Martin Heidegger

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Martin Heidegger

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Full name	Martin Heidegger
Born	26 September 1889 Meßkirch, Germany
Died	26 May 1976 (aged 86) Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
School/tradition	Phenomenology · Hermeneutics · Existentialism
Main interests	Ontology · Metaphysics · Art · Greek philosophy · Technology · Language · Poetry  · Thinking
Notable ideas	Dasein · Gestell · Heideggerian terminology
Influenced by[show] Anaximander · Parmenides · Heraclitus · Plato · Aristotle · Duns Scotus · Kant · Hölderlin · Schelling · Hegel · Kierkegaard · Nietzsche · Dilthey · Brentano · Husserl · Rilke  · Trakl  · Jünger
Influenced[show] Strauss · Sartre · Kuki · Merleau-Ponty · Gadamer · Arendt · Marcuse · Foucault · Nancy · Ricoeur · Derrida · Agamben · Vattimo · Borgmann · Stiegler · Lacan · Dreyfus · Benoist

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) (German pronunciation: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛɡɐ]) was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time, is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger remains controversial due to his association with Nazism.

Introduction

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it means for something "to be", tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more authentic analysis of being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis of which beings are already understood", or that which underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place.^[1] But since philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of being from which their theories derive, and since they have incorrectly applied those theories universally, they have confused our understanding of being and human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.

Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, commencing from Plato, has left its traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we speak to our notions of "common sense", is susceptible to error, to fundamental mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—reality, logic, God, consciousness, presence, et cetera. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.

Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, theology and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Well-known philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Ahmad Fardid, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.

Heidegger infamously supported National Socialism and was a member of the Nazi Party from May 1933 until May 1945^[2]. His defenders, notably Hannah Arendt, see this support as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics.)^[3] Defenders think this error was largely irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics, such as his former students Emmanuel Lévinas^[4] and Karl Löwith^[5], hold that Heidegger's support for National Socialism was immoral and revealed flaws inherent in his thought.^[6]

Biography

Early years

The Mesnerhaus in Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up.

Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Germany. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church, Friedrich Heidegger, and his wife Johanna, née Kempf. In their faith, his parents adhered to the First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch. The religious controversy between the wealthy Altkatholiken and the working class led to the temporary use of a converted barn for the Roman Catholics. At the festive reunion of the congregation in 1895, the Old Catholic sexton handed the key to six year old Martin. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a Jesuit seminary, though he was turned away within weeks because of the health requirement, and what he described as a psychosomatic heart condition.^[7] After studying theology at the University of Freiburg from 1909 to 1911, he switched to philosophy, in part again because of his heart condition. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, and in 1916 finished his venia legendi with a thesis on Duns Scotus.^[8] In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent, then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I, working behind a desk and never leaving Germany. After the war, he served as a salaried senior assistant to Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg until 1923.

Marburg years

In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Friedländer, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Irene Strauss Paley, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Gunther (Stern) Anders, and Hans Jonas.

Freiburg years

When Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers including one from Berlin, the most prestigious German university of the day. Among his students at Freiburg were Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928.

Engagement with National Socialism

On April 21, 1933, Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg, joining the Nazi party on May 1, 1933^[9]. Heidegger publicly endorsed Nazism. In a November 1933 article in the Freiburg student newspaper, Heidegger wrote:

The German people must choose its future, and this future is bound to the Führer^[10].

A more detailed account of the personal and philosophical relations between Heidegger and National Socialism is given below.

Postwar years

After leaving the Nazi Party in May 1945, Heidegger did not again participate in any other political organizations. However, he never repudiated his prior statements praising Hitler and National Socialism. Citing his Nazi ties during the years 1933 to 1945, the French Occupation Authority ruled that Heidegger had been a "Mitläufer" (fellow traveller, tagalong) with the Nazis and banned him from teaching in Germany. Authorities later rescinded this decision in 1951, and Heidegger became Professor emeritus with all privileges. He then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.

Personal life

Heidegger's stone-and-tile chalet clustered among others at Todtnauberg.

Heidegger married Elfriede Petri on March 21, 1917, in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend Engelbert Krebs, and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son Jörg was born in 1919. According to the recently published correspondence between the spouses^[11], Hermann (born 1920) is the son of Elfriede and Friedel Caesar. Martin Heidegger had extramarital affairs with Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann, both students of his. Arendt was Jewish and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany prior to World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war.^[12]

Heidegger spent much time at his vacation home at Todtnauberg, on the edge of the Black Forest. He considered the seclusion provided by the forest to be the best environment in which to engage in philosophical thought.^[13]

Heidegger died on May 26, 1976 and was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.

Heidegger's grave in Meßkirch

Philosophy

Being, time, and Dasein

Heidegger's philosophy is founded on the attempt to conjoin what he considers two fundamental insights:

• The first of these is Heidegger's observation that, in the course of over two thousand years of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the "world" itself), but has forgotten to ask what "being" itself is. This is Heidegger's "question of being", and it is Heidegger's fundamental concern throughout his work from the beginning of his career until its end. One crucial source of this insight was Heidegger's reading of Franz Brentano's treatise on Aristotle's manifold uses of the word "being", a work which provoked Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger opens his magnum opus, Being and Time, with a citation from Plato's Sophist ^[14] indicating that Western philosophy has neglected "being" because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question. Heidegger's intuition about the question of being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes his concern with the "history of being", that is, the history of the forgetting of being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive "destruction" of the history of philosophy.
• The second intuition animating Heidegger's philosophy derives from the influence of Edmund Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, "to the things themselves"). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended toward something, and is always "about" something) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in "care." This is the basis of Heidegger's "existential analytic", as he develops it in Being and Time. Heidegger argues that to be able to describe experience properly means finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to "Dasein", the being for whom being is a question.^[15] In Being and Time, Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. Dasein, then, is not intended as a way of conducting a "philosophical anthropology", but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything like a "philosophical anthropology."^[16] Dasein, according to Heidegger, is care. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that Dasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one's own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one's own existence, is the basis of Heidegger's notions of authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for Dasein which depend on escaping the "vulgar" temporality of calculation and of public life.

The marriage of these two observations depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that Dasein is an essentially temporal being; it also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, unlike for Husserl, philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology, and thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of Being and Time was thus always only a first step in Heidegger's philosophy, to be followed by the "dismantling" (Destruktion) of the history of philosophy, that is, a transformation of its language and meaning, that would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of "limit case" (in the sense in which special relativity is a limit case of general relativity).

That Heidegger did not write this second part of Being and Time, and that the existential analytic was left behind in the course of Heidegger's subsequent writings on the history of being, might be interpreted as a failure to conjugate his account of individual experience with his account of the vicissitudes of the collective human adventure that he understands the Western philosophical tradition to be. And this would in turn raise the question of whether this failure is due to a flaw in Heidegger's account of temporality, that is, of whether Heidegger was correct to oppose vulgar and authentic time.^[17]

Being and Time

View from Heidegger's vacation chalet in Todtnauberg. Heidegger wrote most of Being and Time there.

Being and Time (German title: Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, is Heidegger's first academic book. He had been under pressure to publish in order to qualify for Husserl's chair at Freiburg University and the success of this work ensured his appointment to the post.

It investigates the question of being by asking about the being for whom being is a question. Heidegger names this being Dasein (see above), and the book pursues its investigation through themes such as mortality, anxiety, temporality, and historicity. It was Heidegger's original intention to write a second half of the book, consisting of a "Destruktion" of the history of philosophy — that is, the transformation of philosophy by re-tracing its history — but he never completed this project.

