Introduction 1
“To think is to confine yourself to a
single thought that one day stands still like a
star in the world's sky.”
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought
An Introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time
Written and read by Taylor Carman, Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University
This essay is excerpted from the audiobook of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger © 2020 Ukemi Productions LTD and available for purchase at audible.com
Being and Time is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century philosophy. Written in the Weimar period of German history, between the two world wars, it became the primary source of what was already then known as existentialism, or “existence philosophy” (Existenzphilosophie), though its author, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), always rejected that label. Its influence has been felt, in one way or another, by all subsequent movements in European philosophy, and by analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world, if often highly critically. The text is notoriously difficult to read, but no more so than the classic works of Aristotle or Hegel, not to mention the more recent writings of the French post- structuralists who have defined themselves in relation to Heidegger’s thought.
Who was Martin Heidegger and what is Being and Time, his magnum opus, about?
In his lectures on Aristotle, Heidegger famously told his students that Aristotle lived, thought, and died, and that that is all you need to know about him. What matters is not the man, but the work. Heidegger himself has been called a man without a biography, and while that is of course hyperbolic, it is probably better to begin with the book rather than the man.
Being and Time addresses a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be? This question of being (die Seinsfrage) is maximally general: it asks, of anything that is, what it means that it is. But surely the notion of being – what we mean when we say “is” or “am” or “are” – is so basic, so primitive, that nothing more can be said about it. Surely we can’t give a philosophical definition of the meaning of being in the way in which dictionaries offer definitions of words. And yet, Heidegger says, we all understand it, more or less. We know that a house exists, and we know that before it was built it didn’t exist, and that after it burns down it no longer exists. We know that cities and religions and art works and prime numbers exist. Perhaps most importantly, we know that we exist. And we know that we didn’t always exist but came into existence, and that we will cease to exist when we die. What do we know when we know these things?
Heidegger tells us that Being and Time – a hefty tome of more than 400 pages, divided in two halves, Division One and Division Two – offers only a “preliminary” approach to that question. It answers it only tentatively by suggesting that we always understand being somehow in terms of time. The book, however, does not directly address the general question of being, but instead describes the one thing, the unique entity that – as we have just seen – understands being, if only roughly, namely us. Human beings exist, and are moreover the only existing things (as far as we know) with an understanding of what it is for anything to exist, including themselves. Indeed, Heidegger argues, that understanding of being is precisely what makes us “us.” He therefore does not refer to us by any of the traditional names familiar from the history of philosophy – man, person, soul, mind, spirit, consciousness, homo sapiens. His term for us is instead Dasein – an ordinary German word for existence, but whose literal meaning is being there. Our being, Heidegger says, is being-in-the-world. We don’t first exist and only then subsequently come into the world, or encounter it fresh. Rather, as soon as we are “there,” in the world, we find ourselves already having been there, “thrown” into the world, Heidegger says. It is our thrownness that grounds our sense of having a past: we are always already there, in the world.
But that much is only, at best, half the story. For we are also always already pressing or projecting into actions, projects, goals, purposes – things we somehow aim at and that give our lives shape, direction, and meaning. For just as we don’t first of all exist and then bump into a world external to us, likewise we don’t first exist and then subsequently form intentions, make plans, and perform actions as something, as it were, extra. For Dasein, to be is to be already thrown into the world, but it is also always to be projecting into possibilities that constitute our understanding of who we are – a rebellious teenager, an aspiring poet, a loyal citizen, a clever entrepreneur, a disappointed idealist. This projection into possibilities is what grounds our sense of having a future. We are not confined to an isolated present moment, but are always ahead of ourselves.
The second half of Being and Time – that is, Division Two – moves from an account of these fundamental structures of being-in-the-world to a description of what it means for Dasein to exist, as Heidegger says, authentically or inauthentically. “Authenticity” is not the opposite of fake or unreal, as for example an authentic Rembrandt painting is not a forgery, or an authentic diamond is not just a piece of glass. Instead, living authentically means living your life as your own, “owning it” as we say, owning up to your situation and your commitments. It is not exactly “being true to yourself,” since that suggests
that you already have an identity, prior to taking up your commitments. But you don’t. It is your commitments that make you who you are, and authenticity means taking those commitments seriously, whether by embracing them wholeheartedly or abandoning them resolutely in favor of some other way of living.
Living inauthentically, by contrast, means living according to custom and doing as “one does,” that is, in compliance with the average, generic standards of everyday normality. Conforming to public norms is not itself a bad thing. With no commitment to shared standards of intelligibility and rightness, after all, social life would come grinding to a halt. But merely living your life as one is “supposed to” falls short of embracing your existence as your own, for you must live your own life and no one else can live it for you.
Nor, even more poignantly, can anyone else die your death for you. Our being, Heidegger says, in the first chapter of Division Two of Being and Time, is essentially a being-toward- death, and my death individualizes me, just as my body and my life are irreducibly mine, unlike things I can transfer to others, such as money and possessions, or even the privileges of rank and status in the social world. To relate to death inauthentically is to console
oneself with the (after all, perfectly correct) thought that everyone dies – and therefore so do I, just like anyone. Dying authentically means owning your life as fragile and precious precisely because you know it will collapse into nothing. That might sound gloomy, but Heidegger insists it is simply what we all know to be the truth about our existence, unless we are evading it or fleeing from it, as we often do. Indeed, Heidegger insists, we all know that a delicate mixture of circumstance and choice is what our existence amounts to, even if we choose to believe in a life after death, for no such belief in immortality would even be intelligible if we did not first grasp the poignancy and inevitability of our demise. For Heidegger, then, owning up to the uniqueness and impermanence of existence, in light of the singularity of death, is a necessary condition of living well, by whatever standards we judge it so – whether aesthetic, moral, or religious.
One of the central themes running through Being and Time is the idea that Dasein’s existence is pervaded by a primordial kind of anxiety (Angst). By that word Heidegger does not mean anything merely psychological. It is not that we are fundamentally nervous, worried, or depressed. Far from it; for the most part, we are fairly comfortable in our daily routines. To say that we are deeply and essentially anxious, instead, is to say that we are attuned to the unsettledness or uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of our existence. We are, and we know we are, so to speak, never fully at home in the world, never unproblematically settled in and defined by our situations, our commitments, our identities. Our lives are contingent, dependent, and vulnerable to disruption and collapse.
The final chapters of Division Two of Being and Time thus describe the temporal structure of human finitude, which Heidegger calls the structure of care, which is in turn the meaning of Dasein’s being. To be a human being is to care about something, for something to matter to us. Obviously, we care about ourselves and each other, but we also take care of animals, and tools, and the material and social environments in which we live. For us, to be is to care, and the structure of care is a temporal structure, stretching from the thrownness of our birth to the finality of our death. Heidegger inherited much of this sense of the drama of human existence from his Danish precursor, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), and he handed it down in turn to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the leading figure of French existentialism in the middle of the century.
The existential themes of Being and Time, however, began to give way in Heidegger’s writings to a different perspective and a different set of concerns during and after the Second World War. Where Being and Time focused on individual existence, his later works give pride of place to more collective, impersonal phenomena such as history, culture, art, language, science, and technology. And in stark contrast to the hefty scholarly treatise before you, Heidegger came to write almost exclusively shorter essays and lectures, favoring thematic specificity over systematic completeness.
Heidegger’s thought was also crucially shaped by the one historical event that will forever be remembered as an essential part of his biography, and that is his enthusiastic support for Hitler and National Socialism, beginning in 1933, when he served for one year as rector of Freiburg University. That support waned, but had not disappeared altogether by the time war broke out in 1939. Heidegger’s nationalism and anti-Semitism, once matters of rumor and controversy, are now undeniable facts and permanent stains on his character and reputation. What is less clear is whether his political actions and attitudes in the 1930s and40s cast a shadow back on the text of Being and Time, which was written in the previous decade. Late in the book he writes at a high level philosophical abstraction about the historical life of a community or people (Volk), but by that he means any and all human communities in the world and throughout history, not just the nations of modern Europe, or specifically Weimar Germany. In other lectures and essays before and during the war Heidegger occasionally tosses political asides and allusions into the philosophical discussion. In Being and Time he does not. The theme is human existence, at any time and in any place. The specificity of modern politics simply does not enter into the argument of the book.
In his later works Heidegger approaches the question of being not by way of the analytic of Dasein, as in Being and Time, but through what we might call Socratic questions, questions of the form, What is x? For example, what is art? That is, what makes a workof art a work of art? What is language? What is poetry? What is technology? In each, Heidegger says, these questions attune us to the more general – but now, he thinks, ultimately unanswerable – question, What is it for anything to be? Heidegger began his philosophical career trying to conceive of an answer, or at least the general form of an answer, to that question. Being and Time is the fruit of that effort. Later he arrived at the view that different cultures in different historical epochs supply their own, different answers, and that beyond that diversity of understandings of being, our wonderment, our sense of awe in the face of the question, is itself as close as we can get to an understanding of the meaning of being.
