the conditions of its procedure: How did the various interpretations of being come about through metaphysics? This question, which thematizes the conditions of metaphysics itself, remained closed to metaphysics by definition, which itself has only the being and its being as its object.

Abysmal thinking

Heidegger”s goal was still to overcome metaphysics. Necessary for this is, first of all, a rejection of metaphysical ultimate justifications. The investigation must not itself bring paradigmatic presuppositions back to its subject. A non-metaphysical thinking has to do without final reasons. It must bring itself into the abyss. Heidegger therefore called his thinking from then on abyssal. From the abyss he now criticized his early philosophy: “Everywhere still in Being and Time up to the threshold of the treatise On the Essence of Reason metaphysically is spoken and presented and yet thought differently. But this thinking does not bring itself into the free of its own abyss.” Only from this abyss, from a position that knows no ultimate reason, could Heidegger bring the history of metaphysics into view and interpret it.

Overcoming the subject-object schema

For Heidegger, the predominant philosophical current of modern philosophy was the subject philosophy starting from Descartes. He rejected this subject-object scheme for an unbiased interpretation of the history of philosophy. When metaphysics considers the world and being as a whole and gives a determination of it (e.g. “everything is spirit”: idealism or “everything is matter”: materialism), the core of its procedure is that it brings being before itself in order to determine it. Heidegger therefore spoke of vor-stellendes Denken. The peculiarity of this vor-stellendes Denken, however, is that it vor-stellt das Seiende as an object for a subject and thus actualizes the subject-object split. Thereby, metaphysics enthrones man as the measure of all things. From now on, the existing has to be presented to the subject man: Only what has been thus established and made certain is also. For Descartes only that is, what can be described mathematically by man.

The Kantian transcendental philosophy also placed the human being as subject in the center of all being, which Kant called the Copernican turn: Not the subject is judged by the world, but the world is judged by its ability to grasp. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had tried to give a secure ground to cognition through the categories of cognition given to pure understanding. Accordingly, Kant”s goal was not to overcome metaphysics, but to create a secure foundation for subsequent speculations. Heidegger thus interpreted Kant as a metaphysician, thus already the aim of his Kant book, where it says right at the beginning: “The following investigation sets itself the task of interpreting Kant”s Critique of Pure Reason as a foundation of metaphysics “. For Heidegger, Kant showed a metaphysical need for an ultimate justification: The subject (reason) is at the same time to serve as the ground for all cognition. It justifies the cognized. Thus, metaphysics consists of the fact that it presents the existing as object for a subject and immediately justifies it through the subject.

According to Heidegger, however, a paradox arises here. For if metaphysics only recognizes as justified that which shows itself to the subject, but the subject cannot justify itself, then it is impossible for it to assure itself of its own ground. Even in reflexive self-assurance, in self-reflection, the subject always grasps itself only as an object and thus misses itself precisely as a subject. The apparent impossibility of the double “itself”, of having itself before itself, could only be overcome by a violent self-setting.

Twisting of Metaphysics as Part of the History of Being

Since in metaphysics Being has experienced various kinds of determinations by man, Heidegger concludes that Being itself has a history. Heidegger calls this the history of being. The Kehre as the twisting of metaphysics describes two things:

In conversation with the great thinkers, not by rejecting hostility, metaphysics should be brought to its limits: “That is why thinking, in order to correspond to the twisting of metaphysics, must first clarify the essence of metaphysics. To such an attempt, the twisting of metaphysics at first appears like an overcoming, which only puts behind it the exclusively metaphysical imagining. But in the twisting, the abiding truth of the apparently repudiated metaphysics returns only specifically as its now appropriated essence.” In retrospect, Heidegger reflected on the first beginnings of Western philosophizing. In their twisting, he sought another beginning.

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First and other beginning

Heidegger tried to identify different epochs in the history of metaphysics. In relation to the philosophy of the early Greeks he spoke of the first beginning, which founded metaphysics. His own thinking and the post-metaphysical age he aimed at, he saw as another beginning.

Misconduct of the first beginning

For Heidegger, the first beginning of the ancient Greeks divides into two events, pre-Socratic thought and the metaphysics emanating from Plato and Aristotle. As expressed for Heidegger in the concept of aletheia (A-letheia as un-concealedness), the early Greeks had an undisguised experience of being: they were still able to see it as unconcealedness. Thus, the being as such was not yet in the center of interest for them, but the unconcealment to the unconcealment. With Plato and Aristotle, however, in Heidegger”s view, a falling away from this unobscured reference to truth occurred. The predominance of metaphysics began. Plato sought support in the ideas, Aristotle in the categories, with which both were only interested in the determination of the existing and tried to follow the metaphysical need to secure and fix it by last reasons.

Decrease to the pre-Socratics

Heidegger wanted to go back behind Plato and Aristotle with the other beginning. The openness and early experiences of the pre-Socratics were to be taken up again and made usable for a future thinking. Thus, Heidegger understood the other beginning neither as a new beginning – since it was based on a constructive appropriation of the philosophical tradition and its failures – nor was the regression to the pre-Socratics determined by a romantic-restorative tendency.

Predominant, on the other hand, is the prospective aspect, which enables man to return to his being by knowing how to understand past history and by opposing metaphysical interpretations of being with new thinking. In order to make the difference between initial thinking and other-initial thinking clear, Heidegger introduced the distinction between Leitfrage and Grundfrage. Here, the leading question denotes the question about being as being and the being of being, which had led to different answers in metaphysics and ontology since Plato and Aristotle, whereas Heidegger claimed to aim at being as such with his formulation of the basic question. His aim was not to define “being” but to investigate how such determinations had come about in the history of philosophy in the first place.

The jump

This new thinking can – despite all reference back to it – not simply be compiled or derived from the old one, because it abstains from all determinations of being. In order to clarify this radically different character, Heidegger spoke of the leap into another thinking. Heidegger prepared this leap in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). This work, written in 1936-1938 and not published during Heidegger”s lifetime, is considered his second major work. The “Beiträge” are among Heidegger”s private writings and are extremely cryptically worded, which is why Heidegger recommended familiarizing oneself with the lectures of the 1930s beforehand.

The leap is the transition from the first to the other beginning and thus an advance into the thinking of the history of being. The writings Besinnungen (1938-1939, GA 66), Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938-1940, GA 69), Über den Anfang (1941, GA 70), Das Ereignis (1941-1942, GA 71) and Die Stege des Anfangs (1944, GA 72) are also to be located in the context of the “Beiträge”.

Another metaphor for the transition from traditional metaphysics to thinking in terms of the history of being is Heidegger”s talk of the end of metaphysics or the end of philosophy and the beginning of thinking, as found in Heidegger”s lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (GA 14). According to Heidegger, in order to make this thinking possible, the history of metaphysics must first be concretely traced and interpreted on the basis of the works of its essential thinkers. Only in this way the history of being becomes tangible.

