Being and Time

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Being and Time, published in 1927 by German philosopher Martin Heidegger, opened with a question that Western philosophy had supposedly forgotten: what does it mean simply to be? The book would go on to shake French existentialism to its roots, reshape psychoanalysis, redirect literary theory, and provoke some of the sharpest insults in twentieth-century intellectual life. Bertrand Russell would accuse the language of running riot. The analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer would call Heidegger a charlatan outright. Jean-Paul Sartre's entire existentialist project, published in 1943, would be described by some as merely a version of what Heidegger had already done. How does a single book generate such furious disagreement across so many fields? And what exactly is it arguing? The answers begin not in a lecture hall but in the rubble of a war-shattered Germany, and in the quiet study of a man who had once trained for a decade as a Catholic theologian before turning his attention to the oldest question in philosophy.

• 2. A Germany in Crisis

  ›

  Germany's defeat in World War I left its intellectual culture unmoored, and critic George Steiner argues that Being and Time belongs to that moment of rupture. Steiner placed it alongside Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia from 1918, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West from 1918, Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption from 1921, Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans from 1922, and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf from 1925. These were works born from the same cultural crisis, even if they pointed in wildly different directions. Richard Wolin describes Being and Time as suffused by sensibilities drawn from secularized Protestantism, with its insistent stress on original sin. The human condition as Heidegger portrays it is, in Wolin's reading, essentially a curse. The book is thick with emotionally laden concepts: guilt, conscience, angst, death. Wolin also identifies in the work what he calls an implicit adoption of the critique of mass society, a critique already voiced by Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. As Jurgen Habermas noted in 1989, elitist complaints about the dictatorship of public opinion were common currency among the German intellectual class of the 1920s. John D. Caputo, noting that Heidegger had made a systematic study of Luther after training as a Catholic theologian, likens the project to a secularized version of Martin Luther's effort to return Christian theology to an earlier, more original form. Almost all of the central concepts in Being and Time, according to Christian Lotz, derive from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard.

• 3. What Is Dasein

  ›

  At the center of Being and Time sits a word Heidegger coined: Dasein, literally meaning being-there. The choice was deliberate. Rather than accept Descartes' picture of a human being as a subjective spectator gazing out at a world of objects, Heidegger insisted that subject and object are inseparable. According to Marcella Horrigan-Kelly and her colleagues, Dasein was intended to embody a living being through the activity of being there, of being in the world. Michael Wheeler, writing in 2011, describes being-in-the-world as an essential characteristic of Dasein, understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than something assembled from separate parts. Heidegger passes his account of Dasein through an analysis of angst, what he calls the Nothing, and mortality. From this he builds toward a concept of the structure of care. Care, for Heidegger, is not an emotion but the fundamental structure of human existence itself. Dasein is, in Heidegger's own framing, the being that will give access to the question of the meaning of Being. Ordinary, even mundane activity in the world provides the access point: it is in everyday life, not in abstract theory, that the sense of being first becomes available. This ordinary access, in Heidegger's account, precedes what he called prescientific understanding, which comes before logic or formal theory. Simon Critchley, in a nine-part commentary on the book published in The Guardian in 2009, put it plainly: despite all its metaphysical machinery, Being and Time ultimately provides an answer to the question of what it means to be human.

• 4. Time, Death, and Authenticity

  ›

  Lilian Alweiss writes that the present, for Heidegger, is the nodal moment which makes past and future intelligible. Michael Kelley describes Heidegger's conviction that time finds its meaning in death: time is understood only from a finite or mortal vantage point. Dasein is thrown into a world, which means its being always carries a kind of pastness with it. At the same time, Dasein projects goals onto the future and occupies itself with the present tasks those goals require. Heidegger describes Dasein as stretched along temporally between birth and death, with access to its possibilities always filtered through a history and a tradition he calls world historicality. For this concept of historicality, Heidegger explicitly credited the historian Wilhelm Dilthey within the text itself. From this temporal structure, Heidegger derives his concept of authenticity. Authenticity is not a moral prescription but a way of grasping and confronting the unique and finite possibilities that belong to each individual. Theodor Adorno, in his 1964 book The Jargon of Authenticity, attacked this framing directly. Adorno accused Heidegger of evading ethical judgment by presenting authenticity as though it were a value-free, technical term, when Adorno believed it smuggled in a positive doctrine of the good life. The dispute points to a tension running through the entire book: Heidegger's central concepts carry enormous emotional weight while he insists they are purely structural descriptions.

