Heidegger met the eschatological dread brought on by the Great War by offering a revolutionary reappraisal of life-one often written off as a kind of radical conservatism, in a time of fascism. Human existence is incurably unstable and incomplete, while those who stay mindful of this sobering fact have at least the dignity of honesty on their side. Nearly a hundred years later, the idea that death can serve as a catalyst for viewing the human condition with uncompromising candor still rings true to many readers.
This was a timely topic especially in the 1920s, when many of Heidegger’s students were veterans who had served in the First World War. Death provides the answer to the question about the meaning of life, for it is through death that we may realize what it means to live authentically. To this day, one of the most widely discussed segments of Heidegger’s opus magnum is his analysis of death as the key to human existence or Dasein, as he calls it. Some have heralded him as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, while others dismiss him as a philosophical “charlatan.” Early in his career, his lecture style proved so engaging that he became known as the “hidden king” of philosophy among the students at Freiburg University, before the publication of his breakthrough work Being and Time (1927). His texts tend to meet with strong reactions from advocates and detractors alike. If nothing else, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is a polarizing thinker. This post is a part of our “ Faith in Revolution” series, which explores the ways that religious ideologies and communities shaped the revolutionary era.
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