Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up... [more]
Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up the wax, used it, molded it. For Heidegger, the truth is revealed in the way the wax is picked up.
Heidegger wanted to bring philosophy back to the ground. He felt it had dwelled too long in the Platonic skies and would serve us better by settling to the level of everyday life. He insisted that our fundamental relation to the world is revealed in the here and now, in our everyday activities and endeavors: in the very way we get out of bed or put on the coffee. For Heidegger, these unconscious acts reveal more about existence than Descartes' excessively contrived logic. We encounter things on the go, in the midst of using them -- we only scrutinize things when they break down. Heidegger wanted to analyze existence at its most banal. He called this investigation "fundamental ontology."
But the investigation yielded disturbing results, because it suggested our fundamental relation to things is one of usage, of instrumentality. Heidegger saw in this relation the essence of modernity: the world reveals itself as a mere resource for our own self-centered affairs. This did not make Heidegger happy. He preferred to think that this relation to objects, this instrumental mode of "being-in-the-world," was not an essential aspect of our nature, but a historical condition. He preferred to think that "being" discloses different manners of relating to the world, and that these modes themselves are revealed to us in the unfolding of time.
Heidegger's main text, "Being and Time" (1927), gained him substantial fame as a philosopher, but his personal reputation came to be spotted with infamy. In 1933, as the Nazis were coming to power, Heidegger was made the rector of the University of Freiburg and was officially absorbed into the National Socialist Party. In this capacity, Heidegger was responsible for firing many Freiburg professors who were Jewish or who belonged to the left. While he only kept his position as rector for a year or so, and later denounced Nazism, his willingness to carry out a fascist agenda leaves many uneasy about the essence of his philosophy.
Despite a slew of scholarship on the subject, the nature of Heidegger's relation to Nazism remains unclear. However, the association had serious ramifications for him after the war: in 1946 he was banned from teaching and suffered a nervous breakdown. When the post-war tumult subsided, Heidegger's teaching credentials were reinstated and he taught at Freiburg until his death in 1976, but for the rest of his life, his work remained under a cloud of suspicion. [show less]