Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in Messkirch, Germany. His father was the sexton of the local church, and Heidegger followed suit by joining the Jesuits. He studied the theology and philosophy of the Middle Ages, as well as the more recent work of Franz Brentano.

He studied with Heinrich Rickert, a well known Kantian, and with Husserl. He received his doctorate in 1914, and began teaching at the University of Freiburg the following year. Although he was strongly influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology, his interests lay more in the meaning of existence itself.

In 1923, he became a professor at the University of Marburg, and in 1927, he published his masterwork, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). Influenced by the ancient Greeks as well as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, as well as Husserl, it was an exploration of the verb “to be,” particularly from the standpoint of a human being in time. Densely and obscurely written, it was nevertheless well received all over Europe, though not in the English-speaking world.

In 1928, he returned to Freiburg as Husserl’s successor. In the 1930’s, the Nazi’s began pressuring German universities to fire their Jewish professors. The rector at Freiburg resigned in protest and Heidegger was elected to take his place. Although he strongly encouraged students and professors to be true to their search for truth, he nevertheless also encouraged loyalty to Hitler. He even joined the Nazi party. Many people, otherwise admirers of his thinking, have never forgiven him for that.

To be fair, he did resign from his position as rector in 1934, and after the war talked about Naziism as a symptom of the sickness of modern society. He stopped teaching in 1944, and after the war, the allied forces prevented him from further teaching. But they later restored his right to teach in light of the fact that his support of Hitler was of a passive rather than active nature. He died in Messkirch on May 26, 1976.

Heidegger spent his entire life asking one question: What is it “to be?” Behind all our day-to-day living, for that matter, behind all our philosophical and scientific investigations of that life, how is it that we “are” at all?

Phenomenology reveals the ways in which we are. The first hurdle is our traditional contrast between subject and object, which splits man as knower from his environment as the known. But in the phenomenological attitude, experience doesn’t show this split. Knower and known are both inextricably bound together. Instead, it appears that the subject-object split is something we developed late in history, especially with the advent of modern science.

The problems of the modern world come from the “falling” of western thought:  Instead of a concern with the development of ourselves as human beings, we have allowed technology and technique to rule our lives and lead us to a false way of being.  This alienation from our true nature is called inauthenticity.

Much of what is difficult about reading Heidegger is that he tries to recover the kind of being that was before the subject-object split by looking at the origins of words, especially Greek words.  In as much as the ancient Greeks were less alienated from themselves and their world, their language should offer us a clue to their relation to being.

Heidegger says that we have a special relationship to the world, which he refers to by calling human existence Dasein.  Dasein means “being there,” and emphasizes that we are totally immersed in the world, and yet we stand-out (ex-sist) as well.  We are a little off-center, you might say, never quite stable, always becoming.

A big part of our peculiar nature is that we have freedom.  We create ourselves by choosing.  We are our own projects.  This freedom, however, is painful, and we experience life as filled with anxiety (Angst, dread).  Our potential for freedom calls us to authentic being by means of anxiety.

One of the central sources of anxiety is the recognition that we all have to die.  Our limited time here on earth makes our choices far more meaningful, and the need to choose to be authentic urgent.  We are, he says, being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode).

All too often, we surrender in the face of anxiety and death, a condition Heidegger calls fallenness.  We become “das Man” --  “the everybody” -- nobody in particular, the anonymous man, one of the crowd or the mob.

Two characteristics of “das Man” are idle talk and curiosity.  Idle talk is small talk, chatter, gossip, shallow interaction, as opposed to true openness to each  other.  Curiosity refers to our need for distraction, novelty-seeking, busy-body-ness, as opposed to a true capacity for wonder.

We become authentic by thinking about being, by facing anxiety and death head-on.  Here, he says, lies joy.