Martin Heidegger

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Heidegger was born on the 26th of September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of a village church sexton. He died in his sleep in Freiburg on the 26th of May 1976, and was buried two days later in his birthplace, beside his parents in the same village graveyard he had walked past each day on his way to school. His gravestone carries a single star, drawn from a sentence he wrote in 1947: "To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky."

  Few philosophers of the twentieth century provoked more admiration or more outrage. Richard Rorty placed him alongside John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein as one of the century's most important philosophers. Simon Critchley called him the most important figure in the continental tradition. And yet in April 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. He wore a swastika pin to a private meeting in Rome in 1936. He never offered an unambiguous public repudiation of what he had done.

  How does a thinker who asked what it means simply "to be" end up signing a vow of allegiance to Adolf Hitler? How does a philosophy built on authenticity and individual conscience coexist with complicity in one of history's most destructive movements? Those are the questions this documentary pursues.

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• 2. From Meßkirch to Marburg

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  Franz Brentano's work was the first serious philosophical encounter of Heidegger's life. He came across it during the period when he was training for the priesthood, a path that included a brief stint at a Jesuit seminary in 1909 before a heart condition ended that chapter within weeks.

  Heidegger turned instead to the University of Freiburg, studying theology and scholastic philosophy before pivoting in 1911 to recent philosophy, particularly Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. His 1914 graduation thesis examined psychologism; his 1915 habilitation, directed by the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert and shaped by Husserl's phenomenology, took Duns Scotus as its subject. That combination of medieval scholasticism and contemporary phenomenology would mark his thinking for decades.

  After working as an unsalaried Privatdozent and serving in a meteorological unit on the western front during the final year of World War I, Heidegger taught at Freiburg from 1919 to 1923, during which time he also became an assistant to Husserl himself. In 1923, he was elected to an extraordinary professorship at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Paul Natorp. Among his students were Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, and Hans Jonas.

  At Marburg, following Aristotle, he began to sharpen the central question he would pursue for the rest of his career: the question of the sense of being. By 1927, that inquiry had produced Being and Time, a book that raised him to what one contemporary account described as a position of international intellectual visibility.

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• 3. The Question of Being

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  Scholar Taylor Carman draws a precise distinction that cuts to the heart of Heidegger's project. Traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?" Heidegger's fundamental ontology asks something prior: "What does it mean for something to be?"

  Heidegger believed that Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks had neglected this question, mistakenly treating being as if it were simply an ultimate entity among other entities. His term for the kind of being that humans specifically have is Dasein, a German compound meaning "being-there." Dasein is defined by a pre-ontological understanding of being that shapes experience before any formal philosophy or science gets underway.

  The concept of being-in-the-world is the cornerstone of this analysis. The "in" here is not the physical containment of a body inside a room. It is the "in" of involvement, of engagement, of what Heidegger calls "residing" or "dwelling." People do not first encounter a world of neutral objects and then assign purposes to them. They encounter a world already organized by projects and uses, what Heidegger calls the "worldhood of the world."

  His example of a fork captures this neatly. When someone picks up a fork at dinner, they are not consciously noting its stabbing properties. They are non-reflectively engaging an in-order-to-eat. The fork is "ready-to-hand"; it is transparent in use. Only when it snaps does it become "present-at-hand," an object requiring focal attention.

  Heidegger identifies three structural features of being-in-the-world that he calls existentiales: understanding, attunement, and discourse. Understanding is the basic know-how with which Dasein navigates daily life. Attunement is the way people find themselves already thrown into a situation where things already matter. Discourse is the articulation that makes language possible. Heidegger unifies these three features under a composite structure he calls "care," and what ties care together is temporality: understanding aims toward future possibilities, attunement is shaped by the past, and discourse discloses the present.

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• 4. Das Man and Authenticity

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  Dasein is never a solitary project. Heidegger insists that social existence is as primordial as individual selfhood, and his term for this social dimension is das Man, usually rendered in English as "the they" or "the one."

