Being and Time () is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. Being and Time had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual history has been compared with works by Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. The book attempts to revive ontology through an analysis of Dasein, or "being-in-the-world." It is also noted for an array of neologisms and complex language, as well as an extended treatment of "authenticity" as a means to grasp and confront the unique and finite possibilities of the individual.
Background Richard Wolin notes that the work "implicitly adopted the critique of mass society" epitomised earlier by Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.Wolin, R., "Martin Heidegger—German philosopher", Encyclopædia Britannica, November 18, 2009. "Elitist complaints about the 'dictatorship of public opinion' were common currency to the German mandarins of the twenties," according to Jürgen Habermas (1989). Wolin writes that Being and Time is "suffused by a sensibility derived from secularized Protestantism" and its stress on original sin, and that the human condition is portrayed as "essentially a curse." Wolin cites the work's extended emphasis on "emotionally laden concepts" like guilt, conscience, angst and death.
The book is likened to a secularized version of Martin Luther's project, which aimed to turn Christian theology back to an earlier and more "original" phase. Taking this view, John D. Caputo notes that Heidegger made a systematic study of Luther in the 1920s after training for 10 years as a Catholic theologian.Caputo, John D. (1978). The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, Ohio University Press Similarly, Hubert Dreyfus likens Division II of the volume to a secularized version of Kierkegaard's Christianity.Dreyfus, H. L. (1991). Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, División I, MIT Press Almost all central concepts of Being and Time are derived from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard, according to Christian Lotz.Luther’s influence on Heidegger. Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation, ed. Mark A. Lamport and George Thomas Kurian, London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017
In terms of structure, Being and Time consists of the lengthy two-part introduction, followed by Division One, the "Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein," and Division Two, "Dasein and Temporality." Heidegger originally planned to write a separate, second volume, but quickly abandoned the project. The unwritten "second half" was to include a critique of Western philosophy.Sein und Zeit, pp. 39–40.
Summary Dasein Being and Time explicitly rejects Descartes' notion of the human being as a subjective spectator of objects, according to Marcella Horrigan-Kelly (et al.).Horrigan-Kelly, Marcella; Michelle Millar; Maura Dowling. "Understanding the Key Tenets of Heidegger’s Philosophy for Interpretive Phenomenological Research", in International Journal of Qualitative Methods, January–December 2016: 1–8. The book instead holds that both subject and object are inseparable. In presenting the subject, "being" as inseparable from the objective "world," Heidegger introduced the term "Dasein" (literally being there), intended to embody a "living being" through their activity of "being there" and "being in the world" (Horrigan-Kelly). Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive combination, being-in-the-world is an essential characteristic of Dasein, according to Michael Wheeler (2011).
Heidegger's account of Dasein passes through an analysis of angst, "the Nothing" and mortality, and of the structure of "care" as such. He then defines "authenticity," as a means to grasp and confront the finite possibilities of Dasein. Moreover, Dasein is "the being that will give access to the question of the meaning of Being," according to Heidegger.Glendinning, S., ed., The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 154.
Being The work claims that ordinary and even mundane "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the meaning, or 'sense of being' [Sinn des Seins]." This access via Dasein is also that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something.""aus dem her etwas als etwas verständlich wird," Sein und Zeit, p. 193. This meaning would then elucidate ordinary "prescientific" understanding, which precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory.Sein und Zeit, p. 12.
Heidegger's concept of Being is metaphorical, according to Richard Rorty, who agrees with Heidegger that there is no "hidden power" called Being. Heidegger emphasizes that no particular understanding of Being (nor of Dasein) is to be valued over another, according to an account of Rorty's analysis by Edward Grippe.Grippe, Edward, Richard Rorty (1931—2007) Internet Encyclopedia This supposed "non-linguistic, pre-cognitive access" to the meaning of Being did not underscore any particular, preferred narrative.
Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall each separately assert that commentators' emphasis on the term "Being" is misplaced, and that Heidegger's central focus was never on "Being" as such. Wrathall wrote (2011) that Heidegger's elaborate concept of "unconcealment" was his central, life-long focus, while Sheehan (2015) proposed that the philosopher's prime focus was on that which "brings about being as a givenness of entities."Wrathall, Mark: Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History, Cambridge University Press, 2011see also, Sheehan, "Making sense of Heidegger. A paradigm shift." New Heidegger Research. London (England), 2015. Being and Time actually offers "no sense of how we might answer the question of being as such," writes Simon Critchley in a nine-part blog commentary on the work for The Guardian (2009). The book instead provides "an answer to the question of what it means to be human" (Critchley).Critchley, S., "Heidegger's Being and Time, part 8: Temporality", The Guardian, July 27, 2009. Nonetheless, Heidegger does present the concept: "'Being' is not something like a being but is rather "what determines beings as beings.""...das Sein, das, was Seiendes als Seiendes bestimmt, das, woraufhin Seiendes, mag es wie immer erörtert werden, je schon verstanden ist,"Sein und Zeit, p. 6. This phenomenon is also called world disclosure.
Time Heidegger believes that time finds its meaning in death, according to Michael Kelley. That is, time is understood only from a finite or mortal vantage. Dasein's fundamental characteristic and mode of "being-in-the-world" is temporal: Having been "thrown" into a world implies a "pastness" in its being. "The present is the nodal moment which makes past and future intelligible," writes Lilian Alweiss.Alweiss, L., "Heidegger and 'the concept of time'" , History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 15, Nr. 3, 2002. Dasein occupies itself with the present tasks required by goals it has projected on the future.Kelley, M., "Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Dasein as an intertwined subject/object cannot be separated from its objective "historicality," a concept Heidegger credits in the text to Wilhelm Dilthey. Dasein is "stretched along" temporally between birth and death, and thrown into its world; into its future possibilities which Dasein is charged with assuming. Dasein's access to this world and these possibilities is always via a history and a tradition—or "world historicality".
Methodologies Phenomenology
Heidegger's mentor Edmund Husserl developed a method of analysis called "phenomenological reduction" or "bracketing," that emphasized primordial experience as its key element. Husserl used this method to define the structures of consciousness and show how they are directed at both real and ideal objects within the world.On the Logical Investigations, see ; and .
Being and Time employs this method but purportedly modifies Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as constituted by consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to Dasein, which cannot be reduced to consciousness. Consciousness is thus an "effect" rather than a determinant of existence. By shifting the priority from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology.
But Being and Time misrepresented its phenomenology as a departure from methods established earlier by Husserl, according to Daniel O. Dahlstrom.Daniel O. Dahlstrom, "Heidegger's Critique of Husserl", in Theodore Kisiel & John van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 244. In this vein, Robert J. Dostal asserts that "if we do not see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach," then it's impossible to exactly understand Being and Time.Robert J. Dostal, "Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger", in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 142.
On publication in 1927, Being and Time bore a dedication to Husserl, who beginning a decade earlier, championed Heidegger's work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928.Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism Of Hannah Arendt (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, p. 120.) Because Husserl was Jewish, in 1941 Heidegger, then a member of the Nazi Party, agreed to remove the dedication from Being and Time (restored in 1953 edition).Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass., & London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 253–258.
Hermeneutics
Being and Time employed the "hermeneutic circle" as a method of analysis or structure for ideas. According to Susann M. Laverty (2003), Heidegger's circle moves from the parts of experience to the whole of experience and back and forth again and again to increase the depth of engagement and understanding. Laverty writes (Kvale 1996), "This spiraling through a hermeneutic circle ends when one has reached a place of sensible meaning, free of inner contradictions, for the moment."
The hermeneutic circle and certain theories concerning history in Being and Time are acknowledged within the text to rely on the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey. The technique was later employed in the writings of Jürgen Habermas, per "Influence and reception" below.
Destructuring
In Being and Time Heidegger briefly refutes the philosophy of René Descartes (in an exercise he called "destructuring"), but the second volume, intended as a Destruktion of Western philosophy, was never written. Heidegger sought to explain how theoretical knowledge came to be seen, incorrectly in his view, as fundamental to being. This explanation takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition, an interpretative strategy that reveals the fundamental experience of being hidden within the theoretical attitude of the metaphysics of presence.Diefenbach, K., Farris, S. R., Kirn, G., & Thomas, P., eds., Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 11–13.
In later works, while becoming less systematic and more obscure than in Being and Time, Heidegger turns to the exegesis of historical texts, especially those of Presocratic philosophers, but also of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, among others.Korab-Karpowicz, W. J., The Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2017), p. 24.
Influence and reception