Being and Time

Being and Time explicitly rejects Descartes' notion of the human being as a subjective spectator of objects, according to Marcella Horrigan-Kelly (et al.).[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).[8] 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).[9]

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.[10]

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."[11] This meaning would then elucidate ordinary "prescientific" understanding, which precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory.[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.[13] This supposed "non-linguistic, pre-cognitive access" to the meaning of Being didn't 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.")[14][15] 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).[16] Nonetheless, Heidegger does present the concept: "'Being' is not something like a being but is rather "what determines beings as beings."[17]

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.[18] Dasein occupies itself with the present tasks required by goals it has projected on the future.[19]

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".

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.[20]

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.[21] 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.[22]

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.[23][24] 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).[25]^{: 253–258}

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."[26]

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.[27] The technique was later employed in the writings of Jürgen Habermas, per "Influence and reception" below.

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.[28]

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.[29]

Primary literature

• Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, volume 2, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1977, XIV, 586p.
• Martin Heidegger (1962). Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press.
• Martin Heidegger (1996). Being and Time. A Translation of "Sein und Zeit". Translated by Joan Stambaugh (7th ed.). Albany, New York: SUNY Press. ISBN 9780791426777.
• Martin Heidegger (2010). Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.

Secondary literature

• Robert Bernasconi, "'The Double Concept of Philosophy' and the Place of Ethics in Being and Time," Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993).
• William D. Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Lee Braver. A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism. Northwestern University Press: 2007.
• Richard M. Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger with a foreword by William J. Richardson. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
• Taylor Carman, Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in "Being and Time" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Cristian Ciocan (ed.), Translating Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, Studia Phaenomenologica V (2005)
• Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time," Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
• Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: MIT Press, 1990).
• Hubert Dreyfus, podcast of Philosophy 185 Fall 2007 Heidegger, UC Berkeley
• Hubert Dreyfus, podcast of Philosophy 189 Spring 2008 Heidegger, UC Berkeley
• Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993, expanded edn.), ch. 1.
• Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time" (Northern Illinois University Press; Revised edition, 1989).
• Magda King (2001). John Llewellyn (ed.). A guide to Heidegger's "Being and time". Albany, New York: SUNY Press. ISBN 9780791447994.
• Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
• James Luchte, Heidegger's Early Thought: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008).
• Richard M. Mcdonough (2006). Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time". Bern: Peter Lang. ISBN 9780820455549.
• William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), ch. 3–4.
• Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Decision of Existence," The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 82–109.
• William J. Richardson (1963). Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought. Preface by Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.; 4th Edition (2003). New York City: Fordham University Press.