Before asking what exists, Heidegger asked what it even means to be
A sexton's son from a Baden village wrote Being and Time in 1927 and changed modern philosophy, influencing Sartre, Arendt, Derrida and many more. He also joined the Nazi Party in 1933 as a university rector and never clearly apologised, a stain that still divides his readers.
Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in Meßkirch, where his father looked after the Catholic church. He trained for the priesthood and briefly entered a Jesuit seminary in 1909, leaving within weeks because of heart trouble. Around then Franz Brentano's study of the many senses of being in Aristotle caught his imagination. By 1911 he had turned to modern philosophy, especially Edmund Husserl, and after wartime service in a weather unit on the western front he became Husserl's assistant at Freiburg.
At Marburg from 1923 he taught students including Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Leo Strauss and Hans Jonas. Being and Time, written partly to qualify for a full chair, made him internationally visible. Its core move is to shift from the traditional question of why anything exists to the prior one of what existing means. He approached it through Dasein, his word for the kind of being humans have: creatures who always already have some grasp of being and who live it as being-in-the-world. In 1928 he succeeded Husserl at Freiburg, where he stayed for the rest of his career.
Chosen as Freiburg's rector on 21 April 1933, he took out Nazi Party membership ten days later, on 1 May, publicly backed Hitler that year, and signed a professors' vow of allegiance in November. Historians judge that his resignation in April 1934 reflected administrative frustration rather than principled opposition, and he kept his membership until 1945. After the war the French authorities barred him from teaching; denazification ended in March 1949 with the classification of Mitläufer, and he returned to lecturing in 1950 to 1951.
His later thought turned to technology, art, poetry and dwelling, with lectures on Hölderlin and Nietzsche. A 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, released only after his death, tried to justify his Nazi past. He died in Freiburg on 26 May 1976, aged 86, and was buried in Meßkirch under a stone marked with a single star.
Source: Martin Heidegger
