Summary
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher who reopened the question that Western philosophy had left dormant since the ancient Greeks: what does it mean for something to exist at all? His 1927 masterwork Being and Time analyzed human existence as always already embedded in a world of practical engagement, social inheritance, and mortality; not as a mind enclosed in a body surveying external objects. This analysis produced concepts (being-in-the-world, ready-to-hand, care, being-toward-death) that later thinkers applied directly to the experience of illness, to the critique of technological medicine, and to clinical ethics. His thought is also entangled, irreversibly, with his support for National Socialism in 1933–34 and with antisemitic passages in his private notebooks published posthumously in 2014. Both the philosophical legacy and the moral failure belong to any honest account.
Life and Context
Heidegger’s philosophical background in rural Catholic southern Germany both illuminated certain dimensions of life (guilt, salvation, handicraft, nature) and obscured others (urban modernity, liberal democracy, cosmopolitanism), according to Polt.(Polt, 1999) This early formation left lasting marks on his thought, as the analysis demonstrates.(Polt, 1999)
[GAP: Heidegger’s early encounter with Brentano’s dissertation and his abandonment of seminary training.] His early academic work took the form of a “theory of theory”: logic understood as the study of timeless valid propositions independent of historical life.(Polt, 1999) He later vehemently rejected this view, arguing that theoretical truth depends on a more basic pre-theoretical unconcealment rooted in historical existence.(Polt, 1999) [GAP: Heidegger’s studies under Rickert, his 1916 habilitation, and a decade of teaching without major publication.]
Two intellectual encounters shaped those years of preparation. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, with its account of the intentionality of consciousness and its ambition for rigorous self-evidence, gave Heidegger the concept of unconcealment: the idea that things must show themselves rather than merely be deduced. But Heidegger came to argue, against Husserl, that perfect self-evidence is impossible in principle, since disclosure is always bound up with historical situatedness.(Polt, 1999) Husserl’s concept of categorial intuition, that the “is” in “here is an apple” is not sensory but an intuited categorical feature of experience; specifically opened for Heidegger the possibility of investigating Being as a phenomenon: not something invented but something given and available for inspection.(Polt, 1999) The second encounter was with Wilhelm Dilthey, the philosopher of the human sciences, who argued that the objects of history, psychology, and the humanities are essentially historical beings rather than ahistorical objects amenable to natural-scientific method.(Polt, 1999) Heidegger’s mature philosophy combines Husserl’s systematic rigor with Dilthey’s sensitivity to concrete historical existence, producing what he called a hermeneutics of facticity.(Polt, 1999)
During those Marburg years (1923–28) his lecture courses drew students from across Germany who later recalled the experience as unlike anything in academic philosophy. Hannah Arendt began a romantic involvement with him in 1925 that lasted over three years; after the war, repelled by his rectorate behavior but willing to resume the relationship, she became instrumental in bringing his work into English translation in the United States.(Polt, 1999) Those early courses also marked a sustained engagement with Paul, Augustine, and Aristotle; not as systematic metaphysicians but as thinkers who had explored the extremes of human experience.(Polt, 1999) The underlying methodological conviction was that human life, in all its individuality and situatedness, is the origin of theoretical truth: one learns what it is to be human not by measuring examples of Homo sapiens but by being human.(Polt, 1999) To handle this without freezing it into doctrine, Heidegger introduced the concept of formal indication: concepts that do not theoretically capture a phenomenon but point toward it, inviting readers to notice it in their own experience.(Polt, 1999)
Being and Time appeared in 1927, composed under the professional pressure of “publish or perish”; in January 1926, Berlin had rejected Marburg’s proposal to promote Heidegger to full professor on grounds of insufficient publication; the book went to press in April 1927 in Husserl’s Yearbook.(Polt, 1999) Theodor Kisiel has identified three compositional stages in the manuscript: a first focused on historical existence (Dilthey-inflected), a second with a phenomenological emphasis on Being in general (Husserlian), and a third focused on temporality, showing Kantian influence.(Polt, 1999)
In 1933, Heidegger served as rector of the University of Freiburg.(Polt, 1999) He held the post from 1933 to 1934, and during that time he supported Hitler, opposed academic freedom, attempted to reorganize the university along revolutionary lines by evaluating faculty in terms of their commitment to the party, and implemented the regime’s policy of “Aryanization” by distributing racial questionnaires that led to the dismissal of some professors.(Polt, 1999) His Rectoral Address (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”) framed the political moment in terms of his own history of Being rather than the Nazi vocabulary of race and domination.(Polt, 1999)
After the war, Heidegger was banned from teaching by the denazification committee and spent several years in something close to breakdown, treated briefly by Viktor von Gebsattel. He returned to lecturing in the early 1950s and spent the rest of his life at Freiburg and at his hut in Todtnauberg, producing a large body of essays and lecture courses on technology, language, poetry, and the history of metaphysics. It was in this postwar period that Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss met him, and through the 1950s and 1960s Heidegger gave seminars for members of Boss’s circle, published posthumously as the Zollikon Seminars.(Polt, 1999) He died in Messkirch in 1976.