Heidegger understood the history of being as the historical relationship of man to being. Thereby history is not the causally interrelated context of events, but its determining moment is the truth of being. This expression, however, does not denote a truth about being. This would mean that there is only one truth, and Heidegger rejected this notion. Rather, Heidegger used this phrase to describe his newly acquired ontological concept of truth. The term “truth of being” refers to the way in which being as concealing and unconcealing anwest, shows itself to man. According to Heidegger, this is a historical process of concealment and unconcealment, over which man cannot dispose.

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A world is happening

Event thinking and history of being

Thus, if Being shows itself in different ways in the course of history, then, according to Heidegger, there must be points of intersection between two such epochs. What happens at these points of intersection and transition he called event. If the course of the different ages is to be traced, in which metaphysics gave different determinations of being in each case, then no metaphysical, ontological or psychological principle may be foisted on this interpretation itself. According to abysmal thought, he argues, there is no absolute and ultimate ground which could explain and assure the transitions. All that can be said, therefore, about such historical upheavals in the conception of the world is that they occur.

The history of being does not mean the history of being (because this has no history), but the history of the dis- and concealments, through which epochally a world happens as a wholeness of meaning and from where then is determined what is essential and what is unessential, what is and what is not. Thereby, history as history of being is not a process that would be regulated by a central power: Only the “that” – that being-history is – can be said.

In this context, Heidegger also speaks of Seinsgeschick, as the way in which Being sends itself to man. Heidegger”s talk of the event, of Seinsgeschick and Seinsentzug, has often earned him the reproach of fatalism through its interpretation as inevitable fate. However, for Heidegger, the fate of being is not an ontic fate (occurring in the world) that rules over people, but precisely a fate of being and the world, according to which the average behavior of people will follow certain paths. Accordingly, this merely expresses “that namely man does not make history as an autonomous subject, but that he himself is always already “made” by history in the sense that he is involved in a process of transmission over which he cannot simply dispose, but which disposes him in a certain way.”

Heidegger does not assume at all that everything that happens to man in detail is due to this fate. Being-fate and event are for him no ontic (i.e. inner-worldly) powers that dispose over man. Since being is not a being, it can be conceived neither genealogically nor causally. Heidegger thus coined the term event to indicate the transition between being-historical epochs without resorting to ideological terms such as idealism or materialism. If, he elaborates this thought, one were to attempt, for example, to use these worldviews to think man”s historical relationship to truth, there would be a constant and unresolvable back-reference between the two: The question of how a new idealistic horizon of understanding is possible would refer to the changed material conditions. For a change of the material conditions, however, a better understanding of the processes of nature is a prerequisite, and so on.

Philosophy gives language to being

For the interpretation of the history of being, philosophy plays a decisive role in Heidegger”s eyes, because it is the place where the proposition of being is expressed by being grasped in thought. The great philosophers captured the world view of their age in words and philosophical systems. According to Heidegger, however, this must not be misunderstood in such a way as if philosophy with its theoretical-metaphysical drafts would bring forth history: “That since Plato the real shows itself in the light of ideas, Plato did not make. The thinker has only corresponded to that which was appropriate to him.” Since, in his view, it is in the philosophical sketches that what is – Being – is most clearly expressed, Heidegger used the surviving philosophical writings for tracing the history of Being. In doing so, the works of the great thinkers also mark the different epochs of the history of being.

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Epochs of the history of being

Heidegger made out different epochs in the history of being. He cites the etymology of the (Greek) word epochê: “to hold in itself”. Being holds on to itself in its promise to man, which means that, on the one hand, truth occurs unconcealingly, but at the same time also conceals the fact of this unconcealing.

Pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle

For Heidegger, the history of being was predominantly the history of decay, which, after an early assent of being in the Greeks, is characterized by increasing abandonment of being and finds its highest intensification in planetary technology and nihilism. If the early Greeks, the Presocratics, had still specifically conceived of truth as unconcealment (ἀλἠθεια) and thus recognized the processual aspect of truth as unconcealment, according to Heidegger, metaphysics had entered the scene with Plato. After the Sophists had shaken the conception of truth, the latter tried to oppose them with an absolute certainty by his doctrine of ideas. By making the being in its recognizability dependent on the idea, the realm of the appearing (and thus transient) opposed the imperishable and therefore only truly existing, the ideas. The idea itself causes the being, and the immutability of the idea makes statements of absolute validity possible. With this, however, truth, according to Heidegger, was thought for the first time as independent of man. The place of truth had thus shifted. Truth became the approximation of the imagining to an “imagined”, over which its actual precondition, i.e. unconcealability, is forgotten.

From this point on, according to Heidegger, it became possible to align oneself with the imagined through methodical alignment. This conception is reflected in the high importance given to the logos. Man becomes a rational animal, an animal rationale. His tool is the logos, with which he disposes of the imagined. The logos releases logic from itself as a discipline of its own, which now claims exclusive validity in the field of thinking. With it, according to Heidegger, everything else that is, i.e. being, can be derived in scientific rigor from what is actually being, i.e. with Plato the ideas, with Aristotle the form. After Plato and Aristotle, schools are formed in which philosophy is dogmatized.

Christian Middle Ages

The Christian Middle Ages remained within the framework of this metaphysical thinking. The dissimulation became even greater, because before that the Romans would not have understood the original experience of the thinkers by their translation of the Greek terms (a-letheia, idea, energeia etc.) into Latin. In the course of this thinking being shifted to causes, and consequently in the Christian Middle Ages a first cause was set as creator God. Thus being became being created (ens creatum). The created, according to Heidegger, seems at the same time rationally determined by God. This prepared rationalism, according to which man can understand and control being through his reason.

Modern times

When at the beginning of modern times the relation of being to God was gradually dissolved, only the modern Cartesian subject remained, which grasped being as an object and gave it its own measure. The will, latent in subjectivity, to grasp and dominate everything that it itself is not, becomes especially clear in Nietzsche”s will to power. In order to dominate, the will sets supreme principles to which everything has to be subordinated: moral values. The will is a value-setting will and asserts itself by imposing its self-created interpretation of the world on others. Heidegger”s interpretation of Nietzsche, however, is inconsistent. In the Rektoratsrede (1933) and still in the first volume of the Nietzsche Interpretation, Heidegger stands behind Nietzsche”s philosophy of the will, while in the second volume he claims that it is precisely the will that prevents openness and makes new thinking impossible.

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Being history and technology

More and more, man had moved into the center of all being and had become the central instance of philosophical interpretations. At the same time, the modern metaphysics of the will emerged, which found its culmination in Nietzsche. Heidegger saw these tendencies not only in the history of philosophy, but also in the events of his time, above all in the form of the constantly expanding technology. To the question “What is technology?”, what is its essence? he answers: The essence of technology itself has nothing technical about it. Rather, technology must be thought of in terms of its origins. According to Heidegger, it has its historical origin in the occidental history of being.

