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CHAPTER I

A. PHILOSOPHER’S BACKGROUND

Martin Heidegger was widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and

important philosophers of 20th century on the European continent and exerted an enormous

influence on virtually in every other humanistic discipline. His critique of traditional

metaphysics and his opposition to positivism and technological world domination have been

embraced by the leading theorists of postmodernity.

Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in Messkirch in south-west Germany

to a Catholic family. His father worked as sexton in the local church. In his early youth,

Heidegger was being prepared for priesthood. However, because of health problems and perhaps

because of a lack of a strong spiritual vocation, Heidegger left the seminary in 1911 and broke

off his training for the priesthood. He took up studies in philosophy, mathematics, and natural

sciences. But he turned instead to philosophical studies. His interest in philosophy first arose

during his high school studies in Freiburg when, at the age of seventeen, he read Franz

Brentano’s book entitled On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle.

He received his doctoral degree in philosophy after completing a dissertation on The

Theory of Judgment in Psychologies in 1913 and a habilitation dissertation on the Theory of three

months of World War I. In 1917 Heidegger married Elfriede Petri in a Protestant wedding and by

1919 they both converted to Protestantism.

Heidegger was employed as an assistant to Edmund Husserl at the university in Freiburg until

1923. During this time, he built a mountain cabin in Todtnauberg in the nearby Black Forest, a
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retreat that he would use throughout the rest of his life. In 1923 he became a professor at the

university in Marburg where he had several notable students including: Hans-Georg Gadamer,

Karl Lowith, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt.

Prior to the publication of Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger evidenced a strong interest

in the analogy between mystical experience and experience in general. By probing the

dimensions of his religious experience, he sought to uncover in the factitious life of Christianity,

a form of existence that is often glossed over by the philosophical tradition. But it was not until

he was introduced to Husserlian phenomenology that he would have the methodological

grounding for his religious interests. Phenomenology is the study of experience and the ways in

which things present themselves in and through experience. Taking its starting point from the

first-person perspective, phenomenology attempts to describe the essential features or structures

of a given experience or any experience in general. From 1916 to 1917 he was an

unsalaried Privatdozent before serving as a weatherman on the Ardennes front during the last).

After the publication of the book, he returned to Freiburg to occupy the chair vacated by

Husserl's retirement. In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and was soon after

appointed Rector of the university. He resigned the rectorship in April 1934. However, he

remained a member of the Nazi party until the end of the war. During his time as Rector,

Freiburg denied Heidegger's former teacher Husserl, born a Jew and an adult Lutheran convert,

access of the university library, invoking the Nazi racial cleansing laws. Heidegger also removed

the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time when it was reissued in 1941, later claiming he

did so because of pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer. Many readers, notably Jürgen

Habermas, came to interpret this ambiguous remark as evidence of his continued commitment to

National Socialism.
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Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, while she

was his doctoral student at the University of Marburg. This affair took place in the 1920s, some

time before Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, bringing these controversy between his

involvement to the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler, and his affair with his student, Martin

Heidegger’s career begin to slowly stop. After World War II, the French Occupation Authority

banned him from teaching from 1945 to 1947 because of his involvement in National Socialism

but by 1951 he was reinstated as an emeritus professor. He taught regularly from 1951-1958 and

by invitation until 1967. He died on May 26, 1976, and was buried in his hometown of

Messkirch.

Heidegger’s association with the Nazis has never ceased to be a source of controversy,

although scholars’ and journalists’ understanding of the depth and degree of this connection, and

its relation to his thought, has differed in different periods. Heidegger discusses this issue most

fully in an interview he gave to the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1966, published after his

death. Recent evidence—particularly the so-called “Black Notebooks”—displays a deeper

connection than he suggested there.

A. SCHOOL

He attended schools near his home town, which was the University of Freiburg. He

became the student of the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl and became one of the

most notable student . He finished his theological training 1909 in the same school , deciding to

pursue studies in mathematics and philosophy instead. He received his doctoral degree in

philosophy after completing a dissertation on The Theory of Judgment in Psychologies in 1913

and a habilitation dissertation on the Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus in 1915.
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B.INFLUENCES

There are a lot of philosophers who influenced Martin Heidegger to be one of the most

remarkable philosopher of postmodernity. One of these is his professor, Edmund Huesserl, even

though there is much bond betwwen these two, there is disagreement over the degree of

influence that Edmund Husserl had on Heidegger's philosophical development, just as there is

disagreement about the degree to which Heidegger's philosophy is grounded in phenomenology.