The Question of Being
Heidegger’s fundamental philosophical question is “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”, a question he treated as genuinely meaningful rather than empty.(Polt, 1999) The question requires an initial clarification that runs through all his work: the distinction between beings (das Seiende, entities that exist) and Being (das Sein, what makes a difference that there is something instead of nothing).(Polt, 1999) Polt frames this as: Being is “the difference it makes that there is something instead of nothing.”(Polt, 1999) Being is not itself a being.(Polt, 1999)
The question is not merely theoretical. Absence and loss reveal it to us with particular force: when a house burns down, its absence is overwhelming; at the death of those we love, their absence attacks and gnaws at us.(Polt, 1999) These are not mere subjective responses; they are moments in which we recognize that there are, in fact, real and rich distinctions between something and nothing, distinctions that ordinary life and ordinary philosophy have failed to register with sufficient care. Being must be thought about through temporality, because entities make a difference to us not only when present but also in the dimensions of past and future.(Polt, 1999)
This is what Heidegger calls the metaphysics of presence: the assumption that to be is to be an enduringly present substance or one of its attributes, the most real being being an eternal, self-sufficient thing.(Polt, 1999) The metaphysics of presence may be appropriate to rocks and tables, Heidegger argued, but it misinterprets human existence, which is constituted not by unchanging presence but by a past one inherits and a future one projects toward.(Polt, 1999)
This is also where temporality enters. For Heidegger, human beings are not just impermanent (present for a while, then gone) but essentially historical: rooted in a tradition they share with others, pursuing possibilities that define them individually and communally. This historicity does not cut us off from Being; it is precisely what opens us to the meaning of Being.(Polt, 1999) On the other hand, it is easier and more comfortable to avoid the question. The absorption in present entities (measuring, managing, manipulating) that constitutes everyday life reflects a deep tendency Heidegger calls inauthenticity: the self-deceptive complacency that mistakes busyness for understanding. Philosophy’s own version of this evasion is the metaphysics of presence, which elevates the theoretical stare at present objects into an ideal of knowledge.(Polt, 1999)
What distinguishes Heidegger’s philosophical practice from a merely academic engagement is his conviction that philosophy is not something one possesses but something one does and undergoes, a elentless and passionate devotion to a question. His formula: “questioning is the piety of thought.”(Polt, 1999) He rejects the standard distinction between working on philosophical “problems” and doing the “history of philosophy,” holding instead that the tradition must be interrogated from within, with tenacity, until the roots of traditional concepts are uncovered and their original power restored.(Polt, 1999) Dead-end paths, his metaphor of Holzwege (woodpaths that terminate in the forest) suggests, are not worthless: to follow a path to its end and be forced to return is to have learned the lay of the land, and one comes back different from having gone.(Polt, 1999)
Being and Time opens with a quotation from Plato’s Sophist on being perplexed about Being, and Heidegger’s point is precisely that what seems most familiar (that things are) turns out to be the most resistant to articulation and demands renewed investigation.(Polt, 1999)
Being and Time
Dasein
Being and Time takes human beings as its starting point not because the human is the most interesting being but because human beings are the beings for whom Being is an issue; we are the beings who ask what it means to be. Heidegger names this kind of entity Dasein (Being-there). Dasein is not a thing with fixed properties but a process whose distinctive character is to be there; to inhabit a meaningful world in which its own Being is always at stake.(Polt, 1999) The contrast is sharp: it makes a difference to you that you are climbing this mountain in this year, but to the mountain it makes no difference where or when it exists.
