Martin Heidegger quotes

Ignoring not only the sciences but the whole of the Western tradition since Plato caused Heidegger to remain too caught up in traditional metaphysics, from which only self-reflection could bring release.

Nietzsche … does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.

The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

Was Heidegger's support for Nazism primarily a philosophical affair — indeed, a philosophical mistake — that could be easily corrected by a change in philosophical position? The opposite would seem to be the case, namely, that Heidegger's support for Hitler was intimately bound up with his own very conservative political views and his deep-seated anti-democratic and anti-modern attitudes. Since those attitudes demonstrably persist in Heidegger's thinking up to his death, to what degree is Heidegger's entire philosophy, both early and late, inextricably linked with his politics in the broadest sense, that is, with what he called the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism? […] And then there is a question of why, after the war, Heidegger chose to maintain an almost hermetic silence about his support for Hitler and the Nazis. Shouldn't the philosopher who had written so powerfully about the existential themes of responsibility, resoluteness, and authenticity have had at least something to say about his own personal responsibility for his actions during the Third Reich rather than glossing over the matter by blaming everything and everyone else?

We do not “have” a body; rather, we “are” bodily.

Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.

In its essence, technology is something that man does not control.

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

In contrast to “Blessed are they who do not see and still believe,” he speaks of “seeing and still not believing.”

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

If beings are grasped as will to power, the “should” which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a “should” does not determine being. Being determines a “should.” “When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values.” (VIII, 89)

It ought to arouse our suspicions that people who spend enormous efforts on interpreting [Heidegger's] work disagree on the fundamental question whether he was an idealist. For the purposes of this discussion, his lack of a resolute commitment to the basic facts is enough. Suppose you took the notion of Dasein seriously, in the sense that you thought it referred to a real phenomenon in the real world. Your first question would be: How does the brain cause Dasein and how does Dasein exist in the brain? Or if you thought the brain was not the right explanatory level you would have to say exactly how and where Dasein is located in the space time trajectory of the organism and you would have to locate the right causes, both the micro causes that are causing Dasein and its causal effects on the organic processes of the organism. There is no escaping the fact that we all live in one space-time continuum, and if Dasein exists it has to be located and causally situated in that continuum. Furthermore, if you took Dasein seriously you would then have to ask how does Dasein fit into the biological evolutionary scheme? Do other primates have it? Other mammals? What is its evolutionary function? I can’t find an answer to these questions in Heidegger or even a sense that he is aware of them or takes them seriously. But taking these questions seriously is the price of taking Dasein seriously, unless of course you are denying the primordiality of the basic facts.

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.