Being and Time

Martin Heidegger's 1927 work Being and Time is his major philosophical contribution and a cornerstone of existentialist thought. Its influence extends across philosophy, literary theory, and other disciplines, and its historical significance is often ranked alongside the works of Kant and Hegel, despite ongoing controversy. The book aims to breathe new life into ontology by examining "Dasein," a term for the human being understood as "being-in-the-world." It is famous for its dense, invented terminology and its deep exploration of "authenticity"—how an individual can confront their own unique and finite possibilities.

Background

The intellectual background of the work draws heavily on earlier critiques of mass society. Richard Wolin points out that it implicitly adopts the stance of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, while Jürgen Habermas notes that complaints about the "dictatorship of public opinion" were common among German academics in the 1920s. Wolin also argues that the book is steeped in a secularized Protestant sensibility, emphasizing original sin and portraying human existence as fundamentally cursed, with a strong focus on emotional concepts like guilt, conscience, angst, and death.

Some scholars see it as a secular version of Martin Luther's project to return Christianity to its origins. John D. Caputo notes that Heidegger studied Luther extensively in the 1920s after a decade of Catholic theological training, and Hubert Dreyfus compares Division II of the book to a secularized version of Kierkegaard's Christianity. According to Christian Lotz, nearly all of the book's central ideas come from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard.

Structurally, Being and Time opens with a lengthy two-part introduction, followed by Division One ("Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein") and Division Two ("Dasein and Temporality"). Heidegger originally planned a second volume that would critique Western philosophy, but he quickly abandoned that project.

Dasein

The concept of Dasein is central. Marcella Horrigan-Kelly and others note that the book explicitly rejects Descartes' view of the human as a detached observer of objects, instead arguing that subject and object cannot be separated. Heidegger introduces "Dasein" (literally "being there") to describe a living being through its activity of existing in the world.

Michael Wheeler explains that being-in-the-world is not a combination of separate parts but a single, essential characteristic of Dasein. Heidegger's analysis of Dasein examines angst, "the Nothing," mortality, and the structure of "care," before defining "authenticity" as the way to face Dasein's finite possibilities. For Heidegger, Dasein is the entity that can open up the question of the meaning of Being.

Being

Regarding Being itself, the work argues that even ordinary, everyday existence provides access to the meaning or "sense of being." This access, through Dasein, is what makes anything intelligible as something. It would clarify the pre-scientific understanding that precedes abstract logic or theory. Richard Rorty describes Heidegger's concept of Being as metaphorical, agreeing that there is no hidden power called "Being." Edward Grippe notes that, according to Rorty, Heidegger does not privilege any one understanding of Being over another, and this supposed pre-cognitive access does not support any particular narrative.

Some commentators, like Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall, argue that the focus on "Being" is a misreading. Wrathall claims that "unconcealment" was Heidegger's lifelong concern, while Sheehan says his focus was on what "brings about being as a givenness of entities." Simon Critchley, in a 2009 commentary for The Guardian, states that the book offers no answer to the question of Being itself, but instead answers what it means to be human. Nevertheless, Heidegger does define Being as that which "determines beings as beings," not as a being itself.

Time

Time, for Heidegger, finds its meaning in death, according to Michael Kelley—it is understood only from a finite, mortal perspective. Dasein's being-in-the-world is inherently temporal: being "thrown" into a world implies a pastness. Lilian Alweiss writes that the present is the moment that makes past and future intelligible, as Dasein focuses on present tasks required by future goals.

Dasein cannot be separated from its "historicality," a concept Heidegger credits to Wilhelm Dilthey. Dasein is "stretched along" temporally between birth and death, thrown into its world and its future possibilities, which it must assume. Access to this world and these possibilities always comes through history and tradition, or "world historicality."