Being and Time influenced many thinkers, including existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre (although Heidegger distanced himself from existentialism—see below).

Die Kehre

Some scholars have argued that Heidegger's thought after Being and Time exhibits a "turn" in his thinking (die Kehre). Heidegger denied this in a letter—published by William J. Richardson in Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963)—which stated that, if there had been a turn at all, it was simply a matter of going deeper into the same matters. In his later work, Heidegger largely abandons the account of Dasein as a pragmatic, engaged, worldly agent, and instead discusses other elements necessary to an understanding of being, notably language, the earth (as the almost ineffable foundation of world) and the presence of the gods. Nevertheless, Dasein (or "mortals", as he later prefers to say) remains a crucial part of the coming-about or event (Ereignis) of being.

Later works

"Am Feldweg" in Meßkirch. Heidegger often went for a walk on the path in this field. See the text "Der Feldweg" GA Nr. 13

Heidegger's later works, following the so-called "turn" and after the Second World War, seem to many commentators to at least reflect a shift of focus, if not indeed a major change in his philosophical outlook. One way this has been understood is as a shift from "doing" to "dwelling", although others feel that this is to overstate the difference. Heidegger focuses less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior, and more on the way in which behavior itself depends on a prior "openness to being." The essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. Heidegger contrasts this openness to the "will to power" of the modern human subject, which is one way of forgetting this originary openness.

Heidegger understands the commencement of the history of Western philosophy as a brief period of authentic openness to being, during the time of the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander. This was followed, according to Heidegger, by a long period increasingly dominated by the forgetting of this initial openness, a period which commences with Plato, but a forgetting or abandonment which occurs in different ways throughout Western history.

Two recurring themes of Heidegger's later writings are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of "revealing." Poetry reveals being in the way in which, if it is genuine poetry, it commences something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals. But with modern technology a new stage of revealing is reached, in which the subject-object distinction is overcome even in the "material" world of technology. The essence of modern technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" (Bestand) of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. Heidegger described the essence of modern technology as Gestell, or "enframing." Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology: while he acknowledges that modern technology contains grave dangers, Heidegger nevertheless also argues that it may constitute a chance for human beings to enter a new epoch in their relation to being. Despite this, some commentators have concluded that an agrarian nostalgia permeates his later work.

Heidegger's important later works include Vom Wesen der Wahrheit ("On the Essence of Truth", 1930), Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes ("The Origin of the Work of Art", 1935), Einführung in die Metaphysik ("An Introduction to Metaphysics", 1935), Bauen Wohnen Denken ("Building Dwelling Thinking", 1951), and Die Frage nach der Technik ("The Question Concerning Technology", 1954) and Was heisst Denken? ("What Is Called Thinking?" 1954). Also important is Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning]), composed in the years 1936–38 but not published until 1989, on the centennial of Heidegger's birth.

Influences

Aristotle and the Greeks

Heidegger was influenced at an early age by Aristotle, mediated through Catholic theology, Medieval philosophy, and Franz Brentano. Aristotle's ethical, logical, and metaphysical works were crucial to the development of his thought in the crucial period of the 1920s. Although he later worked less on Aristotle, Heidegger recommended postponing reading Nietzsche, and to "first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years."^[18] In reading Aristotle, Heidegger increasingly contested the traditional Latin translation and scholastic interpretation of his thought. Particularly important (not least for its influence upon others, both in their interpretation of Aristotle and in rehabilitating a neo-Aristotelian "practical philosophy"^[19]) was his radical reinterpretation of Book Six of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and several books of the Metaphysics. Both informed the argument of Being and Time.

The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claimed to have revived the question of being, the question having been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending to the Age of Enlightenment and then to modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of this question, Heidegger spent considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, as well as on the tragic playwright Sophocles.

Dilthey

Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life" and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology was influenced in part by his reading of the works of Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger's portrayal of history, historicity, and generation need to be interpreted in this context and, in particular, the correspondence between Dilthey and Paul Yorck von Wartenburg.

Of the influence of Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes the following: "As far as Dilthey is concerned, we all know today what I have known for a long time: namely that it is a mistake to conclude on the basis of the citation in Being and Time that Dilthey was especially influential in the development of Heidegger's thinking in the mid-1920s. This dating of the influence is much too late." He adds that by the fall of 1923 it was plain that Heidegger felt "the clear superiority of Count Yorck over the famous scholar, Dilthey." Gadamer nevertheless makes clear that Dilthey's influence was important in helping the youthful Heidegger "in distancing himself from the systematic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger acknowledges in Being and Time."^[20] Based on Heidegger's earliest lecture courses, in which Heidegger already engages Dilthey's thought prior to the period Gadamer mentions as "too late", recent scholars as diverse as Theodore Kisiel and David Farrell Krell have argued for the importance of Diltheyan concepts and strategies in the formation of Heidegger's thought.^[21]

Even though Gadamer's interpretation of Heidegger has been questioned, there is little doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a gestalt formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.

Husserl

There is disagreement over the degree of influence that Husserl had on Heidegger's philosophical development, just as there is disagreement about the degree to which Heidegger's philosophy is grounded in phenomenology. These disagreements centre around how much of Husserlian phenomenology is contested by Heidegger, and how much this phenomenology in fact informs Heidegger's own understanding.

On the relation between the two figures, Gadamer wrote the following: "When asked about phenomenology, Husserl was quite right to answer as he used to in the period directly after World War I: 'Phenomenology, that is me and Heidegger'." Nevertheless, Gadamer noted that Heidegger was no patient collaborator with Husserl, and that Heidegger's "rash ascent to the top, the incomparable fascination he aroused, and his stormy temperament surely must have made Husserl, the patient one, as suspicious of Heidegger as he always had been of Max Scheler's volcanic fire."^[22]

Robert J. Dostal understands the importance of Husserl to be profound:

Heidegger himself, who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, bases his hermeneutics on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl's account in many ways but seems to have been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by Husserl. [...] The differences between Husserl and Heidegger are significant, but if we do not see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach, we will not be able to appreciate the exact nature of Heidegger's project in Being and Time or why he let it unfinished.^[23]

Daniel O. Dahlstrom sees Heidegger's presentation of his work as a departure from Husserl as unfairly misrepresenting Husserl's own work. Dahlstrom concludes his consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Husserl as follows:

Heidegger's silence about the stark similarities between his account of temporality and Husserl's investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a misrepresentation of Husserl's account of intentionality. Contrary to the criticisms Heidegger advances in his lectures, intentionality (and, by implication, the meaning of 'to be') in the final analysis is not construed by Husserl as sheer presence (be it the presence of a fact or object, act or event). Yet for all its "dangerous closeness" to what Heidegger understands by temporality, Husserl's account of internal time-consciousness does differ fundamentally. In Husserl's account the structure of protentions is accorded neither the finitude nor the primacy that Heidegger claims are central to the original future of ecstatic-horizonal temporality.^[24]

Kierkegaard

Contemporary Heideggerians regard Søren Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts.^[25]. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world. Nonetheless, it is important to notice the difference between the Danish philosopher, whose thought was both individualistic and Christian, and Heidegger, who conceived of human existence as thoroughly social and sharply distinguished philosophy itself from all personal, scientific, and religious commitments.

Hölderlin and Nietzsche

Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or other of these figures, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger read The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.

