In artificial intelligence, with implications for cognitive science, the frame problem describes an issue with using first-order logic
to express facts about a robot in the world. Representing the state of
a robot with traditional first-order logic requires the use of many axioms that simply imply that things in the environment do not change arbitrarily. For example, Hayes describes a "block world"
with rules about stacking blocks together. In a first-order logic
system, additional axioms are required to make inferences about the
environment (for example, that a block cannot change position unless it
is physically moved). The frame problem is the problem of finding
adequate collections of axioms for a viable description of a robot
environment.
John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes defined this problem in their 1969 article, Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence.
In this paper, and many that came after, the formal mathematical
problem was a starting point for more general discussions of the
difficulty of knowledge representation
for artificial intelligence. Issues such as how to provide rational
default assumptions and what humans consider common sense in a virtual
environment.
In philosophy,
the frame problem became more broadly construed in connection with the
problem of limiting the beliefs that have to be updated in response to
actions. In the logical context, actions are typically specified by what
they change, with the implicit assumption that everything else (the
frame) remains unchanged.
Description
The
frame problem occurs even in very simple domains. A scenario with a
door, which can be open or closed, and a light, which can be on or off,
is statically represented by two propositions and . If these conditions can change, they are better represented by two predicates and that depend on time; such predicates are called fluents.
A domain in which the door is closed and the light off at time 0, and
the door opened at time 1, can be directly represented in logic by the following formulae:
The first two formulae represent the initial situation; the third
formula represents the effect of executing the action of opening the
door at time 1. If such an action had preconditions, such as the door
being unlocked, it would have been represented by . In practice, one would have a predicate for specifying when an action is executed and a rule for specifying the effects of actions. The article on the situation calculus gives more details.
While the three formulae above are a direct expression in logic
of what is known, they do not suffice to correctly draw consequences.
While the following conditions (representing the expected situation) are
consistent with the three formulae above, they are not the only ones.
Indeed, another set of conditions that is consistent with the three formulae above is:
The frame problem is that specifying only which conditions are
changed by the actions does not entail that all other conditions are not
changed. This problem can be solved by adding the so-called “frame
axioms”, which explicitly specify that all conditions not affected by
actions are not changed while executing that action. For example, since
the action executed at time 0 is that of opening the door, a frame axiom
would state that the status of the light does not change from time 0 to
time 1:
The frame problem is that one such frame axiom is necessary for every
pair of action and condition such that the action does not affect the
condition. In other words, the problem is that of formalizing a dynamical domain without explicitly specifying the frame axioms.
The solution proposed by McCarthy to solve this problem involves
assuming that a minimal amount of condition changes have occurred; this
solution is formalized using the framework of circumscription. The Yale shooting problem,
however, shows that this solution is not always correct. Alternative
solutions were then proposed, involving predicate completion, fluent
occlusion, successor state axioms, etc.; they are explained below. By the end of the 1980s, the frame problem as defined by McCarthy and Hayes was solved.
Even after that, however, the term “frame problem” was still used, in
part to refer to the same problem but under different settings (e.g.,
concurrent actions), and in part to refer to the general problem of
representing and reasoning with dynamical domains.
Solutions
The
following solutions depict how the frame problem is solved in various
formalisms. The formalisms themselves are not presented in full: what is
presented are simplified versions that are sufficient to explain the
full solution.
Fluent occlusion solution
This solution was proposed by Erik Sandewall, who also defined a formal language
for the specification of dynamical domains; therefore, such a domain
can be first expressed in this language and then automatically
translated into logic. In this article, only the expression in logic is
shown, and only in the simplified language with no action names.
The rationale of this solution is to represent not only the value
of conditions over time, but also whether they can be affected by the
last executed action. The latter is represented by another condition,
called occlusion. A condition is said to be occluded in a given
time point if an action has been just executed that makes the condition
true or false as an effect. Occlusion can be viewed as “permission to
change”: if a condition is occluded, it is relieved from obeying the
constraint of inertia.
In the simplified example of the door and the light, occlusion can be formalized by two predicates and .
The rationale is that a condition can change value only if the
corresponding occlusion predicate is true at the next time point. In
turn, the occlusion predicate is true only when an action affecting the
condition is executed.
In general, every action making a condition true or false also makes the corresponding occlusion predicate true. In this case, is true, making the antecedent of the fourth formula above false for ; therefore, the constraint that does not hold for . Therefore, can change value, which is also what is enforced by the third formula.
In order for this condition to work, occlusion predicates have to
be true only when they are made true as an effect of an action. This
can be achieved either by circumscription
or by predicate completion. It is worth noticing that occlusion does
not necessarily imply a change: for example, executing the action of
opening the door when it was already open (in the formalization above)
makes the predicate true and makes true; however, has not changed value, as it was true already.
Predicate completion solution
This
encoding is similar to the fluent occlusion solution, but the
additional predicates denote change, not permission to change. For
example, represents the fact that the predicate will change from time to .
As a result, a predicate changes if and only if the corresponding
change predicate is true. An action results in a change if and only if
it makes true a condition that was previously false or vice versa.
The third formula is a different way of saying that opening the door
causes the door to be opened. Precisely, it states that opening the door
changes the state of the door if it had been previously closed. The
last two conditions state that a condition changes value at time if and only if the corresponding change predicate is true at time .
To complete the solution, the time points in which the change
predicates are true have to be as few as possible, and this can be done
by applying predicate completion to the rules specifying the effects of
actions.
Successor state axioms solution
The value of a condition after the execution of an action can be determined by
the fact that the condition is true if and only if:
the action makes the condition true; or
the condition was previously true and the action does not make it false.
A successor state axiom is a formalization in logic of these two facts. For
example, if and are two
conditions used to denote that the action executed at time was
to open or close the door, respectively, the running example is encoded as
follows.