  In Heidegger's own words, the they prescribes "the kind of being of everydayness." People take pleasure as they take pleasure; they find shocking what they find shocking; they judge art as they judge art. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus characterized this as a "dictatorship" that threatens to undermine the very project Heidegger set out to pursue: if one is entirely absorbed in das Man, the question of being cannot even be raised.

  Heidegger's response is the concept of authenticity, drawn from the German Eigentlichkeit, where the root eigen means "own." Authenticity, on this account, is not a state to be discovered but something to be enacted: a matter of taking a "resolute" stand on one's own projects rather than drifting in the anonymous current of public opinion. Scholars Somogy Varga and Charles Guignon identify three paths through which Dasein might reach this condition. Anxiety can strip away the comforting anonymity of das Man, exposing a person as an ultimately isolated individual. Direct confrontation with death, one's "ownmost" possibility, discloses irreducible finitude. And the experience of conscience, which Heidegger calls a "call," discloses the debt a person owes to their own possibilities.

  Philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman describes this as a matter not of intellectual comprehension but of hard-won insight: allowing the ego to be eclipsed by the reality of one's finitude. In Heidegger's later work, the term "authenticity" disappears, but Zimmerman argues it is replaced by the concept of Ereignis, an ordinary German word for "event" that Heidegger retheorizes as the appropriation of Dasein into a cosmic play of concealment and appearance.

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• 5. The Turn: Language, Technology, Poetry

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  By 1930, something was shifting in Heidegger's work, and commentators have debated ever since how dramatic that shift was. Heidegger himself used the term Kehre, or the Turn, though he rejected any notion of a sharp about-turn. Scholar Michael Inwood notes that many ideas from Being and Time survive in his later writings under different vocabularies.

  What changed most visibly was the range of questions and the register in which he addressed them. The early Heidegger analyzed Dasein's structure; the later Heidegger turned toward the history of being itself, seeking to recover what he believed was an original experience of being present in early Greek thought that had been obscured by Plato and Aristotle. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, he singles out Heraclitus as the thinker most fundamentally misread by the Western tradition.

  Language moved to the center of this later work. In Being and Time, language was logically secondary, something that could develop from prelinguistic significance. Post-turn, certain words become world-disclosive: they establish the foundational parameters within which understanding occurs at all. Hence his declaration that "Language is the house of being."

  Heidegger saw modern technological civilization as having reduced language to a tool of instrumental reason, flattening the significance of the world. His turn toward poetry, particularly the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin, was a response to this diagnosis. He granted Holderlin a singular place in the history of being and of Germany, calling him a herald whose thought had not yet been truly heard. Several of his lecture courses in the 1930s and 1940s were devoted to reading a single poem; Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister" is one example. His 1936-1940 lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche at Freiburg, published in 1961, formed another major strand of this period, reading The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics.

  The 1951 essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" influenced architectural theorists. "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954) and "What Is Called Thinking?" (1954) extended these later preoccupations. And Contributions to Philosophy, which some commentators consider his second greatest work, was written in 1936-1937 but not published until 1989, thirteen years after his death.

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• 6. The Rectorate and Nazi Allegiance

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  Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933. Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on the 21st of April 1933, and joined the Nazi Party on the 1st of May.

  His inaugural address as rector, the Rektoratsrede, was delivered on the 27th of May 1933 in a hall decorated with swastikas, with members of the Sturmabteilung and prominent Nazi officials present. That summer, in a lecture on Heraclitus, his notes appeared under the heading "Struggle as the essence of Beings" and suggested that if an enemy could not be found for a people, one must be invented, and then annihilated. In November 1933, he signed the Vow of Allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler.

  His tenure as rector was troubled. Some Nazi officials viewed him as a rival; others treated his philosophical writings as gibberish. He resigned in April 1934. But he remained a member of the Nazi Party and, after the rectorate, accepted a position on the Committee for the Philosophy of Law in the Academy for German Law, which had official consultant status in preparing Nazi legislation including the Nuremberg racial laws. Nazi notables Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Carl Schmitt, and Alfred Rosenberg served alongside him.

  Karl Lowith met Heidegger in Rome in 1936 and recorded in an account from 1940 that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, knowing Lowith was Jewish. Lowith recalled that Heidegger left no doubt about his faith in Hitler, and stated that his support for Nazism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.

