Martin Heidegger is one of the most controversial minds in the history of philosophy: a brilliant theorist, a wise mentor, a lover of risky romances, a traitor to his best friends, and a repentant supporter of Hitler. Only the influence exerted by the philosopher on the subsequent development of European culture is indisputable.
Biography
Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in Messkirche, in the Grand Duchy of the German Empire. Martin was of the simplest origin - the son of a peasant woman and a craftsman. The religiosity of the parents - devout Catholics - shaped the interests of the young man. Friedrich Heidegger, his father, served in St. Martin's Church. Wishing to connect his life with the Catholic Church, the future philosopher was trained in a Jesuit gymnasium. Health problems prevented the tonsure of Jesuit monks, so in 1909 Heidegger went for theological education at the ancient University of Freiburg.
Two years later, the young man leaned towards philosophy, changed the faculty and became a student of Heinrich Rickert, the founder of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism. In 1913 he defended his first dissertation and began work on the second. While Heidegger was researching the writings of Duns Scott, the German Empire got involved in World War I. On October 10, 1914, Martin was drafted into the militia for a year. Heart disease and an unstable psyche saved him from front service. Upon his return from the army, he successfully defended himself for the second time and became assistant professor of the theological faculty at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger quickly parted ways with his dogmatic colleagues. In 1916, Edmund Husserl became Rickert's successor at the university department. Deeply impressed by his phenomenology, Martin made the final choice in favor of a philosophical career.
In 1922 Heidegger transferred to the University of Marburg and began swimming freely. A number of fundamental works belong to the period before 1927, the crown of which is “Being and Time”. In 1928 his mentor Edmund Husserl resigned and Heidegger took his place in Freiburg. A respectable family man (in 1917, a wedding took place with Elfrida Petri, who gave birth to a child in 1919), the love of a brilliant student, the brave Hannah Arendt, friendship with outstanding contemporaries - the future of the ambitious philosopher promised to be glorious and cloudless.
A brilliant education and prestigious work did not save Heidegger from a fatal choice: in 1933 he joined the NSDAP in the forefront. For his ardent support of the Nazis, Heidegger was presented with the post of rector. He turned his back on his beloved student Arendt, who openly fought the regime, ended up in a concentration camp and miraculously fled; betrayed Husserl, ignoring the funeral of the once adored teacher; became a threat to his best friend Karl Jaspers, who kept cyanide on his bedside table to die with his Jewish wife when the executioners appeared. The turbidity came on suddenly and lasted 4 months. In September 1933, Heidegger hastily left his post and stopped making fiery speeches from the pulpit. Despite evidence of anti-Semitism in later personal records and loyalty to the party until the fall of the Third Reich, the philosopher claimed to have broken with Nazism at the time of his resignation.
Heidegger was responsible for supporting Nazism: a 1945 court banned him from any public speaking, including teaching. Little is known about the philosopher's personal life in exile. Years later, at a meeting with Marxist students, Heidegger was asked: why did he support an inhuman ideology? He replied that, following Marx and Engels, he believed: the business of a philosopher is not to talk about the world, but to change it. Heidegger's fundamental philosophical legacy was saved by his pupils and students, calling to turn a blind eye to the shameful pages of his biography. The philosopher died and was buried in his small homeland in Meskirche on May 26, 1976, leaving a rich legacy and ongoing disputes about his moral character.
Fundamental ontology
Martin Heidegger is the founder of existentialism. The name is collective for philosophical teachings that tried to rethink the experience of mankind after the tragedy of the First World War. The massacre came as a shock to European civilization. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, scientism prevailed in Western thought: Western philosophy extolled reason and promised stable social progress by the forces of science. The senseless thirst for destruction that gripped humanity made us think about what man really is and what is his place in the world. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud managed to shake the belief in the primacy of reason. The First World War demonstrated the reality of the crisis. The only thing left for philosophers was to generalize experience and draw conclusions.
To solve this problem, Heidegger used the concept of his teacher Edmund Husserl - phenomenology. Husserl discovered that philosophical and scientific optics were clogged with unconscious attitudes. Culture prescribes a certain interpretation of facts, which greatly reduces the potential of researchers. It is necessary first to get to the elementary phenomena given in perception - phenomena. It is proposed to do this with the help of a special intellectual exercise, which Husserl called phenomenological reduction.
Applying Husserl's method to the study of human nature, Heidegger formulated a fundamental ontology in the program work “Being and Time”. Traditionally, ontology is understood as the doctrine of being. Heidegger's approach differs in that it takes into account: the world and one's own existence are always given to man. From the point of view of an outside observer, the individual is part of the world. From the point of view of the individual, he is the center, because he actively constructs a picture of the world from experience. Until now, European thought has sought to separate from the subject and take the place of an outside observer. Heidegger turned philosophy inside out.
Existence is a special way of being in the world, specific to people. Getting into an already existing world, a person necessarily reflects on being and his own existence. The fundamental for the formation of a personality is the awareness of being abandoned into the world against one's own will and one's own finiteness. In children, it is absent, and in adults it is complicated by protracted daily activities. Conformal existence is incomplete and is called das Man. Conscience, melancholy, anxiety pull people out of everyday life and induce them to realize their own final presence in the world. After that, a person returns to everyday life, possessing the fullness of being, calmly and decisively making the way towards the end.
The influence of Heidegger on their activities was recognized by the ideologist of the feminist movement Simone de Beauvoir, her husband Jean-Paul Sartre, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Camus, H. Ortega y Gasset and many other European philosophers. Fundamental ontology contributed to psychiatry: by creatively combining the achievements of psychoanalysis with the doctrine of existence, doctors found new approaches to the treatment of psychosis, neuroses and depression.