This already separates Heidegger from the Cartesian tradition. Dasein is not a subject enclosed in a private sphere who then relates to external objects. Dasein is a “who” with existentialia (structural features of existence) rather than a “what” with categories; properties of present-at-hand objects.(Polt, 1999) The existential analytic of Being and Time is an inventory of these structures.
Phenomenology, in Heidegger’s hands, is the method appropriate to this kind of inquiry: it is fundamentally descriptive rather than explanatory, letting entities show themselves as they are rather than deriving them from premises.(Polt, 1999) Its “method” has no fixed steps: the thing studied must dictate the approach, and the existential analytic “does not do any proving at all by the rules of the ‘logic of consistency.’” This rejection of proof-by-consistency connects directly to Heidegger’s earlier break with his own “theory of theory”: the metaphysics of presence pervades the Western tradition precisely by treating context-free intuition of present-at-hand objects as the ideal of knowledge, whereas genuine understanding is rooted in thrownness and projection.(Polt, 1999)
Being-in-the-World
The most fundamental existentiale is being-in-the-world: the fact that Dasein is essentially involved in a context, always already at home (or not at home) amid a meaningful whole of concerns, practices, and other people.(Polt, 1999) Knowing (the capacity for theoretical cognition) is not Dasein’s basic relation to the world but a derivative mode built on this more primordial practical engagement. Ontology precedes epistemology.(Polt, 1999)
Heidegger distinguishes two fundamental modes of Being for entities we encounter: ready-to-hand (zuhanden) and present-at-hand (vorhanden).(Polt, 1999) Ready-to-hand entities are equipment in use.(Polt, 1999) Present-at-hand entities are objects under theoretical inspection.(Polt, 1999)
The contrast is vivid in the case Polt draws from Oliver Sacks. Dr. P., a patient with visual agnosia, examines a glove and reports: “A continuous surface, infolded on itself. It appears to have five outpouchings, if this is the word.” He is stating facts, but as long as he maintains a purely theoretical attitude, he does not understand what the object is. Only when the glove accidentally ends up on his hand does he exclaim, “My God, it’s a glove!”(Polt, 1999) Dr. P. has lost the ready-to-hand grasp of equipment (the connection of seeing to doing) and is left with accurate but radically impoverished perception. For Heidegger, this is the artificial condition produced when we treat things as if they were first and foremost present-at-hand objects.
Equipment breakdown (malfunction, missing items, obstructions) is philosophically revealing because it forces the ready-to-hand into visibility.(Polt, 1999) When a glove has holes in the fingers, I notice the glove itself rather than simply putting it on.(Polt, 1999) At these moments the whole referential network of worldhood announces itself: the workshop, the tasks, the purposes that normally remain invisible precisely because they are working.(Polt, 1999)
The Cartesian world of extended substance and measurable properties is, for Heidegger, a philosophical abstraction derived from the ready-to-hand world, not a description of our primary encounter with it.(Polt, 1999) A science that treats only measurable present-at-hand properties as real suffers from what Polt calls “intellectualist myopia”: it examines a specialized subset of entities while missing the world in which those entities have their meaning.(Polt, 1999) Heidegger replaces Cartesian geometric space with a “space of appropriateness” (places where meaningful things belong or do not belong) arguing that the lived spatial experience of home, nearness, and fit precedes and enables all abstract coordinate grids.(Polt, 1999)
The Social Dimension
Being-in-the-world is also, from the outset, being-with others (Mitsein). Dasein’s Being is essentially social: solitude is a mode of Being-with, not an escape from it.(Polt, 1999) In ordinary everyday life, Dasein exists not as an authentic self but as das Man (“the they” or “the Anyone”) behaving and understanding the world just as anyone would, guided by public norms and leveling down possibilities to what is currently fashionable, obvious, or expected.(Polt, 1999) Das Man is not a pathology to be overcome; it is an existential constant, the inherited interpretive framework within which individual existence begins. Authenticity does not mean jettisoning tradition but clear-sightedly and resolutely appropriating the possibilities it has opened.(Polt, 1999)
Being-with includes a range of ways of relating to others. Heidegger distinguishes two modes of solicitude: leaping in, which does something for another and thereby relieves that person of the need to do it; and leaping ahead, directed not toward the tasks with which another is concerned but toward that person’s own way of existing.(Polt, 1999) Leaping-in is common and not always wrong, but it can deprive people of the growth that only comes from wrestling with their own situation. Leaping ahead: the teacher who offers questions rather than ready-made answers, the healer who returns patients to their own understanding rather than managing them; is, for Heidegger, the authentic form of care for another. The contrast carries obvious implications for clinical practice.
