# Martin Heidegger One of the 20th century's most influential — and most compromised — philosophers, and a direct intellectual source for the contemporary European and Russian far right. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) reoriented [[Continental Philosophy]] around the "question of Being," wrote what many consider the century's most important work of philosophy in *[[Being and Time]]*, and joined the Nazi Party in 1933, serving as a Nazi rector of his university and never offering a clear postwar repudiation. His critique of technological modernity, rootlessness, and the forgetting of Being makes him a foundational reference for [[Alexander Dugin]] and the [[New Right]]. ## Background Born in Messkirch, in rural Catholic southern Germany, Heidegger began training for the priesthood before turning to philosophy. He became the star student and assistant of [[Edmund Husserl]], the founder of phenomenology, and succeeded him to the chair at Freiburg — later having Husserl, who was of Jewish descent, barred from the university library under Nazi racial laws, a personal betrayal that shadows his legacy. His most famous student and onetime lover, [[Hannah Arendt]], a German-Jewish émigré, resumed contact with him after the war and did much to rehabilitate his philosophical reputation. ## Core ideas ### The question of Being Heidegger's lifelong project was to reawaken the **question of Being** (*Seinsfrage*) — what it means for anything to *be* — which he argued Western philosophy had forgotten since the ancient Greeks, sliding into a habit of treating Being as just another entity. This "forgetting of Being" is, for Heidegger, the hidden root of the modern crisis. ### Dasein and Being-in-the-world In *[[Being and Time]]* (1927), Heidegger analyzes human existence through *Dasein* ("being-there") — the entity for whom Being is a question. Against the Cartesian picture of a detached mind observing a world of objects, he describes humans as always already thrown into a world, absorbed in practical concern, and structured by care, mood, and temporality. Authentic existence means confronting one's own finitude — **being-toward-death** — rather than fleeing into the anonymous conformity of "the They" (*das Man*). ### The critique of technology In his later work, Heidegger argued that modern technology embodies a way of disclosing the world — *Gestell* ("enframing") — that reduces everything, including human beings, to a "standing reserve" of resources to be optimized. This romantic-reactionary critique of technological civilization, rootlessness, and the homogenizing power of modernity is the strand most attractive to the anti-modern right. ## The Nazi question Heidegger's Nazism is not incidental. He joined the party in 1933, gave speeches supporting Hitler, and as rector imposed the *Führerprinzip* on his university. The posthumous publication of his private *Black Notebooks* revealed explicit antisemitic passages tying "world Jewry" to the rootless machination he despised, ending decades of debate about whether his politics infected his philosophy. The central interpretive question — can a philosophy be salvaged from a thinker who put it in the service of the Third Reich? — is unavoidable, and it is exactly this fusion of profound philosophy with reactionary politics that makes Heidegger usable on the far right. ## Reception on the right - **[[Alexander Dugin]]**, the Russian ideologue, makes Heidegger the philosophical cornerstone of his "Fourth [[Political Theory]]," reading the critique of liberal modernity and the call for rooted, authentic peoplehood as a blueprint for a multipolar, anti-Western order. - The European **[[New Right]]** ([[Nouvelle Droite]]) and Traditionalist currents (see [[Traditionalism]]) draw on his anti-modernism and his valorization of rootedness, homeland, and authentic dwelling. - His influence on [[Neoreaction]] and the broader anti-liberal intelligentsia runs through both his critique of technological nihilism and his standing as a "respectable" reactionary giant. At the same time, Heidegger is foundational to thinkers the right detests: he shaped [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] and existentialism, and his student-critics [[Jacques Derrida]] and the post-structuralists built deconstruction partly out of his work — another instance of a single source feeding opposed camps. ## Legacy in the KB context Heidegger is the pivot between [[Existentialism]] and [[Continental Philosophy]] and the most important conduit by which [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]'s anti-modernism reaches the 20th-century reactionary right. For this vault he is doubly significant: as a *source* mined by [[Alexander Dugin]] and the [[New Right]], and as the clearest test case for the recurring question of whether reactionary politics can be separated from the philosophy that served it. ## Major works - *Being and Time* (1927) - *What Is Metaphysics?* (1929) - *Introduction to Metaphysics* (1935, published 1953) - *The Question Concerning Technology* (1954) - *Black Notebooks* (written 1931–1970s, published 2014–) ## See also - [[Being and Time]] — his masterwork - [[Edmund Husserl]] — his teacher, founder of phenomenology - [[Continental Philosophy]] — the tradition he reoriented - [[Existentialism]] — which he decisively shaped - [[Alexander Dugin]] — contemporary far-right appropriation - [[New Right]] — European reactionary heirs