Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Abstract and Keywords:

Heidegger was a revered German philosopher and teacher. He was associated with
phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. This chapter examines the
relevance of Heidegger's work to organization studies. It considers the concept of
'movement' in his understanding of the modern age.
Introduction
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher who studied first theology
and then philosophy in Freiburg. He became both a distinguished thinker and teacher,
and a dubious figure whose political affiliations with the Nazi movement have generated
significant and unavoidable debate. His relationships with colleagues and students, with
his own masters, and the institutions and the world of his time have become to some
extent suffused with legendary connotations.
Heidegger as Thinker of the Movement of
History
Heidegger as Thinker of the Movement of
History
Heidegger as Thinker of the Movement of
History
Heidegger as Thinker of the Movement of
History
Heidegger as thinker of the movement of history
What does Heidegger mean by 'movement' in his attempt to understand history? And
how are we to view organizations, business, or management? Perhaps answers can
come from his engagement and confrontation with Nietzsche where the idea of 'history
as a movement' emerges (Heidegger, 1991a, 1991b, 1976, 2002). By engaging with the
latter's announcement of the 'death of God' (Nietzsche, 1974), he interprets the
movement of history as the collapse of the transcendental horizon.
The 'nothing' of nihilism not only hides itself as a process, but also appears as an
unthinkable, absurd, and unreal imputation against modernity. Heidegger himself helps
us directly in this respect in chapter 3 of the fourth volume of his work on Nietzsche. The
nothing of negation or no-saying is purely and simply 'nothing', what is most null, and so
unworthy of any further attention or respect.
Concluding Remarks:
We are proposing that Heidegger's view of time can only be grasped in relation to his
view of history. As Schürmann argued, 'the understanding of being as time cannot
dispense with the deconstruction of epochs' (Schürmann, 1987: 283). We turn to a key
but enigmatic sentence of Zarathustra's Prologue ('The earth has become small, and on
it hops the last man, who makes everything small' - our emphasis).
Heidegger writes:
Listen closely: ‘The last man lives longest’. What does that say? It says that under
the last man’s dominion, which has now begun, we are by no means approaching
an end, a final age, but that the last man will on the contrary have a strangely long
staying-power. And on what grounds? Obviously on the grounds of his type of
nature, which also determines the way and the ‘how’ in which everything is, and in
which everything is taken to be.
For the animal rationale, this type of nature consists in the way he sets up
everything that is, as his objects and subjective states, confronts them, and
adjusts to these objects and states as his environing circumstances.

Refences:
Cooper, R.L. (1993). Heidegger and Whitehead: A Phenomenological Examination into
the
Intelligibility of Experience (Ohio: Ohio University Press).
Dupré, L.K. (1993). Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and
Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Ettinger, E. (1995). Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press).
Farias, V. (1991). Heidegger and Nazism (Memphis, TN: Temple University Press).
Faye, E. (2009). Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the
Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
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