For Heidegger, technology was related to metaphysical thinking. In this, he clearly differed from common forms of technology criticism of his time. It is true that his critique of technology shows many parallels to other interpretations, which thematize alienation, subjective domination, increase of power and technical rationality. However, he distinguishes himself fundamentally from these through his interpretation of the history of being, since he does not identify the inherent power of political, social, and economic forces as the main problem, but rather seeks the cause in the unhiding of being itself. Heidegger”s critique of technology thus has a seinsgeschichtliche core beyond the practical handling of technology in detail.

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Science and technology

World view of the exact natural sciences

Heidegger believed that natural science can explain how what exists, things, work – but not what things are: Physics can explain why the iron of the hammer is suitable to work hard objects, but not what a hammer is. The meaning of the hammer opens up only in a context of significance, behind whose meaningful totality the thinking cannot go back.

Heidegger”s consideration of science emphasizes one of its aspects: It is a specific way of discovering being. Properties of the scientific procedure are calculating, objectifying, imagining and securing. These characterize their way of seeing and questioning natural processes. Counter-states are calculated. Heidegger emphasized both parts of the word: what is object becomes object in relation to a subject, only “what becomes object in this way is, is considered as being”. Only what man can bring before himself in this form is considered as being. The second part of the term object emphasizes the establishing and securing as a method of science. In this, Heidegger explains, a need is shown, not unlike metaphysics, to find a reason for everything that exists in the subject-object relation. Through this, man, for his part, becomes the “measure and center of being.” This central position of the human being, however, again strengthens the modern subjectivity beginning with Descartes. Only what is shown in this way of understanding the world is recognized. The way science deals with its counter-stand is based on a certain ontology. This ontology consists in the core of a subject, which perceives objects presented as existing and processes them intellectually.

Relationship of science and technology

Heidegger claims the same for technology as for natural science. By its way of looking at being, technology disrobes being from its sensual relations within the world. However, it never completely succeeds in this disrobing of being; the things it discovers do not become singular objects without any relation. Since the world is always a meaningful totality, technology never breaks off all relations of its objects. Instead, it forces them back to the human being as subject through objectification. Thus the world loses its richness of meaning and reference and the existing degenerates to a mere raw material for the subject man. At first, however, man is not aware of this changed conception of the world; the preconditions of his own thinking remain closed to him. Thus, on the one hand, more and more becomes technically possible, on the other hand, the central role in which man imagines himself to be within world events also leads to an increase in the will for technical controllability and availability:

The essence of science and technology

For Heidegger, natural science and technology are both metaphysical concepts of the world. Like metaphysics, natural science and technology conceive of being as merely existing. While metaphysics is actually considered to be a figure that determines classical and ancient thought, which falls into crisis in modern times, Heidegger associated with it a critique of technology, the essence of which is historical.

Technology and natural sciences as phenomena of modernity are thus thought together by Heidegger with the tradition of ancient metaphysics. Heidegger regards both natural science and technology as metaphysical in their essence, whereby this is revealed more sharply in the technical conception of the world: “he thing that is later for historical determination, modern technology, is the thing that is historically earlier with respect to the essence that prevails in it.”

The common interpretation sees in modern times and modernity as well as in the technical age something completely new, which is to be understood as a break with what used to be. Heidegger”s experimentation with language is due to his metaphysical critique. He was looking for a language that is as little as possible burdened by it. This leads him to language as the foundation of being and that natural disposition which makes man himself man in the first place. Not the human being speaks, but “the language speaks” and only through it the human being becomes a speaking being. In contrast, Heidegger shifted the origin of technology back to the metaphysical forms of thought of antiquity, especially to the period between the pre-Socratics and the emerging metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle.

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Superimposition of other ways of understanding the world

The core of Heidegger”s critique is that the technical understanding of the world overrides other ways of understanding. According to a common interpretation, metaphysics concerns the enduring theoretical principles, whereas technology determines the practical relation to man”s changing environment. Heidegger, however, places both in a relationship of mutual influence: on the one hand, thinking determines what is practically implemented (application of the natural sciences), but on the other hand, the practical reference also determines the conception that man has of the world. Even more than a mere influence, each of the two sides is constitutive for the other: without thought determination no practice and without practice no interpretation of the world.

Due to the success of technical achievements and the dominance of technical means, the world view that goes along with it spreads over the whole planet and overlays all forms of world understanding existing beside it. Thus the technical world view settles more and more firmly in the world, Heidegger finds, and thus becomes a frame.

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Technique as a frame

The concept of the rack

Heidegger describes the technical and objectifying thinking as the imagining thinking in the sense that this thinking brings the existing as object before itself and at the same time conceives it in the temporal mode of the present as existing for it. Thus, by means of technology, man puts nature before himself as a mere resource. He does this by using technical means, whose totality Heidegger calls Gestell.

Jobs and stock

Technology brings things to light that do not appear by themselves. In this way, it plays a major role in the process of discovering the world. However, there is another side to how technology discovers the world. For, according to Heidegger, on the other side, the technical discovery of the world immediately provides the interpretation of what is to be done with what has been discovered: What is discovered becomes an object of manipulation or degenerates into a mere resource. Heidegger says that technology puts things to their usability. Hence the talk of technology as Ge-stell.

For Heidegger, technology is a challenge that, for example, “demands of nature to deliver energy that can be extracted and stored as such.” In relation to the Rhine, this means for Heidegger that the Rhine is put to its water pressure. Even if the Rhine still serves as a recreational area despite everything, then it is put on its recreational qualities as a tourist vacation destination.

Relationship to other world views

Heidegger shows the profound difference in the world reference of the technical world reference to others in his lecture “Die Frage nach der Technik” (1953). Here he contrasts the technical-demanding world reference on the one hand with the poetic one (as it is expressed, for example, in Hölderlin”s hymn Der Rhein), and on the other hand with what he considers to be the traditional peasant activity, which does not put the field on the delivery of food, but leaves the seed to the growth forces of nature. By his will to produce and to present things, the human being passes over the own meaning of the things. If everything is considered only under the aspect of usefulness and usability, nature degenerates into a stock that is merely to be tapped and processed.

Intrinsic law of technology

Heidegger refused to consider the essence of technology in terms of the relationship between end and means. He does not see technology as an extended tool of man, but draws attention to the fact that it brings with it completely its own laws. Heidegger sees the problem not only in the fact that modern technology – unlike traditional tools – uses for its work process a source of energy that is independent of human labor and thus also has a sequence of movements that is independent of it, but he is especially concerned about the character of domination that emanates from modern technology. Thus, he said, this brings forth from itself new views and necessities and a corresponding consciousness of victory: for example, when the fabrication of factories, in which factories are in turn fabricated, is perceived as fascinating. All this, according to Heidegger, bears the danger that “the use becomes a use” and that technology has only its own aimlessness as its goal.

Man in the frame

Thus technical action does not take place beyond human activity, but it does not take place “only in man and not decisively through him. Through the autonomy of the technical process, man himself is literally subjected to the wheels, he is degraded to the orderer of the stock. In the extreme case, this leads to the fact that man himself becomes a stock, as which he is then only interested to the extent that he can be made serviceable for the securing of aimless possibilities. Similar to the criticism of the concept of human capital, Heidegger recalled the talk of human material. Therefore, it is not man who places things, but technology itself: It is the frame.