These disagreements centre upon how much of Husserlian phenomenology is contested by

Heidegger, and how much this phenomenology in fact informs his own understanding.

Heidegger himself, who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, bases his hermeneutics

on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl's account in many ways but seems to have

been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by Husserl.The

differences between Husserl and Heidegger are significant, but do not see how much it became

the case, that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach.

Heidegger's silence about the stark similarities between his account of temporality and

Husserl's investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a misrepresentation of

Husserl's account of intentionality. Contrary to the criticisms Heidegger advances in his lectures,

intentionality (by implication of the meaning of 'to be') in the final analysis is not construed by

Husserl as sheer presence (be it the presence of a fact or object, act or event). Yet for all its

"dangerous closeness" to what Heidegger understands by temporality, Husserl's account of

internal time-consciousness does differ fundamentally.

Next of his influencers is,St. Augustine of Hippo, Recent scholarship has shown that

Heidegger was substantially influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo and that Being and Time
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would not have been possible without the influence of Augustine's thought. Augustine's

Confessions was particularly influential in shaping Heidegger's thought. Augustine viewed time

as relative and subjective, and that being and time were bound up together. Heidegger adopted

similar views, e.g. that time was the horizon of being and time temporalizes itself only as long as

there are human beings.

Next to that is,Wilhelm Dilthey, Heidegger's very early project of developing a

"hermeneutics of factical life" and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology was

influenced in part by his reading of the works of Wilhelm Dilthey. Even though Heidegger’s

interpretation for the works of Dilthey was been questioned out, there is little doubt that

Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about

ontology required a gestalt formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to

demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a

new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.

One of the most important influencer to the works of Heidegger is, Søren Kierkegaard.

Heideggerians regarded Søren Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to

Heidegger's own existentialist concepts. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and mortality

draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of

our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence,

and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world. Kierkegaard

is primarily concerned with existence as it is experienced in man's concrete ethico-religious

situation. Heidegger is interested in deriving an ontological analysis of man. But as Heidegger's

ontological and existentialist descriptions can arise only from ontic and existential experience, so

Kierkegaard's ontic and existential elucidations express an implicit ontology.

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And the last two important influencers of Martin Heidegger are, Friedrich Hölderlin and

Friedrich Nietzsche. Many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in

the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published

under the title The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger read

The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a

kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.

The fundamental differences between the philosophical delineations of Heidegger and

Adorno can be found in their contrasting views of Hölderlin's poetical works and to a lesser

extent in their divergent views on German romanticism in general. For Heidegger, Hölderlin

expressed the intuitive necessity of metaphysical concepts as a guide for ethical paradigms,

devoid of reflection. Adorno, on the other hand, pointed to the dialectic reflection of historical

situations, the sociological interpretations of future outcomes, and therefore opposed the

liberating principles of intuitive concepts because they negatively surpassed the perception of

societal realities. Nevertheless, it was Heidegger's rationalization and later work on Hölderlin's

poems as well as on Parmenides ("For to be aware and to be are the same," DK B 3) and his

consistent understanding of Nietzsche's thought that formed the foundation of postmodern

existentialism. This is also the case for the lecture courses devoted to the poetry of Friedrich

Hölderlin, which became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's work and thought.

Heidegger grants to Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of

Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West. Many of

Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry,

and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem (see, for example,

Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister")

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CHAPTER II

1. WORKS

Greatest Works of Matin Heidegger:

Sein und Zeit (1927). Being and Time.

In Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to answer the question "What is being?" He tries

to do this through studying the concept of dasein, a German word that roughly translates to

“being there.” He uses it primarily to refer to the human being, the being who is most self -

consciously aware of its own existence. He then interrogates what "being there," in other words,

being self-aware.

While Heidegger never comes to a satisfactory conclusion—he never finished the book—

he makes discoveries along the way that have had a profound impact on philosophy. Therefore,

going with him on his journey becomes the reader's reward.

