Martin Heidegger



Throughout his career, he sought to help us live more wisely. He wanted us to be braver about facing up to certain truths, and to lead richer, more thoughtful, happier lives. Philosophy was no academic exercise. It was – as it had been for the Ancient Greeks – a spiritual vocation and a form of therapy. He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of new diseases of the soul.. Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with  and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy.

A short biography
Born in the rural, religious town of Meßkirch, Germany, Heidegger was greatly influenced by his upbringing and would hate technology, cities, and pop music for the rest of his life. He went on to study theology at the University of Freiburg, but after two years in 1911 he swapped majors to philosophy. He started teaching philosophy in 1915 and married Elfride Petri in 1917. Two inverse stopped clock moments happened in his life: his affair with in the 1920s and his joining of the Nazi Party in 1933. While he stopped attending Nazi activities in 1934, he remained a member until the party's dismantling, never openly apologized for his involvement apart from calling it "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens"), and it still remains a highly controversial aspect of his life and philosophy. He died in 1976, and is buried in Meßkirch.

Sein und Zeit
Published in 1927, Being and Time is standardly hailed as one of the most significant texts in the canon of (what has come to be called) contemporary European (or Continental) Philosophy. It catapulted Heidegger to a position of international intellectual visibility and provided the philosophical impetus for a number of later programmes and ideas in the contemporary European tradition, including existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, and  notion of 'deconstruction'.

Heidegger's magnum opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) is a long, tedious book that we can't recommend reading (unless you have a brain the size of a planet, in which case, be our guest) because of its various neologisms and, like, impossible prose. We'll summarise it for you (you're welcome). It was written in 1927 and is largely considered influential (apparently it's had impact on architecture? We're not totally sure, but we'll take Stanford's word for it ).

Nothing quite rivals the prose of his masterpiece Being and Time (1927) in terms of contortions and the sheer number of complex compound German words which the author coined, among them 'Seinsvergessenheit' (Forgetfulness of Being), 'Bodenständigkeit' (Rootedness-in-soil) and 'Wesensverfassung' (Essential Constitution).

His work has four main points, and we'll cover them super briefly.

One: we've forgotten to notice that we're alive
It's worth mentioning here that while we know it in theory (obviously you need to be alive to be reading this), Heidegger asserts that we aren't properly in touch with the 'Mystery of Being', the mystery of what Heidegger would term das Sein, or Being with a capital B. Much of his time is devoted to trying to wake us up to the strangeness of living on this tiny planet in a seemingly uninhabited, silent universe.

Many of Heidegger's translators capitalise the word ‘Being’ (Sein) to mark what, in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger will later call the ontological difference, the crucial distinction between Being and beings (entities). The question of the meaning of Being is concerned with what it is that makes beings intelligible as beings, and whatever that factor (Being) is, it is seemingly not itself simply another being among beings. Unfortunately the capitalisation of ‘Being’ also has the disadvantage of suggesting that Being is, as Sheehan (2001) puts it, an ethereal metaphysical something that lies beyond entities, what he calls ‘Big Being’. But to think of Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the capitalisation is supposed to help us avoid. For while Being is always the Being of some entity, Being is not itself some kind of higher-order being waiting to be discovered. As long as we remain alert to this worry, we can follow the otherwise helpful path of capitalisation.

The question of Being aims… at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine beings as beings of such and such a type, and, in doing so, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.

For Heidegger, the modern world is an infernal machine dedicated to distracting us from the basic wondrous nature of Being. It constantly pulls towards practical tasks, it overwhelms us with information, it kills silence, it doesn't want to leave us alone – partly because realising the mystery of Being has its frightening dimensions. Doing so, we may be seized by fear ('Angst') as we become conscious that everything that had seemed rooted, necessary and oh-so-important may be contingent, senseless and without true purpose. We may ask why we have this job rather than that one, are in a relationship with one person rather than another, are alive when we might so easily be dead… Much of daily life is designed to keep these odd, unnerving but crucial questions at bay. What we're really running away from is a confrontation with – and even non-German speakers might respond to the sonorous depth of this key Heideggerian term – ‘das Nichts’ (The Nothing), which lies on the other side of Being. The Nothing is everywhere, it stalks us, it will swallow us up eventually, but – Heidegger insists – a life is only well lived when one has taken Nothingness and the brief nature of Being on board – as we might do when, for example, a gentle evening light gives way to darkness at the end of a warm summer's day in the foothills of the Bavarian alps.

Two: we've forgotten that all being is connected
Enter woo filled theories misquoting Heidegger. In essence, Heidegger says that all being is connected by the fact that everything is existing. We are 'connected' with the clouds in the sky and the rocks five metres away because we all are in the state of existing.

Three: we forget to be free and live for ourselves
Self-explanatory. Basically, Heidegger realised that we spend a great deal of our time trying to please a world that, if we're being honest, probably doesn't really like us that much in the first place, or at least doesn't notice us. Heidegger, therefore, wants us to start living for ourselves and to stop living for the world.

Much about us isn't, of course, very free. We are – in Heidegger’s unusual formulation – 'thrown into the world' at the start of our lives: thrown into a particular and narrow social milieu, surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices and practical necessities not of our own making. Heidegger begs us to break away from das Gerede (the Chatter) in the world (things like news and social media and constant inflows of information) that fills our minds and distracts us, and begs us to break away from the masses (what he termed the they-self as opposed to ourself).

The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this ‘Thrownness’ (this ‘Geworfenheit’) by understanding its multiple features. We should aim to grasp our psychological, social and professional provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal perspective. In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from ‘Uneigentlichkeit’ to ‘Eigentlichkeit’ (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start to live for ourselves.

Four: we treat others as objects
In essense, Heidegger asks us to treat other people as the ends, not the means. Heidegger notes that most of the time we treat others as equipment to help us meet certain ends, and asks that we think about the fact that the person over there is another person, who feels and loves and thinks and has goals like we do. They aren't just a tool, they're another being.