Get Your Smart On
A demystifying introduction to Martin Heidegger's early magnum opus.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. It turned the world of philosophy upside down and inaugurated existentialist phenomenology, existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, and deconstruction.
Although Heidegger published the manuscript prematurely (in order to qualify for an academic position), and then abandoned the project before completing the ambitious plan outlined in this first volume, what we do have is a grandiose display of thinking unlike anything that came before him.
People get hung up on all the words that Heidegger makes up or appropriates as technical terms — part of how he constructs a theoretical universe that is hard to pierce. But when it comes right down to it, Heidegger is naming things that are very common sense, and arguably he is a common sense philosopher, a newfangled pragmatist. Demystifying Heidegger is part of my goal here.
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In Being and Time, Heidegger sets out to destroy the traditional metaphysics of presence and clear the grounds for his kind of ontology.
Destruction (Destruktion) refers to a critical dismantling of traditional philosophical concepts to uncover the foundational assumptions that have shaped Western thought.
Metaphysics of presence describes the dominant tradition in Western philosophy, from Plato onwards, which Heidegger argues privileges what is immediately present, stable, and available, often overlooking temporality and the underlying conditions that make such presence possible.
His main problematic is how to discover the structure of Being, beginning with his analysis of Being as thrown-in-the-world and ending with an analysis of Being-towards-death and temporality as the essence of Dasein. This is the end point of much philosophizing, so understanding it requires some work. Let's get started.
Heidegger's central concern in Being and Time is to understand the structure of Being. This is the overarching question that drives his entire inquiry. He doesn't ask what beings are, but rather what it means for something to be. The difference is between asking the Aristotelian question “What is a chair?” versus “What does it mean for a being to be a chair?” A chair is a thing (a piece of furniture) designed for a person to sit, having back and legs, often made of wood by a craftsman or machine. Notice this is a chair that has been abstracted out from any context, that exists outside of time and place. This could be said about any chair at any time and in any place.
The latter question (“What does it mean for a being to be a chair?”) opens onto a human world that calls for a phenomenological analysis. A chair is available for sitting because we often want to be able to rest in this way. We want to be able to sit at a table to write or eat. So we experience chairs as the possibility for sitting, and this has value for us in any number of ways. (We cannot sit on abstract chairs that exist outside of time and place.)
Moreover, the chair is involved in a network of other available things that show up for us in so far as they are part of our lifeworld and fit into our projects. The chair and the table are related, the table and the plate and cutlery are related, these are related to food and eating, the food and the kitchen and the garden, all these make up, for us, a world of concern — equipment for our sustenance. Now we are getting closer to an authentic account of a chair’s being in the world.
Now let’s take something that is much more interesting instead of that good old chair - us, we, ourselves, the kind of being for whom it’s own being is a question. (Assumedly, chairs don’t ask themselves what it means to be a chair.) Heidegger proposes to study Being from the perspective of “that being for whom being is an issue,” or the untranslatable Dasein, providing an analysis of Being that takes it back to Presocratic though. This is because Dasein, as human existence understood by its capacity for understanding itself as being, serves as the point through which Being is *disclosed *for us. By focusing on Dasein's being-in-the-world and its temporal structure, Heidegger seeks to recover a more original understanding of Being as unconcealment, which he believes was present in early Greek philosophy before the dominance of the metaphysics of presence.
Being as “thrown-in-the-world" highlights the involuntary nature of our existence.1 We find ourselves already existing within a context—defined by history, culture, and social norms—that we did not choose. And the fact that we always find ourselves already situated within a particular context that influences how we understand ourselves and the world around us means that, originally, we borrow our understanding of ourselves and our world from our context. We are the kind of Being that must do work to become authentically themselves through the choices we make — choices that create meaning for us, our activities, our lives — and these choices are structured in and through time. We are thrown into the world, and we live life forwards until it ends, in death.
“Being-towards-death” gives us our orientation. Our existence is inherently finite, and this reality is incorporated as an ever-present possibility that defines our being as anticipation. This gets clearer the more you live and the older you get. You realize that your time is limited and stop trying to please others in ways that don’t serve you well, or you might have a midlife crisis if you have been living a life of going along to get along. This gets clearer if you think to yourself, “If I must die anyways, I minus well do what I really want.” It gets crystal clear in those moments of crisis — perhaps you loose a loved one, or have a physically debilitating accident — when you see what really matters to you. In these examples, we are lifted out of our typical ways of being in the world and achieve a kind of transcendence.2 But this transcendence is not long lasting, as we will inevitably fall back into the comforts of normal life.
This is the existentialist moment in Being and Time: By facing up to death not as an abstract idea but as a very real possibility that we live with, we can take ownership of our existence and strive for authenticity, resolutely choosing for ourselves our own possibilities (not those handed to us by society, family, and tradition). Here the philosophers come to realize (not for the first time) that the structure of our existence — of the kind of being for whom it’s own being is an issue, or Dasein3 — is of infinite possibilities bounded by finitude. That is, infinity inside of finitude. Is this a structure you recognize? What else can be said to have this structure?
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This most recent edition with a fresh translation by Stambaugh incorporates Heidegger’s margin notes and tracks (more faithfully) his technical usage of German terms. It is quite readable, although new readers will want to approach Being and Time as they would a text written in a language that they are learning - start reading and keep reading even if it seems impenetrable. Meaning emerges through repetition and persistence, promise!
Readers interested in Heidegger’s influence can check out Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Jacques Derrida Disseminations, Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air, and Alain Badiou’s Being and Event.
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