This solution is centered around the value of conditions, rather than the
effects of actions. In other words, there is an axiom for every condition,
rather than a formula for every action. Preconditions to actions (which are not
present in this example) are formalized by other formulae. The successor state
axioms are used in the variant to the situation calculus proposed by
Ray Reiter.
Fluent calculus solution
The fluent calculus is a variant of the situation calculus. It solves the frame problem by using first-order logic
terms, rather than predicates, to represent the states. Converting
predicates into terms in first-order logic is called reification; the
fluent calculus can be seen as a logic in which predicates representing the
state of conditions are reified.
The difference between a predicate and a term in first-order
logic is that a term is a representation of an object (possibly a
complex object composed of other objects), while a predicate represents a
condition that can be true or false when evaluated over a given set of
terms.
In the fluent calculus, each possible state is represented by a
term obtained by composition of other terms, each one representing the
conditions that are true in state. For example, the state in which the
door is open and the light is on is represented by the term .
It is important to notice that a term is not true or false by itself,
as it is an object and not a condition. In other words, the term
represent a possible state, and does not by itself mean that this is
the current state. A separate condition can be stated to specify that
this is actually the state at a given time, e.g., means that this is the state at time .
The solution to the frame problem given in the fluent calculus is
to specify the effects of actions by stating how a term representing
the state changes when the action is executed. For example, the action
of opening the door at time 0 is represented by the formula:
The action of closing the door, which makes a condition false instead of true, is represented in a slightly different way:
This formula works provided that suitable axioms are given about and , e.g., a term containing the same condition twice is not a valid state (for example, is always false for every and ).
Event calculus solution
The event calculus
uses terms for representing fluents, like the fluent calculus, but also
has one or more axioms constraining the value of fluents, like the
successor state axioms. There are many variants of the event calculus,
but one of the simplest and most useful employs a single axiom to
represent the law of inertia:
The axiom states that a fluent holds at a time , if an event happens and initiates at an earlier time , and there is no event that happens and terminates after or at the same time as and before .
To apply the event calculus to a particular problem domain, it is necessary to define the and predicates for that domain. For example:
To apply the event calculus to a particular problem in the domain, it
is necessary to specify the events that happen in the context of the
problem. For example:
.
.
To solve a problem, such as which fluents hold at time 5?, it is necessary to pose the problem as a goal, such as:
The
frame problem can be thought of as the problem of formalizing the
principle that, by default, "everything is presumed to remain in the
state in which it is" (Leibniz, "An Introduction to a Secret Encyclopædia", c. 1679). This default, sometimes called the commonsense law of inertia, was expressed by Raymond Reiter in default logic:
(if is true in situation , and it can be assumed that remains true after executing action , then we can conclude that remains true).
Steve Hanks and Drew McDermott argued, on the basis of their Yale shooting
example, that this solution to the frame problem is unsatisfactory.
Hudson Turner showed, however, that it works correctly in the presence
of appropriate additional postulates.
(if is true at time , and it can be assumed that remains true at time , then we can conclude that remains true).
Separation logic solution
Separation logic is a formalism for reasoning about computer programs using pre/post specifications of the form . Separation logic is an extension of Hoare logic
oriented to reasoning about mutable data structures in computer memory
and other dynamic resources, and it has a special connective *,
pronounced "and separately", to support independent reasoning about
disjoint memory regions.
Separation logic employs a tight interpretation of pre/post specs, which say that the code can only access memory locations guaranteed to exist by the precondition. This leads to the soundness of the most important inference rule of the logic, the frame rule
The frame rule allows descriptions of arbitrary memory outside
the footprint (memory accessed) of the code to be added to a
specification: this enables the initial specification to concentrate
only on the footprint. For example, the inference
captures that code which sorts a list x does not unsort a separate list y, and it does this without mentioning y at all in the initial spec above the line.
Automation of the frame rule has led to significant increases in the scalability of automated reasoning techniques for code, eventually deployed industrially to codebases with tens of millions of lines.
There appears to be some similarity between the separation logic
solution to the frame problem and that of the fluent calculus mentioned
above.
Action description languages
Action description languages
elude the frame problem rather than solving it. An action description
language is a formal language with a syntax that is specific for
describing situations and actions. For example, that the action makes the door open if not locked is expressed by:
causes if
The semantics of an action description language depends on what the
language can express (concurrent actions, delayed effects, etc.) and is
usually based on transition systems.
Since domains are expressed in these languages rather than
directly in logic, the frame problem only arises when a specification
given in an action description logic is to be translated into logic.
Typically, however, a translation is given from these languages to answer set programming rather than first-order logic.
In April 1933, Heidegger was elected as rector at the University of Freiburg and was widely criticized for his membership and support for the Nazi Party during his tenure. After World War II he was dismissed from Freiburg and was banned from teaching after denazification hearings at Freiburg. There has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.
In Heidegger's first major text, Being and Time (1927), Dasein
is introduced as a term for the type of being that humans possess.
Heidegger believed that Dasein already has a "pre-ontological" and
concrete understanding that shapes how it lives, which he analyzed in
terms of the unitary structure of "being-in-the-world". Heidegger used
this analysis to approach the question of the meaning of being; that is,
the question of how entities appear as the specific entities they are.
In other words, Heidegger's governing "question of being" is concerned
with what makes beings intelligible as beings.
Life
Early years
The Mesnerhaus in Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up
Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of Johanna (Kempf) and Friedrich Heidegger. His father was the sexton of the village church, and the young Martin was raised Roman Catholic.