Thus man becomes on the one hand the master of the earth, on the other hand by the reversal of the purpose-means-relationship from the frame disempowers and becomes the mere moment of the all-encompassing technical process. Every corner of the planet is integrated into the technical controllability, and the human being meets everywhere only himself, because he gives himself as measure by the technical kind of the world discovery. If he does not let the existing show itself from itself anymore, a loss of truth goes along with this process, Heidegger concludes. Man no longer stands in his original relation to being as the one addressed by the disconcealment. The loss of truth thus also means a loss of self.

In a 1969 ZDF conversation with Richard Wisser, Heidegger clarified that it was not hostility to technology that had led him to his reflections, but that he saw in the uncritical handling of technology the danger of a loss of self on the part of man: “First of all it must be said that I am not against technology. I have never spoken against technology, nor about the so-called demonic of technology, but I am trying: to understand the essence of technology.” Heidegger further expressed his concern about developments in biotechnology: ” so I think of what is developing today as biophysics: that in the foreseeable future we will be able to make man in such a way, that is, to construct him purely according to his organic essence, as one needs him.”

Heidegger also warned against the destruction of the natural environment. The devastation of the earth by the global technical means of power is a double loss: Not only the biological bases of life are exposed to the destruction, also the native, thus historical, nature degenerates to the resource for the global logistics of the rack. Loss of nature is thus also loss of homeland.

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Possibilities of a changed relationship to technology

Whether man succeeds in entering into a new and reflected relationship with technology is – according to the thinking of being-history – not a question of subjective decision, but depends on the skill of the conquest itself. For Heidegger, however, the danger posed by technology also makes it possible for the understanding of being to change from technical thinking to thinking of being. He quotes Hölderlin: “But where there is danger, there grows

Since about the years 1929

Accordingly, art and technology are related by their relation to the truth event: Both are forms of discovery, in both the existing comes into the unconcealedness. While art, however, opens up a realm in which a new relationship of self and world of the historical human being can be established, the technical comprehension of the world always reproduces the same dominating relationship to the world.

According to Heidegger, art, poetry, thinking, founding of the state are acts in which truth happens by realizing a new conception of the world, “whereas science is not an original happening of truth, but in each case the expansion of an already open area of truth”. Thus, for example, physics designs its subject area as the change of matter and energy in space and time. All cognition, which arises from it in the physical science, remains in this area once opened as true. In art, on the other hand, new ways of feeling and understanding the world take place, which cannot be derived from a previous understanding of the world.

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The truth and the art

The question of art must be asked anew

Traditional answers to what art is or should be can be found in aesthetics as a theory of art. In order to explain its subject, terms such as “allegory,” “metaphor,” and “simile” were coined. In this context, the art theorist starts from a separation between the material and the spiritual that goes back to Plato: The work of art is the material bearer of a spiritual meaning that points beyond itself. According to Heidegger, the separation of the material and the spiritual metaphysically divides being into two realms of being, which is why he called traditional aesthetics a “metaphysical theory of art.” In accordance with his project of a transformation of metaphysics, Heidegger strove for an “overcoming of aesthetics”. Heidegger presented a first, preliminary draft of this program in a 1935 lecture entitled “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (“The Origin of the Work of Art”).

Not beauty but truth

At the center of Heidegger”s interest in the “riddle” of art is not the ideal of the aesthetics of classicism, beauty, which is based on antiquity, but the relationship between art and truth. For Heidegger, art no longer serves the pleasure of a viewer, but through it a truth accomplishment takes place. Unlike the technical approach to the world, which is characterized by a pragmatic and utility-oriented approach, the work of art cannot be grasped through these categories. Since the work of art was not made for a specific purpose, it occupies a special position in the world: it cannot be ”used”. Precisely through this refusal, however, the world shows itself as a whole of meaning, in which the objects of use have their place. According to Heidegger, this illumination of the world as a whole can raise the human relationship to the world to consciousness and thus enables a different relation to it.

There are two readings of the work on the origin of the work of art: one interprets it in such a way that Heidegger merely explains the foundation of a world through the work of art in retrospect of past art; the other, on the other hand, emphasizes that for Heidegger, the act of founding itself also becomes recognizable in art. What was important for the progress of his path of thought in the first place was that Heidegger himself captured the founding power of art, at least philosophically.

According to Heidegger, great works of art, such as the poetry of Homer, can establish the culture of an entire people. Herein lies the history-founding power of art: “he work establishes a world”. According to Heidegger, art is a “becoming and happening of truth” because a world is created or illuminated with the work of art. He doubted, however, whether it was still possible to produce “great art” with a binding claim for an entire culture. According to Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin”s poetry, whose memory must be gradually awakened in the individual, opens up ways to do this.

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Hölderlin as a skill

According to Heidegger, Nietzsche was the thinker who pushed metaphysics to the extreme and thus confronts thinking with the decision whether it can agree with it or must seek new ways apart from metaphysics. Science and technology, too, were not alternatives to metaphysics, but also carried it out, as it were, in a practical way. His search for something “quite different” led Heidegger since about 1934 to Hölderlin, whose poetry he interpreted as skill. Hölderlin identified the present as a crisis and asked for a new future in reference to Western history.

Being abandoned as fate

Heidegger”s recapitulation of the history of philosophy and its interpretation as history of being understands the beginning of philosophy as a failure. It is true that being was hidden from early Greek thought in different ways, but in such a way that this hiddenness henceforth provided the measure for human thought and action. Essential was a conception of being as existence, objectivity, as object for a subject, which ultimately led to the technical challenge of the world. According to Heidegger, the fact was forgotten that being was concealed in this way. This forgetfulness of being or also abandonment of being determines the occidental history as a basic feature of thinking, as it were its fate or its destiny: “However, the forgetfulness as apparently separated from it does not only afflict the being of being. It belongs to the thing of being itself, rules as the fate of its being.”

According to Hölderlin, people have acquired great scientific knowledge (he calls them “the many-knowing”), but over this they have forgotten to experience human life in its fullness, versatility and originality. This loss is the loss of the divine. The divine, Heidegger emphasizes, is not something otherworldly in Hölderlin, but it expresses itself in a changed relationship between people and in people”s dealings with nature. It is a conception of life that centers on rejoicing in being-in-the-world.

Thinking God with Hölderlin – as the founding reason

Heidegger did not think the divine scholastically in the form of a creator God who created the earth. This would again degrade God to “cause of being” and being to ens creatum (created). Such a traditional conception implies a principle of causality between God and the created and thus reproduces a thinking that is bent on ultimate justifications. In contrast, Heidegger did not want to think God as a ground of origin and explanation, but freed from all genealogical and causal constraints of thought. For Heidegger, the divine corresponded rather to a kind of ordering principle that collects things and keeps them in an ordered multiplicity. It brings a new relationship of interpersonal relations and thus offers a reason for human togetherness.

Here Heidegger employed a concept that he had previously rejected: the concept of ground. Heidegger”s talk of “founding reason,” indicates that this is not the metaphysical founding reason, but one that God must grant. The metaphor of God as a lute player (in Der Satz vom Grund) shows that the founding reason is to be thought without the metaphysical explanations mentioned above. He quoted the saying of Angelus Silesius: “A heart that is silent to reason God as he wills,

Hölderlin as a poet of transition

According to Heidegger, Hölderlin is the first to express the abandonment of being as a historical phenomenon. The poet understands his age as the one most deeply marked by the abandonment of being, as the “night of the gods. The abandonment of being shows itself as the absence of the gods. Hölderlin had first exposed himself to the shattering realization of the night of the gods and “vicariously and therefore truly obtained the truth for his people.

By deciding whether a god can be again, Hölderlin confronts the decision whether the Occident will master its own destiny. Hölderlin was the first to recognize that the history of being is history. He has the historical role of having “put the proximity and distance of the past and future gods up for decision” after turning away from metaphysics. Heidegger understands his poetry as a “fort-like foundation of being”. To mark this new reference to Being, Heidegger now wrote “Seyn.” Being as Seyn is explicitly conceived as historical and no longer as the imperishable being of a being.

Relationship between poetry and thought

Hölderlin saw the task of the poet “in meager time” as preparing for the arrival of the future God in the form of Dionysus-Christ, which he expected. Heidegger wanted to make Hölderlin”s poetic work accessible through philosophical reflection: “The historical determination of philosophy culminates in the recognition of the necessity of making Hölderlin”s word heard.” He saw himself as the first thinker who could “hear” Hölderlin”s poetry. In this, Heidegger”s concern was to bring “us” closer to Hölderlin, since his poetry “gives us

In order to emphasize this, Heidegger decouples Hölderlin from any literary, political, philosophical, and aesthetic consideration in order to come to a standstill solely in the truth opened up by his songs: He is not concerned with bringing interpretive schemes to bear on Hölderlin from the outside, but rather with allowing the realm of the divine, as expressed in Hölderlin”s poetry, to come to the fore. Heidegger was uncertain whether he could succeed in this and to what extent this was still possible: “Whether we will one day still recognize it? Hölderlin”s poetry is a destiny for us. It waits for mortals to correspond to it. What does Hölderlin”s poetry say? Its word is: the sacred. This word says of the flight of the gods.”

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Course of the Hölderlin interpretation

1934

In the 1946 lecture “Wozu Dichter?” Heidegger once again points out the danger posed by technical world domination. Hölderlin”s word “But where there is danger, there grows

In 1970, in Das Wohnen des Menschen (GA 13), Heidegger confronted poetic dwelling with the unpoetic presumption and excessiveness of the technical age, which lacked God. “Homecoming” and “dwelling” became two terms defining Heidegger”s late work. For all the proximity of these words to poetic-literary expression, they were nevertheless for Heidegger strict descriptions of a changed relationship of man to Being, a relationship that expresses itself through “proximity to Being.”

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The essence of man

According to Heidegger”s conviction, the pressing questions in the “world age of nihilism” can only be solved if not only the conception that man has of the world changes, but at the same time the conception that man has of himself.

Early determinations of the nature of man

In order to gain clarity about the self-conception of man inscribed in the age, Heidegger recapitulates historical ways of human self-understanding. In the beginnings of philosophy, with the pre-Socratics, the human being was still “determined to be the truthfulness of the unconcealedness of being”. This was accompanied by an original astonishment and the knowledge that the unconcealedness does not arise by itself, but that man has to preserve it. The human being carries out this preservation of the existing by offering the work to the existing: In the works of the creators, poets, thinkers and statesmen, the existing is granted an appearance. Thus, the self-understanding of the occidental man in the beginnings of thinking still shows itself through a conscious and unconcealed reference to being.

Metaphysical Disguises and Humanism

With the advent of metaphysics, however, man is no longer understood as the truth of being, but as an animal rationale. Man becomes a thinking animal, whose most primary form of thinking Descartes defines as a mathematical description of the world. With this fixed and one-sided view of man, however, metaphysics loses sight of the question in what way man”s being belongs to truth. Such a metaphysical determination is ultimately assumed to be supra-temporal and eternally valid, thereby excluding any change of being from thought. Thereby, however, metaphysics closes itself “to the simple state of being, that man only in his being west by being addressed by being”, thus keeping himself open for the claim of being.

Ultimately, according to Heidegger, metaphysics still dresses itself in the moral garb of humanism, which also represents a fixed image of man that can be determined concretely and is based on individual moments detached from the world context. Important in this context is Heidegger”s letter on “humanism,” which he wrote to Jean Beaufret in 1946. Humanism, like Aristotle before it, describes man as an animal rationale, which, standing in the middle of being, grasps it intellectually. Thus, in the end, it only strengthens man in his domineering behavior. He moves him into the center of the world and thus assigns him an excellent position in relation to all other being. Thus “man, expelled from the truth of being, circles around himself as animal rationale”.

The consequence is nihilism, in which man elevates himself to the lord of being and which finds its expression in the rack. Heidegger does not simply criticize man”s egoism, because for the egoist there is definitely a space of reference and validity which is independent of him, but which he forcibly overrides. The modern man, on the other hand, who regards himself as animal rationale or subject, sees no other validity at all except in relation of being to himself. While for Heidegger the egoist can get back to letting the other be valid by overcoming himself, the modern subject cannot create a new world out of himself – every attempt to do so must seem like an arbitrary construct and is doomed to failure. Man is rather dependent on a world opening up to him from being, a world with an empty center, without a center.

The shepherd of being

A new relationship to the world, Heidegger argues, must spring from a thinking in terms of the history of being, which raises to consciousness that man and being are dependent on each other. Thus, the essence of man is determined by the closeness to Being, which Heidegger tried to express by the formulation of man as “shepherd of Being”. The fact that we are talking about the shepherd and not about the Lord of Being indicates that the truth of Being is, according to Heidegger, unavailable to man; he alone can direct himself attentively to Being, in the sense of an openness to the event.

This is the basis on which Heidegger describes his intellectual efforts: They are to make it possible for man to return to his being: “In view of man”s homelessness, man”s future destiny shows itself to the thinking of the history of being in the fact that he finds his way into the truth of being and sets out for this finding.” With descriptions like “Einkehr”, “auf den Weg machen” as well as “Heimkehr”, Heidegger wanted to make clear that a new thinking could not consist of fixed truths, which could be found in his philosophy, but had to be accomplished as a path.

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Homecoming

Only the homeland, Heidegger emphasizes, makes the unheimischkeit possible, and thus it applies “only to get there specifically, where we are already. The return of man to his being is to overcome the alienation and homelessness founded in the age of nihilism, as Heidegger said with Nietzsche and Hölderlin. It succeeds, if the human being in the attentiveness to the being, corresponds to the arrival of the event of another beginning. Thereby, on the one hand, being needs the attentiveness of man, it needs him as “accommodation”, on the other hand, man needs being, so that he finds to his being. Heidegger discovers the thought of this “togetherness” already in Parmenides, who spoke of the identity of thinking and being.

