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1927Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Heidegger Reopens the Question of Being, Then Joins the Nazi Party

A student of Husserl's writes one of the century's most influential works of philosophy, and a few years later puts on a party pin

On the timeline · around 1927 · Modern PhilosophyThe Enlightenment and the 19th CenturyModern PhilosophyHeidegger Reopens the Question of Being, Then Joins the Nazi Party190019101920193019401950

Quick facts

Heidegger's dates
1889-1976
Being and Time published
1927
Central concept
Dasein, being-in-the-world
Joined Nazi Party
May 1933

What happened

Martin Heidegger, born in 1889, published Being and Time in 1927, an unfinished but hugely influential treatise whose declared aim was the concrete working out of the question of the meaning of Being, a question Heidegger argued Western philosophy had asked at its outset and then largely forgotten. Heidegger's central analysis focused on Dasein, his term for the distinctively human way of existing, whose basic structure he described as being-in-the-world, always already involved with a surrounding world and with other people rather than standing apart from it as a detached observer. In May 1933, several years after the book's publication, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, a decision one biographer describes as a matter of conviction rather than opportunism, and one that has permanently complicated how his philosophical legacy is read.

Why it matters

Being and Time reshaped 20th-century continental philosophy's approach to human existence, influencing existentialism, hermeneutics, and later poststructuralist thought, while Heidegger's Nazi Party membership has made him a central case study in the unresolved question of whether a philosopher's political commitments can or should be separated from the philosophical work itself.

How we know

Being and Time survives in its original 1927 German edition and has been continuously translated and studied since; Heidegger's Nazi Party membership is documented in party records and in his own wartime rectoral address at the University of Freiburg, independently corroborated by postwar historical research into his personal and institutional conduct.

Sources

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