In 1911 he broke off training for the priesthood and turned his attention to recent philosophy, in particular, Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. He graduated with a thesis on psychologism, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-theoretical Contribution to Logic, in 1914. The following year, he completed his habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus, which was directed by Heinrich Rickert, a Neo-Kantian, and influenced by Husserl's phenomenology.The title has been published in several languages and in English is "Duns Scotus's doctrine of categories and meaning".
He attempted to get the (Catholic) philosophy post at the
University of Freiburg on 23 June 1916 but failed despite the support of
Heinrich Finke [de]. Instead, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I. His service was in the last ten months of the war, most of which he spent in meteorological unit on the western front upon being deemed unfit for combat.
Heidegger married Elfride Petri on 21 March 1917 in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend Engelbert Krebs [de], and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to Hermann [de]
in August 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann's biological
father, but raised him as his son. Hermann's biological father, who
became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel
Caesar. Hermann was told of this at the age of 14; Hermann grew up to
become a historian and would later serve as the executor of Heidegger's
will.
In the same year that he married his wife, Heidegger began a decades-long correspondence with her friend Elisabeth Blochmann. Their letters are suggestive from the beginning, and it is certain they were romantically involved in the summer of 1929. Blochmann was Jewish, which raises questions in light of Heidegger's later membership in the Nazi Party.
From 1919 to 1923, Heidegger taught courses at the University of Freiburg.At this time he also became an assistant to Husserl, who had been a professor there since 1916.
In 1925, a 35-year-old Heidegger began what would be a four-year
affair with Hannah Arendt, who was then 19 years old and his student.
Like Blochmann, Arendt was Jewish. Heidegger and Arendt agreed to keep
the details of the relationship a secret, preserving their letters, but
keeping them unavailable. The affair was not widely known until 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger
gained access to the sealed correspondence. Nevertheless, Arendt faced
criticism for her association with Heidegger after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933.
In 1927 Heidegger published his main work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). He was primarily concerned to qualify to be a full professor. The book, however, did more than this: it raised him to "a position of international intellectual visibility."
Freiburg
When
Husserl retired as professor of philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted
Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by
Marburg. The title of his 1929 inaugural lecture was "What is
Metaphysics?" In this year he also published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
Heidegger was elected rector of the university on 21 April 1933, and joined the Nazi Party on 1 May, just three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. During his time as rector he was a member and an enthusiastic supporter of the party. There is continuing controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his political allegiance to Nazism.
He wanted to position himself as the philosopher of the party, but the
highly abstract nature of his work and the opposition of Alfred Rosenberg,
who himself aspired to act in that position, limited Heidegger's role.
His withdrawal from his position as rector owed more to his frustration
as an administrator than to any principled opposition to the Nazis,
according to historians.
In his inaugural address as rector on 27 May he expressed his support
of a German revolution, and in an article and a speech to the students
from the same year he also supported Adolf Hitler. In November 1933, Heidegger signed the Vow
of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and
High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.
Heidegger resigned from the rectorate in April 1934, but remained a
member of the Nazi Party until 1945 even though the Nazis eventually
prevented him from publishing.
In 1935, he gave the talk "The Origin of the Work of Art". The next year, while in Rome, Heidegger gave his first lecture on Friedrich Hölderlin. In the years 1936–1937, Heidegger wrote what some commentators consider his second greatest work, Contributions to Philosophy; it would not be published, however, until 1989, 13 years after his death.
From 1936 to 1940, Heidegger also delivered a series of lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche
at Freiburg that presented much of the raw material incorporated in his
more established work and thought from this time. These would appear in
published form in 1961. This period also marks the beginning of his
interest in the "essence of technology".
In the autumn of 1944, Heidegger was drafted into the Volkssturm and assigned to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine.
Post-war
In late 1946, as France engaged in épuration légale in its occupation zone,
the French military authorities determined that Heidegger should be
blocked from teaching or participating in any university activities
because of his association with the Nazi Party. Nevertheless, he presented the talk "What are Poets for?" in memory of Rilke. He also published "On Humanism" in 1947 to clarify his differences with Jean-Paul Sartre and French existentialism. The denazification procedures against Heidegger continued until March 1949 when he was finally pronounced a Mitläufer
(the second lowest of five categories of "incrimination" by association
with the Nazi regime). No punitive measures against him were proposed. This opened the way for his readmission to teaching at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1950–51. He was granted emeritus status and then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.
Heidegger's grave in Meßkirch
In 1966 he gave an interview to Der Spiegel
attempting to justify his support of the Nazi Party. Per their
agreement, it was not published until five days after his death in 1976,
under the title "Only a God Can Save Us" after a reference to Hölderlin that Heidegger makes during the interview.
Heidegger's publications during this time were mostly reworked
versions of his lectures. In his last days, he also arranged for a
complete edition of his works to be compiled and published. Its first
volume appeared in 1975. As of 2019, the edition is almost complete at over 100 volumes.
Death
Heidegger died on 26 May 1976 in Freiburg. A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic
priest, Freiburg University professor and earlier correspondent. The
exact nature of their conversation is not known, but what is known is
that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church
and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated.
Heidegger was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.
Early influences
Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology,
was Heidegger's teacher and a major influence on his thought. While the
specific lines of influence remain a matter of scholarly dispute, one thing is clear: Heidegger's early work on Being and Time moved away from Husserl's theory of intentionality to focus on the pre-theoretical conditions that enable consciousness to grasp objects.
Aristotle influenced Heidegger from an early age. This influence was mediated through Catholic theology, medieval philosophy, and Franz Brentano.
According to scholar Michael Wheeler, it is by way of a "radical rethinking" of Aristotle's Metaphysics
that Heidegger supplants Husserl's notion of intentionality with his
unitary notion of being-in-the-world. According to this
reinterpretation, the various modes of being are united in more basic
capacity of taking-as or making-present-to.