In making this move of contextualizing dasein within the material world, Heidegger

famously critiques the Enlightenment idea of how beings and objects interact each other. In

Enlightenment thought, Heidegger says, when we see a chair, for example, we are understood to

be engaging in a complex metaphysical process to comprehend what the chair is and analyze its

use value. We then use the object, which we see as utterly separate from us. Heidegger, however,

thinks that that is only one mode of approaching an object, and that, in reality, we usually don’t

think about things in this way. We don't constantly think at all about how we interact with the

world.
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Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929). Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

Since its original publication in 1929, Martin Heidegger’s provocative book on Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason has attracted much attention both as an important contribution to

twentieth-century Kant scholarship and as a pivotal work in Heidegger’s own development after

Being and Time. This fifth, enlarged edition includes marginal notations made by Heidegger in

his personal copy of the book and four new appendices—Heidegger’s postpublication notes on

the book, his review of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Heidegger’s response to

reviews by rudolf Odebrecht and Cassirer, and an essay “On the History of the Philosophical

Chair since 1866.” The work is significant not only for its illuminating assessment of Kant’s

thought but also for its elaboration of themes first broached in Being and Time, especially the

problem of how Heidegger proposed to enact his destruction of the metaphysical tradition and

the role that his reading of Kant would play therein.

Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, published 1953). Introduction to Metaphysics.

First published in 1959, An Introduction to Metaphysics was the first book-length work

by Heidegger to be published in English, preceding the English translation of Being and Time by

three years. It contains the text of a series of classroom lectures by Heidegger on the topic of

metaphysics, being and Dasein. Heidegger chose this course as the first of his many lecture

manuscripts for publication. It serves as an ideal companion to Being and Time. Gregory Fried

and Richard Polt have retranslated the original German text, presenting the reader with an

updated, more accurate and accessible translation.

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Holzwege (1950). Off the Beaten Track.

This collection of texts (originally published in German under the title Holzwege) is

Heidegger's first post-war book and contains some of the major expositions of his later

philosophy. Of particular note are 'The Origin of the Work of Art', perhaps the most discussed of

all of Heidegger's essays, and 'Nietzsche's Word 'God is Dead',' which sums up a decade of

Nietzsche research. Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of

places, this is the first English translation to bring them all together as Heidegger intended. The

text is taken from the last edition of the work, which contains the author's final corrections

together with important marginal annotations that provide considerable insight into the

development of his thought. This fresh and accurate new translation will be an invaluable

resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious

studies, or intellectual history.

Der Satz vom Grund (1955-56).The Principle of Reason.

The Principle of Reason, the text of an important and influential lecture course that

Martin Heidegger gave in 1955–56, takes as its focal point Leibniz’s principle: nothing is

without reason. Heidegger shows here that the principle of reason is in fact a principle of being.

Much of his discussion is aimed at bringing his readers to the "leap of thinking," which enables

them to grasp the principle of reason as a principle of being.

This text presents Heidegger's most extensive reflection on the notion of history and its essence,

the Geschick of being, which is considered as one of the most important developments in

Heidegger's later thought. One of Heidegger's most artfully composed texts. it also contains
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important discussions of language, translation, reason, objectivity, and technology as well as

remarkable readings of Leibniz, Kant, Aristotle, and Goethe, among others.

Identität und Differenz (1955-57). Translated as Identity and Difference.

Identity and Difference consists of English translations and the original German versions

of two little-known lectures given in 1957 by Martin Heidegger, "The Principle of Identity" and

"The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics." Both lectures discuss the difficult problem

of the nature of identity in the history of metaphysics. A helpful introduction and a list of

references are also provided by the translator, Joan Stambaugh.

A. Philosophical Theories

In Heidegger presents this question of ontological self-access as that of whether there is

“in Dasein an understanding Befindlichkeit in which Dasein has been disclosed to itself in a

distinctive way.” More specifically, this is the question of whether there is a mood that

provides a “way of disclosure in which Dasein brings itself before itself” such that “in it

Dasein itself becomes accessible as simplified in a certain way.” Heidegger’s answer is yes,

there is such a mood, one that can “provide the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping

Dasein’s originary wholeness of being,” and that the mood that “simplifies” Dasein in such a

way as to allow ontological self-disclosure is anxiety. This bears emphasis: anxiety is

introduced as the mood that someone, as ontologist, must be in order to see herself

“simplifed” in such a way that her own ontological structure rather than anything ontically

particular becomes visible.

