Heidegger, Martin
Heidegger, Martin
(1889-) Trained in Husserl’s radical structural analysis of pure consciousness, Heidegger shares with phenomenology the effort to methodically analyze and describe the conceptual meanings of single phenomena. He aimed at a phenomenological analysis of human existence in respect to its temporal and historical character. Concentrating on the Greek tradition, and endeavoring to open a totally different approach from that of the Greek thinkers to the problem of being, he seeks to find his way back to an inner independence of philosophy from the special sciences. Before a start can be made in the radical analysis of human existence, the road has to be cleared of the objections of philosophical tradition, science, logic and common sense. As the moderns have forgotten the truths the great thinkers discovered, have lost the ability to penetrate to the real origins, the recovery of the hard-won, original, uncorrupted insights of man into metaphysical reality, is only possible through a “destructive” analysis of the traditional philosophies. By this recovery of the hidden sources, Heidegger aims to revive the genuine philosophizing which, not withstanding appearances, has vanished from us in the Western world because of autonomous science serious disputing of the position of philosophy. As human reality is so structured that it discloses itself immediately, he writes really an idealistic philosophy of homo faber. But instead of being a rationalistic idealist reading reason into the structure of the really real, he takes a more avowedly emotional phenomenon as the center of a new solution of the Seinsfrage.
Under Kierkegaard’s influence, he pursues an “existential” analysis of human existence in order to discuss the original philosophical question of being in a new way. He explores many hitherto unexplored phenomena which ontology disregarded. Sorge (concern), being par excellence the structure of consciousness, is elevated to the ultimate. Concern has a wholly special horizon of being. Dread (Angst), the feeling of being on the verge of nothing, represents an eminently transcendental instrument of knowledge. Heidegger gives dread a content directed upon the objective world. He unfolds the essence of dread to be Sorge (concern). As concern tends to become obscured to itself by the distracted losing of one’s selfhood in the cares of daily life, its remedy is in the consideration of such experiences as conscience, forboding of death and the existential consciousness of time. By elevating Sorge to the basis of all being, he raised something universally human to the fundamental principle of the world. It is only after an elementary analysis of the basic constitution of human existence that Heidegger approaches his ultimate problem of Being and Time, in which more complicated structures such as the existential significance of death, conscience, and the power of resolute choice explain the phenomena of man’s position in daily life and history.
Main works
Kategorien — u. Bedentungslehre d. Duns Scotus, 1916;
Sein u. Zeit, 1927;
Was ist Metaphysik?;
Kant u. d. Probl. d. Meta., 1929;
Vom Wesen des Grundes, 1929.
See J. Kraft, Von Husserl zu H., 1932. — H.H.