Heidegger's Birthday

This Monday, we celebrate the birth of one of humanity’s greatest and most influential philosophers, and coincidentally the subject of a For Beginners book, Martin Heidegger.  Know chiefly for his book Being and Time, Heidegger questioned the fundamentals of ancient Greek philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and their contemporaries.  He shifted the focus of philosophical questions from the nature of the people and objects in the world to their very existence.

Heidegger’s work is complex and notoriously difficult, dealing with questions of existence vs. nothingness, simply trying to explain why the world exists in the first place.  Core concepts include ‘Being,’ the condition which allows other things to come into existence; ‘beings,’ the objects and people who populate the world; the ‘Nothing,’ the default condition without existence; and Dasein, interpreted as the condition of caring, or a being for whom being is a question.

These concepts may seem commonplace for deep thinkers today, but it was Heidegger who brought them to the collective attention of the world.  Many important schools of thought are influenced by Heidegger.  His works have had an impact on theology, aesthetics, literary criticism, and cultural studies.  His ideas influenced some of history’s other great minds as well, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.

This year, we celebrate over a century of culture enriched by these powerful ideas.  Happy birthday, Martin Heidegger, may your revelations continue ‘Being’ remembered for years to come.