Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger , born in 1889 and died in 1976, is a German Philosophe. He is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.
The principal efforts of Heidegger relate to the traditional Métaphysique, that he interprets and critical from a phenomenologic point of view, Herméneutique and Ontologique. Author of To be and Times ( Center und Zeit ), his thoughts notably influenced modern philosophy, as well as other social sciences.
Its relationship with the ideology Nazi is today the object of discussed debates.
Biography
Martin Heidegger was born with Messkirch (Germany) the September 26th 1889. Raised in a very catholic medium, his/her father was sexton, Heidegger made secondary studies with the College Jesuit of Constancy, then of Freiburg. Then, to the University of this city, it will follow a teaching supported in Théologie, courses of Philosophie, but also of mathematics and sciences. It was intended, without conviction, with the priesthood before giving up the Foi. He will say then that this one is radically incompatible with philosophy.
The July 31st 1915 it is entitled to teach, like part-time lecturer, after having presented its thesis the doctrines of the categories and the significance at Duns Scot . After the First World War, he becomes the assistant, personnel, of Husserl of which he shares the reflections and research on the Phénoménologie. In 1923, it is named professor, nontitular, at the University of Marbourg. The following year, it will become acquainted with Hannah Arendt which will be its pupil and with which it will have a clandestine connection that it will stop at the time of its departure for Freiburg.
The March 12th 1926, it presents to Husserl, at the time of a reception for the 67 years of this one, the manuscript of Sein und Zeit (To be and Time), its first work, which will be published, the following year, at the request of the senior of the University of Marbourg.
In 1928, it takes the continuation of its Master Husserl, left with the retirement, at the University of Freiburg. At the time of the elections of 1932, it votes for the party National-Socialist (NSDAP), will become adherent about it the following year, until in 1945.
The April 21st 1933, it is elected vice-chancellor of the University of Freiburg three months after the advent of Hitler as chancellor of Reich (the January 10th 1933). He will pronounce the famous Discours of the Vice-chancellorship, which will be constantly opposite for him. In dissension on ideology political of national-socialisme, which would not correspond with the philosophical ideal which is it his, it resigns of its administrative offices the April 21st 1934 but will continue its teaching until the end of the war.
In 1945, at the end of the Second world war it will be interdict to teach by the Germans then by the winners of the war. This prohibition will be raised in 1951. Also, it will take again its courses until in 1958, date of its departure to the retirement of the University.
Thereafter, it will continue to animate seminars and to take part in conferences until 1973.
Married the March 21st 1917 with Elfride $petri, he was father of two wire: Jörg and Hermann. He died the May 26th 1976 with Freiburg-in-Brisgau (religious funeral).
Philosophy
The intention of Heidegger could be summarized by a déconstruction of the Western Métaphysique in order to reformulate a ontology there.
He proposes to include/understand the gasoline of the man on the basis of the truth Être. Radical innovation which appears to break with the tradition since the Greek origins of philosophy.
This step is articulated in two periods. On the one hand, the question of the direction Of being it starting from the human existence (Dasein) whose Sein und Zeit is main work and on the other hand, that of the conditions of a manifestation of the truth, in particular through the poetic language in which it sees an access to the Being itself.
Indeed, our daily existence is characterized by unauthentic conduits which occult the being by precipitating it in an ontological vacuity whose technique is the most perfect expression. The man discovers, by the experiment of the anguish, that nothing is the base of its being as a " being-for-the-mort" (see concatenation words).
The fundamental importance of Heidegger is due to this fact: in him, the history of philosophy car-is examined, recapitulated and closed by a bold gesture where it is transcended while being abolished. In the conference the Going beyond of metaphysics , it expresses that the completion of metaphysics finds its truth in the completed technique: cybernetics. It is in this direction, that it is turned as from the years 1936, towards the question of poetry in particular starting from an attentive reading of Hölderlin.
With Heidegger, philosophy conceives itself like a bracket open with Plato and closed at the 20th century, which opens on a new prospect, which is at the same time return to ancestral: the listening of the voice To be it in the myth so that the man releases himself from enfermement ontic.