Heidegger details anxiety in drawing on his previous discussion of the mood of what he fear

in, which he uses to bring out the basic structure all moods share and then to provide a contrast
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with anxiety. In fear, we fear for our life or some aspect of it, and we are afraid “in the face of

which” one is anxious of something in the world that threatens us (a bear chasing us, losing our

job, etc.). Our fearing thus relates us to the world and entities in it in a particular, determinate

way (as do most moods). Anxiety, by contrast, has no entity in the world — no thing or even.

Thus, in anxiety one finds oneself withdrawn from determinate relations to specific entities, and

so “the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety.” Now, if this simply meant

one’s own particular world, disclosed in its breakdown, we wouldn’t have the relevant mood

necessary for disclosing Dasein’s — any and every Dasein’s — being. But here “the world as

such” refers not to the world conceived of as a totality of entities, nor as any particular world of

an individual or group of individuals; rather, it is world as worldhood, what earlier in Heidegger

had identified as the sense of “world” in which it is not taken ontically, as an entity, but rather

ontologically, as the condition of possibility for my having ontical possibilities in my particular

world. This means, then, that “being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is

anxious.” And this in turn means that that for which I am anxious is not myself, understood as

this or that agent determined by a specific set of intra-worldly possibilities, but myself simply as

the kind of entity for whom existing in the world is itsway of being. It follows that that for which

and that of which I am anxious are the same: my own being, formally understood as being-in-

the-world. Keeping in view the question about philosophical access to formal ontological

structure that led to this point, this means that anxiety is the mood in which we are attuned to

ourselves in such a way that what is before us is our own form — a form shared by any and

every Dasein. Precisely what I see and describe is the fact that I — and any ‘I’ — exist in a

world with others, even as I have withdrawn from the particular aspects of my own world and the

others in it. Still, there is a clear echo of Descartes here, who, in raising skeptical questions, set
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the world aside so that, through a pure self-encounter, the grounds of intelligibility of all that is

could come into view. And just as his uncertainty wasn’t that of someone who really doubted the

world — which, he thought, would be tantamount to insanity — so Heidegger’s anxiety isn’t the

mood of someone who is really experiencing the breakdown of all intelligibility. It is rather a

deliberately induced analog to that mood.

So far, then, despite the fact that the term “anxiety” invites one to think of extreme

psychological disturbance (occasioned in whatever way), we can see that in order to answer the

question about ontological methodology that Heidegger himself raises, we can and must interpret

anxiety differently. It is not a mood of disturbance; rather, it is a distinctly philosophical mood

with no essential ‘feel’ to it, in which one finds literally nothing before her — no thing, no entity

— but instead that which is not an entity, i.e., the form of her being as Dasein. Observe that it

begins by indicating a continuing concern with the methodological issue, namely, that of how as

philosophers we can get the whole of Dasein’s ontological structure in view. Here Heidegger

describes this as the task of “putting Dasein as a whole into our fore-having” the results of

which, he says, will necessarily have a “peculiar formality and emptiness. This is because the

wholeness that is sought is specifically not that of me as the particular person I am or the

particular world within which I am normally situated. It seeks is, rather, a further discursive

ontological characterization of the general nature or form of Dasein.

“Dasein’s way of being demands that any ontological interpretation which sets itself the

goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their originariness, should capture the being of this entity, in

spite of this entity’s own tendency” to hide (from) it. This raises the question about how

ontology is to “get the evidence” it requires in order to insure that what it says about Dasein’s

being is true and adequate. How, in other words, can we as philosophers articulate what
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authenticity is as a basic possibility of Dasein? Heidegger’s answer to the question of how

ontological self-disclosure occurs hinges on anxiety. The “Grundbefindlichkeit” of anxiety,

Heidegger says, is “the most elemental way in which thrown Dasein is disclosed,” and, as such,