This is also the case for the lecture courses devoted to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, which became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's work and thought. Heidegger grants to Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem (see, for example, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister").

Heidegger and Eastern thought

Some writers on Heidegger's work see possibilities within it for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. Despite perceived differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, some of Heidegger's later work, particularly "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer", does show an interest in initiating such a dialogue.^[26] Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe, Kuki Shūzō and Kyoshi Miki.

Furthermore, it has also been claimed that a number of elements within Heidegger's thought bear a close parallel to Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen Buddhism and Taoism. An account given by Paul Hsao (in Heidegger and Asian Thought) records a remark by Chang Chung-Yuan claiming that "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands but has intuitively grasped Taoist thought."

According to Tomonubu Imamichi, the concept of Dasein was inspired—although Heidegger remains silent on this—by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being in the world) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having studied with him the year before.^[27]

Some scholars interested in the relationships between Western philosophy and the history of ideas in Islam and Arabic philosophical medieval sources may have been influenced by Heidegger's work.^[28]

Heidegger and Nazism

The rectorate

The University of Freiburg, where Heidegger was Rector from April 21, 1933 to April 23, 1934

Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Heidegger was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg on April 21, 1933, assuming the position the following day, and on May 1 he joined the Nazi Party. Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede, on May 27. It was entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University", and became notorious for its praise of Nazism.

His tenure as Rector was, however, fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some Nazi education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation on April 23, 1934, and it was accepted on April 27. Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi party until the end of the war.

Philosophical historian Hans Sluga places Heidegger's embrace of National Socialism during this period within the context of a similar and often even more enthusiastic acceptance of Nazism from many other German philosophers. He characterises Heidegger's stance while Rector in the following way:

Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.^[29]

In 1945 Heidegger wrote a defence of his term as rector, which he gave to his son Hermann, and which was published in 1983. In it Heidegger referred to his 1933–34 involvement in the following terms:

The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.^[30]

Treatment of Husserl

Beginning in 1917 Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg.^[31]

On April 6, 1933, the Reichskommissar of Baden province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger's predecessor as rector formally notified Edmund Husserl of his "enforced leave of absence" on April 14, 1933.

Heidegger became rector of the University of Freiburg on April 22, 1933. The following week the national Reich law of April 28, 1933 replaced Reichskommissar Wagner's decree. The Reich law required the firing of Jewish professors from German universities, including those, such as Husserl, who had previously converted to Christianity. The termination of the retired professor Husserl's academic privileges thus involved no specific action on Heidegger's part.^[32]

Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl other than through intermediaries. Heidegger later claimed that the relationship with Husserl had already become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with Heidegger and Max Scheler in the early 1930s.^[33]

Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in 1938. In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, Heidegger agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time (restored in post-war editions).^[34]

Heidegger's behavior towards Husserl has evoked controversy. Hannah Arendt had initially suggested that Heidegger's behavior precipitated Husserl's death. She called him a "potential murderer." However, she later recanted this accusation.^[35]

Post-rectorate National Socialist period

After the spectacular failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from most political activity, without canceling his membership in the NSDAP. Nevertheless, references to National Socialism continued to appear in his work, usually in ambiguous ways.

In the course of his 1935 lectures, Heidegger referred to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement" (die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung), that is, of National Socialism. This phrase remained when the lectures were published in 1953 under the title, An Introduction to Metaphysics; however, Heidegger added a parenthetical qualification, without mentioning this change at the time of publication: "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)."^[36]

In the lectures of 1942, published posthumously as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister", Heidegger makes the following remark:

Today—if one still reads such books at all—one can scarcely read a treatise or book on the Greeks without everywhere being assured that here, with the Greeks, "everything" is "politically" determined. In the majority of "research results", the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.^[37]

Karl Löwith met Heidegger in 1936 while the latter was visiting Rome to lecture on Hölderlin. In an account set down in 1940 and not intended for publication, Löwith recounted an exchange with Heidegger over editorials published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

[I] told him that I did not agree either with the way in which Karl Barth was attacking him or in the way [Emil] Staiger was defending him, because my opinion was that his taking the side of National Socialism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy. Heidegger told me unreservedly that I was right and developed his idea by saying that his idea of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] was the foundation for his political involvement.^[5]

Löwith went on to say:

In response to my remark that I could understand many things about his attitude, with one exception, which was that he would permit himself to be seated at the same table with a figure such as Julius Streicher (at the German Academy of Law), he was silent at first. At last he uttered this well-known rationalisation (which Karl Barth saw so clearly), which amounted to saying that "it all would have been much worse if some men of knowledge had not been involved." And with a bitter resentment towards people of culture, he concluded his statement: "If these gentlemen had not considered themselves too refined to become involved, things would have been different, but I had to stay in there alone." To my reply that one did not have to be very refined to refuse to work with a Streicher, he answered that it was useless to discuss Streicher; the Stürmer was nothing more than "pornography." Why didn't Hitler get rid of this sinister individual? He didn't understand it.^[38]

For commentators such as Habermas who credit Löwith's account, there are a number of generally shared implications: one is that Heidegger did not turn away from National Socialism per se but became deeply disaffected with the official philosophy and ideology of the party, as embodied by Alfred Bäumler or Alfred Rosenberg, whose biologistic racist doctrines he never accepted.

Post-war period

Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt occurred some time before Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism, but her friendship with Heidegger did not end when she moved to Heidelberg to continue her studies under Karl Jaspers. Arendt later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at the same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt cautiously resumed their friendship after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt for Heidegger and his political sympathies. The denazification hearings resulted in Heidegger being forbidden to teach between 1945 and 1951. One consequence of his disfavour in Germany was that Heidegger began to engage far more in the French philosophical scene.

In a lecture on technology delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger made the following controversial remark:

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.^[39]

This quotation has been the subject of widespread criticism and interpretation. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, described it as "scandalously inadequate."^[40]

In 1967 Heidegger had an encounter with the poet Paul Celan, a Jew who had survived concentration camps operated by the Nazis' Romanian allies. While admiring aspects of Heidegger's writings, Celan had long been aware of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism.

On July 24 Celan gave a reading at the University of Freiburg, attended by Heidegger. Heidegger there presented Celan with a copy of What is Called Thinking?, and invited him to visit him at his hut at Todtnauberg, an invitation which Celan accepted. On July 25 Celan visited Heidegger at his retreat, signing the guestbook and spending some time walking and talking with Heidegger. The details of their conversation are not known, but the meeting was the subject of a subsequent poem by Celan, entitled "Todtnauberg" (dated August 1, 1967).

The enigmatic poem and the encounter have been discussed by numerous writers on Heidegger and Celan, notably Lacoue-Labarthe. A common interpretation of the poem is that it concerns, in part, Celan's wish for Heidegger to apologize for Heidegger's behavior during the Nazi era.

The Der Spiegel interview

On September 23, 1966, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously (it was published on May 31, 1976). In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with National Socialism in two ways: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach" but stated that he changed his mind about this in 1934, largely prompted by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives.

Thus, in his Der Spiegel interview Heidegger defended as double-speak his 1935 lecture describing the "inner truth and greatness of this movement." He affirmed that Nazi informants who observed his lectures would understand that by "movement" he meant National Socialism. However, Heidegger asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement was no elegy for the NSDAP. Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification later added to An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), namely, "the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity."

