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Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Martin Heidegger |
|---|---|
| Original title | Sein und Zeit |
| Translator | 1962: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson 1996: Joan Stambaugh |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Subject | Being |
| Published | 1927 (in German) 1962: SCM Press 1996: State University of New York Press 2008: Harper Perennial Modern Thought |
| Pages | 589 (Macquarrie and Robinson translation) 482 (Stambaugh translation) |
| ISBN | 0-631-19770-2 (Blackwell edition) 978-1-4384-3276-2 (State University of New York Press edition) |
| Followed by | Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics |
Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit) is a 1927 book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in which the author seeks to analyse the concept of Being. Heidegger maintains that this has fundamental importance for philosophy and that, since the time of the Ancient Greeks, philosophy has avoided the question, turning instead to the analysis of particular beings. Heidegger attempts to revive ontology through a reawakening of the question of the meaning of being. He approaches this through a fundamental ontology that is a preliminary analysis of the being of the being to whom the question of being is important, i.e., Dasein.
Heidegger wrote that Being and Time was made possible by his study of Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901), and it is dedicated to Husserl "in friendship and admiration". Although Heidegger did not complete the project outlined in the introduction, Being and Time remains his most important work. It was immediately recognized as an original and groundbreaking philosophical work, and later became a focus of debates and controversy, and a profound influence on 20th-century philosophy, particularly existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and the enactivist approach to cognition. Being and Time has been described as the most influential version of existential philosophy, and Heidegger's achievements in the work have been compared to those of Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812–1816). The work influenced philosophical treatises such as Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).
Background
According to Heidegger's statement in Being and Time, the work was made possible by his study of Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901). Being and Time was originally intended to consist of two major parts, each part consisting of three divisions.
Heidegger was forced to prepare the book for publication when he had
completed only the first two divisions of part one. The remaining
divisions planned for Being and Time (particularly the divisions on time and being, Immanuel Kant, and Aristotle)
were never published, although in many respects they were addressed in
one form or another in Heidegger's other works. In terms of structure, Being and Time
remains as it was when it first appeared in print; it consists of the
lengthy two-part introduction, followed by Division One, the
"Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein," and Division Two, "Dasein
and Temporality."
Summary
Being
Heidegger
describes his project in the following way: "our aim in the following
treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being and to do so concretely." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology
has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it on the basis
that being is the most universal and emptiest concept, that is
indefinable or obvious.
Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings). "'Being' is not something like a being." Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." Heidegger is seeking to identify the criteria or conditions by which any specific entity can show up at all (see world disclosure).
If we grasp Being, we will clarify the meaning of being, or "sense" of being (Sinn des Seins), where by "sense" Heidegger means that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something."
Presented in relation to the quality of knowledge, according to
Heidegger, this sense of being precedes any notions of how or in what
manner any particular being or beings exist, and is thus pre-scientific.
Thus, in Heidegger's view, the question of the meaning of being would
be an explanation of the understanding preceding any other way of
knowing, such as the use of logic, theory, specific regional ontology.
At the same time, there is no access to being other than via beings
themselves—hence pursuing the question of being inevitably means
questioning a being with regard to its being. Heidegger argues that a true understanding of being (Seinsverständnis)
can only proceed by referring to particular beings, and that the best
method of pursuing being must inevitably, he says, involve a kind of hermeneutic circle, that is (as he explains in his critique of prior work in the field of hermeneutics),
it must rely upon repetitive yet progressive acts of interpretation.
"The methodological sense of phenomenological description is interpretation."
Dasein
Thus the question Heidegger asks in the introduction to Being and Time
is: what is the being that will give access to the question of the
meaning of Being? Heidegger's answer is that it can only be that being
for whom the question of Being is important, the being for whom Being
matters. As this answer already indicates, the being for whom Being is a question is not a what, but a who. Heidegger calls this being Dasein (an ordinary German word literally meaning "being-there," i.e., existence), and the method pursued in Being and Time consists in the attempt to delimit the characteristics of Dasein, in order thereby to approach the meaning of Being itself through an interpretation of the temporality of Dasein. Dasein is not "man," but is nothing other than "man"—it is this distinction that enables Heidegger to claim that Being and Time is something other than philosophical anthropology.
Heidegger's account of Dasein passes through a dissection of the experiences of Angst
and mortality, and then through an analysis of the structure of "care"
as such. From there he raises the problem of "authenticity," that is,
the potentiality or otherwise for mortal Dasein to exist fully enough that it might actually understand being. Heidegger is clear throughout the book that nothing makes certain that Dasein is capable of this understanding.