Dilthey, c. 1855
The works of Wilhelm Dilthey shaped Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life", and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology. There is little doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a gestalt
formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to
demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.
Søren Kierkegaard contributed much to Heidegger's treatment of the existentialist aspects of his thought located in Division II of Being and Time. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst)
and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which
the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth,
our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and
the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual
being-in-the-world.
According to scholar Taylor Carman,
traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?", whereas Heidegger's
fundamental ontology asks "What does it mean for something to be?"
Heidegger's ontology "is fundamental relative to traditional ontology in
that it concerns what any understanding of entities necessarily
presupposes, namely, our understanding of that by virtue of which
entities are entities".
This line of inquiry is "central to Heidegger's philosophy". He
accuses the Western philosophical tradition of mistakenly trying to
understand being as such as if it were an ultimate entity. Heidegger modifies traditional ontology by focusing instead on the meaning of being.
This kind of ontological inquiry, he claims, is required to understand
the basis of our understanding, scientific and otherwise.
In short, before asking what exists, Heidegger contends that people must first examine what "to exist" even means.
In his first major work, Being and Time, Heidegger pursues
this ontological inquiry by way of an analysis of the kind of being that
people have, namely, that humans are the sort of beings able to pose
the question of the meaning of being. According to Canadian philosopher Sean McGrath Heidegger was probably influenced by Scotus in this approach. His term for us, in this phenomenological context, is Dasein.
Title page of first edition of Being and Time
This procedure works because Dasein's pre-ontological
understanding of being shapes experience. Dasein's ordinary and even
mundane experience of "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the
meaning" or "sense of being"; that is, the terms in which "something
becomes intelligible as something." Heidegger proposes that this ordinary "prescientific" understanding precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory. Being and Time is designed to show how this implicit understanding can be made progressively explicit through phenomenology and hermeneutics.
Being-in-the-world
Heidegger introduces the term Dasein to denote a "living being" through its activity of "being there".
Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive
combination, it is characterized by Heidegger as "being-in-the-world".
Heidegger insists that the 'in' of Dasein's being-in-the-world is
an 'in' of involvement or of engagement, not of objective, physical
enclosedness. The sense in which Dasein is 'in' the world is the sense
of "residing" or "dwelling" in the world.
Heidegger provides a few examples: "having to do with something,
producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making
use of something".
Just as 'being-in' does not denote objective, physical
enclosedness, so 'world', as Heidegger uses the term, does not denote a
universe of physical objects. The world, in Heidegger's sense, is to be
understood according to our sense of our possibilities: things present
themselves to people in terms of their projects, the uses to which they
can put them. The 'sight' with which people grasp equipment is not a
mentalistic intentionality, but what Heidegger calls 'circumspection'.
This is to say that equipment reveals itself in terms of its
'towards-which,' in terms of the work it is good for. In the everyday
world, people are absorbed within the equipmental totality of their
work-world. Moreover, on Heidegger's analysis, this entails a radical holism. In his own words, "there 'is' no such thing as an equipment".
For example, when someone sits down to dinner and picks up their
fork, they are not picking up an object with good stabbing properties:
they are non-reflectively engaging an 'in-order-to-eat'. When it works
as expected, equipment is transparent; when it is used, it is subsumed
under the work toward which it is employed. Heidegger calls this
structure of practically ordered reference relations the 'worldhood of
the world'.
Heidegger calls the mode of being of such entities "ready-to-hand", for they are understood only in being handled.
If the fork is made of plastic, however, and it snaps in the course of
using it, then it assumes the mode of being that Heidegger calls
"present-at-hand." For now the fork needs to be made the object of focal
awareness, considering it in terms of its properties. Is it too broken
to use? If so, could the diner possibly get by with another utensil or
just with their fingers? This kind of equipmental breakdown is not the
only way that objects become present-at-hand for us, but Heidegger
considers it typical of the way that this shift occurs in the course of
ordinary goings-on.
In this way, Heidegger creates a theoretical space for the
categories of subject and object, while at the same time denying that
they apply to our most basic way of moving about in the world, of which
they are instead presented as derivative.
Heidegger presents three primary structural features of
being-in-the-world: understanding, attunement, and discourse. He calls
these features "existentiales" or "existentialia" (Existenzialien) to distinguish their ontological status, as distinct from the "categories" of metaphysics.
Understanding is "our fundamental ability to be someone,
to do things, to get around in the world". It is the basic "know-how" in
terms of which Dasein goes about pursuing the usually humdrum tasks
that make up daily life. Heidegger argues that this mode of
understanding is more fundamental than theoretical understanding.
Attunement is "our way of finding ourselves thrust into the world".
It can also be translated as "disposition" or "affectedness". (The
standard translation of Macquarrie and Robinson uses "state-of-mind",
but this misleadingly suggests a private mental state.) There is no
perfect equivalent for Heidegger's Befindlichkeit, which is not even an ordinary German word. What needs to be conveyed, however, is "being found in a situation where things and opinions already matter".
Discourse (sometimes: talk or telling [de:Rede])
is "the articulation of the world into recognizable, communicable
patterns of meaning." It is implicated in both understanding attunement:
"The world that is opened up by moods and grasped by understanding gets
organized by discourse. Discourse makes language possible." According to Heidegger, "Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility."
In its most basic form, this referential whole manifests itself in the
way things are told apart just in the course of using them.
Heidegger unifies these three existential features of Dasein in a composite structure he terms "care": "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)." What unifies this formula is temporality.
Understanding is oriented towards future possibilities, attunement is
shaped by the past, and discourse discloses the present in those terms. In this way, the investigation into the being of Dasein leads to time. Much of Division II of Being and Time is devoted to a more fundamental reinterpretation of the findings of Division I in terms of Dasein's temporality.