Care
Heidegger uses the term “care” (Sorge) to name the unitary structure of Dasein’s Being, consisting of being‑ahead‑of‑itself, being‑already‑in, and being‑at‑home‑amid entities.(Polt, 1999) Care names the structure of being‑ahead‑of‑oneself (projecting toward possibilities, the dimension of future), being‑already‑in (facticity, the dimension of past), and being‑at‑home‑amid entities (falling, the dimension of present).(Polt, 1999) This is not a psychological description of “caring people”; care is the formal structure of Dasein’s Being, manifest even in carelessness or indifference.(Polt, 1999)
Moods are not merely subjective colorings overlaid on an independently accessible world; they are ontologically disclosive.(Polt, 1999) Fear discloses something as a threat. Love gives us sight. The mood of getting up on the wrong side of bed is an ongoing burden we carry; what Heidegger calls thrownness (facticity): the always-already-having-been-in-the-world, a past one did not choose but must work with.(Polt, 1999) Understanding, correspondingly, is not primarily theoretical cognition but practical competence; the “know-how” that projects Dasein toward possibilities and discloses entities as available for engagement.(Polt, 1999)
Interpretation, built upon understanding, always operates within what Heidegger calls the hermeneutical circle of fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception: there is no presuppositionless apprehension of anything.(Polt, 1999) The appropriate response to this is not to try to escape the circle but to enter it rightly; testing one’s presuppositions against the things themselves rather than forcing them into concepts they resist. Discourse (Rede) is the articulation of the intelligibility that attunement and understanding reveal; it is the ontological ground of language, not a bridge between private subjectivities.(Polt, 1999) We are already “outside,” enmeshed in a meaningfully patterned world with others; communication augments this shared exposure rather than creating it.
Falling (Verfallenheit) is Dasein’s constant tendency to be absorbed in present entities and conventional interpretations, avoiding the burden of genuine self-determination.(Polt, 1999) It is not a moral failing but an ontological constant that follows directly from thrownness: without the already-interpreted world as a foundation, Dasein would teeter on the edge of meaninglessness. Falling generates the “idle talk,” “curiosity,” and “ambiguity” that characterize das Man’s grip on everyday life.
Being and the truths related to it are, Heidegger argues, Dasein-dependent: without Dasein, individual entities would continue to exist, but Being itself would not be “given,” since Being is what it means for entities to show up as entities; and entities can show up only to someone.(Polt, 1999) Truth, correspondingly, is more fundamental than propositional correctness: it is unconcealment (alētheia), the disclosure of the world that care enacts.(Polt, 1999) Dasein is always already “in the truth” insofar as care discloses the world, but also always “in untruth” insofar as falling generates concealing, superficial interpretations that cover what it discloses.
Anxiety (Angst) holds a privileged place in this structure because it is not about any particular entity but about Being-in-the-world as a whole.(Polt, 1999) In anxiety, beings “slip away”; they lose their air of familiarity and significance.(Polt, 1999) Dasein feels uncanny (unheimlich, literally “not-at-home”), exposed to the groundlessness of its own existence.(Polt, 1999)
Being-toward-Death and Authenticity
Division II of Being and Time moves from the structures of everyday Dasein to the question of authentic existence. Heidegger distinguishes mortality from demise: demise is the biological event of a body ceasing to function; mortality is the ongoing existential condition of being the kind of being whose possibilities are finite and ownmost — “mine to live, mine to make something of, in the face of my possible nonexistence.”(Polt, 1999) Mortality is the only possibility that cannot be delegated to anyone else.
Authentic being-toward-death is not morbidity or a cult of death; it is the acceptance that one’s possibilities are finite and the consequent willingness to choose among them with full awareness of their limits.(Polt, 1999) This acceptance is “soberly joyful” rather than depressive. Combined with the phenomenological reinterpretation of conscience, a ilent call from care to the fallen they-self, disclosing not a particular moral transgression but the structural indebtedness and responsibility of care itself(Polt, 1999); and with resoluteness (authentic disclosedness that opens the “Situation,” the authentic present, in which one seizes one’s thrownness rather than drifting)(Polt, 1999), being-toward-death makes possible a different relation to one’s inherited possibilities.
