Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was born in Messkirch, a small town in the Black Forest region of Baden, Germany, the son of a Catholic sexton and barrel-maker. He received an education initially intended to prepare him for the priesthood, studying at Jesuit schools before ill health interrupted his theological training and redirected him toward philosophy at the University of Freiburg. There he came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology — a method of rigorous attention to the structures of conscious experience — and became Husserl’s most gifted student and eventual designated successor.
Heidegger’s early lectures at Freiburg and then Marburg during the 1920s developed the ideas that would culminate in Being and Time (1927). His students included figures who would become central to twentieth-century thought: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Hans-Georg Gadamer all passed through his seminars. His lectures were described by those who attended them as electrifying — a kind of philosophical demolition of inherited assumptions followed by painstaking reconstruction on different foundations. Being and Time, which Heidegger published at 37 to secure his academic appointment at Marburg, appeared in one of the most important philosophy series in Germany and immediately established him as a major figure.
Being and Time poses a question that philosophy had, Heidegger argued, systematically neglected since the Greeks: the question of Being itself — what does it mean for anything to be? Rather than approaching this through abstract metaphysics, Heidegger begins with a phenomenological analysis of human existence — which he calls Dasein, literally “being-there.” He examines how we find ourselves thrown into a world not of our choosing, how we encounter things primarily as equipment ready-to-hand rather than as objects for detached contemplation, how anxiety reveals the groundlessness of our existence, and how authenticity requires confronting our own mortality rather than fleeing into das Man — the anonymous “they” of social conformity. The book’s vocabulary — facticity, thrownness, fallenness, care, being-toward-death — transformed philosophical language.
Heidegger’s intellectual legacy is shadowed by his political conduct. He joined the Nazi Party in May 1933, served as rector of Freiburg University under the Nazi regime, and delivered speeches suffused with National Socialist rhetoric. Though he resigned the rectorship in 1934 and his relationship with Nazism grew increasingly complicated, he never fully recanted his political involvement, and postwar debates about the relationship between his philosophy and his politics remain unresolved and fierce. The publication of his Black Notebooks revealed anti-Semitic passages that deepened these controversies.
Despite this, Heidegger’s influence on twentieth-century thought was enormous and largely unavoidable. His later work, departing from the project of Being and Time, explored poetry, technology, and the history of Western metaphysics through figures like Hölderlin and Nietzsche. Existentialism (Sartre), hermeneutics (Gadamer), deconstruction (Derrida), and contemporary Continental philosophy all bear his imprint. Being and Time, reviewed on WritersReview.com, remains one of the most difficult and most rewarding books in the philosophical canon — a work that dismantles centuries of philosophical assumption and forces the reader to confront, with unusual clarity, what it actually means to be a finite human being in a world one did not choose.