Self-interpretation of the early writings

According to Heidegger, in order to overcome the ascendancy of man to the “lord of being” that accompanies the modern subject-centeredness, man must again become aware of his finitude and his essence. In this context, the existentials elaborated in Being and Time return, i.e., the essential moments of human existence, such as concern, being-to-death, determination, fear, etc. Heidegger, however, shifts their focus: Thus, he understands the “concern for one”s own being-in-the-world” anew as “concern for the revelation of Being”.

In a reinterpretation of himself, Heidegger presents this as if he had already thought of the existentials in this way at the time of writing “Being and Time” or, as it were, unconsciously meant them in this way.

The custom

In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the clearing of Being in Dasein alone, whereby “truth (discoverability) always had to be wrested from Being”, an appropriation that was “as it were always a robbery”. In his later philosophy he assumed that man and being need each other. This need, however, was not one that expressed itself as appropriation or consumption. In needing, man rather nestles himself to the conditions. For Heidegger, man is not the subject of need in this context. He illustrates this with a verse by Hölderlin from his hymn Der Ister:

Heidegger interprets Hölderlin: “”Es brauchet” says here, however: A beingness exists between rock and pricks, between furrows and earth within the being realm that opens up with the inhabiting of the earth. The dwelling of mortals has its own place.”

Man could not dispose of this inner connection of earth and man. The And, which founds the locality for the dwelling of the mortals, is rather an ancient order. “The human being lives by nestling in this relationship. Man cannot take possession of the And,” Byung-Chul Han summarizes Heidegger”s train of thought. According to Heidegger, man cannot technically produce the inner relation or otherwise bring it about himself. The fact that the human being can nestle himself to it can only happen. In the “attentiveness to Being”, man can correspond to the event as the one addressed and used by Being.

Serenity

In a 1955 lecture entitled Gelassenheit, Heidegger presented approaches for a critical but not defensive approach to technology. With the term Gelassenheit he describes the simultaneous Yes and No to technology, through which man could keep himself free from an overpowering claim on himself by technology: “We let the technical objects into our daily world and at the same time leave them outside. That is: based on themselves as things that are nothing absolute, but remain themselves dependent on something higher.” This goes hand in hand with “openness to the mystery”, to the neither preventable nor foreseeable technical upheaval of man”s living conditions in the course of the past and coming centuries as something historically completely new.

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Geviert

Heidegger”s constellation of the world as a square is seen as a counter-design to the homelessness and abandonment of being of modern man, which he states. Modern man places himself in the center of everything that exists and, through his planning-calculating subjectivity, opens up everything that surrounds him only with regard to its usability as a raw material or source of energy. Thereby he robs himself of his world, as a sensible totality, which also contains such relations, whose chain of references does not lead into the Um-will of man. This ultimately denies man dwelling and makes him homeless.

Four world regions

The square is, as it were, the spatial counterpart to the temporal event. It spans a space through four dimensions, consisting of heaven and earth, mortals and divines. According to Heidegger, the mortals are those people whose actions are not determined by the will to power, but who are “capable of death as death.” With the divinities, Heidegger also referred to his way of thinking God elaborated on Hölderlin, but kept open whether it is the one or whether it is a multiplicity of gods that were here thought by him as a region of the Geviert. What now constitutes the space of the Gevierts only in its spatiality, Heidegger called dwelling. Dwelling is the spatiality in time. Mortals dwell because of their finiteness. Thus, Heidegger determined the relation of being of human beings as a “relation of mortality”: “But dwelling is the basic trait of being, according to which mortals are.”

The world as a quadrangle shows possibilities to think a world without center. Thus each of the four world regions receives its sense only in relation to the other three. Heidegger postulated a dynamic working of sense: “the happening mirror game”. The relation of the four “world regions” to each other is not to be understood as a mere representation of one in the other, but as an inseparable intimacy. That the world regions are thus not only joined together afterwards, Heidegger tried to clarify in his lecture on “The Thing” in 1950.

The thing

According to Heidegger, the intimacy of the world regions is founded by the thing, which gathers the world by referring to the four world regions of the Geviert. In his essay “The Thing” he clarified the gathering of the thing by the example of a jug. Heidegger thereby approached his language strongly to the poetic:

Unlike in Being and Time, the thing here is not determined by its chain of reference to other things – the Um-zu and the finality of the Um-will of Dasein. Instead, Heidegger now chooses the references of being and staying: “In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of heaven and earth.” The relationship of heaven and earth and their mutual interpenetration occurs through and is suspended in the rain and spring water. Water here is not H2O located in one place in physical space-time. Heidegger claims to leave things where they are: in the world. “To pour out of the pitcher is to give. The jug-ness of the jug west in the gift The gift of the pouring can be a drink. There is water, there is wine to drink.” The water is libation. But it is only because it is poured from the pitcher that it is gift. The gift is gift because it comes from the pitcher as pouring, it has its essence from the pitcher-ness. Correspondingly, the jug is jug because it preserves the libation in the emptiness that lies between its vessel walls. Both, Trunk and Krug, are what they are only by reference to each other, but not as individuals. The references are, according to Heidegger, before the single things are, and are not first constituted by them.

Living

Thus, according to Heidegger, the thing has the property of assembling the regions of the world, opening up the world as the relational wholeness of the Geviert. For the discussion of this, Heidegger fell back on the etymology of the word thing from “Thing”, the Germanic term for assembly, an assembly that concerns man, in Heidegger”s language: “Das Ding dingt”, i.e., it assembles a world. Thus the things grant to the human being a dwelling and “sparing dwelling” in the world opened by them.

The human being, according to Heidegger, does not stand in the center of the world, which he does not determine, but is himself be-dingt. World is not “in itself” and thus “for” someone, but the happening of the openness of being in man. Accordingly, Heidegger rejects any philosophy of worldview.

Such a world happens historically. It has no center from which a supertemporal order could be established. A thinking that corresponds to this world – occasionally called “event thinking” – proceeds neither deductively nor justifying, it rather happens, like “when the early morning light grows silently over the mountains …”.

Heidegger did not only make philosophical considerations about this, but emphasized how important for a change of thinking attitudes like feelings and moods are. A different beginning would have to be accompanied by a certain mood attitude (Verhaltenheit). Moods, in their openness, are not directed to individual things, but to the whole of the world. Thus, the heart is sometimes seen as the center of Heideggerian thinking. In its openness to the event “beats

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Language as the house of being

For Heidegger, in the course of his path of thought, it became increasingly clear that the event of truth is a linguistic event. If truth happens in the form of art, science or technology, then this is always also a linguistic event. Therefore, the thinker must clarify what language is in the first place.

