Martin Heidegger
He asked what it means to exist, and produced one of the twentieth century’s most profound answers. Then he joined the Nazi party and used his position as Rector of Freiburg to exclude the teacher who made him from the university library. He never publicly apologized.
Martin Heidegger grew up in a village without electricity. He was born in 1889 in Messkirch, Baden, the son of a Catholic sexton. The village was small enough that electricity did not arrive until he was in his teens. He was a serious student, supported by the local church for seminary studies, who drifted from theology to philosophy and discovered in the ancient question -- what does it mean to be? -- a problem no one had properly faced.
He came to Freiburg and encountered Edmund Husserl, who was developing something he called phenomenology: the rigorous, systematic description of the structure of conscious experience. Heidegger became his assistant, his student, and eventually his designated successor. Husserl considered him his greatest student. He engineered Heidegger’s appointment to the professorship at Freiburg that had been his own.
In 1927, Heidegger published Being and Time. It was dedicated: to Edmund Husserl, in friendship and admiration.
The book asked a question that sounded simple and was not. What does it mean to be? Not: what are the properties of things? Not: how do we know them? But: what is the sheer fact of existence itself? Heidegger argued that Western philosophy since the pre-Socratics had stopped asking this question. It had covered it over with questions about entities, about what things are, without asking what Being itself is. He called this the forgetting of Being. The task of his philosophy was to reopen the question.
His analysis of human existence, which he called Dasein -- meaning being-there -- was the starting point. We are not minds looking out at a world from inside our skulls. We are always already in a world, engaged with it, caught up in it before any theoretical reflection begins. The hammer in our hand is ready-to-hand: not an object we observe but a tool that disappears into our activity. We see through it to what we’re building. Only when it breaks does it become present-at-hand, an object of inspection.
We are, Heidegger argued, thrown into a world we did not choose. A time, a culture, a language, a body: we find ourselves already in these, unable to step outside them to evaluate them neutrally. We project forward from this thrownness toward possibilities, toward a future we shape by our choices.
We exist most of the time in what he called the they-self, das Man: the anonymous social world in which one does what one does, thinks what one thinks, without genuinely owning one’s existence. Anxiety tears the covering away -- not fear of any particular thing, but a pervasive mood of groundlessness. Authentic existence means facing this rather than fleeing it.
Being-toward-death is the horizon of this authenticity. Death is not merely an event at the end of life. Our finitude is constitutive of who we are, present in every moment as the structural condition of our existence. Facing death authentically -- not denying it, not consoling ourselves with generalizations about everyone dying someday -- is what makes genuine self-ownership possible.
Being and Time was immediately recognized as a major work. In 1928 Heidegger returned to Freiburg as Husserl’s successor. Hannah Arendt, who would become one of the twentieth century’s most important political philosophers, was his student. She was eighteen when their affair began in 1924. He was thirty-five and married. She was Jewish. She fled Germany in 1933.
In 1933, Martin Heidegger joined the National Socialist Party.
He signed his membership on May 1, 1933. Ten days later, he became Rector of the University of Freiburg. His inaugural address as Rector aligned the university with the Nazi project. He spoke of the German essence, of struggle and service, of a new beginning for a people returning to its origins. He was at the height of his powers. He chose.
That same month, under his signature as Rector, Edmund Husserl was barred from using the university library. The man who had championed Heidegger at every stage, who had given him his career, who had trusted him with the professorship that had been his own, was excluded from the institution they had both built. Heidegger did not write to Husserl. He did not defend him. He did not visit.
Husserl wrote to a former student: it appears that at the present time I am persona non grata at the University of Freiburg. He died in April 1938, broken and isolated. Heidegger did not attend the funeral. For the 1941 edition of Being and Time, he removed the dedication to Husserl.
Heidegger resigned as Rector in April 1934, apparently disillusioned with the party’s failure to develop a coherent philosophical vision. But he never resigned from the NSDAP. He never publicly apologized.
His later philosophy turned to the Question Concerning Technology. Modern technology, he argued, is not merely a set of tools. It is a way of revealing the world -- a metaphysical understanding of Being in which everything, including human beings, is reduced to a standing reserve, a resource available for optimization and use. He called this Gestell, enframing. The danger is not nuclear weapons or pollution. The danger is the framing itself: the inability to encounter anything that is not quantifiable, usable, extractable.
The Black Notebooks, published in 2014, contained passages that went further than his public writings: references to a world Jewry as an agent of rootless rationalism, dismissals of Husserl’s philosophy in terms that carried anti-Semitic undertones. The publication reopened the question that has never been resolved: whether the thinking and the betrayal come from the same source. Whether the philosopher who analyzed thrownness and authenticity was himself engaged in the most comprehensive flight from genuine existence when it mattered most.
He died in Messkirch in 1976. He had returned, at the end, to the village where he was born.
Hannah Arendt outlived him by one year. Her own political philosophy developed partly in critical dialogue with his work. She never fully answered the question of what it meant that the teacher who had shaped her thinking had made the choice he made.
Neither have we.