Martin Heidegger Quotes (1889-1976)

“This characteristic of Dasein’s being—this “that it is”—is veiled in its “whence” and “whither.””

“In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.”

“There is an idea that technology is in its essence something human beings have under their control. In my opinion, that is not possible. Technology is in its essence something that human beings cannot master of their own accord.”

“The history of the concept of time is the history of the discovery of time and the history of its conceptual interpretation. ...it is the history of the question of the being of entities, the history of the attempts to uncover entities in their being, borne by the particular understanding of time, by the particular level of conceptual elaboration of the phenomenon of time. Hence, in the end, the history of the concept of time is more accurately the history of the decline and the history of the distortion of the basic question of scientific research into the being of entities. It is the history of the incapacity to pose the question of being in a radically new way and to work out its fundamentals anew—an incapacity which is grounded in the being of Dasein.”

“The spirit of poetry (only authentic and great poetry is meant) is essentially superior to the spirit that prevails in all mere science.”

“We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength...”

“Existential analytics [the object of the book] decides nothing about the existence of God, about human freedom and the immortality of the soul.”

“Existential analytics [the object of the book] decides nothing about the existence of God, about human freedom and the immortality of the soul.”

“Mathematical knowledge is no more rigorous than philological-historical knowledge. It merely has the character of “exactness,” which does not coincide with rigor.”

“In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.”

“If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.”

“In Spinoza, Hegel finds the fully developed “standpoint of substance” which cannot, however, be the highest standpoint because Being is not yet thought equally fundamentally and resolutely as thinking thinking itself. Being, as substance and substantiality, has not yet developed into the subject in its absolute subjectivity. Still, spinoza appeals always afresh to the whole thinking of German Idealism, and at the same time provokes its contradiction, because he lets thinking begin with the absolute.”

“For what is healthy and what is sick, every people and age gives itself its own law, according to the inner greatness and extension of its existence. Now the German people are in the process of rediscovering their own essence and making themselves worthy of their great destiny. Adolf Hitler, our great Führer and chancellor, created, through the National Socialist revolution, a new state by which the people will assure itself anew of the duration and continuity of its history.... For every people, the first warranty of is authenticity and greatness is in its blood, its soil, and its physical growth. If it loses this good or even only allows it to become considerably weakened, all effort at state politics, all economic and technical ability, all spiritual action will remain in the end null and void.”

“I desire to restore alienation to the literary sense it possessed before the abominable Martin Heidegger, Nazi philosopher of Dasein....I prefer... Freud, alienation essentially as the estrangement he termed the "Uncanny" (Unheimlich), which, as I have argued elsewhere, is our modern version of the Sublime.”

“As we have seen, Heidegger secularizes the Single One of Kierkegaard, that is, he severs the relation to the absolute for which Kierkegaard’s man becomes a Single One. And as we have seen, he does not replace this “for” with any other worldly and human “for”. He ignores the decisive fact that only the man who has become a Single One, a self, a real person, is able to have a complete relation of his life to the other self, a relation which is not beneath but above the problematic of the relations between man and man, and which comprises, withstands and overcomes all this problematic situation.”

“Heidegger’s political views are commonly deplored today on account of his early and open support of Nazism. Because of this connection, many like to suppose that his influence on subsequent political thought (as distinct from general intellectual thought) in Europe has been meager. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Heidegger’s major ideas were sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the left, which they were. Following the war, Heidegger’s thought, shorn of its national socialism but fortified in its anti-Americanism, was embraced by many on the left, often without attribution. In the writings of numerous thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, “Heideggerianism” was married to communism, and this odd coupling became the core of the intellectual left for the next generation.”

“What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world’s evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.”

“Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain 'the German catastrophe' by arguing that technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller; thus they were unable to resist Hitler's 'mass Machiavellianism'. Thomas Mann was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in 'Brother Hitler', the entire German Bildungsburgertum possessed a monstrous younger sibling who embodied some of their deepest-rooted aspirations. An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. So much for the greatness of the German universities. Their fall from grace was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel.”

“Heidegger's method, and especially the philosophical earnestness fundamental to its application, achieved for the philosophical public of Germany a new Copernican revolution of speculative thought. It one takes that judgment seriously, one should expect, therefore, that a more considered study might reveal, within the framework of an anthropocentric approach to metaphysics, some unique insight or some new tools of analysis. As a matter of fact, I cannot make any such discovery either in Heidegger's published works or in oral exposition of his views. A close examination seems rather to expose, within the ponderous sentences of essay lecture, a very insubstantial basis for a flimsy superstructure. Heidegger's philosophy is unique only rampant misuse of language and in its own emphatic claim to uniqueness.”

“Martin Heidegger taught an entire course on boredom, calling it the “insidious creature [that] maintains monstrous essence in our [Being].” It’s been speculated that Heidegger signed up with the Nazis at least in part to cure himself of boredom.”