MARTIN HEIDEGGER

German existentialist and social critic. Probably the most divisive philosopher of the 20th century, being an acknowledged leader and central figure to many continental philosophers, and either a convenient example of meaningless metaphysics, or else an apologist for Nazism, to other analytical thinkers. Educated at Freiburg in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl. His most important work, Sein und Zeit (1927, trs. as Being and Time, 1962), clears the space for the quest for Being that informs Heidegger’s works. Modern humanity has lost the ‘nearness and shelter’ of Being; we are no longer at homes in the world as primitive man was; truth is no longer revealed; thought is separated from Being and only a favored few have any hope of recapturing oneness with Being. Many of these themes, and especially belief in the possibility of escaping from metaphysics and returning into an authentic communion with independent nature, were commonplaces of German Romanticism, but Heidegger reworked them in a way that caught the 20th century imagination. . . .