Influences on the thoughts of Martin Heidegger

by koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

conjoint lecturer at Avondale College

Australia

6 September 2009

Martin Heidegger taught at Marburg between 1923-1927 together with Rudolph Bultmann and Bultmann was influenced by him.

F. Nietzsche, S. Kierkegaard, and K. Jaspers and the thought of Heidegger

Scholars have demonstrated that Heidegger was strongly influenced by F. Nietzsche [God is dead theologian]; S. Kierkegaard [Existentialist]; and K. Jaspers (see A. de Waelhens in 1942).

In 1927 Heidegger published a book Being and Time and 32 years later in 1959, he still asserts the importance of Being saying: "What mattered then, and still does, is to bring out the Being (Sein) of beings (seienden)" (see Heidegger, On the Way to Language [New York: Harper, 1959, reprint 1971]: 30).

Looking carefully at what he says, one can say that Heidegger stresses ontology, not so much existentialism (Marjorie Grene, Martin Heidegger [London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957]: 12).

van wyk notes:

1. However, we may comment that ontology overlaps with existentialism in such a way that the two cannot be separated at times.

2. Furthermore, either man creates God by bringing the Being to the fore or God becomes pantheistically in us when the Being is brought out of us. Both concepts borders on atheism and man's creation of his own god or gods.

E. Husserl and the thought of Heidegger

Although Heidegger dedicated this book, Being and Time to E. Husserl (a phenomenonlogist), there are many differences between the two:

a. Heidegger felt that Being is the fundamental issue while Husserl declared that the fundamental issue is that certitude and knowledge are not identical (see A. Thiselton, The Two Horizons [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1980], 145). 

b. Heidegger rejected a dualism between consciousness and reality but Husserl was stressing it.

c. For Husserl pure consciousness free from subjectivity is one where there is an abstraction from its world but for Heidegger involvement with the environment is an indispensable characteristic of human subjectivity. There is for Heidegger no escape from the world.

d. For Husserl Dasein separates from its world and then subjectivity and objectivity is created but for Heidegger Dasein is interacting with its world already before subjectivity or objectivity is created (Thiselton 1980: 145).

One can understand Husserl and Heidegger better if one understands the difference between Aristotle and Plato. There is a Middle Age drawing of the school of Athens which shows Plato on the left, pointing up and Aristotle standing on his left pointing down. What it means, and the artist understood that very well, is that for Plato reality is outside this world and experience, up, whereas for Aristotle, reality is in this world, here. That is why Theodore Husserl would look for pure conscience outside this world like Plato and Heidegger would look for reality mixed with this world phenomena.

van wyk notes:

1. If Jesus Christ did not come and was not a reality in this world, Plato would be right and Aristotle would be wrong.

2. The coming of Jesus in the incarnation means that reality out there (Plato) became reality here (Aristotle).

3. In Seventh Day Adventist thinking the role of Substitution on our behalf in heaven in the Sanctuary functions of Jesus as Priest (firstly) and High-Priest (since 1844 [based on the year-day principle of the 2300 days or years of Daniel 8:14]) is together with the Exemplary aspect of Christ life, namely that in sanctification we now follow righteously to imitate Christ's life on earth in order to glory God in our lifes on earth. This is Plato and Aristotle together and not only one or the other. Of course it will be Christian neo-platonism and Christian neo-aristotelianism that is involved here.

4. In the sense of the glorification of Reason and Humanism as the secular Aristotelianism employed it, absolutely no.

5. The glorification of the one aspect [either reality out there and not here; or reality here and not out there] polarized as this, is not a correct portrayal of the gospel, atonement and salvation of Bible. 

W. Dilthey and Max Scheler's role on Heidegger's thought

Other scholars may have also had an impact on Heidegger

like W. Dilthey and Max Scheler.

1. Heidegger mentioned in fact that the world is mesmerized by Plato's ideas and thus do not think asking questions about Being is important. He is thus opening the way for an Aristotelian investigation. He does this in his introduction to his Being and Time in 1927.

2. Heidegger pushed for the Aristotelian concept of reality here rather than above by bringing the Platonic concept of absolutes out there [in heaven] to earth by saying that Being is universal, indefinable and self-evident.

3. Heidegger rejects that it cannot be examined, in typical Aristotelian terms, of course rejecting the Platonic paradygm that God is out there and cannot be investigated.

4. Heidegger insists that Being is not an entity.

van wyk notes:

a. Being became an entity when Jesus Christ took on flesh in the incarnation.

b. It is true that God cannot be created but created all things but if He chose to be an entity, like being visible to Moses as flames in a bush in Exodus 3, then Heidegger is not correct in his thinking. He is bypassing biblical data.

