Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher.

Sourced

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why."

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

• Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
  • Essence of Ground (1929)

• Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage.
  • Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question."
  • What is Metaphysics? (1929)

• What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.
  • Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) — a publication of lectures of 1935.

• Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.
  • Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) [Beitrage Zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)], notes of 1936 - 1938, as translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (1989)

• The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.
  • Letter on Humanism (1947)

• The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
  • Letter on Humanism (1947)

• Language is the house of the truth of Being.
  • Letter on Humanism (1947)

• Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
  • Four Lectures on Technology (1949)

• Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken.
  • The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
  • What is Called Thinking? [Was heisst Denken?] (1951 - 1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (1968)

• Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.
  • The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

• The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.
  • The Principle of Reason (1955-1956) as translated by Reginald Lilly (1991)

• Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.
  • Interview (23 September 1966) , published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976}, as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.

• From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today’s literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
  • Interview (23 September 1966) , published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976}, as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.

Being and Time (1927)

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

• The possible ranks higher than the actual.
  • Introduction

• Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.
  • Stambaugh translation

• The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."
  • Stambaugh translation

• In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.
  • Stambaugh translation

• Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.
  • Macquarrie & Robinson translation

• Being is only Being for Dasein
  • Macquarrie & Robinson translation

• Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.
  • Macquarrie & Robinson translation

Quotes about Heidegger

• [Heidegger] lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.
  • Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's onetime lover, as quoted in Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, by Elżbieta Ettinger, Yale University Press (1997), p. 28.

• Heidegger’s political views are commonly deplored today on account of his early and open support of Nazism. Because of this connection, many like to suppose that his influence on subsequent political thought (as distinct from general intellectual thought) in Europe has been meager. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Heidegger’s major ideas were sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the left, which they were. Following the war, Heidegger’s thought, shorn of its national socialism but fortified in its anti-Americanism, was embraced by many on the left, often without attribution. In the writings of numerous thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, “Heideggerianism” was married to communism, and this odd coupling became the core of the intellectual left for the next generation.
  • James Caesar (2000). “The Philosophical Origins of Anti-Americanism in Europe”, in Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, Paul Hollander (ed), Ivan R. Dee, ISBN 1566635640 p. 58

• Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists.
  • Stephen Hicks (2004), Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Scholargy Press, p. 58

• Ask professional philosophers of today to name the five most significant philosophers of the twentieth century and, whether they love him or loathe him, most will include Heidegger on the list. 

  • Stephen Hicks (2007), Nietzsche and the Nazis, Occam's Razor, p. 10

• All in all, Heidegger's philosophy is an example of Herrschaftswissen [roughly translated as 'knowledge of domination'] in the service of a repressive society. It calls on us to abandon concepts for the sake of a promised communion with Being -- but this Being has no content, precisely because it is supposed to be apprehended without the 'mediation' of concepts; basically it is no more than a substantivation of the copula 'is'.
  • Leszek Kołakowski (1981), Main Currents in Marxism, Vol. 3: The Breakdown, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0192851098, p. p 363

• The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc. […] Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided.
  • John Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” The New York Review of Books, 27 October 1983

• Was Heidegger's support for Nazism primarily a philosophical affair -- indeed, a philosophical mistake -- that could be easily corrected by a change in philosophical position? The opposite would seem to be the case, namely, that Heidegger's support for Hitler was intimately bound up with his own very conservative political views and his deep-seated anti-democratic and anti-modern attitudes. Since those attitudes demonstrably persist in Heidegger's thinking up to his death, to what degree is Heidegger's entire philosophy, both early and late, inextricably linked with his politics in the broadest sense, that is, with what he called the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism? […] And then there is a question of why, after the war, Heidegger chose to maintain an almost hermetic silence about his support for Hitler and the Nazis. Shouldn't the philosopher who had written so powerfully about the existential themes of responsibility, resoluteness, and authenticity have had at least something to say about his own personal responsibility for his actions during the Third Reich rather than glossing over the matter by blaming everything and everyone else?
  • Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” New York Review of Books, 14 Jan 1993.