The structural guilt disclosed by conscience has two dimensions.(Polt, 1999) One is indebtedness: one cannot control the past from which one must work, and every existence rests on a foundation one did not lay.(Polt, 1999) The other is responsibility: every choice of a possibility excludes infinite other possibilities, and to project oneself into any path is to leave other paths behind.(Polt, 1999)
Heidegger’s argument also requires a reexamination of selfhood. There is no underlying, enduring soul or self-substance in Dasein; the kind of steadiness that care admits is steadfastness (anticipatory resoluteness) rather than the persistence of an enduring thing.(Polt, 1999) To treat oneself as having an unchanging thinglike self is a product of falling, which leads Dasein to apply to itself the categories appropriate to present-at-hand objects.
Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is the “meaning” of care: future, past, and present are not points on a timeline but “ecstases”: the three dimensions in which Dasein stands out of itself (coming-toward-itself from the future, having-been in the past, making-present).(Polt, 1999) In inauthentic everydayness, the present dominates; in authentic temporality, the present gains fresh depth from past and future.(Polt, 1999) The ordinary understanding of time as a sequence of “nows” on an infinite timeline is an abstraction derived from this richer temporal existence, not its ground.(Polt, 1999)
Historicity is the more concrete working-out of temporality: Dasein “stretches along” between birth and death, forming a story rather than merely a biological trajectory.(Polt, 1999) Authentic existence “repeats” (in Heidegger’s sense of retrieving, not imitating) possibilities from one’s heritage, appropriating them freely and creatively rather than aping them.(Polt, 1999) Fate names authentic resoluteness as it operates at the individual level; choosing from within one’s heritage under the shadow of mortality; destiny is the communal analogue, arising through the way a community articulates and struggles with shared possibilities.(Polt, 1999)
A necessary qualification bears on the analysis itself: the existential-ontological inquiry cannot begin from a presuppositionless standpoint.(Polt, 1999) Heidegger’s account of authenticity is necessarily drawn from existentiell truth, from his own way of existing as a particular, limited human being.(Polt, 1999)
For completeness, Heidegger also distinguishes Dasein’s mode of temporal existence from that of non-human animals. Animals, he argues in lectures from 1929–30, are “poor in world”: caught in an instinctive “ring” of environmental triggers and responses, they cannot stand out into heritage, fate, and mortality as Dasein does, and so they cannot struggle with the meaning of their situation or become exposed to Being as such.(Polt, 1999)
Being and Time was published as Part One; Division III, which was to step from the analysis of Dasein to the meaning of Being in general, was never completed. Heidegger reportedly found his account of time as the horizon of Being entirely inadequate and claimed to have burned the manuscript.(Polt, 1999)
The Turn (die Kehre) and Later Heidegger
The shift in Heidegger’s thinking that commentators call die Kehre (the turn) is best described as a move “from the understanding of Being to the happening of Being.”(Polt, 1999) Where Being and Time asked what it is about human beings that makes Being intelligible to us, the later work reverses the emphasis: human beings are claimed by, or swept up in, the gift of Being (which claims and changes them) rather than serving as its transcendental ground. Being is not a feature of our understanding; it is an event (Ereignis) that happens to us.
Heidegger’s style shifts correspondingly. During the 1930s he relies increasingly on common, basic German words (their sounds and histories) and moves between questions without crystallizing into a doctrine or technical vocabulary.(Polt, 1999) He comes to regard philosophy as closer to poetry than to science, since both are more sensitive to the richness of meaning than disciplinary research can be.(Polt, 1999)
“What Is Metaphysics?” and the Role of Anxiety
In his 1929 inaugural lecture “What Is Metaphysics?”, Heidegger stages anxiety as the mood that discloses the problem of Being most directly. In anxiety, beings as a whole “slip away” and sink into indifference; what Heidegger calls nihilation. In “the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings; and not nothing.”(Polt, 1999) The nothing plays a positive role in revealing Being: Being can be meaningful only against the background of a limit where it borders on meaninglessness. This essay prompted a sharp controversy with Rudolf Carnap, who dismissed Heidegger’s statements about nothingness as grammatical nonsense. The deeper disagreement, as Polt reconstructs it, is about whether truth is objective and propositional or historically conditioned by mood, language, and culture: Heidegger holds that moods disclose the world more fundamentally than any proposition, so logic as a theory of propositional truth cannot be philosophy’s first word.(Polt, 1999)
Polt draws out the point’s wider application: teenage angst and midlife crises, though clichéd, are real phenomena; crises of foundations in which an established interpretation of existence becomes unstable and unsatisfying. The nothing, in those moments, has the potential to provide fresh illumination: beings can now have more meaning than they did in the hackneyed interpretations of everyday life.(Polt, 1999) The same logic applies to illness as an encounter with one’s own finitude that can, when not merely suppressed, reopen the question of what genuinely matters.