Time
Finally, this question of the authenticity of individual Dasein cannot be separated from the "historicality" of Dasein. On the one hand, Dasein, as mortal, is "stretched along" between birth and death, and thrown into its world, that is, thrown into its possibilities, possibilities which Dasein is charged with the task of assuming. On the other hand, Dasein's
access to this world and these possibilities is always via a history
and a tradition—this is the question of "world historicality," and among
its consequences is Heidegger's argument that Dasein's potential for authenticity lies in the possibility of choosing a "hero."
Thus, more generally, the outcome of the progression of Heidegger's argument is the thought that the being of Dasein
is time. Nevertheless, Heidegger concludes his work with a set of
enigmatic questions foreshadowing the necessity of a destruction (that
is, a transformation) of the history of philosophy in relation to
temporality—these were the questions to be taken up in the never
completed continuation of his project:
The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?
Phenomenology in Heidegger and Husserl
Although Heidegger describes his method in Being and Time as phenomenological, the question of its relation to the phenomenology
of Husserl is complex. The fact that Heidegger believes that ontology
includes an irreducible hermeneutic (interpretative) aspect, for
example, might be thought to run counter to Husserl's claim that
phenomenological description is capable of a form of scientific
positivity. On the other hand, however, several aspects of the approach
and method of Being and Time seem to relate more directly to Husserl's work.
The central Husserlian concept of the directedness of all thought—intentionality—for example, while scarcely mentioned in Being and Time, has been identified by some with Heidegger's central notion of Sorge (cura, care or concern). However, for Heidegger, theoretical
knowledge represents only one kind of intentional behaviour, and he
asserts that it is grounded in more fundamental modes of behaviour and
forms of practical engagement with the surrounding world. Whereas a
theoretical understanding of things grasps them according to "presence,"
for example, this may conceal that our first experience of a being may
be in terms of its being "ready-to-hand." Thus, for instance, when
someone reaches for a tool such as a hammer, their understanding of what
a hammer is is not determined by a theoretical understanding of
its presence, but by the fact that it is something we need at the moment
we wish to do hammering. Only a later understanding might come to contemplate a hammer as an object.
Hermeneutics
The total understanding of being results from an explication of the implicit knowledge of being that inheres in Dasein.
Philosophy thus becomes a form of interpretation, but since there is no
external reference point outside being from which to begin this
interpretation, the question becomes to know in which way to proceed
with this interpretation. This is the problem of the "hermeneutic
circle," and the necessity for the interpretation of the meaning of
being to proceed in stages: this is why Heidegger's technique in Being and Time is sometimes referred to as hermeneutical phenomenology.
Destructuring of metaphysics
As part of his ontological
project, Heidegger undertakes a reinterpretation of previous Western
philosophy. He wants to explain why and how theoretical knowledge came
to seem like the most fundamental relation 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 at the base of previous
philosophies that had become entrenched and hidden within the
theoretical attitude of the metaphysics of presence. This use of the word Destruktion is meant to signify not a negative operation but rather a positive transformation or recovery.
In Being and Time Heidegger briefly undertakes a destructuring of the philosophy of René Descartes, but the second volume, which was intended to be a Destruktion
of Western philosophy in all its stages, was never written. In later
works Heidegger uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of
Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, among others.
Related work
Being and Time is the major achievement of Heidegger's early career, but he produced other important works during this period:
- The publication in 1992 of the early lecture course, Platon: Sophistes (Plato's Sophist, 1924), made clear the way in which Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was crucial to the formulation of the thought expressed in Being and Time.
- The lecture course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, 1925), was something like an early version of Being and Time.
- The lecture courses immediately following the publication of Being and Time, such as Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1927), and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), elaborated some elements of the destruction of metaphysics which Heidegger intended to pursue in the unwritten second part of Being and Time.
Although Heidegger did not complete the project outlined in Being and Time, later works explicitly addressed the themes and concepts of Being and Time. Most important among the works which do so are the following:
- Heidegger's inaugural lecture upon his return to Freiburg, "Was ist Metaphysik?" (What Is Metaphysics?, 1929), was an important and influential clarification of what Heidegger meant by being, non-being, and nothingness.
