— Ch. 1 · Postwar German Cultural Crisis —
Being and Time.
~7 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
The year 1927 marked the publication of Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, a book that would soon define an era of thought. This work emerged from a Germany still reeling from its defeat in World War I. Richard Wolin observed that the text implicitly adopted a critique of mass society, echoing earlier warnings by Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. The cultural atmosphere was thick with elitist complaints about what Jürgen Habermas called the dictatorship of public opinion. These sentiments were common currency among the German mandarins of the twenties. Wolin further noted that the book was suffused by a sensibility derived from secularized Protestantism. It stressed concepts like original sin to portray the human condition as essentially a curse. George Steiner argued that Being and Time was a direct product of this crisis in German culture following the war. He compared it to other major works published between 1918 and 1925, including Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Even Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf appeared on this same list of culturally significant texts from the period. John D. Caputo noted that Heidegger made a systematic study of Martin Luther after training for ten years as a Catholic theologian. Hubert Dreylius later likened Division II of the volume to a secularized version of Kierkegaard's Christianity. Almost all central concepts of the work are derived from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard according to Christian Lotz.
The Concept Of Dasein
Heidegger explicitly rejected Descartes' notion of the human being as a subjective spectator of objects. Marcella Horrigan-Kelly and her colleagues explained that the book holds subject and object to be inseparable. Instead of viewing humans as detached observers, Heidegger introduced the term Dasein. This word literally means being there. It was intended to embody a living being through their activity of being there and being in the world. Michael Wheeler described being-in-the-world as an essential characteristic of Dasein understood as a unitary phenomenon. The account passes through an analysis of angst, the Nothing, and mortality. He then defined authenticity as a means to grasp and confront the finite possibilities of Dasein. Heidegger stated that Dasein is the being that will give access to the question of the meaning of Being. Richard Rorty agreed with Heidegger that there is no hidden power called Being. Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall separately asserted that commentators' emphasis on the term Being is misplaced. Wrathall wrote that Heidegger's elaborate concept of unconcealment was his central life-long focus. Sheehan proposed that the philosopher's prime focus was on that which brings about being as a givenness of entities. Simon Critchley wrote that the book provides an answer to the question of what it means to be human rather than how we might answer the question of being as such.