”On the Essence of Truth” and Freedom as Letting-Be
In “On the Essence of Truth” (1930), Heidegger reconceives freedom not as arbitrary choice but as the letting-be of beings: “Freedom, understood as letting beings be, is the fulfillment and consummation of the essence of truth in the sense of the disclosure of beings.”(Polt, 1999) Letting-be sounds passive but is in fact a form of engagement: to let the rain show itself, one must care enough about it that it properly registers. Concealment, in this essay, operates at two levels. Beings as a whole are disclosed in moods, but this original openness is mysterious; through falling (which Heidegger rechristens “insistence” here), we approach beings as if they were open of themselves and forget that there is a mystery at all. The result is double concealment: not merely failing to know the mystery but failing to notice that there is a mystery in the first place.(Polt, 1999)
Introduction to Metaphysics and the History of Being’s Restriction
In his 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger traces four restrictions through which Western philosophy has progressively narrowed the meaning of Being: Being versus becoming, Being versus seeming, Being versus thinking, and Being versus the “ought.”(Polt, 1999) Each restriction reflects a historically conditioned ontological prejudice rather than an insight into Being itself. The Greeks originally experienced Being as physis; arising and abiding, a being emerging as something instead of nothing, rising up, taking its stand, persisting.(Polt, 1999) Truth was alētheia, unconcealment, a ind of appearing. With Plato, Being became mere eternity and truth became mere correctness: this is the inaugural moment of the metaphysical tradition of presence that Heidegger’s entire career attempts to dismantle.
”The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Strife of World and Earth
The 1935 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” develops the ontological vocabulary in a new direction. Works of art are sites, Heidegger argues, where “the truth of beings has set itself to work.” This truth requires the strife of world and earth: world is the meaningful context that opens a community’s possibilities, the system of significance within which things have their place; earth is the mysterious, self-concealing source from which beings spring and into which they tend to withdraw, resisting complete domestication by any world.(Polt, 1999) The artwork holds world and earth in productive tension rather than resolving them, which is why it can reveal the world afresh rather than merely confirming what we already know.
The Contributions and Beyng as Event
The Contributions to Philosophy (composed 1936–38, published posthumously) is the most sustained document of the turn. Here Heidegger introduces the archaic spelling Beyng (Seyn) to mark that what he is discussing is not a being but the origin of the difference that there are beings at all: “Beings are. Beyng essentially occurs.”(Polt, 1999) Beyng occurs as Ereignis (event or appropriation) in which human beings and Being are “owned” to each other: Dasein is “the thrown thrower,” inheriting a meaning of Being it cannot avoid and responsible for keeping it alive and open.(Polt, 1999)
In this same period, Heidegger develops his critique of machination (Machenschaft), a orerunner of his later concept of technology (Gestell). Machination is not merely human manipulation but a revelation of beings as a whole as exploitable and manipulable objects: quality reduces to quantity, questioning withers, and the difference it makes that there is something instead of nothing dwindles to mere presence-at-hand.(Polt, 1999) Against this, Heidegger distinguishes Erfahrung (experience as a journey that changes the journeyer) from Erlebnis (experience as superficial stimulus that leaves one fundamentally untouched): modern culture piles up Erlebnisse as compensation for the impoverishment of machination while never opening itself to Being itself.(Polt, 1999)
The Postwar Essays
The postwar essays develop this critique in a more widely accessible register. In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Heidegger describes modern technology as Ge-stell (enframing): a way of unconcealing beings as standing-reserve (Bestand); exploitable resources for manipulation.(Polt, 1999) For a world shaped by technological enframing, to be means to be either a resource available for exploitation or the subject doing the exploiting: natural things become “natural resources,” human beings “human resources,” books “information resources.”(Polt, 1999) Heidegger’s deeper fear is not nuclear war or ecological collapse but the loss of openness to Being itself, a ully technologized humanity so entrapped in enframing that it would lose all suspicion that beings can show themselves in richer ways.(Polt, 1999)
The same essay contains one of Heidegger’s rare explicit references to the Holocaust, and it is, as Polt notes, “most disturbing”: Heidegger equates Nazi genocide with mechanized agriculture as “in essence the same”; both symptoms of technological nihilism.(Polt, 1999) The passage does not condone mass murder, but it implies that modern farming is just as bad, and it blurs the distinction between totalitarianism and democracy in a way that is both morally obtuse and philosophically evasive. It belongs to the same pattern of displacement that characterizes his postwar self-interpretation more broadly.