Work
Its work, which should comprise more than one hundred volumes (102 or 108) when the edition is completed by it, mainly consists of its Cours which show the comprehension of all the Histoire of philosophy. In each Philosophy, he intends to flush out impensé singular which is it his the, due one to the lapse of memory Être, from which its blindness with the Histoire would come which it however contributes to work, promoting thus always more a Métaphysique of the will whose dead end culminates in the “will of will” characteristic of the accomplished Nihilisme.
Its sources
Its sources are very diverse, so that it constitutes a vast second reading of all the history of Western metaphysics.In Ontology, hermeneutics of factitiousness , written Heidegger: “My fellow traveller in research was the young person Luther and my model Aristote, that the first hated. The blows, it is Kierkegaard which carried them to me, and the eyes, it is Husserl which established them to me”. (Ga 63, pp. 5-6)
Three ways led Heidegger to Être and time , its deliver-Master:
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First of all, the thought aristotelician where Heidegger finds the question of the direction of being it. It reads since 1907 the book of Franz Brentano, Of the multiple significance of being at Aristote (1862). In the years 1920, it devotes the majority of its courses (1921, 1922,1924,1926) to the phenomenologic interpretation of the texts of Aristote.
- Then, the Phenomenology Husserl ienne . Heidegger reads the Logical Recherches since 1909. He becomes the assistant of Husserl to Freiburg and animates seminars of introduction to the Logical Recherches . In 1925, in its course on Prolégomènes with the history of the concept of time , it pays once again homage to the opening which constitutes in its eyes the work of 1901 and its three fundamental discoveries (intentionality, the phenomenologic direction of a priori and the intuition catégoriale) but takes its distances with regard to the turning transcendantal of phenomenology husserlienne of the Guiding ideas (1913). Sein und Zeit is dedicated to Husserl, “in testimony of veneration and friendship”. Heidegger succeeds to him Freiburg in 1929.
- Enfin, the theological source . “Without this theological source, I would never have arrived on my way of thought”, Heidegger writing in his “Maintenance on the word with a Japanese” (in Acheminement towards the word ).
Before To be and time
In 1918-19, Heidegger works out a course on “the philosophical bases of the medieval Mysticisme” (Ga 60), where it quotes Maître Eckhart, Saint Bernard, Therese d' Avila. Heidegger is devoted initially to a phenomenology of the religious life where it finds the experiments fundamental of the life which lead it to the development of analytical human Dasein . Its course of winter 1920 relates to Saint Paul, and that of the summer 1921 on Saint Augustin. In 1924, he pronounces a conference on the sin at Luther. In 1927, he pronounces an entitled conference “Phenomenology and theology”. Its latest writings, them are also marked by this source: the principle of reason , course of 1955, analyzes lengthily the worms of the mystic Angelus Silesius, and serenity ( Gelassenheit ) is a concept inherited Maître Eckhart.In the middle of the Years 1920, with the setting in front of the question of the time in the course Prolégomène with a history of the concept of time ( Prolegomena zur Geschichte of Zeitbegriffs ) (1925), Heidegger is brought to work on Kant. It devotes the six-month period of winter 1927-1928 to a phenomenologic interpretation of the Critique of the pure reason , which leads in 1929 to the publication of Kant and the problem of metaphysics and to its famous confrontation with Cassirer the same year to Davos.
The reference to Leibniz is less present, but Heidegger devotes to him some meetings of its seminar in 1928, and finds at his place the fundamental question of metaphysics: “Why it there with being and not rather nothing? ”
As from 1929, Heidegger turns to the German Idéalisme. The seminar of summer 29 which carries this title, DER deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) will not finally be marked. It devotes its seminar of winter 1930 to the study of the Phénoménologie of the Spirit of Hegel , and its seminar of summer 1936 being studied of Schelling.
To be and Time
To be and Time ( Center und Zeit , 1927), the most important work, constitutes the first part of a project which was not carried out in the long term. It marks an important turning of the continental philosophy (Lévinas - which was however opposed to Heidegger, on the question of ontology, considered with its reading that it belonged to the large imprescriptible philosophical texts). It is under its influence that develop the Existentialisme and the Déconstruction.
