September 26: Happy Birthday, Martin Heidegger!
He was one of the giants of philosophy in the 20th century. Hannah Arendt, a great philosopher in her own right, was his student. She said of him that his students saw in him “the hidden king who reigned in the realm of thinking.” His philosophy was new and exciting and full of passion, and the passion stayed with him even when good old common sense left him. We’re speaking, of course, of Martin Heidegger, the most influential of what we today call “continental” philosophers.
He was born, in 1889, into another time, but his life was inextricably linked with the great wars of the 20th century. Heidegger’s insistence on the power of man to shape himself according to his will, to put himself into the centre of creation, appealed to the ideologists of Nazi Germany. Heidegger failed to distance himself from them, becoming, in the eyes of many, complicit in the crimes of the Nazis, and this accusation overshadowed the rest of his life after the war.
Philosophically, Heidegger saw man, or Dasein, as he called the way of Being of man, as something special, different from all things, and yet intimately connected with them. Only man, in Heidegger’s world, is able to create himself, to define the way he wants to be, what he wants to become, and how he wants to interact with the world around him, using things as tools to further his own goals. At the same time, he finds himself thrown into a world, and forced to make sense of it and find his place within it. His system is complex, and his language, a German as colourful and playful as it is obscure, did not help his cause. “The nothingness nothings,” was one of his infamous quotes, used by analytic philosophers to make fun of continental thought. But there were some great thoughts in Heidegger’s philosophy that later were picked up and developed in the continental tradition, leading to existentialism (via Sartre), philosophical hermeneutics, and a Heideggerian philosophy of technology that is still used fruitfully by philosophers of robot ethics today.
We saw how, for Heidegger, we let things be what they are through experiencing them in the full compass of their relations to nature, human life, and the ‘holy’ and mysterious. Chōmei, steeped in the Buddhist conception of the interdependence of everything, would concur.
His greatest interpreter for the English-speaking world has perhaps been Hubert Dreyfus, who used Heidegger’s basic approach to criticise AI and modern technology in general, and who tried to find a Heideggerian approach to meaning in the modern world. His lectures on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit are freely available on the Internet and they’re some of the most eye-opening philosophy one can find on the Internet today.
A man of many contradictions, Heidegger loved to be away from the world himself, spending time in his cabin in the woods and mountains of South Germany. In many photographs, he’s seen wearing the typical clothes of mountain villagers, as if he was always trying to hide among them, to become invisible to the great, destructive forces of the 20th century, that he could never really escape from. He left behind a huge work, much of it difficult and dark, his later philosophy often likened to mysticism rather than clear, argumentative thought. And like many intellectuals who were caught between the fronts of great wars, and who were forced by history to take sides, he could never shake off the shadow of an immense guilt that followed him into the grave.
Happy Birthday, Martin Heidegger!