The language speaks

Heidegger rejected a conception of language as a mere instrument of communication. From his point of view, such a conception was the basis of the technical age, whose calculating thinking “communicates” information only for the organization of the mastery of being. The calculating thinking places the human being in the center of all being also in relation to language. According to Heidegger, however, if man thinks that “language is in his possession”, he misses its very essence: “Language speaks, not man. Man speaks only by skillfully corresponding to language.” With this, Heidegger wanted to express that man is a participant in a language that he himself did not produce alone. He is involved in a process of transmission and can only relate to what has been transmitted, to language.

Heidegger”s consideration, however, is not a cultural-philosophical one: with the tautological formulation “language speaks” he wants to prevent the phenomenon of language from being traced back to something other than language itself. According to his “ab-gründigen” thinking, he wants to escape a justification of language by something else. Thus, for example, what language is as language cannot be understood by tracing it back to the acoustic pronouncement, speech. Rather, according to Heidegger, language is something that is difficult to grasp because of our proximity to it, and therefore that which usually remains unthematized because it is just so close must be brought to language. In the treatise “On the Way to Language,” he made the attempt to get to that “in whose realm we are ever already.”

Language and world

The philosopher wanted to describe what language is beyond the mere means of communication. Thus, language has a world-opening function, which he discovered above all in poetry. Just as a thing opens up a world and thereby grants man dwelling, this also applies to language, especially to poetry. In the non-calculating language of poetry, being is touched as a whole. Language is the place where being appears. Insofar as language is thought of as a place, Being ”dwells” in it, as it were. Heidegger called language “the house of being”.

Central for Heidegger”s conception of language is therefore not the assumption of a chain of propositional statements from which truth is to be derived according to the rules of logic, but its relation to being. Accordingly, in language a world comes to language according to the respective experience of man in the history of his being. With this, Heidegger represents a counter-position to the philosophical tradition: “In philosophy, propositions can never be proven; and this already not because there are no highest propositions from which others could be derived, but because here “propositions” are not the true thing at all, nor simply that about which they state.”

Heidegger explains the completely different form of linguisticity in poetry with a fragment of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus: “”The Lord, whose place of saying is at Delphi, neither says, nor conceals, but beckons”. The original saying neither only directly reveals, nor does it simply conceal, but this saying is both in one and as this one a beckoning, where the said points to the unsaid, the unsaid to the said and to be said.”

The language grants a poetic dwelling

By giving language to the meaningful references in the world, the poetic word creates a world. In doing so, poetry, unlike propositional statements, leaves open spaces. In the unsaid, space remains for the references of the world that have not been expressed. Through the many secondary meanings that the poetic words carry, the world becomes rich in references. It is semantic references, which is why the world is a linguistic phenomenon: dwelling cannot be done in a silent space; things in the world are rather eloquent. The pure functionality of a technical world, on the other hand, would be poor in references.

Poetry does not make statements about individual things, but focuses on their relationship. As an example, Heidegger explains that the gift and the jug can only be thought through their relationship to each other, not on their own. By giving voice to the relationship that lies before the individual things, poetry first founds the world as a relational wholeness that precedes the individual things. Through the foundation of the world, poetry grants the mortals (in this) residence and dwelling. Heidegger took this meaning from an excerpt of a poem by Hölderlin: “Full of merit, yet poetically, wohnet

According to Heidegger, man never has language at his disposal in its entirety, but relates to it. Thus, the poet cannot make dwelling possible by virtue of himself, but is dependent on the granting of language. Therefore, man must overcome the idea of language as a means of communication, because in this understanding of language only a technical reference to the world is expressed. Only if he recognizes that language is not an individual part in a technical world, but the house of being, a new world can happen.

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Overview

Martin Heidegger is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His thoughts, directly and through some of his students, exert a great and lasting influence on modern philosophy, even outside Germany, as well as on the humanities.

Heidegger was perceived by many as a charismatic personality who exerted a strong fascination on his students. Karl Löwith, Heidegger”s student, Nietzsche connoisseur and skeptic, characterized him as follows:

His direct students include Hans-Georg Gadamer, who continued the hermeneutic approach, Hannah Arendt, who set herself apart from Heidegger in her political writings, among other things, through her revolutionary concept of free plural confrontations in the political sphere, Hans Jonas, who, as an existential philosopher, took responsible ethical positions on ecology and medicine in his late work, and Ernst Tugendhat, who, starting from a critical attitude toward Heidegger”s concept of truth, found his way to analytical philosophy.

Through Jean-Paul Sartre, Heidegger gave the impetus for French existentialism. Herbert Marcuse connected the reflections from Being and Time with Marxism. Emmanuel Levinas developed his more human-oriented ethics in critical distinction to Heidegger”s strong orientation to Being. Michel Foucault”s biography of thought was accompanied by an intensive reading of Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida took up the idea of ontological difference and destruction in his concept of différance. Pierre Bourdieu dealt critically with Heidegger”s political ontology. Heidegger also exerted great influence on modern Japanese philosophy, and the Heidegger Complete Edition is published in Japanese. With reference to Heidegger”s late thought, many attempts have been made to connect his approaches to Far Eastern traditions of thought – but recent works question this connection. Heidegger also influenced the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, with whom he taught jointly at the University of Marburg in the 1920s.

In 1953, Walter Schloss (1917-1994) founded the Heidegger Circle “Circle of Reflection” in Berlin, which dealt with Heidegger”s writings and was additionally connected with Heidegger and his wife through correspondence and visits. Guests, members and leaders of the circle included later professors. The circle was supported by state funds, had up to 17 members and existed for about ten years.

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Criticism

Heidegger”s philosophical work was rejected as a whole from various sides, for example by the empiricist-positivist Vienna Circle, which saw in Heidegger”s philosophy a return to metaphysics. Philosophers working in language analysis, such as Rudolf Carnap, rejected Heidegger”s terminology early on as empty of content. Carnap developed his critique in 1932 in Overcoming Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language. Here he declares metaphysical terms to be generally meaningless, since what they denote cannot be proven logically or empirically. On the basis of Heidegger”s concept of “nothing” he tried to show that metaphysical concept formation is often also simply based on logical confusions: This arises from an ontologization of the negative existential quantifier (“not”), which cannot be made at all in a logically correct language.

Although Carnap”s strict criteria for meaningful language use have not been shared by later analytic philosophers (mainly due to the expanding work of Wittgenstein and Popper), the split between continental and analytic-Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition goes back to this and remained determinant for a long time. Only Richard Rorty tried to build bridges between the two again.

Also of great poignancy were the attacks on the part of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor W. Adorno”s Jargon of Actuality (first edition 1964), which polarized continental intellectual life in the 1960s. In the first part of Negative Dialectics, Adorno conducts his central argument with Heidegger: “Historicity silently places history in the unhistorical . On the other hand, again, the ontologization of history permits one to ascribe being-power to unseen historical power and thus to justify subordination to historical situations as if it were commanded by Being itself.”

Hans Albert criticized Heidegger from the perspective of critical rationalism. Heidegger, in the succession of Hegel and Husserl, had prepared the ground for a new irrationalism, which “in contrast to scientific thinking is located in the vicinity of poetry”. Albert sees in Heidegger”s philosophy an attempt to rehabilitate pre-scientific ways of thinking and to undermine the tradition of rational argumentation, using unclear, mystifying language to create the impression of depth of thought, which his work actually lacks completely. This impression is made above all by “contemporaries who, while cavorting in philosophical realms, are in reality looking for religious edification or need a substitute for religion.”

