Heidegger, Martin

Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher, educated at Freiburg Jesuit Seminary and Freiburg University. Heidegger was primarily concerned with the question of being; in his formulation, he dealt with the question ‘what is “is”?’ Heidegger used the word Dasein to refer to specifically human modes of being. In his most famous work, Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962), he studies Dasein in relation to time, asking how Being deals with its temporality, including the fear of being ‘thrown into Being’. Sartre published his response in L'Être et le néant, in 1943 (Being and Nothingness, 1956). Heidegger believed that Being can only be articulated through language; he defined as ‘poetry’ that language capable of doing this. He admired Rilke and Hölderlin.

Although Heidegger's writing is often abstruse, and in spite of the backlash against him due to his sympathies with Nazism, his writings have had enormous influence on 20th-cent. century thought and literary theory. He was a crucial influence for 20th-cent. existentialism (especially Sartre), one of the founders (with Hans-Georg Gadamer) of hermeneutic criticism, and his work was a starting point for Jacques Derrida's development of deconstruction. A collection of his work on the nature of thought, language, and poetry has been translated as Poetry, Language, Thought (1971). There is a study by G. Steiner (1978).