The proper response to technology is not to smash machines but to achieve what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit (releasement), a isposition “outside the distinction between activity and passivity,” a kind of attentive, grateful receiving of what is given.(Polt, 1999) Gelassenheit is not inert suffering but waiting, listening, responding, a tance toward beings that neither imposes our technical standards on them nor simply abandons them.
In the “Letter on Humanism” (1947), Heidegger reconceives human ek-sistence as “ecstatic inherence in the truth of Being”: we are the beings to whom it makes a difference that there is something instead of nothing, and who are needed for this difference to occur.(Polt, 1999) The human being is not “the lord of beings” but “the shepherd of Being.”(Polt, 1999) Ethics itself is recast: instead of a system of rules and values, Heidegger proposes that the word ēthos means “abode”, that living ethically is a matter of finding one’s way to one’s abode in the truth of Being, and that valuing imposes our standards on beings “instead of acknowledging how they are.”(Polt, 1999) Good and evil spring from the interplay of Being and nihilation, as healing and raging, not from the violation of rules.
Language, accordingly, is “the house of Being”; not a tool humans use to communicate pre-given facts but the medium in which the fundamental revelation of the world occurs.(Polt, 1999) Everyday language is, in a later formulation, “a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer”: poetry recaptures the illuminating power that secretly resides in ordinary words, letting us see the world as if for the first time.(Polt, 1999) Even an ordinary headache, Heidegger notes, presents itself within a historically situated linguistic context that shapes what the pain is experienced as: a modern person experiences it as a nuisance interfering with work, while a medieval person would experience it as a sign of the fallen condition of the flesh to be endured piously.(Polt, 1999)
Reception in Medicine and Phenomenology of Illness
Heidegger’s influence on medicine was not incidental; it began during his own lifetime. Ludwig Binswanger had already drawn on Being and Time in developing Daseinsanalyse, a orm of existential psychiatry that replaced the Freudian metapsychology of drives with an analysis of the patient’s world-structure. Through Binswanger and his contemporaries, Heidegger’s concepts entered clinical psychiatry before the Second World War.(Polt, 1999) The more systematic connection came through Medard Boss, the Swiss psychiatrist who met Heidegger in the late 1940s and persuaded him to conduct seminars for members of his clinical circle; these seminars, gathered in the Zollikon Seminars (GA 89), represent Heidegger’s most direct engagement with medicine.(Polt, 1999)
The structural resources that later phenomenologists of illness drew upon are concentrated in Being and Time. The equipment-breakdown analysis (ready-to-hand to present-at-hand) maps directly onto illness as a disruption of embodied competence: the body that normally withdraws into activity as ready-to-hand equipment becomes conspicuously present-at-hand when it malfunctions, forcing the patient into a theoretical relation with a body now experienced as object.(Polt, 1999)(Polt, 1999) Drew Leder’s The Absent Body (1990) built this analysis into a full phenomenology of somatic dysfunction. The structure of anxiety (the uncanny sense of being-not-at-home) became Fredrik Svenaeus’s defining characterization of illness in The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health (1999): illness as unhomelike being-in-the-world, health as homelike. The Cartesian critique of medicine; treating patients as purely present-at-hand entities (measurable objects) and thereby stripping away the world-context in which their symptoms have meaning; has been the theoretical touchstone for phenomenological medicine from Toombs and Zaner through Carel.(Polt, 1999)
The anxiety analysis from “What Is Metaphysics?” extends this further. When beings as a whole lose their air of familiarity in the nihilation of anxiety, what patients sometimes describe as the onset of serious illness (the moment when the world they inhabited simply no longer holds) maps precisely onto this structure.(Polt, 1999)(Polt, 1999) Whether illness produces a crisis that opens onto fresh meaning (Erfahrung) or merely accumulates as a series of unwanted stimuli (Erlebnis) is, in Heidegger’s terms, the difference between an encounter with finitude that reconfigures one’s existence and a merely suffered imposition.(Polt, 1999)
The technology critique extends this further. Ge-stell as the ontological structure of biomedicine means that when patients are revealed as “standing-reserve” (diagnostic targets, cases, human resources) the richer openness of their Being as Dasein is concealed.(Polt, 1999)(Polt, 1999) The response Heidegger proposes (attentive letting-be rather than technical control) parallels the phenomenological medicine tradition’s call for restored patient subjectivity and the therapeutic stance of witnessing alongside rather than managing.(Polt, 1999)
The language analysis also carries clinical weight. If the meaning of symptoms is always disclosed within a historically specific linguistic world(Polt, 1999)(Polt, 1999); if “having a headache” and “my head is hurting me” are not equivalent reports on the same raw datum; then clinical listening requires attending to the patient’s interpretive world, not merely extracting quantitative indicators from it.