Das Man
As implied in the analysis of both attunement and discourse, Dasein is "always already", or a priori, a social being. In Heidegger's technical idiom, Dasein is "Dasein-with" (Mitsein), which he presents as equally primordial with "being-one's self" (Selbstsein).
Heidegger's term for this existential feature of Dasein is das Man, which is a German pronoun, man, that Heidegger turns into a noun.
In English it is usually translated as either "the they" or "the one"
(sometimes also capitalized); for, as Heidegger puts it, "By 'others' we
do not mean everyone else but me.... They are rather those from whom
for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too". Quite frequently the term is just left in the German.
According to philosopher Hubert Dreyfus,
part of Heidegger's aim is to show that, contrary to Husserl,
individuals do not generate an intersubjective world from their separate
activities; rather, "these activities presuppose the disclosure of one shared world." This is one way in which Heidegger breaks from the Cartesian tradition of beginning from the perspective of individual subjectivity.
Dreyfus argues that the chapter on das Man is "the most confused" in Being and Time
and so is often misinterpreted. The problem, he says, is that
Heidegger's presentation conflates two opposing influences. The first is
Dilthey's account of the role that public and historical contexts have
in the production of significance. The second is Kierkegaard's
insistence that truth is never to be found in the crowd.
The Diltheyian dimension of Heidegger's analysis positions das Man
as ontologically existential in the same way as understanding,
affectedness, and discourse. This dimension of Heidegger's analysis
captures the way that a socio-historical "background" makes possible the
specific significance that entities and activities can have. Philosopher Charles Taylor
expands upon the term: "It is that of which I am not simply unaware...
but at the same time I cannot be said to be explicitly or focally aware
of it, because that status is already occupied by what it is making
intelligible".
For this reason, background non-representationally informs and enables
engaged agency in the world, but is something that people can never make
fully explicit to themselves.
The Kierkegaardian influence on Heidegger's analysis introduces a more existentialist dimension to Being and Time. (Existentialism is a broad philosophical movement largely defined by Jean-Paul Sartre
and is not to be confused with Heidegger's technical analysis of the
specific existential features of Dasein.) Its central notion is authenticity, which emerges as a problem from the "publicness" built into the existential role of das Man. In Heidegger's own words:
In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the
real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy
ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they
shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking. The 'they',
which is nothing definite, and which we all are, through not as the sum,
prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.
This "dictatorship of das Man" threatens to undermine
Heidegger's entire project of uncovering the meaning of being because it
does not seem possible, from such a condition, to even raise the
question of being that Heidegger claims to pursue. He responds to this
challenge with his account of authenticity.
Authenticity
Heidegger's term Eigentlichkeit is a neologism, in which Heidegger stresses the root eigen,
meaning "own." So this word, usually translated "authenticity", could
just as well be translated "ownedness" or "being one's own".
Authenticity, according to Heidegger, is a matter of taking
responsibility for being, that is, the stand that people take with
respect to their ultimate projects. It is, in his terms, a matter of
taking a properly "resolute" stand on "for-the-sake-of-which". Put
differently, the "self" to which one is true in authenticity is not
something just "there" to be discovered, but instead is a matter of
"on-going narrative construction".
Scholars Somogy Varga and Charles Guignon
describe three ways by which Dasein might attain an authentic relation
to itself from out of its "fallen" condition as "they"-self. First, a
powerful mood such as anxiety
can disclose Dasein to itself as an ultimately isolated individual.
Second, direct confrontation with Dasein's "ownmost" potential for death
can similarly disclose to Dasein its own irreducible finitude. Third,
experiencing "the call of conscience" can disclose to Dasein its own
"guilt" (Schuld) as the debt it has to itself in virtue of having
taken over pre-given possibilities that it is now Dasein's own
responsibility to maintain.
Philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman describes authenticity as "resolving to accept the openness which, paradoxically, one already is". He emphasizes that this is a matter, not of "intellectual comprehension", but of "hard-won insight". Authenticity is ultimately a matter of allowing the ego to be "eclipsed by the manifestation of one's finitude".
Although the term "authenticity" disappears from Heidegger's writing after Being and Time, Zimmerman argues that it is supplanted in his later thought by the less subjective or voluntaristic notion of Ereignis.
This ordinary German term for "event" or "happening" is theorized by
Heidegger as the appropriation of Dasein into a cosmic play of
concealment and appearance.
Heidegger's "Turn", which is sometimes referred to by the German die Kehre,
refers to a change in his work as early as 1930 that became clearly
established by the 1940s, according to some commentators, who variously
describe a shift of focus or a major change in outlook.
Heidegger himself frequently used the term to refer to the shift announced at the end of Being and Time from "being and time" to "time and being". However, he rejected the existence of the "sharp 'about turn'" posited by some interpreters. Scholar Michael Inwood also calls attention to the fact that many of the ideas from Being and Time
are retained in a different vocabulary in his later work—and also that,
in other cases, a word or expression common throughout his career comes
to acquire a different meaning in the later works.
This supposed shift—applied here to cover about 30 years of
Heidegger's 40-year writing career—has been described by commentators
from widely varied viewpoints, for instance, from dwelling (being) in the world to doing (temporality) in the world. This aspect, in particular the 1951 essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", has influenced several architectural theorists.
Other interpreters believe the Turn can be overstated or doesn't exist at all. For instance, Thomas Sheehan believes this supposed change is "far less dramatic than usually suggested", and entails merely a change in focus and method. Mark Wrathall argued that the Turn isn't found in Heidegger's writings, but is simply a misconception.
The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claims to revive this question of being that had been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending into the Age of Enlightenment,
as well as modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval
of the question, Heidegger spends considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander.
