Born Sept. 26, 1889, in Messkirch, Baden; died there May 26, 1976. German existentialist philosopher.

Heidegger studied at the University of Freiburg under H. Rickert and E. Husserl; he was the latter’s assistant at Freiburg from 1920 to 1923. He was a professor at the University of Marburg from 1923 to 1928 and at the University of Freiburg from 1928 to 1951 (rector, 1933–34). Heidegger was suspended from teaching in 1945 for having collaborated with the Nazis.

Heidegger’s early world view was a blend of various tendencies in the idealist philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the phenomenology of Husserl and M. Scheler, the philosophy of life of W. Dilthey, and individual motifs of dialectical theology. In his Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), Heidegger posed the question of the meaning of existence, which in his opinion had been forgotten by traditional European philosophy. Attempting to build an ontology on the basis of Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger sought to uncover the meaning of being through the examination of human existence, inasmuch as the understanding of being is characteristic only of man. According to Heidegger, the ontological basis of human existence is made up of its finiteness and transitoriness; thus, time must be considered the most substantial characteristic of being. Heidegger tried to reinterpret the European philosophical tradition, which considered pure being as something outside time. He attributed such an inauthentic understanding of being to the absolutization of one of the moments of time—the present, the “eternal presence,” when authentic temporality disintegrates as it were, turning into a consecutive series of “now” moments, into physical (in Heidegger’s view, “vulgar”) time. Heidegger considered the identification of being with the real (with the empirical world of things and phenomena) to be the basic vice both of modern science and of the European contemplation of the world in general.

The experience of temporality is identified in Heidegger’s early writings with a strong feeling of personality. Concentration on the future gives the personality a true existence, whereas the result of the preponderance of the present is that the world of things, or the everyday world, pushes man’s finiteness into the background. Such concepts as dread, resoluteness, conscience, guilt and anguish express the spiritual experience of a personality that feels its uniqueness, momentariness, and mortality. Later, in the mid–1930’s, these concepts were replaced by those expressing a reality that was not so much personal and ethical as impersonal and cosmic: being and nothing, the hidden and the manifest, the well-founded and the unsupported, the heavenly and the earthly, the human and the divine. Heidegger now tried to perceive man himself, proceeding from the “truth of existence.” Analyzing the origin of the metaphysical method of thought and of perception of the world as a whole, Heidegger tried to show how metaphysics, being the root of all European life, was gradually preparing the way for a new European science and technology, setting as its goal the subordination to man of all reality, and how it begat irreligiosity and the whole style of life of contemporary society, with its urbanization and depersonalization.

The sources of metaphysics, according to Heidegger, go back to Plato and even to Parmenides, who introduced the principle of understanding as contemplation, constant presence, and the fixed abiding of being before one’s eyes. In opposition to this tradition, Heidegger used the term “awareness” to characterize true thought: it is impossible to see existence; one can only be aware of it. According to Heidegger, the overcoming of metaphysical thought demands a return to the primary but unrealized opportunities of European culture—to that pre-Socratic Greece that still lived “in the truth of being.” Such a return is possible because being, although “forgotten,” still lives in the intimate bosom of culture—in language: “Language is the home of being” (Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Bern, 1947, p. 61). In the modern attitude toward language as a tool, language becomes technicalized, a means of transmitting information and thereby dies as genuine speech, saying or narrating; it loses that last thread which binds man and his culture to existence, and language itself becomes dead. Therefore, Heidegger considered the task of “listening to language” to be a world-historical one; people do not speak through language, but language speaks to people and through people. The language that reveals the truth of existence continues to live most of all in the works of poets; it was not by coincidence that Heidegger lectured on the works of Hölderlin, R. M. Rilke, G. Trakl, and S. George. He developed his speculative philology in the mainstream of the traditions of German romanticism (J. G. Hamann, Novalis, late F. W. J. von Schelling), expressing a romantic attitude to art as a repository of existence that gives man a protectedness, a safeness.

In his last years Heidegger turned his gaze ever more toward the East, in particular to Zen Buddhism, to which he was brought by a yearning for the ineffable and by a tendency to mystical contemplation and a metaphorical mode of expression. Thus, if in his early works Heidegger tried to construct a philosophical system, he later proclaimed the impossibility of a rational comprehension of existence. As a whole, Heidegger’s irrational philosophy is one of the acute manifestations of the crises of modern bourgeois consciousness.