“it puts Dasein’s being-in-the-world face-to-face with the ‘nothing’ of the world; in the face of

this ‘nothing,’ Dasein is anxious with anxiety about its ownmost ability-to-be” Echoing this, in

his discussion of death, understood by Heidegger as “the “possible impossibility of existence,”

he claims that “being-towards-death is essentially anxiety.” This possibility is “attested” to in

“conscience,” which Heidegger understands as a kind of discourse in which one “calls” to

oneself, though in an odd sort of way, for in it nothing is said, and the call seems to be both mine

and not mine — “from me and yet from beyond and over me.” This call, nevertheless, brings me

into anxiety so that I realize that I am “guilty” which means both thrown into and yet responsible

for my own existence. From this position, I can then accept or refuse the responsibility for

myself that is disclosed to me: I can be “resolute” and so authentic, or not.Moreover, in doing

something (asking a question of myself), I also thereby affect myself (I “hear” the question),

which entails an effective response on my part: I feel my action of questioning myself. This

feeling that results from affecting myself by asking ontological questions of myself, the entity I

am seeking to understand, is, then, the mood of philosophy.

Additionally, this mood is one in which, having withdrawn from all that is in order to get

in view the basis of my understanding of that which is, entities (the world and my world-indexed

determinations) may be said to have become “nothing.” I have deliberately induced the

philosophical mood I am in and so, in that sense, cultivated my “death,” i.e., the “nothing” of

that which is, entities.

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B.Main Argument

Being and Time

Being and Time is composed of a systematic analysis of human being (Dasein) as a

preparatory investigation into the meaning of being as such. This analysis was originally meant

as a preliminary stage of the project, but Part II of the book was never published. In his later

work, Heidegger pursues the unfinished stages of Being and Time in a less systematic form.

In order for Heidegger to gain secure footing for his "fundamental ontology," he first

investigates how the issue of being arises in the first place. He claims that being only becomes a

matter of concern for one unique entity, the human being. Thus, in order to get traction regarding

the question of being, Daseins way of being must first be illuminated. One significant aspect of

this way of being is Daseins immersion and absorption in its environment. Heidegger calls the

immediacy in which Dasein finds itself concerned in everyday life Daseins being-in-the-world.

In his argument, he emphasizes the fact that we first exist in worlds or contexts in which

we uncover things’ meaning and characteristics in terms of their use. For example, consider a

hammer. The hammer’s being is its readiness to hand. Its true weight is its being too light or

heavy to use effectively, not a neutral one or two pounds, and its true place is the fact that it is

too near or too far away to use well, not a point or number on a geometric grid. Such practical

time, space, and utility are just as much as the neutral times and spaces of physics and

mathematics, and cannot be reduced to them. Indeed, theoretical observing and measuring occurs

only as a narrowing or reducing of practical action.

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Heidegger concentrates on practical activities when he first develops the elements that

characterize human beings because what is useful comes to light only in terms of something that

is a possibility for humans. One central characteristic of our being is that we “fall” into the things

with which we deal. We thus tend to misunderstand our own being as equivalent to the being of

objects. Moreover, the possibilities we understand, and for the sake of which we are, are those

whose meaning we share with everyone else. We are thus not usually our authentic selves but,

rather, merely instances of what “we” are and “they” choose and believe. Furthermore, it is not

only our understanding of possibilities and our falling into everyday entities that reveal matters

meaningfully. Our moods or states of mind also do this. Fear, for example, reveals entities—

terrifying or dreadful things, say—that are just as fully real as what causes them chemically or

biologically.

Certain moods—radical anxiety, most clearly—can wrench us from our fallen

misunderstanding of ourselves and bring us face to face with our own responsibility for being or

meaning. When anxiety comes together with my seeing the unity of all my possibilities in my

anticipation of dying—the potential impossibility of all my possibilities—and with how my

always being thrown into one tradition negates other options, it becomes possible for me to

resolve upon my human being as it truly is: the ways that I am responsible for meaning. I

become authentic; I become my own.

Authenticity, thrownness, resolve and other phenomena that Heidegger made

intellectually famous are, he claims, not meant morally. Indeed, the content of an authentic

action would vary with time and place. Authenticity at most illuminates the world freshly; it does

not offer guidance. Still, no one who reads Heidegger would rather fall into inauthentic
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understanding than be authentic.In the course of Heidegger’s discussion of the elements of

human being (which, collectively, he calls “care”) he argues that we always understand our being

in terms of time. We project our possibilities by expecting or anticipating them; we illuminate

what has been as we reach forward toward our possibilities; and we deal with things practically

and scientifically in their presence. Heidegger here is opposing his understanding of human

being with the dominating traditional meaning of being, which has been what is purely and

never-endingly present.