In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempts to reconstruct the
"history of being" in order to show how the different epochs in the
history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of being. His goal is to retrieve the original experience of being present in the early Greek thought that was covered up by later philosophers.
According to W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Heidegger believed "the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides,
which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and
misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent
Western philosophy. In his Introduction to Metaphysics,
Heidegger states, "Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is
Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek
misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless
in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward
redisclosing what is authentically Greek."
Charles Guignon
writes that Heidegger aims to correct this misunderstanding by reviving
Presocratic notions of being with an emphasis on "understanding the way
beings show up in (and as) an unfolding happening or event." Guignon adds that "we might call this alternative outlook 'event ontology.'"
Language
In Being and Time,
language is presented as logically secondary to Dasein's understanding
of the world and its significance. On this conception of worldhood,
language can develop from prelinguistic significance.
Post-turn, Heidegger refines his position to present some basic words (e.g., phusis,
the Greek term that roughly translates to "nature") as
world-disclosive, that is, as establishing the foundational parameters
in terms of which Dasein's understanding can occur in the specific ways
that it does. It is in this context that Heidegger proclaims that
"Language is the house of being."
In the present age, he says, the language of "technology", or
instrumental reason, flatten the significance of our world. For
salvation, he turns to poetry.
Heidegger rejected the notion of language being purely a means of
communication. Language construed us such, he believed, would form the
basis of an age of technology, the digital thought processes of which
would only use language to organise and communicate the coverage of that
which exists. Thinking in terms of calculation and digital processing
would put man at odds with language, at the centre of everything that
exists. If man would believe that they would have language at their
disposal, that they would be the one to use it, then, Heidegger
believed, man would completely miss the core tenet of language itself: "It is language that speaks, not man. Man only speaks if they neatly correspond to language." In this way, Heidegger wanted to point out that man is only a participant of language that they have not themselves created. Man is bound within a sort of process of transfer and may only act with respect to anything the language conveys.
In this, however, Heidegger does not think in terms of philosophy of culture: The tautology of the formulation language speaks
(originally in German "die Sprache spricht") is his way of trying to
prevent the phenomenon of language to be used with respect to anything
else than language itself. In line with his unique thinking, he is
seeking to avoid having to justify the language by anything else. In
this way, language could for instance never be explained by the sheer
transmission of acoustic sounds, or speaking. According to Heidegger,
language is rather difficult to fathom because we are too close to it,
hence we need to speak about that which usually remains unmentioned
because it is just to close to us. His work "Unterwegs zur Sprache" (On the way to language) is an attempt to reach "a place we already are in."
Influences
Heidegger dedicated many of his lectures to both Nietzsche and Hölderlin
Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin
were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture
courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and
1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger reads The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.
Michael Allen Gillespie says that Heidegger's theoretical acceptance of "destiny" has much in common with the millenarianism
of Marxism. But Marxists believe Heidegger's "theoretical acceptance is
antagonistic to practical political activity and implies fascism".
Gillespie, however, says "the real danger" from Heidegger isn't quietism but fanaticism. Modernity has cast mankind toward a new goal "on the brink of profound nihilism" that is "so alien it requires the construction of a new tradition to make it comprehensible."
Gillespie extrapolates from Heidegger's writings that humankind may degenerate into "scientists, workers, and brutes".
According to Gillespie, Heidegger envisaged this abyss to be the
greatest event in the history of the West because it might enable
humanity to comprehend being more profoundly and primordially than the Presocratics.
The poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin became an increasingly central
focus of Heidegger's later work and thought. Heidegger grants Hölderlin a
singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany,
as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West
more generally. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include
meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the
lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem; for
example, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister".
On 27 May 1933, Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede (titled "The Self-assertion of the German University"), in a hall decorated with swastikas, with members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and prominent Nazi Party officials present.
That summer he delivered a lecture on a fragment of Heraclitus
(usually translated in English: "War is the father of all"). His notes
on this lecture appear under the heading "Struggle as the essence of
Beings."
In this lecture he suggests that if an enemy cannot be found for the
people then one must be invented, and once conceptualized and
identified, then the 'beings' who have discovered or invented this enemy
must strive for the total annihilation of the enemy.
His tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some Nazi
education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts
as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his
philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation
as rector on 23 April 1934, and it was accepted on 27 April. Heidegger
remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party
until the end of the war.
Philosophical historian Hans Sluga
wrote, "Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an
anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a
book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders
and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism."
In 1945, Heidegger wrote of his term as rector, giving the writing to his son Hermann; it was published in 1983:
The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the
movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness,
that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a
concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no
way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for
that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being
effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my
own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not
capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.
Treatment of Husserl
Beginning in 1917, German-Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl
championed Heidegger's work, and helped Heidegger become his successor
for the chair in philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928.
On 6 April 1933, the Gauleiter of Baden
Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees,
including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg.
Heidegger's predecessor as rector formally notified Husserl of his
"enforced leave of absence" on 14 April 1933.
Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg on 22 April
1933. The following week the national Reich law of 28 April 1933
replaced Reichskommissar Wagner's decree. The Reich law required the
firing of Jewish professors from German universities, including those,
such as Husserl, who had converted to Christianity. The termination of
the retired professor Husserl's academic privileges thus did not involve
any specific action on Heidegger's part.
Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl, other than
through intermediaries. Heidegger later claimed that his relationship
with Husserl had already become strained after Husserl publicly "settled
accounts" with Heidegger and Max Scheler in the early 1930s.
Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in 1938,
for which he later declared himself regretful: "That I failed to express
again to Husserl my gratitude and respect for him upon the occasion of
his final illness and death is a human failure that I apologized for in a
letter to Mrs. Husserl". In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, Heidegger agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time (restored in post-war editions).
