Martin Heidegger (1889 to 1976) was a German philosopher, among the most influential of the twentieth century, whose book Being and Time (1927) asked what it means for anything to be at all; by ‘being’ he meant not any particular thing but the way things show up for us as the things they are, a question he thought Western thought had forgotten. His later warning that modern technology turns the whole world into a stockpile of resources sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s critique of Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and whether that bears on his philosophy is still argued over.
Who was Martin Heidegger? #
He was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a small rural town in south-west Germany, the son of a master cooper. He studied Catholic theology at the University of Freiburg before turning to philosophy, and became a student and then assistant of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, the careful description of experience as it is lived.1 He taught at Marburg from 1923 and then at Freiburg, and in 1927 published Being and Time, the book that made his name.2 He went on writing and lecturing until his death in Freiburg in 1976, and was buried in Messkirch.1
What did he mean by “being”? #
The difference between things that are and their being, what it is for them to be at all. Rocks, trees, hammers and people are all beings; but what it means for each of them to be, and how they come to show up for us as what they are, is a different question, and for Heidegger the deepest one. He thought Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks had slid into treating being as just another thing, the most general thing, and so had forgotten the question. Being and Time set out to ask it afresh.3
He began with us, because we are the beings for whom being is a question. He called the human way of being Dasein, ‘being-there’, and described it as being-in-the-world. We are not minds looking out at a world of objects; we are already caught up in a world, using things, caring about things, dealing with other people. A hammer, in use, is not an object we stare at but part of the work in hand; it only becomes a mere ‘thing’ when it breaks. We also find ourselves ‘thrown’ into a time, a place and a culture we did not choose, and easily slip into living as ‘they’ live, doing what one does. Facing our own death, the one possibility nobody else can take on for us, can call us back from that drift into living as ourselves.4
What did he say about technology and dwelling? #
That the essence of modern technology is not machinery but a way of seeing. In The Question Concerning Technology (1954) he called it enframing, a way of seeing in which everything comes to show up as ‘standing-reserve’, a resource on call, there to be extracted, stored and used. His example is the river Rhine. The old wooden bridge joined bank to bank and left the river a river; the hydroelectric plant dams the river into itself, so that the river now appears only as a supplier of power.5
Against that he set dwelling. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) he wrote that “Mortals dwell in that they save the earth”, and that saving the earth “does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.”6 In later talks he spoke of Gelassenheit, a releasement towards things, a meditative thinking that lets things be and stays open to mystery, in place of thinking that only calculates.7
How does Heidegger’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in his critique of a world turned into resources. Therapeutic Shamanism traces that attitude to the move from hunter-gathering to what Daniel Quinn called totalitarian agriculture. Hunter-gatherers saw themselves as part of the land, belonging to it, one species in a community of species; totalitarian agriculture says, in effect, ‘We now own this land’, and decides what lives on it and what dies, growing only what it wants and using the land as it wishes.8 Heidegger’s standing-reserve describes the same stance from inside modern philosophy, though he placed its roots in the long history of Western thought and in modern technology, not in the coming of farming. See What is the Fall? and What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
His dwelling, which saves the earth instead of mastering it, is close in spirit to that sense of belonging to the land. And his warning that a whole way of seeing can hide itself, so that people take it for simply how things are, meets the teaching that the hierarchical judgement ‘up is good and down is bad’ has soaked so deeply into the culture and its language that most people never notice it.9
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On the other-than-human world, sharply. In lectures of 1929 to 1930 Heidegger set out three theses: “the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming.”10 Only humans, on his account, have a world in the full sense; the animal is held captive by its surroundings, and the stone has no access to anything at all. His philosophy of being stays centred on the human being.
Therapeutic Shamanism holds the opposite. Everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, stones included.11 Treating our own kind of consciousness, self-awareness, as the highest or only kind is part of our arrogance as humans and of the myth of human supremacy; there is a continuum, with self-awareness at one end and collective-awareness at the other, and beings such as plants, far towards the collective end, are conscious in a way most people do not even recognise as consciousness.12 See What is the myth of human supremacy? and Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Was Heidegger a Nazi, and does it matter for his philosophy? #
He was a member of the Nazi Party. Elected rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, he joined the party on 1 May that year, and as rector was responsible for bringing the university into line with the party’s aims. He resigned the rectorship in April 1934 but remained a party member until the end of the regime.13 After the war he was barred from teaching until 1949, and he never gave a full public repudiation of his support; in an interview with Der Spiegel in 1966, published after his death, he defended his conduct.14 His private philosophical notebooks, the Black Notebooks, published from 2014, include antisemitic passages.15
Whether this bears on his philosophy is disputed. At one end, the philosopher Julian Young, in Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (1997), argues that Heidegger’s philosophical works do not “stand in any essential connection to Nazism”, and that one may accept any of them and remain a liberal democrat. At the other, the philosopher Emmanuel Faye, in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005), argues that it is “impossible to dissociate” the work from his political commitments.16 Faye’s critics, among them the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan, reply that his readings distort Heidegger’s texts.17
