Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is one of the most influential and most troubling philosophers of the twentieth century — a thinker whose insights are so original and whose language is so demanding that generations of readers have had to decide whether the encounter with his work is worth its considerable difficulty, and whose catastrophic involvement with National Socialism forces every reader to hold philosophical depth and political horror in the same hand. His masterwork Being and Time (1927) asked the question that philosophy had, he argued, forgotten: not what kinds of things exist, but what it means to be at all. That question — the question of Being — reopened everything. And in answering it, Heidegger dismantled the Cartesian framework that had governed Western thought for three centuries and replaced it with a vision of human existence as always already out in a world, involved, situated, and with others.

Core Ideas

Heidegger’s foundational move is the analysis of Dasein — the German word for “existence” that he uses for the human way of being, literally “being-there.” Dasein is not a subject inside a mind who then encounters an external world; Dasein is always already in a world, engaged with things and others in practical involvements. Being-in-the-world is the primary structure of human existence, not a secondary achievement. Before I theorize, I am already involved; before I observe, I am already doing; before I am a subject, I am already with others. This overturning of the Cartesian picture is Heidegger’s most durable contribution and the foundation of everything that follows.

The three constitutive moments of Dasein’s being-in-the-world are thrownness, projection, and fallenness. Thrownness (Geworfenheit): I find myself already thrown into a situation not of my choosing — a historical moment, a body, a language, a set of possibilities and limitations. I did not choose to be born here, now, as this. Projection (Entwurf): Dasein is always already ahead of itself, oriented toward possibilities, living in a kind of future-directedness. I am not a fixed thing but a being who is always already becoming. Fallenness (Verfallenheit): the tendency to get absorbed in the everyday — in what “one” does, in das Man (the “they-self”), in the anonymous public world that relieves me of the burden of my own existence.

Care (Sorge) is Heidegger’s term for the unified structure of Dasein’s being — the way our existence is always a matter of being-ahead-of-ourselves-in-the-world-alongside-others. We are essentially caring beings: everything we encounter matters, even if only in the mode of indifference. And being-with (Mitsein) is a constitutive dimension of this care: we are not first alone and then in relations with others; being-with is part of the basic structure of our existence. Dasein is inherently social. Even when I am alone, I am alone in a world shaped by others.

Being-toward-death is one of Heidegger’s most important and disturbing concepts. Death is not just an event that will eventually happen to me; it is the most fundamental possibility of my existence, one that is entirely mine and that I cannot delegate or escape. Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) — literally, “ownedness” — requires owning my being-toward-death, not fleeing from it into the anonymous comfort of das Man. Most of the time, we live inauthentically — absorbed in the public world, refusing the anxiety that comes with owning our finitude. Authentic existence does not mean constant anxiety but rather a different relationship to the possibilities of one’s life, a willingness to take one’s existence as genuinely one’s own.

Heidegger’s later work shifts from the analysis of Dasein to the question of Being itself — the “history of Being” and the way Western metaphysics has progressively covered over the question of Being by taking beings as the fundamental unit. His analysis of technology as a mode of revealing the world — specifically, as a mode that “enframes” everything as standing-reserve (Bestand), available for exploitation and calculation — is one of the most powerful critiques of modernity available. Henry Corbin was Heidegger’s student and brought his analysis of the oblivion of Being into the context of Islamic mysticism; Levinas was both deeply formed by Heidegger and drove a coach and horses through the hole in his ethics.

Key Works

• Being and Time (1927) — The masterwork; the fundamental analysis of Dasein and the question of Being.
• “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1950) — An essay that develops Heidegger’s account of truth as unconcealment through an analysis of how art opens a world.
• “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954) — The central text of his analysis of modern technology as a mode of revealing that enframes everything as resource.
• Poetry, Language, Thought (1971) — A collection including essays on Hölderlin, the nature of dwelling, and the thing; among his most accessible late writings.
• “Letter on Humanism” (1947) — His response to existentialism; distinguishes his project from Sartre’s and clarifies the turn in his later work.

Connections

Emmanuel Levinas — Levinas was Heidegger’s student and deeply formed by him, but responded to Heidegger’s ontology with the insistence that ethics must come before Being.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Merleau-Ponty deepened and corrected Heidegger’s being-in-the-world by giving the body the central role it deserved.

Henry Corbin — Corbin was Heidegger’s French translator and a student of his philosophy, who brought the existential analysis into dialogue with Islamic mysticism.

James Filler — Filler’s project shows how Neoplatonism illuminates and grounds Heidegger’s question of Being and his understanding of relation.

Paul Tillich — Tillich’s concept of the Ground of Being and being-toward-death draw on Heidegger’s existential framework and translate it into theology.

Phenomenology — Heidegger transformed phenomenology from a method of consciousness-analysis into an inquiry into the meaning of Being.

Existentialism — Heidegger is the foundational figure of existentialism, though he resisted the label Sartre gave to the tradition.

Being-in-the-World — The core concept of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein.

Relational Ground — Being-with (Mitsein) as a constitutive dimension of Dasein reveals that relation is not secondary but ontologically fundamental.

Quotes

“Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.” — Being and Time

“The human being is not the lord of beings. The human being is the shepherd of Being.” — “Letter on Humanism”

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” — (attributed)

“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.” — “The Question Concerning Technology”