Heidegger's behavior towards Husserl has provoked controversy.
Hannah Arendt initially suggested that Heidegger's behavior precipitated
Husserl's death. She called Heidegger a "potential murderer". However,
she later recanted her accusation.
Post-rectorate period
After the failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from most political activity, but remained a member of the Nazi Party. In May 1934 he accepted a position on the Committee for the Philosophy of Law in the Academy for German Law,
where he remained active until at least 1936. The academy had official
consultant status in preparing Nazi legislation such as the Nuremberg racial laws that came into effect in 1935. In addition to Heidegger, such Nazi notables as Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Carl Schmitt, and Alfred Rosenberg belonged to the Academy and served on this committee.
In a 1935 lecture, later published in 1953 as part of the book Introduction to Metaphysics,
Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and greatness" of the Nazi
movement, but he then adds a qualifying statement in parentheses:
"namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity".
However, it subsequently transpired that this qualification had not
been made during the original lecture, although Heidegger claimed that
it had been. This has led scholars to argue that Heidegger still
supported the Nazi party in 1935 but that he did not want to admit this
after the war, and so he attempted to silently correct his earlier
statement.
In private notes written in 1939, Heidegger took a strongly critical view of Hitler's ideology;
however, in public lectures, he seems to have continued to make
ambiguous comments which, if they expressed criticism of the regime, did
so only in the context of praising its ideals. For instance, in a 1942
lecture, published posthumously, Heidegger said of recent German
classics scholarship, "In the majority of "research results," the Greeks
appear as pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of
academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does
National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not
that it needs this anyhow."
An important witness to Heidegger's continued allegiance to Nazism during the post-rectorship period is his former student Karl Löwith,
who met Heidegger in 1936 while Heidegger was visiting Rome. In an
account set down in 1940 (though not intended for publication), Löwith
recalled that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, though
Heidegger knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith also recalled that
Heidegger "left no doubt about his faith in Hitler", and stated that his support for Nazism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.
Heidegger rejected the "biologically grounded racism" of the Nazis, replacing it with linguistic-historical heritage.By living according to the principle of race [the Jews] had themselves
promoted the very reasoning by which they were now being attacked and so
they had no right to complain when it was being used against them by
the Germans promoting their own racial purity."
Post-war period
After the end of World War II, Heidegger was summoned to appear at a denazification hearing. Heidegger's former student and lover Hannah Arendt spoke on his behalf at this hearing, while Karl Jaspers spoke against him. He was charged on four counts, dismissed from the university and declared a "follower" (Mitläufer)
of Nazism. Heidegger was forbidden to teach between 1945 and 1951. One
consequence of this teaching ban was that Heidegger began to engage far
more in the French philosophical scene.
In his postwar thinking, Heidegger distanced himself from Nazism,
but his critical comments about Nazism seem scandalous to some since
they tend to equate the Nazi war atrocities with other inhumane
practices related to rationalization and industrialisation, including the treatment of animals by factory farming.
For instance in a lecture delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger said:
"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its
essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the
extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of
countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen
bombs."
In 1967 Heidegger met with the Jewish poet Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor. Having corresponded since 1956,
Celan visited Heidegger at his country retreat and wrote an enigmatic
poem about the meeting, which some interpret as Celan's wish for
Heidegger to apologize for his behavior during the Nazi era.
Heidegger's defenders, notably Arendt, see his support for Nazism
as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in
quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics). Defenders think this error was irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics such as Levinas, Karl Löwith, and Theodor Adorno claim that Heidegger's support for Nazism revealed flaws inherent in his thought.
Der Spiegel interview
On 23 September 1966, Heidegger was interviewed by Georg Wolff, a former Nazi, and Rudolf Augstein for Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously. ("Only a God Can Save Us" was published five days after his death, on 31 May 1976.)
In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with Nazism in
two ways. First, he claimed that there was no alternative, saying that
with his acceptance of the position of rector of the University of Freiburg
he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from
being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi
administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an "awakening" (Aufbruch)
which might help to find a "new national and social approach," but said
that he changed his mind about this in 1934, when he refused, under
threat of dismissal, to remove from the position of dean of the faculty
those who were not acceptable to the Nazi party, and he consequently
decided to resign as rector.
In his interview Heidegger defended as double-speak
his 1935 lecture describing the "inner truth and greatness of this
movement." He affirmed that Nazi informants who observed his lectures
would understand that by "movement" he meant Nazism. However, Heidegger
asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement wasn't
praise for the Nazi Party. Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification later added to Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), namely, "the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity."
The eyewitness account of Löwith from 1940, contradicts the account given in the Der Spiegel
interview in two ways: that he did not make any decisive break with
Nazism in 1934, and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more
profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement. The
Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949
quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the
extermination camps. In fact, the interviewers were not in possession of
much of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies. Furthermore, Der Spiegel journalist Georg Wolff had been an SS-Hauptsturmführer with the Sicherheitsdienst, stationed in Oslo during World War II, and had been writing articles with antisemitic and racist overtones in Der Spiegel since the end of the war.
The Farías debate
Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard,
among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation
between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazi politics. These debates
included the question of whether it was possible to do without
Heidegger's philosophy, a position which Derrida in particular rejected.
Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the
first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on Paul Celan
by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, which shortly preceded the detailed
studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.
The Black Notebooks
In 2014, Heidegger's Black Notebooks were published although he had written in them between 1931 and the early 1970s. The notebooks contain several examples of anti-Semitic sentiments, which have led to reevaluation of Heidegger's relation to Nazism. An example of Heidegger using anti-Semitic language he once wrote "world Judaism
is ungraspable everywhere and doesn't need to get involved in military
action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to
sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people". The term and notion
of "world Judaism" was first promoted by the anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and later appeared in Hitler's infamous book Mein Kampf.