- Einführung in die Metaphysik (An Introduction to Metaphysics), a lecture course delivered in 1935, is identified by Heidegger, in his preface to the seventh German edition of Being and Time, as relevant to the concerns which the second half of the book would have addressed.
- Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning], composed 1936–38, published 1989), a sustained attempt at reckoning with the legacy of Being and Time.
- Zeit und Sein (Time and Being), a lecture delivered at the University of Freiburg on January 31, 1962. This was Heidegger's most direct confrontation with Being and Time. It was followed by a seminar on the lecture, which took place at Todtnauberg on September 11–13, 1962, a summary of which was written by Alfred Guzzoni. Both the lecture and the summary of the seminar are included in Zur Sache des Denkens (1969; translated as On Time and Being [New York: Harper & Row, 1972]).
Influence and reception
The critic George Steiner argues that Being and Time is a product of the crisis of German culture following Germany's defeat in World War I, similar in this respect to works such as Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia (1918), Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (1921), Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans (1922), and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925).
Upon its publication, it was recognized as a groundbreaking
philosophical work, with reviewers crediting Heidegger with "brilliance"
and "genius". The book, which has been described as the "most influential version of existential philosophy", quickly became "the focus of debates and controversy".
Heidegger claimed in the 1930s that commentators had attempted to show
similarities between his views and those of Hegel in order to undermine
the idea that Being and Time was an original work. In response,
Heidegger maintained that his thesis that the essence of being is time
is the opposite of Hegel's view that being is the essence of time. Karl Jaspers, writing in the first volume of his work Philosophy (1932), credited Heidegger with making essential points about "being in the world" and also about "existence and historicity".
Heidegger's work has been suggested as a possible influence on Herbert Marcuse's Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), though Marcuse later questioned the political implications of Heidegger's work. Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote Being and Nothingness (1943) under the influence of Heidegger's work, has been said to have responded to Being and Time with "a sense of shock". Sartre's existentialism has been described as "a version and variant of the idiom and propositions" in Being and Time. Because of Heidegger's revival of the question of being, Being and Time also influenced other philosophers of Sartre's generation, and it altered the course of French philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that Being and Time,
"springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more
than an explicit account of the 'natürlicher Weltbegriff' or the
'Lebenswelt' which Husserl, towards the end of his life, identified as
the central theme of phenomenology". Heidegger influenced psychoanalysis through Jacques Lacan, who quotes from Being and Time in a 1953 text.
The publication of the English translation of the work by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson in 1962, helped to shape the way in which Heidegger's work was discussed in English. Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968) was influenced by Heidegger's Being and Time, though Deleuze replaces Heidegger's key terms of being and time with difference and repetition respectively. Frank Herbert's science fiction novel The Santaroga Barrier (1968) was loosely based on the ideas of Being and Time. The philosopher Lucien Goldmann argued in his posthumously published Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy (1973) that the concept of reification as employed in Being and Time showed the strong influence of György Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923), though Goldmann's suggestion has been disputed. Being and Time influenced Alain Badiou's work Being and Event (1988). Roger Scruton writes that Being and Time
is "the most complex of the many works inspired, directly or
indirectly, by Kant's theory of time as 'the form of inner sense'." He
considers Heidegger's language "metaphorical" and almost
incomprehensible. Scruton suggests that this necessarily follows from
the nature of Heidegger's phenomenological method. He finds Heidegger's
"description of the world of phenomena" to be "fascinating, but
maddeningly abstract". He suggests that much of Being and Time is
a "description of a private spiritual journey" rather than genuine
philosophy, and notes that Heidegger's assertions are unsupported by
argument.
Stephen Houlgate compares Heidegger's achievements in Being and Time to those of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812-1816). Simon Critchley calls the work Heidegger's magnum opus,
and writes that it is impossible to understand developments in
continental philosophy after Heidegger without understanding it. Dennis J. Schmidt praises the "range and subtlety" of Being and Time, and describes its importance by quoting a comment the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made in a different context, "from here and today a new epoch of world history sets forth."
Heidegger has become common background for the political movement
concerned with protection of the environment, and his narrative of the
history of Being frequently appears when capitalism, consumerism and technology are thoughtfully opposed. Michael E. Zimmerman
writes that, "Because he criticized technological modernity’s
domineering attitude toward nature, and because he envisioned a
postmodern era in which people would “let things be,” Heidegger has
sometimes been read as an intellectual forerunner of today’s “deep
ecology” movement.
Being and Time also influenced the enactivist approach to cognition.