• 5. Phenomenology and Its Debts

  ›

  Edmund Husserl, Heidegger's mentor, had developed a method called phenomenological reduction, sometimes called bracketing, that placed primordial experience at the center of philosophical analysis. Husserl used it to map the structures of consciousness and their orientation toward both real and ideal objects. Being and Time adopts this method but claims to modify Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Heidegger argued that consciousness is not what constitutes Dasein; rather, consciousness is a peripheral effect of existence, not its ground. By shifting priority from consciousness to existence, from psychology to ontology, Heidegger redirected phenomenology's subsequent history. On publication, Being and Time bore a dedication to Husserl, who had championed Heidegger's work beginning about a decade earlier and had helped him secure the chair in philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928. Then, in 1941, Heidegger, by then a member of the Nazi Party, agreed to remove that dedication because Husserl was Jewish. The dedication was restored in the 1953 edition. Daniel O. Dahlstrom has argued that Being and Time actually misrepresented its own methods, presenting itself as a departure from Husserl while leaning heavily on Husserl's framework. Robert J. Dostal put it more bluntly: without seeing how much Husserlian phenomenology provides the scaffolding for Heidegger's approach, it is impossible to understand Being and Time with any precision. Beyond phenomenology, the book also employed what Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle, a method of moving between parts and whole in a continuous spiral. Susann M. Laverty, drawing on Kvale's 1996 account, describes the spiral as ending when one reaches sensible meaning free of inner contradictions, at least for the moment. Heidegger acknowledged within the text itself that this method, and his theories of history, drew on Wilhelm Dilthey's writings.

• 6. Influence and Dissent

  ›

  Upon publication in 1927, reviewers credited Heidegger with brilliance and genius. The book's reach proved wide and lasting. Herbert Marcuse made an early attempt to build a Heideggerian Marxism, though the effort was ultimately abandoned. Jurgen Habermas drew on Heidegger's work in developing his own hermeneutics. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan brought Heidegger's thinking into psychoanalysis, as did Medard Boss. The poet Paul Celan incorporated Heidegger's ideas into his essays on poetic theory. Alain Badiou's 1988 work Being and Event drew separately on Being and Time, and the enactivist approach to cognition theory also acknowledged it as an influence. Not everyone was persuaded. Bertrand Russell dismissed it as language running riot. A. J. Ayer called Heidegger a charlatan. Roger Scruton, writing in 2002, described it as a description of a private spiritual journey rather than genuine philosophy. Against these dismissals, Richard Rorty ranked Heidegger among the century's most important philosophers, alongside John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Stephen Houlgate, writing in 1999, compared Heidegger's achievement to those of Kant and Hegel. Critchley's verdict in 2009 was perhaps the most sweeping: developments in continental philosophy after Heidegger cannot be understood without understanding Being and Time. Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall have each separately proposed that commentators have actually been fixating on the wrong term. Wrathall argued in 2011 that Heidegger's central lifelong focus was his concept of unconcealment. Sheehan, writing in 2015, suggested the prime focus was on that which brings about being as a givenness of entities. Both challengers point toward the unwritten second volume, which was to have contained a full critique of Western philosophy, a project Heidegger quickly abandoned and never completed.

• 7. The Works That Followed

  ›

  Heidegger's lecture course from 1925, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, served as something like an early version of Being and Time before the book itself appeared. The 1992 publication of his 1924 lecture course Platon: Sophistes made clear how Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics had shaped the thinking that found its way into the book. After Being and Time, the lecture courses Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie from 1927 and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik from 1929 elaborated elements of the metaphysical critique that the unwritten second volume was meant to develop. His 1929 inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Was ist Metaphysik, offered what many readers found the most accessible clarification of what he meant by being, non-being, and nothingness. A lecture course from 1935, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, was identified by Heidegger himself in his preface to the seventh German edition of Being and Time as relevant to the concerns the book's second half would have addressed. The work Beitrage zur Philosophie, composed between 1936 and 1938 but not published until 1989, was a sustained attempt to reckon with the legacy of Being and Time. The most direct confrontation came on the 31st of January, 1962, when Heidegger delivered a lecture at the University of Freiburg titled Zeit und Sein, or Time and Being. A seminar on the lecture followed at Todtnauberg from the 11th to the 13th of September, 1962; Alfred Guzzoni wrote the summary. Both the lecture and the summary were collected in Zur Sache des Denkens, published in 1969 and later translated into English as On Time and Being by Harper and Row in New York in 1972.