Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heideggerwas a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the IEP, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century." Heidegger is best known for his contributions to Phenomenology and Existentialism, though as the SEP cautions, "his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification."...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth26 September 1889
CountryGermany
We would like only, for once, to get to where we are already.
The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home...By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world's worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted and withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which the world worlds...All coming to presence...keeps itself concealed to the last.
From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.
Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.
So it's clear from whence the history of philosophy is the inner movement of the course of spirit, that is, of absolute subjectivity, towards itself.
Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.
...Before considering the question that is seemingly always the most immediate one and the only urgent one, What shall we do? we ponder this: How must we think? For thinking is genuine activity, genuine taking a hand, if to take a hand means to lend a hand to...the coming to presence of Being.
The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies....they tell us nothing about entities in their Being.
Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.
True time is four-dimensional.
The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.
But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.