Heidegger History

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was an influential German philosopher best known for his Being and Time, published in 1927 and known too for his support of Hitler's fascism.
Heidegger tried to shed new light on an issue that many lonesome adolescents have wondered about - the question of being. He thought he could cut to the essence of the question with an imaginative array of words. Essence was a word he used often, including his article "The Essence of Truth," which he described as "truth as truth." He was trying to describe "being" without the relation or connection to other things that allow us to place and thereby to understand. He was pursuing ontology, without epistemology but metaphysics nevertheless, and muddled concerning "spirit," in league with his fellow German Oswald Spengler. British philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer disliked Heidegger's work, Russell commenting that "One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interest point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive."
Heidegger believed in German culture, tradition and a third way between communism and capitalism. He said: "Everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition." He was a critic of modern science and what he thought was humanity's subjugation to technology. He wrote with an a sense of impending crisis or catastrophe and spoke of a "darkening of the world" and an "enfeeblement of the spirit." He referred to Germany caught between the world of Anglo-American democracy to the west and Soviet communism to the east. Germany, he believed, was thereby under pressure and "most endangered."
Germany had endangered itself with its foolish foreign policies earlier in the century and with its wrongheaded policies while trying to defend itself in pursuing the Great War of 1914-19, and in the twenties Germany had an opportunity through moderation to improve its place in the world. But Heidegger was another of those alarmists with illusions. Germany, according to Heidegger, was "the most metaphysical of nations," and he was happy with this, wanting the Germans to look inward in order "to wrest a destiny from within itself," a destiny different from the Soviet Union and the United States, which he saw as the same insofar as there was "the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average man." Heidegger saw cultural decadence and unbridled mechanization in Western industrial society.
Heidegger was interested in spirit, in German geist, which translates to something like "spirit-mind." Was this spirit that Heidegger considered akin to the passions of football fans? Were the Germans more deeply religious? Was it this spirit in Wagner's music - which a few Swedes have thought excessive and symptomatic of the German character? While wordy and attempting exactitude and getting to essence, Heidegger was presupposing a spiritual exceptionalism and superiority to Germans that did not clearly exist.
Heidegger had a view about people similar to that of Nietzsche. He looked with favor upon the spirit of exceptional people - thinkers like himself. He looked with disfavor upon the average people, the weak-willed individuals who took no risk and sought only comfort and security. A rival view was held by enemy theorists: Marxists. Whatever one can say against Marxists, they had respect for the humanity or spirit of common people. We can include among them those revisionist Marxists known as Social Democrats, who had started Germany's Weimar Republic and led Germany's labor unions - Hitler's enemies all.
Heidegger, reared a Catholic, taught at the Protestant University of Marburg and attracted students from all over Europe - young people by their parent's wealth able to pursue an interest in the mysteries that Heidegger was sensationalizing. Among Heidegger's students were two Jews who would end up at the University of Chicago in the 1950s: Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Heidegger was not one of those German anti-Semite fanatics such as Goebbels and Hitler. Strauss was impressed by Heidegger but was to criticize his concern for "Being rather than beings." Heidegger was seventeen years older than Arendt, and married with two children. He was meeting with Arendt at her place, an attic apartment, with diffidence according to Arendt, who asked him in a note: "Why do you give me your hand shyly, as if it were a secret? Are you from such a distant land that you do not know our wine?"
Following Hitler's rise to power in January 1933, Heidegger joined the National Socialist (Nazi) Party - while communists, labor leaders and others in Germany were first being thrown into concentration camps. The rector of the University of Freiberg was dismissed and Heidegger appointed in his place. In his inaugural as rector, Heidegger mentioned essence numerous times, spoke of "spiritual leadership," the will of the German people, their "historical mission" and he ended with a quote from Plato that "All that is great stands in the storm."
Germany losing the war - Hitler going out, by the way, in a great storm - forced Heidegger to revise his thinking. Like many former Nazis he bent a little to the values of the victors - and in telling his past, some have said, distorted that past. His political response to the Holocaust was opposite that of Hannah Arendt: he urged a withdrawal from public life and resignation. Heidegger confused his own failings with the significance of philosophy and humanity's power to respond rationally to impending problems. He said, "Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human mediations and endeavors."