Being and Time

"He who does not know what homesickness is," he declared, "cannot philosophize." For Martin Heidegger, who died last week at 86, the sickness was that of the soul and the home was nothing less than existence itself.

Heidegger's own existence was an embodiment of modern philosophy. The son of a Roman Catholic sexton in southern Germany, Martin was first attracted to the priesthood. At Freiburg University, his theological interests were deflected to mathematics and science and finally to philosophy, which for him was a matter of life and death.

Radical Renewal. From its beginning, Heidegger's career was marked for controversy. His professors at first embraced their phosphorescent student. They were soon dismayed to find him neglecting past allegiances and expressing ideas of furious originality. He was universal in influence and appeal--yet he was heavily Teutonic in style and thought. His philosophical parents were the aphoristic Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Yet Heidegger's own writings are jargon-filled and obscure--so much so that Novelist Guenter Grass parodied them in Dog Years as a symptom of Germany's political disintegration.

It was a case of ad hominem; the man is easy to attack. His thought is far less susceptible to predators. To Kierkegaard, reason was devouring faith, like a snake swallowing its own tail. The solution was a radical renewal of Christian belief. To Nietzsche, humanity's theological license had expired, and man could either plunge into nihilism or freedom. This now classical alienation from faith became Heidegger's concern. In his seminal work, Being and Time, he set out to investigate the nature of existence. He tried to discard the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. Heidegger's man is "thrown" into the void. Confronted by dread, this "authentic person" lives in the full awareness of his extinction; between sentience and death he can find freedom and purpose.

Heidegger's work often lapsed into concentric circles: "Anxiety makes manifest ... its Being towards its own most potentiality-for-Being--that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself." He made studied verbal analogies (for example, heil, whole; heilig, holy; and heilen, to heal). His days as a professor and rector at Freiburg University revealed a power worship that has disfigured German philosophy since the days of Hegel. Sympathetic to Naziism, he declared in 1933: "The Fuhrer himself and alone is the German reality present and future and its law."

But Heidegger's thought belied the vague sentences and the contradictory behavior. In the classic study of existential philosophy, Irrational Man, New York University Professor William Barrett wrote: "Both atheist and theist have to reckon with Heidegger's thought for he is dealing with matters with which both will have to come to terms." The "matters" of existence and the nature of God immediately affected such modern theologians as Rudolf Bultmann and Reinhold Niebuhr. On the other side of the existential divide, Jean-Paul Sartre's thought is marked with Heideggerian references to being and nothingness, despair and negation. It is typical that Heidegger, having helped to found a modern school of philosophy, disavowed it. In a celebrated open letter he announced that he was not an existentialist. He wrote that he was concerned not with man, but with Being.

The statement was typically ambiguous. Thought cannot be divorced from writer, nor can action be severed from responsibility. Heidegger himself was living proof. Reclusive by nature--he refused even to own a telephone--he nonetheless was married and the father of three children. His lectures attracted huge crowds, and he continued, into his ninth decade, to write books not only about Being but for man. In those books he declared that every great thinker thinks but one great thought. The vast outpourings of Heidegger's mind may, in the end, be reduced to a single concept: the quest for the meaning of Being. He made it a great expedition.

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