In another instance Heidegger wrote "by living according to the
principle of race [Jews] had themselves promoted the very reasoning by
which they were now being attacked and so they had no right to complain
when it was being used against them by the Germans promoting their own
racial purity". However, in the notebooks there are instances of Heidegger writing critically of Biological racism and biological oppression.
A notable entry in the notebooks are his writings about his
mentor and former friend Edmund Husserl specifically relating to Husserl
Jewish heritage. In 1939, only a year after Husserl's death, Heidegger
wrote in his Black Notebooks:
the occasional increase in the power of Judaism is
grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in
its modern evolution, offered the point of attachment for the expansion
of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative capacity, and these
thereby created for themselves an abode in the "spirit" without ever
being able, on their own, to grasp the concealed decisive domains. The
more originary and inceptual the future decisions and questions become,
all the more inaccessible will they remain to this 'race.' (Thus
Husserl's step to the phenomenological attitude, taken in explicit
opposition to psychological explanation and to the historiological
calculation of opinions, will be of lasting importance—and yet this
attitude never reaches into the domains of the essential
decisions[....].)
This would seem to imply that Heidegger considered Husserl to be philosophically limited by his Jewishness.
Reception
Influence
Heidegger is often considered to be among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century by many observers. American Philosopher Richard Rorty has ranked Heidegger as among the most important philosophers along with John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Simon Critchley has praised Heidegger for his contributions to Continental philosophy.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek
has referred to Heidegger as a "great philosopher" and rejected the
notion that his alleged anti-semitism against him tainted his
philosophy.
In France, there is a very long and particular history of reading
and interpreting Heidegger's work. Because Heidegger's discussion of
ontology is sometimes interpreted as rooted in an analysis of the mode
of existence of individual human beings (Dasein), his work has often
been associated with existentialism. Derrida sees deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion"—literally "destruction"—and "Abbau"—more literally "de-building"). The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness is marked. Heidegger himself, however, argued that Sartre had misread his work.
Hubert Dreyfus introduced Heidegger's notion of "being-in-the-world" to research in Artificial intelligence. According to Dreyfus, long-standing research questions such as the Frame problem can be only dissolved within an Heideggerian framework. Heidegger also profoundly influenced Enactivism and Situated robotics. Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon has expressed admiration for Heidegger and has praised his philosophy.
Some writers on Heidegger's work see possibilities within it for
dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy,
particularly East Asian thinking.
Despite perceived differences between Eastern and Western philosophy,
some of Heidegger's later work, particularly "A Dialogue on Language
between a Japanese and an Inquirer", does show an interest in initiating
such a dialogue. Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading
Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe and Kuki Shūzō. The scholar Chang Chung-Yuan stated, "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands Tao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well."
Philosopher Reinhard May sees great influence of Taoism and Japanese
scholars in Heidegger's work, although this influence is not
acknowledged by the author. He asserts it can be shown that Heidegger
sometimes "appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from
the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics." To this he
adds, "This clandestine textual appropriation of non-Western
spirituality, the extent of which has gone undiscovered for so long,
seems quite unparalleled, with far-reaching implications for our future
interpretation of Heidegger's work."
Notable figures known to be influenced by Heidegger's work today include Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent Russian far-right political philosopher.
Criticism
According to Husserl, Being and Time
claimed to deal with ontology, but only did so in the first few pages
of the book. Having nothing further to contribute to an ontology
independent of human existence, Heidegger changed the topic to Dasein.
Whereas Heidegger argued that the question of human existence is central
to the pursuit of the question of being, Husserl criticized this as
reducing phenomenology to "philosophical anthropology" and offering an
abstract and incorrect portrait of the human being.
Aspects of his work have been criticized by those who acknowledge his
influence. Some questions raised about Heidegger's philosophy include
the priority of ontology, the status of animals, the nature of the
religious, Heidegger's supposed neglect of ethics (Emmanuel Levinas), the body (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), sexual difference (Luce Irigaray), and space (Peter Sloterdijk). A. J. Ayer
objected that Heidegger proposed vast, overarching theories regarding
existence that were completely unverifiable through empirical
demonstration and logical analysis.
In France, there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting Heidegger. In 1929 the Neo-KantianErnst Cassirer and Heidegger engaged in an influential debate, during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs in Davos, concerning the significance of Kantian
notions of freedom and rationality. Whereas Cassirer defended the role
of rationality in Kant, Heidegger argued for the priority of the
imagination.The reception of Heidegger's philosophy by Anglo-American analytic philosophy, beginning with the logical positivists, was almost uniformly negative. Rudolf Carnap accused Heidegger of offering an "illusory" ontology, criticizing him for committing the fallacy of reification
and for wrongly dismissing the logical treatment of language which,
according to Carnap, can only lead to writing "nonsensical
pseudo-propositions".
Hegelian-Marxist thinkers, especially György Lukács and the Frankfurt School,
associated the style and content of Heidegger's thought with
irrationalism and criticized its political implications. For instance, Theodor Adorno wrote an extended critique of the ideological character of Heidegger's early and later use of language in the Jargon of Authenticity, and Jürgen Habermas admonishes the influence of Heidegger on recent French philosophy in his polemic against "postmodernism" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
Bertrand Russell considered Heidegger an obscurantist,
writing, "Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is
extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here
running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence
that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in
Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for
logic." According to Richard Polt, this quote expresses the sentiments of many 20th-century analytic philosophers concerning Heidegger.
The film director Terrence Malick translated Heidegger's 1929 essay Vom Wesen des Grundes into English. It was published under the title The Essence of Reasons (1969). It is also frequently said of Malick that his cinema has Heideggerian sensibilities.
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