Thinkers

Martin Heidegger

Modern European · Europe · 1889 to 1976

German thinker who asked what it means to exist as a person who knows about time and death. He rejected the label "existentialist".

What it is

Martin Heidegger (1889 to 1976) was a German philosopher who asked what it means for anything to be, who analysed human existence as being in a world of practical and social meaning, and who in his later work criticised the modern technological age. He is widely seen as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century, and also as one of the most controversial, because he joined the Nazi party in 1933.

He was born in Messkirch, a small town in southwest Germany, and he died in Freiburg. He was influenced by Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and his main work, Being and Time, appeared in 1927. His ideas shaped later movements in philosophy and well beyond it, including the existentialism of Sartre, Arendt's political thought, hermeneutics, deconstruction and critical theory.

The main ideas

• The question of being. Heidegger's guiding question is the meaning of being itself, which he thought Western philosophy had long forgotten to ask. In Being and Time he approached it by examining the way time structures our engagement with the world.
• Dasein, being-in-the-world. He used the German word Dasein for the human kind of being. Dasein is not a detached observer facing a world of objects. It is already in a world shaped by practical and social contexts, and these give meaning to what it does. This was a challenge to the picture of human beings as isolated subjects, which he traced to Descartes.
• Everyday life and moods. He paid close attention to ordinary things, such as tools, and to moods, especially anxiety, as ways in which the structure of our existence shows itself.
• Authenticity and death. Being and Time also treats authenticity, death, guilt and resoluteness, as part of an account of how a person can take hold of their own existence.
• The turn and the later work. After a change in his thinking known as the turn, he gave language a central role and turned to early Greek thinkers, to Hölderlin and to poetry and art.
• Technology. In his later work he criticised the modern technological world as a danger, in which everything is treated as something to be used. He called modern technological culture nihilistic and hoped to reach a way of thinking that was no longer metaphysical.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone fixing a leaking tap. They are not thinking about the tap as an object with properties. They are using the tools without noticing them, as part of getting on with their day. Heidegger would say that this everyday practical engagement is how we are first in the world, and that detached observation comes later and depends on it. The same point about moods: when anxiety strikes, the ordinary world loses its grip, and what it normally hides becomes visible for a moment.

His politics

In April 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor, Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg, and in May of that year he joined the Nazi party. As rector he was responsible for bringing the university into line with Nazi aims. His involvement has caused a long and bitter debate, and many readers say it has come to overshadow his philosophy. How far his thinking is tied to that politics remains disputed.

Questions and criticism

• Is it too obscure? His writings are notoriously difficult. Readers ask whether his own vocabulary helps or hides what he means.
• Can the thinker be separated from the man? People disagree about whether his philosophy is compromised by his political choices, or whether it can be judged on its own terms.
• Is technology really the danger? It is fair to ask whether a single description of the modern age as dominated by technology can do justice to its variety.

Close neighbours

Heidegger was a student and assistant of Husserl, whose phenomenology he reworked into a different project. He is a major source for existentialism, for Sartre in particular, and for hermeneutics, critical theory and later European philosophy. The page on existentialism describes the movement his work influenced.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Where to start reading

Books by Martin Heidegger or about them, from the easiest way in to the harder ones.

All the books, by tradition

Philosophies they belong to or are close to

• Existentialism

Who they connect to

Influenced

• Emmanuel Levinas · Levinas learned from Heidegger's Being and Time before turning against its priority of being.
• Giorgio Agamben · He attended Heidegger's seminars and took up his work on being and language.
• Hannah Arendt · Arendt studied with Heidegger and kept parts of his thought while going her own way.
• Hans-Georg Gadamer · He studied and worked under Heidegger, and took up his view of understanding as a basic human act.
• Herbert Marcuse · He studied under Heidegger before turning to Marx and critical theory.
• Jacques Derrida · He took up Heidegger's criticism of Western thought and reworked it into his own method.
• Jean-Paul Sartre · Sartre's Being and Nothingness draws heavily on Heidegger.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Merleau-Ponty took from Heidegger the idea that we are always already in the world, not outside it.
• Michel Foucault · Foucault said that Heidegger was the philosopher who mattered most to him.
• Richard Rorty · Rorty used Heidegger's criticism of the old idea that the mind mirrors reality.

Influenced by

• Edmund Husserl · Heidegger was Husserl's student and assistant and turned his method toward existence.
• F. W. J. Schelling · Heidegger lectured on Schelling's essay on human freedom.
• Friedrich Nietzsche · Heidegger gave long lecture courses on Nietzsche and read him as the end of the old way of asking what is real.
• John Duns Scotus · Heidegger wrote his first university thesis on a text then attributed to Scotus.
• Søren Kierkegaard · Heidegger's analysis of anxiety and death was shaped by his reading of Kierkegaard.
• Wilhelm Dilthey · Heidegger took up his stress on lived experience and on understanding as a basic human act.

Reacted against by

• Emmanuel Levinas · Levinas held that ethics comes before the question of being.
• Jurgen Habermas · Habermas criticised Heidegger's turn away from reason and his political record.
• Theodor Adorno · Adorno's Jargon of Authenticity attacked Heidegger's language and politics.
• Watsuji Tetsuro · He argued that Heidegger's account of being in time leaves out space, climate and other people.

Runs parallel to

• Dogen · Dogen's account of time as being is often compared with Heidegger's. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Modern European thinkers

• Arthur Schopenhauer · 1788 to 1860
• Alexis de Tocqueville · 1805 to 1859
• Thomas Henry Huxley · 1825 to 1895
• Wilhelm Dilthey · 1833 to 1911
• Friedrich Nietzsche · 1844 to 1900
• Sigmund Freud · 1856 to 1939
• Georg Simmel · 1858 to 1918
• Henri Bergson · 1859 to 1941
• Max Weber · 1864 to 1920
• Ernst Cassirer · 1874 to 1945

Sources we used

• Martin Heidegger · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
• Martin Heidegger · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026