Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who employed Husserl’s ideas about phenomenology in an effort to better understand the nature of “Being” — i.e., questions about ontology. Indeed, according to Heidegger there is only one basic question in philosophy: the Seinsfrage, or the question of being. As a result, Heidegger developed a philosophy in which he argued that the nature of human existence involved active participation in the world, regardless of what that participation entailed. This he labeled “being there,” in German Dasein.
The complexity of Heidegger’s language is legendary and staggering — but unlike so many other philosophers his intention was not to try and delve into highly abstract concepts, but rather to make more understandable the very immediate and relevant aspects of our everyday experience of life. For him, the critical error made in so much of Western philosophy has been to erase the distinction between human beings and objects.
Heidegger did not believe that people could be treated like passive objects in any philosophical sense because unlike objects, only humans could raise the important questions about existence and human nature in the first place. Thus, humans must be approached as questioning, thinking beings — not as passive, remote, and impersonal things.
When we deal with impersonal things, we can better understand them by simply listing their key attributes — and this is generally quite sufficient. But humans don’t have static attributes that are central to their identities and which can be rattled off in a list. Instead, humans are ever engaged in a process of creating and understanding their attributes — a process which by its very nature defied easy comprehension from the outside. Only those immediately and intimately involved in it can comprehend it, and even then only from their own perspective.
Ultimately, this process is something dependent upon our willingness to make decisions and make commitments in our lives. We find ourselves “thrown into the world,” and here we must stay — but to create a life for ourselves we must also create ourselves, a continuous task that is never finished and that is always a consequence of the choices we must make every day.
In this, Heidegger was heavily dependent upon Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology. Like Husserl, Heidegger took very seriously the original Greek meaning of the word “phenomenon,” which literally means “that which reveals itself.” For Heidegger, that which is uniquely human is also that which reveals itself in the ongoing process of choices, decisions, commitments, and being. Here, though, “being” is not simply passive existence; instead, it is the active engagement with the world — thus the German Dasein, or “being there,” sometimes translated as “presence.”
Because of this, Heidegger argued that for a person “being in the world” is not a matter of spatial and temporal location, but rather a mode of being — a way of living, not unlike “being in love” or “being in politics” is. The world is not an impersonal container of human beings like a glass is a container of water; rather, it is the field of human concern where we discover and develop our full potentials.
It’s a question of intimate relationships, understanding, questioning, and developing. We discover both our world and ourselves not through passive, abstract thought but through an active engagement between ourselves and that which we find at hand. These notions would come to be regarded as the basic source of modern existentialist thought because later philosophers would rely heavily upon Heidegger’s analysis of the nature of human existence as it relates to one’s engagement with the outside world.
Heidegger’s philosophy is sometimes overshadowed by the enthusiastic support he showed for the Nazis and their education policies when he served as the Rector for the University of Freiburg 1933-34. He not only publicly converted to National Socialism, but he also deliberately distanced himself from Husserl, a Jewish philosopher whom he had previously admired. Because of this, Heidegger was suspended from all teaching duites after the war from 1945 to 1950. Only in 1951 was he allowed to teach again and he retired just one year later. The exact scope and nature of his Nazi sympathies remains a matter of debate.
Most people today tend to classify Heidegger as an existentialist, even though he never specifically adopted the term to describe his own philosophy. Moreover, Heidegger also distanced himself from Sartre’s existentialism because the latter focused so much more on the nature of human reality than on the nature of Being more generally. Indeed, this only further underscores the difficulty in defining “existentialism” — how can both Sartre and Heidegger be existentialists when they ended up disagreeing on so much?
