Heidegger

"Martin Heidegger was born in the small town of Messkirch on the edge of the Black Forest in 1889, a few months after Nietzsche rushed across the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, threw his arms around a cab-horse, and never came out of the embrace. This conjuncture was to be an important one for the young Heidegger; he saw a line of continuity in the idea that he came into the world as Nietzsche’s reason left it. Heidegger would go on to compare philosophical communication as speaking from mountain top to mountain top, and Nietzsche, in his Alpine seclusion, was, for him, the nearest peak. As had been the case for Nietzsche growing up in a different corner of provincial Germany, it didn’t take long for Heidegger and those around him to recognize his brilliance. He excelled in all areas, from math to Greek, theology to physics, and the choice was open to him. His staunchly Catholic family favored theology; he chose philosophy.

When he completed his studies, he moved to the picturesque university town of Freiburg im Breisgau in a different part of the Black Forest to work with Edmund Husserl, the founder of a new school of philosophy: phenomenology. Husserl felt that it did not suffice to examine the abstractions and to trace the contours of the conceptual systems of such thinkers as Leibniz and Hegel. For him, a philosopher worthy of the name needed to examine more closely how one arrived at such abstractions through how one experienced individual phenomena. And how one arrived at ideas and conceptual systems was through the thousand affects and attitudes that condition them, which meant that the phenomenologist needed to go, in his words, “back to the things themselves.”...

Cabinet Magazine