She questions the direction to be it starting from a déconstruction ( Abbau ) of the being-there (Dasein) of the man, fundamental topic of the ontology, defined by Aristote as being the question of being it as being. For Heidegger, this one is fallen in lapse of memory and commonplace (the philosophical tradition that will have to be destroyed - or, according to the translations - déconstruire), and must be rested in the light of “analytical of Dasein”, i.e. a study structural of the human existence.
“The Dasein (literally " Being-là" i.e. the human existence thought like presence of the world or " To be with the monde") is a being (i.e., existing it, the being real, concrete) which is not restricted to appear within being. It well rather has the following privilege ontic: for this being, it goes there in its being of this being. Comprehension to be it is itself a possibility of being of Dasein. The privilege ontic of Dasein consists of what it is ontological. ” ( To be and Time ).
In other words, the man is this ontologiquement being ontologiquement privileged in this which it has always already a certain agreement to be, not a knowledge, but a certain implicit comprehension and not set of themes of what “Being” for the étants means (things which are) which surrounds it. The knowledge of being is known as ontic: science is an example of ontic knowledge in what she never questions presupposed of her relations to the objects. The question of being it being, as for it, is known as ontological.
Heidegger and history of philosophy
Heidegger undertook to read again all the philosophers almost, and to begin again, again, the history of philosophy under the angle of the fundamental ontology drawn in Être and Time which throws, according to him, a “new critical lighting on the metaphysics, which it does not cease thinking until in its ultimate consequences, thus contributing to its collapse”. The Métaphysique is achieved and its end must be from now on ratified - it is the topic of the end of metaphysics. The history of philosophy, according to comprehension that it suggests some, is the history of “the lapse of memory Être by the fact of privileging the knowledge of being by adopting the point of view of being”. Thus plunged in the lapse of memory of its source (that is to say the word Être which is still let hear at the Présocratiques and which was, since, forgotten) and delivered to the study of being, it is exposed to yield in front of science if not to be reduced to it - the science whose feature which characterizes it is that it “does not think”.
Heidegger will not cease digging the questions which it raises with all philosophy, since the Présocratiques, under the aegis of the question Être, and starting from a “new comprehension of the truth”, heard either like adaequatio (between reality and spirit, or, in modern terms, subject and object), but like alêthéïa (thebuckled one), like revealing Être, which is held in withdrawal, infinite resource the possible ones.
The turning ( Kehre ) in the thought of Heidegger
The turning historial ( Kehre ) of the thought of Heidegger, becoming a “meditation of the history To be it”, heard within the meaning of a subjective genitive, like “the history of Western metaphysics” in which the Being exempts itself while withdrawing itself, the conduit to be turned to the beginning of this history: the Présocratiques. It devotes its seminar of summer 1932 to the study of Anaximandre and Parménide. Courses are devoted still thereafter to Parménide (1942/43) and Héraclite (1943 and 1944, then in 1966-1967 in common with Eugen Fink). The Chemins which do not carry out nowhere (“word of Anaximandre”) and the Essais and conferences (“Logos”, “Moired”, “Alêthéïa”) take again the majority of these readings.This Turning correlatively leads it towards the end of Western metaphysics, its completion in the Nihilisme with Nietzsche. Heidegger devotes six seminars to the study of its work of 1936 to 1942 which are collected in two volumes, Nietzsche I and Nietzsche II . In 1943, he pronounces the conference “the word of Nietzsche, God died”, included in the Chemins . In 1953, it does the conference pronounce “Which is Zarathoustra de Nietzsche? ”, included in the Tests and conferences .
The Nihilism, it will determine it dependant on the Technique and its advent as a Cybernétique.