2.Philosophical relation to:

A.POLITICS

Heidegger never claimed that his philosophy was concerned with politics. Nevertheless,

there are certainly some political implications of his thought. He perceives the metaphysical

culture of the West as a continuity. It begins with Plato and ends with modernity, and the

dominance of science and technology. He thus implies in the post-modernist fashion that Nazism

and the atom bomb, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, have been something like the “fulfillment” of the

tradition of Western metaphysics and tries to distance himself from that tradition. He turns to the

Presocratics in order to retrieve a pre-metaphysical mode of thought that would serve as a

starting point for a new beginning. However, his grand vision of the essential history of the West

and of western nihilism can be questioned. Modernity, whose development involves not only a

technological but also a social revolution, which sets individuals loose from religious and ethnic

communities, from parishes and family bonds, and which affirms materialistic values, can be

regarded as a radical departure from earlier classical and Christian traditions. Contrary to
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Heidegger’s argument, rather than being a mere continuity, the “essential” history of the West

can then be seen as a history of radical transformations.

He is a revolutionary thinker who denies the traditional philosophical division between

theory and practice, and this is especially clear when he boldly declares in his Introduction to

Metaphysics that “we have undertaken the great and lengthy task of demolishing a world that has

grown old and of building it truly anew”. He wants to overturn the traditional culture of the West

and build it anew on the basis of earlier traditions in the name of being. Like other thinkers of

modernity, he adopts a Eurocentric perspective and sees the revival of German society as a

condition for the revival of Europe (or the West), and that of Europe as a condition for the

revival of for the whole world; like them, while rejecting God as an end, he attempts to set up

fabricated ends for human beings. Ultimately, in the famous interview with Der Spiegel, he

expresses his disillusionment with his project and says: “Philosophy will not be able to bring

about a direct change of the present state of the world . The greatness of what is to be thought is

too great.” Like being, which he describes as “disclosing self-concealing,” after making a

disclosure he withdraws; after stirring up a revolution, he leaves all its problems to others.He

says: “only a God can still save us,” but the God for whom, in the absence of philosophical

thought, he now looks is clearly not that of the Christians or of any contemporary religion.

Heidegger claims that the human being as Da-sein can be understood as the “there” (Da)

which being (Sein) requires in order to disclose itself. The human being is the unique being

whose being has the character of openness toward Being. But men and women can also turn

away from being, forget their true selves, and thus deprive themselves of their humanity. This is,

in Heidegger’s view, the situation of contemporary humans, who have replaced authentic

questioning concerning their existence with ready-made answers served up by ideologies, the
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mass media, and overwhelming technology. Consequently, Heidegger attempts to bring today’s

men and women back to the question of being. At the beginning of the tradition of Western

philosophy, the human being was defined as animal rationale, the animal endowed with reason.

Since then, reason has become an absolute value which through education brings about a gradual

transformation of all spheres of human life. It is not more reason in the modern sense of

calculative thinking, Heidegger believes, that we need today, but more openness toward and

more reflection on that which is nearest to us—being.

B.RELIGION

In various texts, Martin Heidegger speaks of god and the gods, but the question of how

exactly Heidegger’s thought relates to theology and religion in a broad sense—and to God in a

specific sense—remains unclear and in need of careful, philosophical excavation. Ben Vedder

provides the first book-length study on Heidegger’s relation to the philosophy of religion,

offering greater accessibility into an area that continues to fascinate philosophers, theologians,

and all those interested in the philosophy of religion. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From

God to the Gods deals intimately with hotly debated topics such as Heidegger’s interpretation of

Saint Paul, Nietzsche and the death of God, ontotheology, and Heidegger’s discussion of the

“last god,” taking into account the early, middle, and later texts of Heidegger. Vedder describes

the tension between religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and religion and poetic

expression, on the other.If we grasp religion completely from a philosophical point of view, we

tend to neutralize it; but if we conceive it in a simply poetic way, we tend to be philosophically

indifferent to it.
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C.HUMAN NATURE

Heidegger shows “Human reality” (Dasein) is often lost in inauthentic and everyday life.

