Martin Heidegger: biography, thought, works

martinHeidegger stood out as one of the main philosophers of the century. XX with his reinterpretation of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, indicating a hermeneutic dimension.

His proposals were directly relevant to the existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre and for the developmenthermeneutic by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Not only did they attend lectures and study with this great German thinker, we found also among his most philosophically expressed students Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse.

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Martin Heidegger Biography

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a city in southwestern Germany. Coming from a Roman Catholic family, his father, Friedrich Heidegger, was a sexton in a church in the city. Together with his mother, Johanna Kempf Heidegger, and her brothers, Fritz and Mariele, the family had a simple life in a quiet rural town.

After fundamental studies, at the age of 14, Heidegger is sent to two Jesuit schools

, as a candidate for the priesthood. During this period he learns Greek and Latin, and has his first contact with a study of Franz Brentano, about the various senses of "being" in Aristotle.

Martin Heidegger influenced existentialism and hermeneutics. [1]
Martin Heidegger influenced existentialism and hermeneutics. [1]

He began his higher studies at the age of 20, at a seminary in Freiburg (known as Sapientia) and at Albert Ludwig University (known today only as the University of Freiburg). In his studies, he had access to great names in the history of philosophy, such as SorenKierkegaard and Wilhelm Dilthey, who certainly exerted an influence on his thinking, and also read many books by his teachers and some theologians of the time.

The year 1911 brought many changes for the young MartinHeidegger. wassick most of the year, having to return to his hometown in search of rest. Upon returning to Freiburg, he decides to leave the seminar. His wish in this period was to go study with Edmund Husserl, whose texts he had begun to read, at the University of Göttingen, but leaving the seminar led to the end of an annual scholarship, making it impossible to move to the northern region of Germany.

Keeping your attention only in the courses of philosophy, earned his doctorate in 1913, achieving permission to teach two years later with a publication on DunsScot.

Married Elfride Petri, who was Protestant, in 1917, in a discreet ceremony in the chapel of the University of Freiburg. Upon returning, in 1919, from a brief military activity, he announced his disengagement from Catholicism and becomes assistant to Edmund Husserl, which was already in Freiburg since 1916.

During this period, although Heidegger had great admiration for the phenomenological method of this philosopher, who became a friend, begins to distance itself from it theoretically, reinterpreting it, at the same time that it starts to be recognized as excellent teacher.

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His courses on Aristotle and the themes of medieval philosophy expose brilliant interpretations, and your mentor points you to to teach at the University of Marburg. He started in 1923 and remained at that institution for five years, and continued to teach courses on various topics in the history of philosophy. It is during this period that his great work, being and time (Sein und zeit, in German), is finalized.

In the same year of its publication, 1927, the position of senior professor was available, but the author returns to Freiburg due to the retirement of his mentor. In your first class as successor to Edmund Husserl, is applauded by a crowd of students.

His political involvement with the National Socialist Party, in 1933, raises doubts and questions even today, especially with the recent publication of the so-called black notebooks (Schwarze heft, in German), which contained the philosopher's notes and sketches since 1931. Even though he left the party a short time later, he was accused of being nazi and barred from teaching until 1949.

The philosopher claimed to have positioned himself against the regime and its deeds in his classes and tried to clarify this involvement in a famous interview with Der Spiegel in 1966, but his silence was criticized by many, especially for Hannah Arendt.

Despite the difficulties caused in his teaching career by this issue, the decades from 1940 to 1970 were fruitful in writing. In his later years he kept up his studies and gave many lectures, the last being in 1975 in Zähringen. has been busy with the organization of your complete works and kept in touch with friends until he died at his home in 1976.

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Martin Heidegger's ontological foundation

The notoriety achieved with the publication of his first work, To beit's time (1927), contrasts with the difficulty of reading the text. With the first translations into Latin languages ​​only appearing in the second half of the 20th century, many interested people read the work in German.

This difficulty is explained by Martin Heidegger's own style and way of philosophizing. O excessive use of hyphenation, the various emphases through prefixes and the neologisms they only indicate that the words in their ordinary use are not adequate to clarify the question of being. This way of presenting philosophical problems is used throughout his work and has influenced many thinkers.

This philosopher claims that the main question of philosophy had not yet been answered, namely, the question of being. The sciences in general only study the loved, i.e, all that is, which is determined in a certain configuration and that we can think or talk about, but being is the very possibility of understanding beings as beings, so there would be a ontological difference. Putting this question again indicates that our understanding is still superficial, but the very attempt to answer already directs us in the investigation.