The Löwith account from 1936 has been cited to contradict the account given in the Spiegel interview in two ways: that there was no decisive break with National Socialism in 1934 and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement. The Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the extermination camps. In fact, the Der Spiegel interviewers were not in possession of much of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies.^[41]

Influence and reception in France

Heidegger was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, and his ideas have penetrated into many areas, but in France there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting his work.

Existentialism and pre-war influence

Heidegger's influence on French philosophy began in the 1930s, when Being and Time, "What is Metaphysics?" and other Heideggerian texts were read by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, as well as by thinkers such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille.^[42] Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology (the study of being) is rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings (Dasein, or being-there), his work has often been associated with existentialism. The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's Being and Nothingness is marked, but Heidegger felt that Sartre had misread his work, as he argued in later texts such as the "Letter on 'Humanism'." In that text, intended for a French audience, Heidegger explained this misreading in the following terms:

Sartre's key proposition about the priority of existentia over essentia [that is, Sartre's statement that "existence precedes essence"] does, however, justify using the name "existentialism" as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort. But the basic tenet of "existentialism" has nothing at all in common with the statement from Being and Time [that "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"]—apart from the fact that in Being and Time no statement about the relation of essentia and existentia can yet be expressed, since there it is still a question of preparing something precursory.^[43]

"Letter on 'Humanism'" is often seen as a direct response to Sartre's 1945 lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism." Aside from merely disputing readings of his own work, however, in "Letter on 'Humanism,'" Heidegger asserts that "Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one." Heidegger's largest issue with Sartre's existential humanism is that, while it does make a humanistic 'move' in privileging existence over essence, "the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement." From this point onward in his thought, Heidegger attempted to think beyond metaphysics to a place where the articulation of the fundamental questions of ontology were fundamentally possible.

Post-war forays into France

After the war, Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period on account of his activities as Rector of Freiburg University. He developed a number of contacts in France, where his work continued to be taught, and a number of French students visited him at Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in Heidegger and "the jews", which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, one step toward bringing together French and German students). Heidegger subsequently made several visits to France, and made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of correspondence with Jean Beaufret, an early French translator of Heidegger, and with Lucien Braun.

Derrida and deconstruction

Deconstruction came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of Jacques Derrida's work (Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. There was discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this failed to take place. Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of September 29, 1967 and May 16, 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as a philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see Penser à Strasbourg, Jacques Derrida, et al., which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida").

Jacques Derrida made emphatic efforts to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounted to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion"—literally "destruction"-and "Abbau"-more literally "de-building"). According to Derrida, Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian concerns is overly psychologistic, anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to Dasein in Being and Time. Because of Derrida's vehement attempts to "rescue" Heidegger from his existentialist interpreters (and also from Heidegger's "orthodox" followers), Derrida has at times been represented as a "French Heidegger", to the extent that he, his colleagues, and his former students are made to go proxy for Heidegger's worst (political) mistakes, despite ample evidence that the reception of Heidegger's work by later practitioners of deconstruction is anything but doctrinaire.

The Farías debate

Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. These debates included the question of whether it was possible to do without Heidegger's philosophy, a position which Derrida in particular rejected. Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.

When in 1987 Víctor Farías published his book Heidegger et le nazisme, this debate was taken up by many others, some of whom were inclined to disparage so-called "deconstructionists" for their association with Heidegger's philosophy. Derrida and others not only continued to defend the importance of reading Heidegger, but attacked Farías, on the grounds of poor scholarship and for what they saw as the sensationalism of his approach. Not all scholars agreed with this negative assessment: Richard Rorty, for example, declared that "[Farias'] book includes more concrete information relevant to Heidegger's relations with the Nazis than anything else available, and it is an excellent antidote to the evasive apologetics that are still being published."^[44]

Bernard Stiegler

More recently, Heidegger's thought has considerably influenced the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This is evident even from the title of Stiegler's multi-volume magnum opus, La technique et le temps (volume one translated into English as Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus).^[45] Stiegler offers an original reading of Heidegger, arguing that there can be no access to "originary temporality" other than via material, that is, technical, supports, and that Heidegger recognised this in the form of his account of world historicality, yet in the end suppressed that fact. Stiegler understands the existential analytic of Being and Time as an account of psychic individuation, and his later "history of being" as an account of collective individuation. He understands many of the problems of Heidegger's philosophy and politics as the consequence of Heidegger's inability to integrate the two.

Criticism

Heidegger's influence upon 20th century continental philosophy is unquestioned and has produced a variety of critical responses.

Early criticisms

The content of Being and Time, according to Husserl, claimed to deal with ontology, but from Husserl's perspective only did so in the first few pages of the book. Having nothing further to contribute to an ontology independent of human existence, Heidegger changed the topic to Dasein. Whereas Heidegger argued that the question of human existence is central to the pursuit of the question of being, Husserl criticized this as reducing phenomenology to "philosophical anthropology" and offering an abstract and incorrect portrait of the human being.^[46]

The Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger engaged in an influential debate located in Davos in 1929, concerning the significance of Kantian notions of freedom and rationality. Whereas Cassirer defended the role of rationality in Kant, Heidegger argued for the priority of the imagination. Dilthey's student Georg Misch wrote the first extended critical appropriation of Heidegger in Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl, Leipzig 1930 (3. ed. Stuttgart 1964).

Left-Hegelianism and critical theory

Hegel influenced Marxist thinkers, especially György Lukács and the Frankfurt School, associated the style and content of Heidegger's thought with German irrationalism and criticized its political implications.

Initially members of the Frankfurt School were positively disposed to Heidegger, becoming more critical at the beginning of the 1930s. Heidegger's student Herbert Marcuse became associated with the Frankfurt School. Initially striving for a synthesis between Hegelian-Marxism and Heidegger's phenomenology, Marcuse later rejected Heidegger's thought for its "false concreteness" and "revolutionary conservativism." Theodor Adorno wrote an extended critique of the ideological character of Heidegger's early and later use of language in the Jargon of Authenticity. Contemporary social theorists associated with the Frankfurt School have remained largely critical of Heidegger's works and influence. In particular, Jürgen Habermas admonishes the influence of Heidegger on recent French philosophy in his polemic against "postmodernism" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). However, recent work by philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis tries to show that Heidegger's insights into world disclosure are badly misunderstood and mishandled by Habermas, and are of vital importance for critical theory, offering an important way of renewing that tradition.^[47][48]

Reception by Analytic and Anglo-American philosophy

Criticism of Heidegger's philosophy has also come from analytic philosophy, beginning with logical positivism. Accusing Heidegger of offering an "illusory" ontology, Rudolf Carnap criticized him, in "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" (1932), of committing the fallacy of reification and of wrongly dismissing the logical treatment of language, which, according to Carnap, can only lead to writing "nonsensical pseudo-propositions."

A strong critic of Heidegger's philosophy was the British logical positivist A. J. Ayer. In Ayer's view, he proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence, which are completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis. For Ayer, this sort of philosophy was a poisonous strain in modern thought and he considered Heidegger to be the worst example of such philosophy which Ayer believed to be entirely useless.

Bertrand Russell commented, expressing the sentiments of many mid-20th-century English-speaking philosophers, that:

Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.^[49]

Roger Scruton stated that:

His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult—unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it^[50].

The analytic tradition values clarity of expression. Heidegger, however, has on occasion appeared to take an opposing view, stating for example that "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,' i.e., 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."^[51] Apart from the charge of obscurantism, other analytic philosophers considered the actual content of Heidegger's work to be either faulty and meaningless, vapid or uninteresting.