But human being can also find his authenticity and open the mystery of the Being, source of all

things. Heidegger, in Being and Time (1927), describes the condition of Dasein, this being

particularly where Being has to be there.The existing human, thrown into the world and

abandoned to itself (what Heidegger calls our dereliction), is a reality whose nature is to be

mainly concern: which means it is constantly thrown forward of himself, he’s anticipe itself, it

never coincides with its own essence.

Here’s a way of being and existence that could give rise to anxiety. Now what exactly

does “human reality” is to escape itself, forget, to hide his true self. Heidegger’s philosophy is, in

fact, centered on the difference between Being and beings. However, among the various “beings”

(a table, a tool, an animal, a book …), there is one whose existence is precisely a question of

Being: Dasein, support the issue of Being and Being open to that. It is, indeed, opening to the

Being that is constitutive of man and his characteristic. However, this opening is veiled

and,moreover, constantly threatened.The human being repressed or forgotten Being, or

preferring the views empirical perspective, most daily and reassuring.This threat is even at work

in metaphysics, the study of phenomena beyond that, since Plato and Aristotle, speaks of being

in the size of oblivion. But the forgetting of being, torn from the true spiritual openness

characterize the utmost contemporary cultures.

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CHAPTER III

SUMMARY

Born on September 26, 1889 in Messkirch, Germany, Martin Heidegger was arguably

one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century mainly due to his beliefs against

positivism for modernity and technological world domination which makes him largely quoted in

the post-modern world.

He was born in a religious catholic family and was destined to provide service in the local

church. His father was also a sexton in the local church. His early education was conducted in

Konstanz in 1903 and was financed by the church. In 1906, he moved to Freiburg but in 1911

Heidegger broke off from the seminary and left training for priesthood, some say it was due to

health reasons, while other argue it was perhaps due to lack of spiritual involvement. He started

studying Theology in the University of Freiburg, and in 1911 he switched subjects to philosophy.

He also took up subjects such and mathematics and natural sciences. He had special interest in

subjects such as phenomenology, psychology, existentialism political theory and theology. In

1913, he completed his doctorate in philosophy.

Heidegger’s first encounter with philosophy was in his high school years when he started reading

Edmund Husserl’s “logical investigations”.

During the First World War Heidegger was appointed in the army, but was later discharged due

to health issues. In 1915, he completed a thesis on Scotus’s “Doctrine of Categories and

Meaning”, after which he was appointed a lecturer in University of Freiberg.

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In 1917, he married Elfride Petri, with whom he had two sons Jörg and Hermann. In 1918, there

was a brief break in his academic career, when he was asked to serve in the army again for the

last ten months of the war. After his return from the war, Heidegger announced his break from

Catholicism on January 9, 1919. Shortly after that he was appointed as Husserl’s assistant and

began lecturing at Freiberg. Although he admired Husserl, Heidegger never blindly followed

Husserl’s ideas and soon began a radical interpretation of Husserl’s works. In 1927, he published

his famous work on “Being and Time”. This is one of his most famous and influential works and

this was the work that earned him full professorship at Marburg and after Husserl’s retirement

Heidegger was made the chair of philosophy at University of Freiberg.

In 1930, his life took a political turn as Hitler came into power. Heidegger believed that he could

steer the Nazi movement in the right direction. In 1933, he formally joined the Nazi party and

produced a number of speeches for the Nazi cause. This was one of the most controversial times

of Heidegger’s life, not only marked by his political involvement but also by a change in his

thinking known as “the turn”.

The last decades of his life were spent writing and publishing generously but there was

no marked change in his philosophy or thinking. His insightful essays were on topics such as

“What are Poets for?” (1946), “Letter on Humanism” (1947), “The Question Concerning

Technology” (1953), “The Way to Language” (1959), “Time and Being” (1962), and “The End

of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964).

Martin Heidegger died on May 26, 1976, and was buried in the churchyard in Messkirch.
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CONCLUSION

Martin Heidegger is without doubt is the most incomprehensible german philosopher that

has ever lived. All throughout his complicated works, Heidegger tells us some simple meaning of

our lives, the sickness of our time and the roots to freedom.