  Heidegger's treatment of Edmund Husserl became a focal point for critics. Husserl had championed Heidegger's work since 1917 and helped him secure the Freiburg chair. By 1933, Heidegger had broken off contact with his mentor. He did not attend Husserl's cremation in 1938, an absence for which he later expressed regret in a letter to Husserl's widow. In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, he agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time; it was restored in postwar editions. Hannah Arendt initially called Heidegger a "potential murderer" over the Husserl affair, though she later recanted that accusation.

  In 2014, Heidegger's Black Notebooks, written from 1931 into the early 1970s, were published. They contain explicit anti-Semitic passages. One refers to "world Judaism" as "ungraspable everywhere." Another argues that Jews had "promoted the very reasoning by which they were now being attacked" and therefore had no right to complain. Scholars have traced the phrase "world Judaism" to the anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to Hitler's Mein Kampf.

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• 7. Denazification and the Postwar Reckoning

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  In late 1946, French military authorities determined that Heidegger should be blocked from teaching or participating in any university activities because of his association with the Nazi Party. He was formally classified as a Mitlaufer, the second lowest of five categories of incrimination, when denazification proceedings concluded in March 1949. No punitive measures were proposed. He was readmitted to teaching at Freiburg in the winter semester of 1950-51, taught regularly from 1951 to 1958, and then by invitation until 1967.

  His postwar critical comments about Nazism struck many observers as deeply inadequate. In a lecture delivered in Bremen in 1949, he equated the Nazi extermination camps with modern agriculture, the hydrogen bomb, and the blockading of countries into famine: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps."

  In 1967, Heidegger met Paul Celan, a Jewish poet and concentration camp survivor, at his country retreat. The two had been corresponding since 1956. Celan wrote an enigmatic poem about the meeting, which some interpret as an expression of his wish that Heidegger would apologize for his conduct during the Nazi era. No such apology came.

  On the 23rd of September 1966, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which he agreed to discuss his political past on the condition that it not be published until after his death. The interview appeared five days after he died, on the 31st of May 1976, under the title "Only a God Can Save Us." He defended his rectorate as an attempt to protect the university from politicization. Lowith's 1940 account, which reported that Heidegger wore a swastika pin in Rome and declared his support for Hitler, directly contradicts the version Heidegger offered Der Spiegel. The interviewers were not in possession of much of the evidence now known for his Nazi sympathies; one of them, Georg Wolff, had himself been an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer stationed in Oslo during the war.

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• 8. Legacy and Influence

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  Jean-Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Richard Rorty were all substantially shaped by Heidegger's thought, whether in agreement or in opposition. Derrida traced deconstruction to Heidegger's own terms Destruktion and Abbau. Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness shows Heidegger's direct influence, though Heidegger himself argued that Sartre had misread him, and published "On Humanism" in 1947 partly to clarify the difference.

  Hubert Dreyfus introduced the notion of "being-in-the-world" to research in artificial intelligence, arguing that long-standing problems like the Frame problem could only be dissolved within a Heideggerian framework. Heidegger also shaped Enactivism and Situated robotics.

  The scholar Chang Chung-Yuan wrote that Heidegger was "the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands Tao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well." Philosopher Reinhard May argued that Heidegger drew heavily, and without acknowledgment, from German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics, describing the extent of this unacknowledged appropriation as "quite unparalleled."

  Criticism came from many directions. Husserl accused Heidegger of reducing phenomenology to philosophical anthropology. Rudolf Carnap called his ontology an "illusory" product of reification and logical confusion. Bertrand Russell wrote that one could not help suspecting that "language is here running riot." Theodor Adorno produced an extended critique of Heidegger's use of language in Jargon of Authenticity. Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Lowith, and Adorno argued that his Nazism revealed flaws inherent in the thought itself; Hannah Arendt and Slavoj Zizek, in their different ways, held that the philosophy could be separated from the politics.

  Heidegger arranged for a complete edition of his works, the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, to be compiled in his final days. The first volume appeared in 1975. As of October 2025, the collection, which runs to 106 volumes, is complete.

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