Heidegger and poetry
Lastly, Heidegger devotes, as from the Thirties and until the end of its life, of many studies to poetry. Its course of 1934-35 is a reading of the anthems “the Germanic one” and “the Rhine” of Hölderlin. Other seminars will follow, devoted to “Remembering” (1941-42) and to “Ister” (1942). In 1946, it does conference pronounce celebrates it “Why poets? ”, interpretation of Hölderlin and Rilke, included in the Ways . In 1951, he pronounces a conference contemplating the words of Hölderlin “the man lives as a poet”, included in Essais and conference . In 1958, he pronounces a conference on Hebel. 1959, it publishes Acheminement towards the word , collection of conferences contemplating the Sprache starting from Hölderlin, Georg Trakl, Stefan George and Novalis. The work is dedicated to the French poet Rene Char, that Heidegger reads and meets: “for Rene Tank/in thanks of the poetic dwelling near at time to the seminars of Thor/with the safety of the friendship”. Lastly, in 1967, then in 1970, Heidegger attends Freiburg with the readings of Paul Celan (on this meeting, cf H. France-Lanord, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger , Fayard, 2004).
The apolitical attitude heideggérien
The majority of the interpreters consider that the theses of Heidegger, in particular those developed Sein und Zeit , mark the political absence of thought. What some precisely will object to him like a lack. Its existentiaux concepts are, indeed, free from any historicity (Dasein and the anguish which characterizes it like Being-for-the-death, are universal year-histories). Heidegger seems to scorn the political arena, because it concerns the analysis of a particular field of being, concerned with a speech of “one”, field of unauthenticity leading to all the illusions in which Dasein is let go, and which contributes to veil the access to its existential truth to him.
Contemporary of Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner is one of those which will denounce this lack. Heidegger would propose only " definitions; neutres" human existence, from which no political analysis can be elaborate. nor no decision taken compared to a historical and political economic situation. However, explains Plessner, the gasoline of the man does not exist, it does not hold in any definition, because he has to be determined itself in the history, in a historical way and according to the situations where he becomes what he decided to be. Plessner supports that the Man can be contained in “no neutral definition of a neutral situation”.
In 1931, he writes the Capacity and the human nature , after the opening of the national-Socialists to the elections of 1930. It is in this context that it exhorts philosophy to be awaked of its dream, to cease believing that it will be able to seize the “base” of the man. Its concept of historicity leads it to think that it must be risked in the field of the policy and take the responsability to clash with its dangers. The policy is defined according to Plessner, in manner very “machiavelienne”, like “the art of the favorable moment, of the favorable occasion”, which the Greeks called the kairos and this why Machiavel associated the fortuna with the virtù necessary to the politician.
And in 1931, the requirement of the moment, for a philosopher, is precisely to seize the political dimension which builds the man, its membership of people who is his distinctive feature, and the importance of nationality ( Volkstum ).
Plessner addresses the one second criticism to Heidegger: that not to grant sufficient attention to the nationality, from which all the political difficulties of people arise. The man exists only in the horizon of his people. According to Plessner, the philosophy of the authenticity does nothing but dig the ditch, traditional in Germany, between “a private sphere of the hello of the heart and a public sphere of the capacity”. According to him, Heidegger supports the indifference in policy thus.
Heidegger however, in Center und Zeit , devotes certain paragraphs, very few, to think the historicity of people and what it calls the " destiny of a peuple". On the one hand, Dasein, is always Mitsein, one being-with, which live within a community of similar, a political company. In addition, with the § 74, he declares that the historical destiny, authenticates, of Dasein is only achieved “in the community, the people”. Moreover, he insists on the fact that this to occur does not rest at all on the meeting of “isolated destinies”. Heidegger in To be and time proposes in Dasein an ideal freedom which is before very free report/ratio of the individual to oneself.
Heidegger underlines the factitious powers of existence which are the community and the people. There too, each one is thrown, in people, in a community, which it did not choose. So that authentic Dasein, which agreed to recognize its state d'" being-jeté" in the existence, can and must recognize in the same way, without illusions, as it is thrown in people, at a certain moment of the history, in a culture. It is this whole of pre-conditions of any existence, nonselected, which makes the condition of any Dasein, universal because the same one for all. And, the intrication of the factitious data of any individual human existence and of the history in becoming of people, of a community, is named by Heidegger, " destin". This historical membership, can, just as the individual existence, being lived in an authentic or unauthentic way, according to whether Dasein, recognizes the destiny of its people, worries and assumes its responsibilities for them.