Not all analytic philosophers, however, have been as hostile. Gilbert Ryle wrote a critical yet positive review of Being and Time and Ludwig Wittgenstein made a remark recorded by Friedrich Waismann: "To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety"^[52] which has been construed by some commentators^[who?] as sympathetic to Heidegger's philosophical approach. These positive and negative analytic evaluations have been collected in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (Yale University Press, 1978). Heidegger's reputation within English-language philosophy has slightly improved in philosophical terms in some part through the efforts of Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty, and a recent generation of analytically-oriented phenomenology scholars. Pragmatist Rorty claimed that Heidegger's approach to philosophy in the first half of his career has much in common with that of the latter-day Ludwig Wittgenstein, a significant figure in analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, Rorty asserted that what Heidegger had constructed in his writings was a myth of being rather than an account of it^[53].

Contemporary European reception

Even though Heidegger is considered by most observers to be the most influential philosopher of the 20th century in continental philosophy, aspects of his work have been criticised by those who nevertheless acknowledge this influence, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Some questions raised about Heidegger's philosophy include the priority of ontology, the status of animals, the nature of the religious, Heidegger's supposed neglect of ethics (Emmanuel Lévinas), the body (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), or sexual difference (Luce Irigaray).

Emmanuel Lévinas was deeply influenced by Heidegger yet became one of his fiercest critics, contrasting the infinity of the good beyond being with the immanence and totality of ontology. Lévinas also condemned Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, stating "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."^[54]

Cinema

• The Ister (2004) is a film based on Heidegger's 1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin, and features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. The official site is located here.
• The film director Terrence Malick translated Heidegger's 1929 essay "Vom Wesen des Grundes" into English. It was published under the title The Essence of Reasons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969, bilingual edition).

Bibliography

Gesamtausgabe

Heidegger's collected works are published by Vittorio Klostermann. The Gesamtausgabe was begun during Heidegger's lifetime. He defined the order of publication and controversially dictated that the principle of editing should be "ways not works." Publication has not yet been completed.

The contents are listed here: Heidegger Gesamtausgabe.

Selected works

A complete list of English translations of Heidegger's work is available here.

Further reading

This article's further reading may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive, less relevant or many publications with the same point of view; or by incorporating the relevant publications into the body of the article through appropriate citations.

On Being and Time

• William Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism
• Taylor Carman, Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in "Being and Time"
• Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I
• Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects
• Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Revised Edition
• E.F. Kaelin, "Heidegger's Being & Time: A Reading for Readers"
• Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time
• Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time
• Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time
• James Luchte, Heidegger's Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality

Biographies

• Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore
• Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life
• Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil
• John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

Politics and Nazism

• Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger
• Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias
• Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
• Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie : autour des séminaires inédits de 1933-1935, Paris, Albin Michel, 2005. ISBN 2-226-14252-5
• Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Transcendence Ends in Politics", in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political
• Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism
• Karl Löwith Heidegger's Existentialism
• Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews"
• Günther Neske & Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers
• Political Texts – Rectoral Addresses
• Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (ed.), The Heidegger Case
• Daniel Ross, Heidegger and the Question of the Political
• Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany
• Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education
• Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: the Fate of the Political
• Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy ISBN 0-262-23166-2.

Other secondary literature

• Robert Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing
• Walter A. Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being
• Gabriel Cercel / Cristian Ciocan (eds), The Early Heidegger (Studia Phaenomenologica I, 3-4), Bucharest: Humanitas, 2001, 506 p., including letters by Heidegger and Pöggeler, and articles by Walter Biemel, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Theodore Kisiel, Marion Heinz, Alfred Denker
• Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology
• Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time", in Margins of Philosophy
• Paul Edwards, Heidegger's Confusions
• Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity
• Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry
• William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory
• William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos
• Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Decision of Existence", in The Birth to Presence
• Herman Philipse, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation
• Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction
• François Raffoul, Heidegger and the Subject
• François Raffoul & David Pettigrew (ed), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy
• John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger
• John Sallis (ed), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, including articles by Robert Bernasconi, Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gasché, and John Sallis, among others.
• Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy
• Tony See, Community without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger
• Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut
• Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
• Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger

Reception in France

• Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger, 4 vols.
• Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols.
• Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961

Influence on Japanese philosophy

• Mayeda, Graham. 2006. Time, space and ethics in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō, and Martin Heidegger (New York: Routledge, 2006). ISBN 0415976731 (alk. paper).

Influence on Asian philosophy

• Parkes, Graham. 1987. Heidegger and Asian Thought. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824810643.

See also

• Aletheia
• Heideggerian terminology
• Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"
• Ontotheology
• Ontology

References

External links

This article's external links may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links. (September 2009)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Martin Heidegger

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Martin Heidegger

General information

• German Heidegger Society. (German)
• Heidegger information in English: Ereignis.
• Phainomena – Heidegger-blog: literature, activities and news about Heidegger and his philosophy. (German)
• Der Spiegel Interview

Works by Heidegger

• English translations of Heidegger's works.
• Complete contents of the Gesamtausgabe.
• Martin Heidegger : Existence And Being (1949) on archive.org

Works on Heidegger

• "Martin Heidegger" [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] – informative article, summarizing Heidegger's philosophy, including his theories on Angst, and criticisms from other philosophers such as Husserl.
• Books introducing Heidegger.
• Dutton, Denis (1988). "Kaufmann, Heidegger, and Nazism". Philosophy and Literature (12): 325–326. http://www.denisdutton.com/heidegger.htm. Retrieved 2006-07-12.  – a positive review of Walter Kaufmann's and George Steiner's negative treatments of Heidegger.
• Hearing Heidegger and Saussure by Elmer G. Wiens.
• "Viewing Power in Heidegger and Levinas" by Mitchell Cowen Verter.
• "Serious response to Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger and nazism". (French)
• "Nazi foundations of Heidegger's Work" by Emmanuel Faye, with a discussion. (French)
• "For the opening of Heidegger's Archives" by Emmanuel Faye. (French)
• Réponses de Gérard Guest (1) (au dossier publié dans "Magazine Littéraire"). (French)
• Réponses de Gérard Guest (2) (au dossier publié dans "Le Point"). (French)
• Heidegger: Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Breisgau (Multilingual).
• Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault by Hubert Dreyfus.
• http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/papers.html Recent Papers by Hubert Dreyfus.
• Heidegger on Truth as Alethéia
• Heidegger and the History of Metaphysics as Ontotheology
• What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World, a paper by Roy Hornsby
• François Fédier: Avant-Propos: Heidegger à plus forte raison, Fayard, Paris, 2007. (French)
• François Fédier: Mécanique de la diffamation. (French)
• Heidegger contre le nazisme (blog Sorbonne-Paris4). (French)
• A Normal Nazi Thomas Sheehan on Heidegger
• Heidegger and Nazism: An Exchange
• Heil Heidegger! A critical re-evaluation of Heidegger in The Chronicle Review - Chronicle of Higher Education

Media

• Human all too human : Martin Heidegger – BBC documentary.
• Heidegger Speaks. Part 1. English subtitled. (YouTube).
• Martin Heidegger. Teil 2. German. 1975 (YouTube).
• François Fédier, Pascal David et Faye.Multimedia. (French)
• Heidegger speaking.
• Podcast of Prof. Hubert Dreyfus' undergraduate lectures on Heidegger.
• Andrew Mitchell on Martin Heidegger from the radio program Entitled Opinions
• Guardian series on Being and Time, by Simon Critchley

Jean-Paul Sartre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean-Paul Sartre

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Full name	Jean-Paul Sartre
Born	21 June 1905 Paris, France
Died	15 April 1980 (aged 74) Paris, France
School/tradition	Existentialism, Marxism
Main interests	Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics, Phenomenology, Ontology
Notable ideas	"Existence precedes essence" "Bad faith" "Nothingness"
Influenced by[show] Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Mao, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, De Beauvoir, Camus, Kojève, Flaubert, Céline, Merleau-Ponty, Dos Passos
Influenced[show] De Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, R. D. Laing, Iris Murdoch, André Gorz, Alain Badiou, Fredric Jameson, Michael Jackson, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Kenzaburo Oe, Doris Lessing, William Burroughs, Gilles Deleuze

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (French pronunciation: [saʁtʁ], English: /ˈsɑrt/; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy and Existentialism, and his work continues to influence further fields such as sociology and literary studies. Sartre was also noted for his lifelong relationship with the author and social theorist, Simone de Beauvoir.

