Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (/ˈhaɪdɛɡər, -dɪɡər/; German: [ˈmaɐ tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher, widely seen as a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition, particularly within the fields of existential phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. From his beginnings as a Catholic academic, he developed a groundbreaking and widely influential philosophy. His relationship with Nazism has been a controversial and widely debated subject. For Heidegger, the things in lived experience always have more to them than what we can see; accordingly, the true nature of being is "withdrawal". The interplay between the obscured reality of things and their appearance in what he calls the "clearing" is Heidegger's main theme. The presence of things for us is not their being, but merely their being interpreted as equipment according to a particular system of meaning and purpose. For instance, when a hammer is efficiently used to knock in nails, we cease to be aware of it. This is termed "ready to hand", and Heidegger considers it an authentic mode. The "time" in the title of his best-known work, Being and Time, refers to the way that the given features ("past") are interpreted in the light of their possibilities. Heidegger claimed that philosophy and science since ancient Greece had reduced things to their presence, which was a superficial way of understanding them. Modern technology made things mere stockpiles of useful presence. It has been suggested[by whom?] that Heidegger's championing of Nazism as university chancellor between 1933 and 1934 was motivated by his view that the Nazis did not share the technological worldview of American capitalism and Soviet communism. In the aftermath of World War II, he was banned from teaching, and denounced by Karl Jaspers. Amid mounting pressure that included talk of confiscating his books, Heidegger suffered a minor nervous breakdown. He tearfully apologized for his misdeeds to a former mentor, by then an archbishop, but never made similar statements in public. He was rehabilitated and made a professor emeritus in 1951.