Criticisms
The importance given to Heidegger in the world of the continental Philosophie is very large. Nevertheless, its reception among the analytical philosophical is different. Except for a favorable recension of To be and Time by Gilbert Ryle in the article “Mind off Being and Time” little time after its publication, the analytical contemporaries of Heidegger found the contents as much as the style like examples in the worst way of doing of philosophy.
The analytical tradition develops the clarity of expression, while Heidegger thought that “to make itself understandable is suicide for philosophy. ” In addition to the charge of obscurantism, the analytical philosophers consider the contents which can be glané of works of Heidegger like trivialement false, not-verifiable or uninteresting. This vision largely survived.
Reception
It had in particular as pupils Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean Wahl, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, max Horkheimer, Oscar Becker, Walter Biemel, Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka. One can add that many philosophers of reputation in Europe, either were trained with the thought of Heidegger, or largely influenced by his work. In Italy it is the case of Giorgio Agamben, Massimo Cacciari, Gianni Vattimo, among others, in Germany Ernst Tugendhat, Peter Sloterdijk, in Spain, Jose Ortega there Gasset, Xavier Zubiri, Julián Marías, in Greece Kostas Axelos, Romania Alexandru Dragomir. In the United States or Canada, many are also the thinkers who, such Hubert Dreyfus, Stanley Cavell or Richard Rorty, or Charles Taylor, refer to Heidegger and which knew its influence.
Reception of Heidegger in France
It is undoubtedly in France that the influence of Heidegger was more prégnante. The reference book on the reception of Heidegger in France east " Heidegger in France" of Dominique Janicaud, published at Albin Michel in 2001 (volume 2 is composed of discussions with the main actors of this reception).
It is Georges Gurvitch which it first, in 1928, made state in its course with the Sorbonne of Sein und Zeit.
But, it is starting from the end of the Second world war that the thought of Heidegger influences the intellectual life considerably, in particular through the Being and Nothing of Sartre, of inspiration heideggerienne, although, since 1946, in his Lettre on humanism , the Master of Freiburg took his distances with the existentialism sartrien.
In 1955 it is invited in France by Maurice de Gandillac and Jean Beaufret, to present a conference to Cerisy. It meets Jacques Lacan at which it remains. It was then regularly invited by Rene Char in Provence, to hold of the seminars retranscribed in Questions IV .
He was a thinker of reference for a pleiad of authors such Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alexandre Kojève, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Luc Marion, Claude Romano, in the line of the phenomenology and philosophies of the existence. Also for the great names of structuralism Lacan, Foucault, Althusser. Many writers like Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Rene Tank, Roger Munier, Michel Deguy. In the line of phenomenologic psychiatry, or Daseinsanalyse, Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Henri Maldiney. Within the framework of the studies aristotelicians, Pierre Aubenque, then Remi Brague. From the point of view of the déconstruction of metaphysics, Jacques Derrida, and his own pupils: Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Its interpreter “authorized” in France: Jean Beaufret, followed François Fédier.
Heidegger and Nazism
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Adhering to the Nazi party in 1933, the implication of Heidegger under third Reich and the influence of the theories Nazis on her thought, are the subject of interrogations and many and polemical debates, particularly in France. The controversy was in particular launched by Karl Löwith in 1946, in the review the Modern times and continues still today.
See also: Heidegger and the Nazism
Works
Translated into French
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To be and Time , 1927.
- What metaphysics? , 1929.
- Kant and the problem of metaphysics , 1929.
- Introduction to metaphysics , 1935.
- Nietzsche , 1936-1946.
- Lettre on humanism , 1946.
- Chemins which does not carry out nowhere, 1950.
- Which does one invite to think? , 1951.
- the question of the technique , 1953.
- Routing towards the word (Unterwegs zur Sprache) , 1953-1959
- End of philosophy and the task of the thought , 1964.
- Héraclite , 1966-1967.
- devastation and waiting: Maintenance on the country lane , 1945, ED. Gallimard, Paris, 2006.
Writings gathered
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