5. Heidegger presented the hermeneutical circle by saying:

"Every seeking (Suchen) gets guided beforehand by what it sought" (see M. Heidegger, Being and Time [1927]: 24 and German at 5).

a. He says that if we do not know what Being is, how do we know what it is that we are asking.

b. Secondly, if we know what Being is, why should we need to ask what it means?

c. The hermeneutical circle is known already in Plato's days. Michael Gelven indicated that Plato formulated it in Meno. Socrates is asked how it is possible to inquire at all, since if we know what to inquire about, there is no need for inquiry, whereas if we do not know, inquiry becomes impossible since we do not know what we are looking for.

d. Different than Plato, Heidegger felt that our initial pre-understanding is a kind of vague and veiled darkness, a "vague average understanding of Being" (Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927: 23 and in the German 25; see Thiselton 1980: 147). 

6. Heidegger then proceed to bring a distinction between Ontology and Ontic where Ontology is a kind of fundamental ontology [probably the vague pre-understanding] which gives rise to all ontologies and from which the analysis of Dasein must be made [the actual inquiry or the answer to the question raised in the pre-understanding].

He said "fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic [analysis] of Dasein" (M. Heidegger, Being and Time [1927]: 34 in the English).

7. Heidegger explained that Dasein is not close to us, we are it (see M. Heidegger, Being and Time 1927: 36).

8. To see the two horizons in Heidegger is to look at the following statement about the role of time in Being:

"Time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being" (M. Heidegger, Being and Time 1927: 39).

van wyk notes:

1. Look at his logic: time is the horizon for being of Dasein through which we understand Being.

2. Being is thus beyond this horizon of Dasein it seems, or there is a second horizon?

9. Heidegger wants to be radical

"If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved . . .By taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first way of determining the nature of Being" (see M. Heidegger, Being and Time 1927: 44). He sees tradition as a barrier that must be dissolved.

van wyk notes:

a. We must remind ourselves that all scholars working with a hermeneutics of suspicion wants to radically destroy tradition and most of the times it includes a fundamental understanding of the Bible and a faith approach that must be destroyed.

b. Heidegger is referring back to Nietzsche when he talks about this.

c. We have to realize that Heidegger is saying that lesser minds have buried creative thinkers in the past, who has the similar approach as himself and they need to be honored anew: Plato, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche (see Thiselton 1980: 151).

10. In 1927 the book Being and Time was written and in 1953 Heidegger wrote in the preface to the seventh edition that the destruction of the history of ontology [tradition that buried creative thinkers] cannot be attempted right now. In 1962 he delivered a lecture at Freiburg university "Time and Being".

Anyone reading Heidegger will soon find him creating phrases with hyphens like:

ready-to-hand

towards-which

present-at-hand

Being-in-the-world

Even the word existence, Heidegger wrote as Ek-sistenz in his later writings.

van wyk notes:

1. When someone starts with this phenomenon of description of his own thoughts, one must know that he does not want people to understand him so he keeps eluding their catching-up on his thought.

2. Heidegger's writing is unintelligible in appearance like someone who is using drugs. Scholars will be very angry if they see this conclusion but there are more straightforward ways in saying things or expressing oneself. For a clumsy sentence by Heidegger see Thiselton 1980: 172). 

3. The way it works, someone who speaks clearly his thoughts get fired but someone who speaks unintelligible avoid being pinpointed since they do not understand him fully.

11. Heidegger and authentic thinking

Heidegger said about authenticity

"Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for ... the authenticity of its Being and for this authenticity as a possibility which it always is" (M. Heidegger, Being and Time 1927: 232). Another aspect of anxiety is that it individualizes, says Heidegger.

It is remarkable that when people in the Seventh Day Adventist church come up with doctrinal positions that are strange or foreign to the movement or to the interpretation of the Bible by the pioneers and scholars of the Movement, then they fall back on saying that they are trying to be authentic.

For Heidegger, idle talk is inauthentic but silence is authentic existence. This monkish attitude is buddhistic and Heidegger said that in inauthentic existence people hear nothing but loud idle talk (M. Heidegger, Being and Time 1927: 343).

Martin Heidegger became another voice rejecting the hermeneutics of affirmation and set himself up to defend and formulate the hermeneutics of suspicion.

For him a person cannot proclaim truth, not say that he has the truth. For him guilt is not connected to a theological view of sin. He wanted to focus on ontology and made this the most important thing in all aspects of living, thinking and definition. No wonder he is an existentialist that used ontology as his basic point for his World-view.