He diagnosed mortal humanity as suffering from number of diseases of the soul. He

categorized it into three, first was, we forgot we are living. It means that we might be physically

here but we have not existed for ourselves but we exist for other things and people. That we are

curious of what makes us a being and thus, it makes as afraid of being nothing. Second to this is

we forgot that all being is connected, even the tiniest being is connected to every one of us. He

observed that as us became being that who can think properly, we became more focused of what

we should do that made us more egoistic and treat other beings differently. That we always

choose to not appreciate other beings before we become nothing (die). And the last one was, we

forgot to live for ourselves and be free. We are in his unsual formulation , thrown into the world.

Out of it all, he wants us to overcome all our throwness and became ourselves and appreciate our

lives.

For this, he made me realized that us being ‘beings’ we always live for ourselves and not for

others to see. And we should live appreciating everything that’s existing and here with us

because our time is only borrowed and we don’t have much time to spear.
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CHAPTER IV

ABSTRACT

Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life offers important insights by engaging Paul’s

Epistle to the Galatians, where he distinguishes ‘Paul the Pharisee’ from ‘Paul the Christian’ in

order to explicate the nature of faith in contrast to systematic theology. Neither certitude in

God’s existence is primordial to Christian faith, according to Heidegger, nor is rabbinic nor

theological disputation concerning God’s existence or God’s nature. Instead, what is essential to

Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life are: (1) faith as lived experience and (2)

recognition of ‘the Christ’ (ho christos/ha mašíaḥ). This ‘recognition’, however, requires

phenomenological clarification and not philosophy of religion as traditionally construed.

ARGUMENTS/ REMARKS

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was perhaps the most divisive philosopher of the

twentieth century. Many hold him to be the most original and important thinker of his era. Others

spurn him as an obscurantist and a charlatan, while still others see his reprehensible affiliation

with the Nazis as a reason to ignore or reject his thinking altogether. But Heidegger’s undoubted

influence on contemporary philosophy and his unique insight into the place of technology in

modern life make him a thinker worthy of careful study.

In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the bold claim that

Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of what it

means for something to be — to be present for us prior to any philosophical or scientific

analysis.
 24

He sought to clarify throughout his work how, since the rise of Greek philosophy,

Western civilization had been on a trajectory toward nihilism, and he believed that the

contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis — our decline toward nihilism — was intimately

linked to this forgetting of being. Only a rediscovery of being and the realm in which it is

revealed might save modern man.

In his later writings on technology, which mainly concern us in this essay, Heidegger

draws attention to technology’s place in bringing about our decline by constricting our

experience of things as they are. He argues that we now view nature, and increasingly human

beings too, only technologically — that is, we see nature and people only as raw material for

technical operations. Heidegger seeks to illuminate this phenomenon and to find a way of

thinking by which we might be saved from its controlling power, to which, he believes, modern

civilization both in the communist East and the democratic West has been shackled. We might

escape this bondage, Heidegger argues, not by rejecting technology, but by perceiving its danger.
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Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge various people who have been with me as I have worked

on this thesis. First, I owe an enormous gratitude to my mother, Liza Laspobres, for funding all

the expenses that I have cost just to fulfill this thesis and for letting me leave our home whenever

I want to find a place for the purpose of finishing this thesis. Secondly, Thanks to ‘G-squad’

mostly to Ajiel V. Naciongayo, for letting us crash in there house to connect to their wifi with

full pleasure. Through the struggles and hardships that I’ve in encountered in the making of this

thesis you stayed with me guys. May God bless you! Fourthly, I would like to give gratitude to

our ever generous Philosophy teacher, Mr. Francisco Granica, whom have trusted and give me

the chance to experience in creating a thesis alone for me to be prepared in my future paper

works. I hope that my you will be satisfied with my work and all the time that I spent to make

this thesis a success. This is a great experience for me that I’ll never forget.

Lastly, and most of all I would like to thank God, the father almighty, for letting me finish this

thesis through his help and guidance. It has been a great privilege for me in knowing who and

what did Martin Heidegger contributed not only in the philosophy world but also in our daily

lives.
 26

References

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