Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose work shaped phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism in the twentieth century. Many scholars regard him as the most important thinker of his era, and his influence extends into architecture, literary criticism, theology and cognitive science. He matters chiefly because he revived what he called the question of being, which he argued Western thought had neglected since the ancient Greeks.

Born in the small town of Messkirch in Baden, Heidegger was raised Catholic, the son of a cooper who was also the village sexton. He trained for the priesthood, entered a Jesuit novitiate in 1909 and left within weeks because of heart trouble. According to his own account, a copy of Franz Brentano's dissertation on the many senses of being in Aristotle, lent to him in 1907 by the seminary director Conrad Gröber, first drew him to the question of being. He then turned to philosophy, took his doctorate in 1913 with a thesis on psychologism and qualified as a lecturer in 1915 with a study of Duns Scotus under the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. In 1916 he became Husserl's assistant.

In 1923 he moved to Marburg, then the leading centre of neo-Kantianism, and began to shape his own path through readings of Aristotle, Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Luther, and Kierkegaard, Dilthey and Nietzsche. His major book, Being and Time, appeared in 1927. In it he analysed Dasein, the human way of being, as being-in-the-world: an existence thrown into possibilities, which already understands being before any theory does. The book brought him international attention, though he regarded it as unfinished, since the planned part on time never appeared in its original form.

In 1928 he succeeded Husserl in the chair at Freiburg, where his 1929 inaugural lecture was titled 'What is Metaphysics?' Around the 1930s his thinking underwent what is called the Kehre, or turn. He moved away from the starting point of the analysis of human existence toward the happening of being itself, and toward language, technology, art and poetry, especially the poems of Hölderlin. Introduction to Metaphysics and the Letter on Humanism, the latter written after the war, reflect this change and his distance from traditional metaphysics, which he described as a forgetting of being.

The years from 1933 to 1945 are the most controversial of his life. He was elected rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, joined the Nazi Party and publicly supported the regime for a time, resigning the rectorship in 1934 but continuing to teach. The extent of his commitment, and the relation between his philosophy and his politics, remain much debated. After the war he was barred from teaching, and in 1949 he was classified as a 'fellow traveller', a category without punitive measures, which allowed him to return to teaching at Freiburg in 1951.

His influence was especially strong in France, where Sartre, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Lévinas engaged with his thought. His students included Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith. His writings on technology have fed critiques of modern civilisation, while his dense and personal style continues to divide readers. He died in Freiburg in 1976.