Biography

Early life and thought

Jean-Paul Sartre was born and raised in Paris to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin, and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. (Her father, Charles Schweitzer, 1844-1935, was the older brother of Albert Schweitzer's father, Louis Théophile, 1846-1925).^[1] When Sartre was 15 months old, his father died of a fever. Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.^[2] As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.^[3] He studied and earned a doctorate in philosophy in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education that was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals.^[4] Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, among others. In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship,^[5] though they were not monogamous.^[6] Sartre served as a conscript in the French Army from 1929 to 1931 and he later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.^[7]

Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943).^[8] Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Sartre and World War II

French journalists visit General George C. Marshall at his office in the Pentagon building,(1945)

In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist.^[9] He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux,^[10] and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war — in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D, Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Because of poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered his position as a teacher at Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse at Paris, and was given a new position at Lycée Condorcet, replacing a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law.

After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti and his wife Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. Socialisme et liberté soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write, instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, none of which was censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.

After August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew. In the book he tries to explain the etiology of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until he turned away from communism, a schism that eventually divided them in 1951, after the publication of Camus' The Rebel. Later, while Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resistor who wrote.

When the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and started writing full-time as well as continuing his political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).

Politics

Jean Paul Sartre (middle) and Simone de Beauvoir (left) meeting with Che Guevara (right) in Cuba, 1960

The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948 work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced communism, denied the purgings of Stalin, had an affair with a KGB-agent^[11] and defended existentialism, though never officially joining the Communist Party, and took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatory of the Manifeste des 121. Furthermore, he had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967.

As a fellow-traveller, Sartre spent much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about free will with communist principles, which taught that socio-economic forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a critical role in shaping our lives. His major defining work of this period, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960 (a second volume appeared posthumously). In Critique, Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received up until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with the leading Communist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.

Sartre went to Cuba in the '60s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"^[12] and the "era's most perfect man."^[13] Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel."^[14]

Following the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli Olympians were killed by the Palestinian organization Black September in Munich 1972, Sartre said terrorism "is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others." Sartre also found it "perfectly scandalous that the Munich attack should be judged by the French press and a section of public opinion as an intolerable scandal."^[15] However, Sartre was generally supportive of Israel and Zionism.^[16]

During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction leader Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment.^[17]

Late life and death

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterballast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it. He was the first Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the prize,^[18] and he had previously refused the Légion d'honneur, in 1945. The prize was announced on 22 October 1964; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread;^[19] on 23 October, Le Figaro published a statement by Sartre explaining his refusal. He said he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award, and did not want to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution.^[19]

However, Lars Gyllensten, long time member of the Nobel prize committee has controversially claimed in his autobiography that Sartre later tried to access the prize money, but was subsequently turned down.^[20] Allegedly, the French philosopher in 1975 wrote a letter to the Nobel Prize committee saying that he had changed his mind about the prize, at least when it came to the money. At which point the prize committee is said to have declined the request, stating that the funds had been reinvested in the Nobel institute. However, there has never been any evidence presented or confirmation given to prove any such story.

Though his name was then a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience. President Charles de Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire."^[21]

In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied: "I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet...If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived,...how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself." Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work (and using drugs for this reason, e.g., amphetamine) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remained unfinished.

He died 15 April 1980 in Paris from an oedema of the lung.

Sartre's grave in the Cimetière de Montparnasse

Sartre lies buried in Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was well attended, with estimates of the number of mourners along the two hour march ranging from 15,000 to over 50,000.^[22][23]

Thought

The basis of Sartre's existentialism can be found in The Transcendence of the Ego. To begin with, the thing-in-itself is infinite and overflowing. Sartre refers to any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-reflective consciousness." Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc. the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness." There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human condition. The reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or otherwise) can only limit the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to understand or describe it. It follows, therefore, that any attempt at self-knowledge (self-consciousness - a reflective consciousness of an overflowing infinite) is a construct that fails no matter how often it is attempted. Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object.

The same holds true about knowledge of the "Other." The "Other" (meaning simply beings or objects that are not the self) is a construct of reflective consciousness. A volitional entity must be careful to understand this more as a form of warning than as an ontological statement. However, there is an implication of solipsism here that Sartre considers fundamental to any coherent description of the human condition.^[24] Sartre overcomes this solipsism by a kind of ritual. Self consciousness needs "the Other" to prove (display) its own existence. It has a "masochistic desire" to be limited, i.e. limited by the reflective consciousness of another subject. This is expressed metaphorically in the famous line of dialogue from No Exit, "Hell is other people."

Sartre stated that "In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence--as not-bound to life", meaning the value of the Other's recognition of me depends on the value of my recognition of the Other In this sense to the extent that the Other apprehends me as bound to a body and immersed in life, I am myself only an Other as Ego. ^[25]

The main idea of Jean-Paul Sartre is that we are, as humans, "condemned to be free."^[26] This theory relies upon his belief that there is no creator, and is formed using the example of the paper knife. Sartre says that if one considered a paper knife, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes essence".^[27] This forms the basis for his assertion that since one cannot explain their own actions and behaviour by referencing any specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. "We are left alone, without excuse".

Authenticity and Individuality

Sartre maintained that the concept of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience death consciousness so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge.^[28]

La Nausée and existentialism

As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, having equal value to discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism. With such purpose, this novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them.

This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste — specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free") as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas proves to be bitterly rejected.

Sartre and literature

Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948, the Roman Catholic Church placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited books. Most of his plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people".

Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was the The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism.

Sartre as a public intellectual

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Balzac Memorial in the 1920's

While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved around the notion of human freedom, he began a sustained intellectual participation in more public matters in 1945. Prior to this—before the Second World War—he was content with the role of an apolitical liberal intellectual: "Now teaching at a lycée in Laon [...] Sartre made his headquarters the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays, read novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote. And he was published" (Gerassi 1989: 134). Sartre and his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, existed, in her words, where "the world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out" (de Beauvoir 1958: 339).

Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in the The Age of Reason, which was completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the Second World War. By forging Mathieu as an absolute rationalist, analyzing every situation, and functioning entirely on reason, he removed any strands of authentic content from his character and as a result, Mathieu could "recognize no allegiance except to [him]self" (Sartre 1942: 13), though he realized that without "responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing" (Sartre 1942: 14). Mathieu's commitment was only to himself, never to the outside world. Mathieu was restrained from action each time because he had no reasons for acting. Sartre then, for these reasons, was not compelled to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and it took the invasion of his own country to motivate him into action and to provide a crystallization of these ideas. It was the war that gave him a purpose beyond himself, and the atrocities of the war can be seen as the turning point in his public stance.