Polt himself notes that Heidegger’s ideas work “in surprising and indirect ways in fields as diverse as architecture, literature, and even the study of nursing.”(Polt, 1999) This demonstrates the broad clinical and humanistic reach of Heidegger’s ideas across diverse fields.(Polt, 1999)
Legacy and Controversy
The controversy over Heidegger’s politics is not peripheral to his philosophy; as Polt’s sustained examination concludes, it leads “straight to the heart of it.”(Polt, 1999)
The documented record is not in dispute. Heidegger supported Hitler, implemented racial policies, and served as National Socialist rector of Freiburg in 1933–34.(Polt, 1999) A 1933 seminar text contains the passage: “The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people … [then the task is] to prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of total annihilation”; passages that, in Polt’s reading, show Heidegger with “his finger on the murderous pulse of Nazism.”(Polt, 1999)
The Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte, GA 94–102), composed across the 1930s and 1940s but not published until 2014, added new evidence.(Polt, 1999) They include occasional remarks about “world Judaism” as an “uprooting” force; not defined racially but in terms of its supposed mission to uproot beings from Being, as “worldless” rootless cosmopolitanism.(Polt, 1999) The nadir is the claim that because Nazi machination is metaphysically “Jewish,” the persecution of Jews amounts to a “self-annihilation.”(Polt, 1999)
In the Black Notebooks (GA 95), Heidegger wrote that during the years 1930–1934 he saw in National Socialism the possibility of a transition to another inception.(Polt, 1999) He later acknowledged his earlier delusion but affirmed the movement on thoughtful grounds as the consummation of modernity.(Polt, 1999)
After the war, Heidegger’s self-interpretation followed a pattern Polt describes with care: shift focus from the realm of beings (corpses, gas chambers) to the “essential” realm of Being; transfer responsibility from human beings to Being which “destines” history; globalize the disaster to pan-Western civilization; present Germans as victims of this sweeping destiny.(Polt, 1999) Polt judges this “cowardly and self-deceptive” and, in the terms of Being and Time itself, “glaringly inauthentic”; mirroring the postwar German they-self rather than facing the horror squarely.(Polt, 1999)
The interpretive questions that follow are genuinely difficult. Does the formal emptiness of “authentic choice” in Being and Time (the injunction to “choose!” without any guidelines for choosing content) lend philosophical respectability to the arbitrary engagement Heidegger made in 1933?(Polt, 1999) Does the concept of being-in-the-world, where “world” means the cultural sphere of a community sharing a heritage, lend itself to a demonization of the outsider?(Polt, 1999) These are not questions scholarship has settled. What Polt’s survey of seven interpretive positions establishes is that none of them resolves the matter without remainder.(Polt, 1999)
Polt’s final assessment: at his best, Heidegger “masterfully combines phenomenological insight with sensitivity to history”; at his worst he replaces insight with harangue; on the problem of Being, his creativity is unmatched; but his insistence on viewing everything through the lens of that problem “betrays a certain lack of imagination.”(Polt, 1999)
See Also
- Edmund Husserl
- Phenomenology
- Being and Time
- Phenomenology of Illness
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Ludwig Binswanger
- Medard Boss
- Oliver Sacks
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Hannah Arendt
Sources
- Polt, R. (1999). Heidegger: An Introduction. Cornell University Press. [polt-heidegger-an-introduction-1999]