Heidegger: Philosophy in an Hour

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007466283
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

One of the two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was linguistic analysis, derived largely from Wittgenstein. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and its fundamental question was: ‘What is the meaning of existence?’ For Heidegger, this was not a query that could simply be ‘analysed away’ – it was beyond the reach of logic or reason. This was the primary ‘given’ of every individual life. To confront it, Heidegger needed to develop an entirely new form of philosophy.

Here is a concise, expert account of Heidegger’s life and philosophical ideas, entertainingly written and easy to understand. Also included are selections from Heidegger’s work, suggested further reading and chronologies that place Heidegger in the context of the broader scheme of philosophy.

Heidegger’s Life and Works

Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in the south German mountain village of Messkirch, just a dozen miles north of Lake Constance and the border with Switzerland. This was a pious rural area, where little had changed for centuries. Heidegger came from a background of small farmers and craftsmen. His father was a master cooper and sexton of the local Catholic church, his mother a farmer’s daughter from a neighbouring village. Martin showed an early interest in religion and seemed destined to join the priesthood. After high school he became a Jesuit novice, going to Freiburg University on a church scholarship in 1909 to study theology. But soon it became clear to him that his main interest was in philosophy, and after two years he switched to this subject. This was a brave decision, as it meant that he lost his church scholarship. But it was already evident to the university authorities that he had exceptional talent. He was given a small grant, which he supplemented by private tutoring.

In Heidegger’s school years there are no tales of escapades or the usual scrapes in which students become involved. Young Martin was intensely preoccupied with spiritual-philosophical questions. The earnest country boy was deeply unsettled by the manifestations of the modern urban world that he encountered in Freiburg. This may have been an out-of-the way provincial city, but the nearby Black Forest attracted a constant stream of cosmopolitan tourists. The citizens and students of Freiburg prided themselves on keeping up with the latest intellectual and social trends which were sweeping Germany. During the 1890s and 1900s the country was undergoing an astonishing transformation into a major industrial power. When German unification culminated in the founding of the German Empire in 1871, 70 percent of its population had been living on the land; by 1910 this had fallen to 40 percent. The old traditional rural Germany in which Heidegger had grown up had remained largely undisturbed since medieval times. Now it was giving way to modern cities where automobiles, electrification, and heavy industry prevailed. All aspects of Western culture were becoming urbanised.

Philosophy too was undergoing an analogous crisis. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany had prided itself on providing the leading European philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel. They had produced all-embracing metaphysical systems which explained the world and everything in it, including humanity. In many ways these systems had begun to take the place of God. (It was Hegel, not Nietzsche, who first pronounced ‘God is dead’.) Such systems were a way of viewing how the world worked. They were grounded in metaphysics – that is, in beliefs and assumptions that lay beyond our experience of the physical world. (Metaphysics literally means ‘beyond physics’.) But the tradition of grand and immensely serious metaphysical systems like those conceived by Kant, Hegel, and even Schopenhauer had come to an end. Gleefully Nietzsche had exploded this inflated tradition of systematic philosophy with pinpricks of epigrammatic wit before scandalously dying of syphilitic insanity in 1900. For Hegel, ‘God is dead’ had been an insight; for Nietzsche it was the basis of his entire philosophy.

Since then the preeminence of philosophy had been undermined by science and its new sibling subject, psychology. (There is an illuminating analogy here between the contemporaneous process of art being undermined by photography.) For many, scientific truth had begun to supplant philosophic truth. In 1905 Einstein had produced his Special Theory of Relativity. In this, the long-standing philosophical problem of time was simply reduced to the fourth dimension in the space-time continuum. Philosophy had become mathematics. Worse was to come with quantum theory, also described by Einstein in 1905, where light could be regarded as both a particle and a wave. In other words, light was solid matter and an immaterial motion simultaneously. Scientific reality defied the basic rule of logic: the law of contradiction. (An entity is something, or it is not something: it cannot be both at the same time, or neither.) The entire notion of philosophy was based upon logic.

Many, including Einstein himself, saw this illogicality as just a temporary anomaly, which would soon be resolved. It was nothing more than a necessary mathematical sleight of hand needed to overcome apparently conflicting experimental evidence. After all, mathematics too surely depended upon logic.

Yet even if logic survived this onslaught, it faced another threat – this time from psychology. According to ‘psychologism’, as it came to be called, logic was not based upon universal rules, and thus it did not produce abstract irrefutable truths. As early as 1865 the English philosopher John Stuart Mill had declared that logic in fact ‘owes all its theoretical foundations to psychology’. The truths of psychology initially arose from self-observation and our personal experience of the world. This meant that the axioms upon which we base our thought must surely be no more than ‘generalisations from experience’. The law of contradiction was not a universal truth, it was simply the way human beings thought. Logic was rooted in our psychology. So what became of philosophy? Was our entire attempt to know the truth about ourselves and the world doomed?

The twenty-two-year-old Heidegger had turned to philosophy in order to reach beyond all that he found inadequate in theology. He had wished to discover a certainty in which to ground his resistance to all the bewildering and multiplying uncertainties of the modern urban technological world. But now even philosophy itself was coming to an accommodation with science and modernity. The trend was away from the lofty spirituality he sought, toward down-to-earth positivism. This attempted to eliminate all systems and remnants of metaphysics from philosophy. Only truths such as those of experience, scientific experiment, or mathematics were acceptable. All of these could be either demonstrated or proved.

The main modern philosophy that sought to resist this trend was phenomenology, whose leading exponent was the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Early in his student days, Heidegger borrowed Husserl’s Logical Investigations from the university library. Reading this work proved nothing less than a revelation to him. He kept the book in his room for the next two years. (Evidently no one asked for it at the library.) Heidegger was so overwhelmed that he ‘read it again and again’. He even became obsessed with the physical actuality of the book itself: ‘The spell emanating from the work extended to the outer appearance of the sentence structure and the title page.’

Heidegger graduated in 1913 but continued with postgraduate studies at Freiburg. A year later Europe was plunged into a world war. This traumatic event was at first welcomed with almost universal enthusiasm. On both sides, thousands of young men rushed to volunteer. Columns of troops marching to the railway stations to embark for the front were pelted with flowers by cheering crowds – from Glasgow to Budapest, from St. Petersburg to Rome. Many, of all classes, who had sensed an emptiness in their lives, now found a meaning in emotional patriotism. But this was to be a war without glory, such as none had foreseen. Battle tactics as ancient as battle itself were used against modern weapons. Machine guns mowed down advancing lines of thousands upon thousands, gas warfare blinded and suffocated, entire resentful armies rotted in the mud of the trenches. The civilian population was kept largely oblivious of this, with life continuing as before. Meanwhile an entire era of class-stratified society, inspired by the certainties of ‘God and country’, formed by ‘a century of peace, progress, and prosperity’, was dying amidst a slaughter the like of which had never been seen before. (On the opening day of the Battle of the Somme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Heidegger’s Life and Works
• Further Information
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher