Being and Time
“For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression "being". We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.”
Plato, Sophist
Being and Time
In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger conducts a phenomenological analysis of human being (Dasein), especially with regard to its temporal and historical character. Heidegger asserts that care (sorge) is the structure of the being of Dasein as being-in-the-world.
Although Heidegger never completed the project he had outlined for elucidating the meaning of being, he did manage to articulate a revolutionary approach to thinking about the problem in terms of time as the “horizon of all understanding of being.” Most of Being and Time itself is concerned with “preparing the ground” for understanding the meaning of being by carrying out a subtle and revolutionary phenomenology of the human mode of existence.
After Being and Time, Heidegger’s thinking began emphasizing language as the vehicle through which the question of being can be unfolded. He turned to the exegesis of historical texts, especially of the Presocratics, but also of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and to poetry, architecture, technology, and other subjects. By focusing on the Presocratic beginning of Western thought, he wanted to repeat the early Greek experience of being, so that the West could turn away from the dead end of nihilism and begin anew.
Heidegger on Being and Time
What is presented [in Being and Time] concerns the type of problem such as has never as yet been touched upon. If to understand "what there is" is based on the understanding of what it means "to be" and if, furthermore, this understanding, being ontological, is in some sense oriented with respect to time, then our problem must be to establish the temporality of existence with regard to the intelligibility of Being. This is the crucial turning point. The analysis of death [in Being and Time] was meant in just this one sense, namely, to emphasize the radical futurity of existence; it was not offered as a final metaphysical thesis on the essence of death. The analysis of anxiety has the single purpose to prepare for the question: on the basis of which metaphysical sense of existence is it possible at all that man can confront such a thing as "Nothingness?" Only if I grasp the meaning of "Nothingness" or of anxiety can I possibly understand "Being." Unless I can understand "Being" and "Nothing" as one, there cannot arise the question about the origin of the "Why?". There is no problem more elementary and concrete than that of Being, Nothing, and Why? The entire analysis of existence is based upon them. And I am asking another methodological question: how is one to start off with a metaphysics of existence? Does it not presuppose a definite worldview? Is it not the business of philosophy to deliver worldviews? Yet, they are presupposed by any and all philosophizing. The philosopher does not offer a worldview directly and by way of a doctrine. Rather is it the case that it may become possible, in the process of philosophizing, to realize radically the transcendence of existence itself, i.e., the inner possibility of this finite creature to confront being as such.
Martin Heidegger, A Cassirer-Heidegger Seminar. Trans. by Carl H. Hamburg
“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”