“When questioning, the one who questions, as such, at least is. [...] To clarify the issue of being is, first of all, to make transparent the being of the issue, or rather, of the one who questions. [...] Who is he, this being that will answer the question of the meaning of being because, immediately, being, he responds to it? We ourselves, says Heidegger”|1|

However, the question does not arise as an individual, but as Dasein. This German expression is used by MartinHeidegger to indicate the entity that poses the question for the being. It is not, in any case, a conceptualization, since Dasein é be-there, that is, the human being as the being that is always in the world, and we could not think of it otherwise. To describe the conditions in which this entity shows itself it is what constitutes existential analytics—and this forms the basis of all ontologies, for it is this being that understands being.

The originality of this study precedes theories that aim to investigate the various manifestations of human beings, such as anthropology Or the biology. In each of these possible investigations, the properly ontological study that its scientific work does not provide would be absent.

“A person is not a thing, a substance, an object. [...] The whole being of man is in question, which is usually understood as a unity of body, soul and spirit. Body, soul and spirit can designate, in turn, regions of phenomena that can be distinguished thematically from each other, with a view to specific investigations. [...] When, however, the question of man's being is raised, it is not possible to calculate it as the sum of the moments of being, as soul, body and spirit which, in turn, must still be determined in their to be. And even for an ontological attempt to proceed in this way, one should presuppose an idea of ​​the being of totality.” |2|

Main works by Martin Heidegger

Studies subsequent to being and time, unfinished work, are marked by a removal of the influence of Edmund Husserl. Although the question of being has not ceased to be present in all of Martin Heidegger's production, the question of truth as an unveiling, a concept presented by the Greek term aletheia, is one of the most discussed, especially in from the essence of the truth (1943) and The fundamental questions of philosophy (1984) — posthumously organized work. Both feature editions of texts used in classes taught in 1925 and beyond.

“Does the fact that the Greeks experienced the essence of truth as an unveiling immediately mean that the unveiling of the being was for them what is worthy of questioning? No way. The Greek experienced for the first time the unveiling of the entity, they requested it as truth and determined on its basis the truth as correction; and they positioned and founded that foundation—but they asked no more broadly, nor expressly, for himself.” |3|

Edited in 1954, essays and conferences is one of the best known collections of this philosopher, in which the reflection on the question of technique and other texts that make it clear how this thinker returned to the original meaning of Greek terms to think about the problems of our time. In a near period he wrote the famous Letter on Humanism (1947), when he distanced himself from the humanism of Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Being is neither God nor a foundation of the world. The Being is more distant than any being and, nevertheless, it is closer than any being, be it a rock, an animal, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the closest. And yet, for man, proximity is what is furthest away.” |4|

on the way to language (1959) brings together texts that question the ordinary use of language as an expression of mental states or as an essentially human activity. Although speech is a human characteristic, our relationship with language is still undetermined: what would its essence actually be? According to the philosopher, there would be a poetic relationship with language that differs from the usual ways of understanding it. This understanding does not occur when we try to theorize it, but in a specific experience.

“But where does language as a language come to the word? Rarely, where we don't find the right word to say what concerns us, what provokes, oppresses or excites us. At that moment, we didn't say what we wanted to say and so, without realizing it, the language itself touches us, very far away, briefly and fleetingly, like its vigor.” |5|

Considered by some to be the second great work of this philosopher, Contributions to philosophy it was first published in 1989, although it was mostly written before the outbreak of 2nd World War.

Image credit

[1] Willy Pragher / commons

Grades

|1| DUBOIS, Christian. Heidegger: introduction to a reading. Translated by Bernardo Barros Coelho de Oliveira. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004.

|2| HEIDEGGER, Martin. being and time. Translated by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Petropolis: Voices; Bragança Paulista; University Publisher São Francisco, 2005.

|3| HEIDEGGER, Martin. The fundamental questions of philosophy: "problems" select from "logic". Translated by Marco Antonio Casanova. São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2017.

|4| HEIDEGGER, Martin. about humanism. 2nd ed. Translated by Emmanuel Carneiro Leão. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian time, 1995.

|5| HEIDEGGER, Martin. on the way to language. Translated by Márcia Sá Cavalcante de Schuback. Petropolis: Voices; Bragança Paulista; University Publisher São Francisco, 2003.

By Marco Oliveira
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