Much of the criticism of Heidegger and his work has been directed at the reproach of National Socialism and anti-Semitism, both in relation to his person and to his philosophical thought. The relationship between his work and National Socialism has been discussed since a study by A. Schwan in 1965. Silvio Vietta, on the other hand, has also elaborated Heidegger”s explicit critique of National Socialism and its development into a large-scale world power politics such as technological globalization.

Whereas previously only a few remarks with anti-Semitic connotations were found in his writings, since the publication of statements from the Schwarze Hefte in 2014 there has been widespread agreement among researchers that Heidegger was an anti-Semite, due to numerous anti-Semitic stereotypes, although biological racism is excluded by the majority. In the context of National Socialist beliefs, apart from the various speeches in which he explicitly glorified Hitler, National Socialist aspects of his work on Hölderlin and Nietzsche in particular are debated. The spectrum of opinions ranges from the point of view, also held by Heidegger himself, that his National Socialist commitment was an erroneous phase with no effect on his work, to the interpretation of his entire philosophy as National Socialist ideology.

See also: →Doxography on the question of anti-Semitism in Heidegger →Debate on Martin Heidegger and Fake News.

Edmund Husserl perceived the work as a departure from the aims of his Phenomenology, even though Heidegger placed it under the title Phenomenology and dedicated it to Husserl, leaving the work without this dedication in the 5th edition of 1941. Heidegger tended toward strong exaggerations in the writing. This earned him criticism from various quarters. For example, his analysis of tenses was criticized for sacrificing the present to a life directed toward the future. It was also criticized that the self-reliance he proclaimed for a conscious life was so detached from society and fellow human beings that it was ultimately solipsism.

Heidegger carried out his world analysis only on the basis of tools for the practical meaning contexts of life. With this, however, things other than tools cannot be understood; for example, what the ring we wear on our finger means. Also, the linkage of all things back to the Umwillen of Dasein narrows the view of the world.

The great importance Heidegger attached to death is also often met with rejection in its reception. Thus, it is not clear why problems of existence can only be illuminated in view of death.

Hannah Arendt, who would actually have dedicated her main philosophical work to Heidegger if his stance on National Socialism had not made this impossible, developed against Heidegger”s concept of mortality the counter-model of “nativity,” i.e., every newly born human being, every generation, always has the chance to make a new beginning in order to shape a freer, better world. In her article What is Existential Philosophy?, first published in the USA in 1946, Arendt had once publicly criticized Heidegger”s philosophy.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty criticized Heidegger”s lack of inclusion of the corporeality of Dasein. In distinction to Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty shows a “third way” to describe the fundamental connection between Dasein and the world. Unlike Heidegger, who sees the subject in its being as Dasein, he sees it in its corporeality, from which the original experience of the world arises.

The philosopher of religion Klaus Heinrich comments on Heidegger from his terms and arrives at a radical critique of his philosophy.

Andreas Graeser provides fundamental criticism of Heidegger”s theses and their justifications.

Ernst Tugendhat compared Husserl”s concept of truth with that of Heidegger. For Husserl, truth opens up when the being shows itself “as it is in itself”. This formula contains through its “how” a comparison of the thing with itself. Heidegger, on the other hand, interprets truth as discoverability. In doing so, however, he largely drops the critical comparison of the thing with itself in distinction to Husserl, which for Tugendhat means: “If truth means unconcealment, as Heidegger understands the word, then what matters is that an understanding of the world opens up at all, not that we examine it critically.” Tugendhat thus sees no value in Heidegger”s concept of truth, since it does not indicate a way in which statements can be examined for their truth.

Criticism of the late work

While Heidegger”s late work is often rejected or more or less ignored, Jacques Derrida, in particular, refers to it positively in contrast to the thought processes in Being and Time, since Heidegger had thus overcome the philosophy of the subject.

Heidegger”s attempt to think the “divine” and to invoke it with Hölderlin did not meet with the approval of even those who certainly appreciated his way of thinking, as an inconsistent part of his philosophy. Byung-Chul Han speaks in this context of a “”theological” compulsion”.

In the writings after the Kehre, according to Han and others, explanations of word origins are often passed off as etymologically correct, but Heidegger sometimes carried them out in a daring and disguising manner. Heidegger himself emphasized that these did not function as proofs, but were intended to open up new dimensions to philosophical language.

The interpretations that Heidegger gave to some of the poems of Hölderlin, Trakl, Rilke, and Stefan George have met with criticism from literary scholars. They claim that Heidegger read these poems from his own worldview and “reinterpreted” them in the categories of his thought. However, Heidegger explicitly did not intend his interpretations to contribute to literary studies. Rather, he claimed to make “annotations,” this even at the risk of missing the “truth of Hölderlin”s poetry.”

Heidegger”s interpretations of the history of his being, for example, those of Plato or Nietzsche, also cannot stand up to a close examination in terms of the history of philosophy. Various Heidegger interpreters point this out. In addition, a compilation from Nietzsche”s estate (“Der Wille zur Macht”), which had not been published by Nietzsche in this form, was decisive for Heidegger”s argument with Nietzsche. According to Pöggeler, however, Heidegger”s deliberate perspectival narrowings and one-sidedness aimed at exposing basic patterns of Western thought and thus opening up new approaches to the tradition”s stock-in-trade. He was less concerned with a historically correct interpretation than with a constructive “dialogue” with the thinkers, with a “conversation” that is placed under a certain questioning from the outset.

Intercultural hermeneutics criticizes Heidegger”s hermeneutically closed philosophy of language for its difficulty in initiating a dialogue between East and West. His writing “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache. Between a Japanese and a Questioner” (1953

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Fonts

The Martin-Heidegger-Gesamtausgabe is published by Vittorio Klostermann. It is designed for 102 volumes. An index of all Heidegger”s writings (7609 numbers) can be found in: Heidegger-Jahrbuch 1. Freiburg

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Secondary literature

Philosophy Bibliography: Martin Heidegger – Additional Literature on the Topic

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Movies

Heidegger himself donated a large part of his estate to the Marbach Literature Archive during his lifetime.

In the years 1931-1975, Heidegger kept diary entries, “thought diaries” with posthumous publication intentions: they have been published since March 2014 as “Schwarze Hefte” in several volumes. Especially the anti-Semitic statements contained therein revived the scholarly debate and research on Heidegger”s position on fascism, National Socialism, and anti-Semitism (Heidegger-Rezeption).

In 2014, the grandson Arnulf Heidegger took over the administration of the estate from his father Hermann.

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Sound documents

The following recordings are part of the Speech of the Month series of the University Library of Freiburg and the Catholic Academy of the Archdiocese of Freiburg:

Other sound documents:

Sources

1. Martin Heidegger
2. Martin Heidegger