The war opened Sartre's eyes to a political reality he had not yet understood until forced into continual engagement with it: "the world itself destroyed Sartre's illusions about isolated self-determining individuals and made clear his own personal stake in the events of the time" (Aronson 1980: 108). Returning to Paris in 1941 he formed the "Socialisme et Liberté" resistance group. In 1943, after a lack of Communist support forced the disbandment of the group, Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group^[29], in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war. He continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it through literature" (Thody 1964: 21).

The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre’s work is packaged in the introduction he wrote for a new journal, Les Temps Modernes, in October 1945. Here he aligned the journal, and thus himself, with the Left and called for writers to express their political commitment (Aronson 1980: 107). Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directed more to the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left.

Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept; neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in true existential fashion, "culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention". This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a pragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the belief in human freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this over-arching theme of freedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines" (Kirsner 2003: 13). Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: "the international world order, the political and economic organisation of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminate information. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world" (Scriven 1999: xii).

Moreover, his views were divergent from the prevailing political situation. The most clear example of this is in his post-war attitude to the French Communist Party (PCF), who, following Liberation were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy and opposition, which appeared to lure young French men and women away from the ideology of Marxism and into Sartre’s own existentialism (Scriven 1999: 13). His troubled and varied relationship with Communism—and Marxism in particular—was a consequence of their doctrines that would have prevented his notion of radical freedom. And to align himself too rigidly with any political movement would have circumscribed the very freedom he was searching for. This search is most evident in his earlier writings and, especially after the Second World War, in his public activities, which he had begun to regard as more significant upon recognition of the futility of words in contrast to action. (Kirsner 2003: 60).

In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged Sartre in political matters, he set forth a body of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme of his early thought and began to explore alternative solutions to the problems posed there" (Aronson 1980: 121). The greatest difficulties that he and all public intellectuals of the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of the world that were outdating the printed word as a form of expression. In Sartre's opinion, the "traditional bourgeois literary forms remain innately superior", but there is "a recognition that the new technological 'mass media' forms must be embraced if Sartre's ethical and political achievements as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification of bourgeois political practices and the Sartre's raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural, of the working class" (Scriven 1993: 8). The struggle for Sartre was against the monopolising moguls who were beginning to take over the media and destroy the role of the intellectual. His attempts to reach a public were mediated by these powers, and it was often these powers he had to campaign against. He was skilled enough, however, to circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media, advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice versa. (Scriven 1993: 22).

The role of a public intellectual can lead to the individual placing himself in danger as he engages with disputed topics. In Sartre's case, this was witnessed in June 1961, when a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of Algerian self-determination at the time had led Sartre to become a target of the campaign of terror that mounted as the colonists' position deteriorated. A similar occurrence took place the next year and he had begun to receive threatening letters from Oran. (Aronson 1980: 157).

Selected bibliography

• L'Imagination (Imagination: A Psychological Critique), 1936
• La Transcendence de l'égo (The Transcendence of the Ego), 1937
• La Nausée (Nausea), 1938
• Le Mur (The Wall), 1939
• Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions), 1939
• L'Imaginaire (The Imaginary), 1940, lit. "The Unconscious"
• Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943 - a modern version of the Oresteia
• L'Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943
• Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew; literally, Reflections on the Jewish Question), 1943
• Huis-clos (No Exit), 1944
• Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) trilogy, comprising:
  • L'Âge de raison (The Age of Reason), 1945
  • Le Sursis (The Reprieve), 1947
  • La Mort dans l'Âme (Troubled Sleep, title formerly translated as Iron in the Soul, literally "Death in Spirit"), 1949
• Morts sans sépulture (Deaths without burial; aka The Victors; Men Without Shadows in English), 1946
• L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946
• La Putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute) 1946
• Qu'est ce que la littérature? (What is literature?), 1947
• Baudelaire, 1947
• Situations, 1947 –1965
• Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands), 1948
• "Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus), introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1948
• Le Diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord), 1951
• Les Jeux sont faits (The Chips are Down), 1952
• Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1952
• Kean (adaptation of Alexandre Dumas, père's play) 1953, produced Paris 1954, revived London 2007 [1]
• Nekrassov, 1955
• Existentialism and Human Emotions, 1957
• Search for a Method, 1957
• Les Séquestrés d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona), 1959
• Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), 1960
• "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
• Search for a Method (English translation of preface to Critique, Vol. I), 1962
• Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 1964
• Les Mots (The Words), 1964, autobiographical
• L'Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), 1971–1972 - on Gustave Flaubert
• Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for Ethics), 1983, 1947-48 notes on ethics
• Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939 - Mars 1940 (War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War 1939-1940), 1984, notebooks from Sartre's time in the Phony War of 1939-1940

See also

• Existentialism
• Atheist existentialism
• Wilfrid Desan
• Sartre and bad faith

Sources

• Aronson, Ronald (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre - Philosophy in the World. London: NLB
• Gerassi, John (1989) Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. Volume 1: Protestant or Protester? Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• Judaken, Jonathan (2006) "Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
• Kirsner, Douglas (2003) The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Lang. New York: Karnac
• Scriven, Michael (1993) Sartre and The Media. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
• Scriven, Michael (1999) Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
• Thody, Philip (1964) Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Hamish Hamilton

References

Further reading

• Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905-80, 1985.
• Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
• Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Volume 1: Protestant or Protester?, University of Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 0226287971.
• R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971.
• Suzanne Lilar, A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris: Grasset, 1967.
• Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
• Heiner Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from the German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar, Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture philosophique), Paris 2001.
• Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• P.V. Spade, Class Lecture Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. 1996.
• H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996.
• H. Wittmann, Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom.Ed. by Dirk Hoeges. Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs, vol. 13, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang 2009 ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8
• Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1954)
• BBC (1999). "The Road to Freedom". Human, All Too Human.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean-Paul Sartre

By Sartre

• Full Ebooks in French on the website 'La philosophie'
• Americans and Their Myths Sartre's essay in The Nation (18 October 1947 issue)
• Sartre Texts on Philosophy Archive
• Sartre Internet Archive on Marxists.org
• French Audiobook (mp3), incipit of The Words (1964), read aloud in French by IncipitBlog.

On Sartre

• UK Sartre Society
• Groupe d'études sartriennes, Paris
• Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason essay by Andy Blunden
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Existentialism Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Sartre.org Articles, archives, and forum
• Texts on Sartre Sartre Rubric on the website of the Sorbonne Marx Seminar
• "The Second Coming Of Sartre", John Lichfield, The Independent, 17 June 2005
• The World According to Sartre essay by Roger Kimball
• Reclaiming Sartre A review of Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism
• Biography and quotes of Sartre
• Living with Mother. Sartre and the problem of maternity, Benedict O'Donohoe, International WebjournalSens Public.
• L’image de la femme dans le théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre - Jean-Paul Sartre:sexiste? by Stephanie Rupert
• Pierre Michel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Octave Mirbeau.
• Listen to Radio 4's In Our Time programme on Sartre - RealAudio
• Sartre: philosophy, literature, politics (articles), International Webjournal Sens Public

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Nick Bostrom

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This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (June 2009) (Find sources: Nick Bostrom – news, books, scholar)

Nick Bostrom at the 2006 Singularity Summit.

Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström in 1973) is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk and the Anthropic principle. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is currently the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

In addition to his writing for academic and popular press, Bostrom makes frequent media appearances in which he talks about transhumanism-related topics such as cloning, artificial intelligence, superintelligence, mind uploading, cryonics, nanotechnology, and the simulation argument.

In 1998, Bostrom co-founded (with David Pearce) the World Transhumanist Association^[1] (which has since changed its name to Humanity+). In 2004, he co-founded (with James Hughes) the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bostrom currently serves as the Chair of both organizations. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the newly created Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is the 2009 recipient of the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement.^{[2] [3]}

Contents [hide] 1 Philosophy 1.1 Ethics of human enhancement 1.2 Existential risk 1.3 Anthropic principle 1.4 Simulation hypothesis 2 Books 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Philosophy

Ethics of human enhancement

Bostrom is favourable towards "human enhancement", or "self-improvement and human perfectibility through the ethical application of science"^[1][4], as well as a critic of bio-conservative views.^[5]

Existential risk

Bostrom has addressed the philosophical question of humanity's long-term survival.^[6] He defines an existential risk as one in which an "adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." In the 2008 volume "Global Catastrophic Risks", editors Bostrom and Cirkovic offer a detailed taxonomy of existential risk.

Anthropic principle

Bostrom has argued that the correct understanding of the anthropic principle is by means of his Strong Self-Sampling Assumption: Each observer-moment should reason as if it were randomly selected from the class of all observer-moments in its reference class. In this conception, each observer moment should be analysed as if it were randomly sampled. Analysing an observer's experience into a sequence of "observer-moments" helps avoid certain paradoxes. However the main ambiguity is the selection of the appropriate "reference class". For the Weak Anthropic Principle this might correspond to all real or potential observer-moments in our universe. For the Strong version, it might correspond to all observer-moments in the multiverse. Bostrom's mathematical development shows that choosing either too broad or too narrow a reference class leads to counter-intuitive results; but he is not able to prescribe a perfect choice.

Simulation hypothesis

On the surface, Bostrom's simulation hypothesis is an example of a skeptical hypothesis, a proposal concerning the nature of reality put forward to question beliefs, and as such, there is a long history to the underlying thesis that reality is an illusion. This thesis can be dated back to Plato, arguably underpins the Mind-Body Dualism of Descartes, and is closely related to phenomenalism, a stance briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell. However, Bostrom has argued that this is not the case, and that there are empirical reasons why the 'Simulation Hypothesis' might be valid. He suggests that if it is possible to simulate entire inhabited planets or even entire universes on a computer, and that such simulated people can be fully conscious, then the sheer number of such simulations likely to be produced by any sufficiently advanced civilization (taken together with his Strong Self-Sampling Assumption) makes it extremely likely that we are in fact currently living in such a simulation.

Bostrom contends that at least one of the following statements is overwhelmingly likely to be true:

1. Almost no civilization will reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities.
2. Almost no civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a simulated reality, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.
3. Almost all entities with our general set of experiences are living in a simulation.

Books

• Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy, ISBN 0-415-93858-9
• Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom, ISBN 978-0198570509

See also

• Differential technological development
• Doomsday argument
• Dream argument
• Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth
• Simulation hypothesis
• Simulated reality

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "The ideas interview: Nick Bostrom; John Sutherland meets a transhumanist who wrestles with the ethics of technologically enhanced human beings" John Sutherland, The Guardian, 9 May 2006.
2. ^ http://gannonaward.org/The_Gannon_Award/The_Gannon_Group.html
3. ^ http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/archive/2009/eugene_r._gannon_award_for_the_continued_pursuit_of_human_advancement
4. ^ Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2003): pp. 493-506
5. ^ Nick Bostrom (2005) "In Defence of Posthuman Dignity" Bioethics, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 202-214
6. ^ Nick Bostrom (March 2002), "Existential Risks", Journal of Evolution and Technology

External links

• Nick Bostrom's homepage.
• Bostrom's Anthropic Principle page, containing information about the anthropic principle and the Doomsday argument.
• Bostrom's Simulation Argument page.
• Oxford Future of Humanity Institute
• The Guardian interviews Bostrom about the World Transhumanist Association
• Interview on transhumanism
• TED Talks: Nick Bostrom on our biggest problems at TED Global in 2005
• http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/archive/2009/eugene_r._gannon_award_for_the_continued_pursuit_of_human_advancement

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Categories: Transhumanists | Swedish philosophers | 1973 births | Living people

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The main article for this category is Polyamory

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Polyamory

Subcategories

This category has only the following subcategory.

C

• [+] Polyamorous culture (3 P)

Pages in category "Polyamory"

The following 42 pages are in this category, out of 42 total. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more).

Polyamory A Adultery B Natalie Clifford Barney Simone de Beauvoir Bloomsbury Group John Byrne (Scottish playwright) C Church of All Worlds Compersion E Dossie Easton The Ethical Slut F French Twist H Janet Hardy Hugh Hefner Robert A. Heinlein

H cont. A Home at the End of the World (film) A Home at the End of the World I Patricia Ireland J V. M. Johnson K Kerista Alfred Kinsey L Liberated Christians List of polyamorists Loving More N New relationship energy Graham Nicholls P PolyFamilies Polyday Polyfidelity

P cont. Polytrothism Primary and secondary (relationship) S Vita Sackville-West Jean-Paul Sartre Summer Lovers Tilda Swinton T Terminology within polyamory Triad (David Crosby song) Triad (sociology) V Vicky Cristina Barcelona W Jennifer L. Wesp Nan Wise Z Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Polyamory"

Categories: Free love | Sexual fidelity | Intimate relationships

Category:Psychedelic drug advocates

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Subcategories

This category has only the following subcategory.

I

• [+] Ibogaine activists (6 P, 2 F)

Pages in category "Psychedelic drug advocates"

The following 75 pages are in this category, out of 75 total. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more).

A Pablo Amaringo B Charles Baudelaire Jello Biafra Walter Bowart David Jay Brown William S. Burroughs C Laurence Caruana D Paul Devereux Philip K. Dick Rick Doblin Florinda Donner Ann Druyan F Michel Foucault G Mestre Gabriel Stephen Gaskin H. R. Giger Allen Ginsberg Peter Gorman Jan Greve Alex Grey Stanislav Grof H Clark Heinrich Nick Herbert (physicist) Bill Hicks Albert Hofmann

H cont. Alfred Matthew Hubbard Harold L. Humes Aldous Huxley I David Icke K Ken Kesey Paul Krassner Stanley Krippner Patrick K. Kroupa L Timothy Leary John C. Lilly Howard Lotsof Mel Lyman M Dennis McKenna Terence McKenna Chris McKinstry Don Barry Mason Ralph Metzner Marcia Moore Grant Morrison Jim Morrison N Ethan Nadelmann Willie Nelson O Humphry Osmond Jonathan Ott P Dale Pendell

P cont. Mark Pesce Daniel Pinchbeck R Ram Dass Christian Rätsch Charles A. Reich Arthur Rimbaud Joe Rogan S Jean-Paul Sartre Tim Scully Benny Shanon Alexander Shulgin Ann Shulgin R. U. Sirius Huston Smith Paul Stamets Owsley Stanley Myron Stolaroff Rick Strassman T Tenacious D Hunter S. Thompson D. M. Turner W Bob Wallace A. J. Weberman Andrew Weil Robert Anton Wilson