Martin Heidegger
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was educated in the
phenomenological tradition under Edmund Husserl. While Heidegger has remained a
controversial figure, largely because of his political affiliations with the National
Socialists, he has proved to be a key figure within twentieth-century European thought
and a significant influence on other thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques
Derrida. Following the publication in 1927 of his seminal work, Being and Time,
Heidegger pursued the whole problem of humankind’s situatedness in the world, in a
project centred on the key concepts of dasein and the question of ‘Being’. Heidegger
argued that the alienation of contemporary existence was based on the separation of
thought from ‘Being’, a condition epitomized by the privileging of technology and
calculative thinking in the modern world. His project was therefore an attempt to return
humankind to some form of authentic existence.
A concern for the architectural underpins Heidegger’s philosophy. For Heidegger the
problem of man’s situatedness in the world is inextricably bound up with the question of
dwelling. Thus Heidegger stresses the link between dwelling and thinking, which he
traces back etymologically to links between antique words. Not only does architecture
allow for the possibility of dwelling, but it is also precisely part of that dwelling. To
dwell authentically, for Heidegger, is to dwell poetically, since poetry is a manifestation
of truth restored to its artistic dimension. Architecture becomes a setting into work of
‘truth’, and a means of making the ‘world’ visible. Fundamental to this process is the
ancient Greek term techne, linked in Heidegger’s mind to the term tikto—‘to bring forth
or to produce’—a concept to be distinguished from the modern term ‘technology’ in
which techne remains ‘resolutely concealed’.
The extracts bring out the importance of context for Heidegger. The world is not ‘in
space’, but ‘space’ is in the world. ‘Space’, for Heidegger, contains a sense of ‘clearing-
away’, of releasing places from wilderness, and allowing the possibility of ‘dwelling’.
‘Space’ is therefore linked to ‘Being’. In his famous example of the Greek temple,
Heidegger illustrates how the temple discloses the spatiality of Being through its
‘standing there’. Fundamental to Heidegger’s treatment of architecture is the situatedness
of buildings—their dasein. Thus the temple grows out of the cleft rock, no less than the
bridge ‘gathers together’ the banks of the river. Similarly the farmhouse in the Black
Forest is born on and of the mountain slope where it sits, built by the ‘dwelling’ on
peasants.
The centrality of Heidegger’s thought to twentieth-century thinking is evident in the
context of other essays in this volume. In particular, parallels may be drawn with the
work of Gadamer, Vattimo and Bachelard, while contrasts may be made with the work of
Adorno, Benjamin, Derrida, Lefebvre and Lyotard. Heidegger’s discussion of the bridge
in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ can be compared to that of Simmel in ‘Bridge and
Door’, while his treatment of techne can be compared to that of Foucault in ‘Space,