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1889, in the small town of Messkirch in Baden, Germany a lower middle class
couple welcomed the birth of their first child, who would later go on to become
a renowned philosopher. Martin Heidegger grew up in a largely catholic
background and was declared a gifted child by his local priest at the young age
of 14. Thus, in 1909 he began training for his priesthood, but “two years later
discontinued his clerical training to focus instead on philosophy, while also
undertaking work in science and math” (Sherman & Solomon, 2003, p. 144). In
1915, he married Elfride Petri and later had two children with her. After a
stint of military training during WW1, as his health did not permit him to
actually go to battle, he returned to teaching in universities in Germany until
the end of WW2. It is also interesting to note Heidegger’s admittedly “strange
relationship to Hitler’s Germany” (Naess, 1965, p.179). After the war, during
de-Nazification, he was “was stripped of his professorship and banned from
teaching until 1949” due to his reported Nazi sympathies during the 1930s
(Sherman & Solomon, 2003, p. 178). In 1951, the University of Freiburg
offered him emeritus status so that he could continue lecturing until near the
end of his life in 1976.
Though
Heidegger repudiated the claim in a long open letter in 1946, he was seen as a
great “existentialist” and “humanist” during his time (Naess, 1965, p. 178). He
contributed greatly to the fields hermeneutics, psychology, political theory,
and metaphysics. However, perhaps his greatest work was done in the field of
phenomenology and the question of being. He stressed the importance of
self-reflection in order to understand the being. The being’s essence is in his
existence and each beings characteristic of being mine or “mineness” permits an
either authentic or inauthentic way of life (Naess, 1965). Heidegger focused on
“passionate thinking” and rethinking on these questions of being, presence,
life, and time, and is said “to have brought thinking to life” (Sherman &
Soloman, 2003, p. 146). 
