page_title: Martin Heidegger
section_title: Kierkegaard
hierarchical_section_title: Martin Heidegger / Philosophy / Influences / Kierkegaard
caption_attribution_description: Español: Boceto inacabado de Søren Kierkegaard c. 1840 por su primo Niels Christian Kierkegaard
context_page_description: Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism.
  In Being and Time, Heidegger addresses the meaning of "being" by considering the question, "what is common to all entities that makes them entities?" Heidegger approaches this question through an analysis of Dasein, his term for the specific type of being that humans possess, and which he associates closely with his concept of "being-in-the-world". This conception of the human is in contrast with that of Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes, who had understood human existence most basically as thinking, as in Cogito ergo sum.
  Heidegger's later work includes criticism of the view, common in the Western tradition, that all of nature is a "standing reserve" on call for human purposes.
  Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.
context_section_description: Heideggerians regarded Søren Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world.
  Patricia J. Huntington claims that Heidegger's book Being and Time continued Kierkegaard's existential goal. Nevertheless, she argues that Heidegger began to distance himself from any existentialist thought.
  Calvin Shrag argues Heidegger's early relationship with Kierkegaard as:
  Kierkegaard is primarily concerned with existence as it is experienced in man's concrete ethico-religious situation. Heidegger is interested in deriving an ontological analysis of man. But as Heidegger's ontological and existentialist descriptions can arise only from ontic and existential experience, so Kierkegaard's ontic and existential elucidations express an implicit ontology.
caption: Søren Kierkegaard, considered to be the first existential philosopher
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