Being and Time
by Martin Heidegger

Harper Perennial, 2008, 589 pages; Transl. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson

Reviewed by T. Nelson

artin Heidegger's mentor, Edmund Husserl, was interested in the phenomenon of consciousness. But to Heidegger, consciousness is just a small part of our reality. Even ‘Being’ was too narrow a term. It was meaningless, he thought, to consider an individual subject in isolation from the outside world. “Only as phenomenology,” he wrote, “is ontology possible.” Thus, he argued, Dasein, or Being-in-the-world, not Being, is the fundamental unit of phenomenology. Only in the context of the world as a whole, which contains entities, their beginnings and endings, inanimate objects, as well as space and time itself, can our existence be understood.

Thus, Dasein is more than just existence. It encompasses the entirety of the individual human experience. Even our ordinary ‘everydayness’— anxiety, ‘care’ (i.e. daily concerns), inauthenticity, and language—are part of our Dasein. Dasein, says Heidegger, is not just the “I myself” but the primordial domain for the kind of Being that entities possess. He wrote: “This insight even affords access to a phenomenological problematic in its own right, which has in principle the signification of providing a framework as a ‘formal phenomenology of consciousness.” [p. 151]

He never completed that framework; Being and Time is only the first third of his intended design. In this part, Heidegger devotes his energy to producing an ‘analytic of Dasein.’ He attributes to it a tremendous philosophical power, saying that it even eliminates the question of whether the world is real.

It also eliminates absolute truth: “There is truth only insofar as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is.” Even universal facts of nature are not true until someone discovers them, and they cease to be true when no longer believed.

This idea is sometimes taken as a foundation of postmodernism. But it shouldn't be: if postmodernists tried to appropriate Heidegger it was because they misunderstood him. When Heidegger writes “Before Newton's laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’” [p.270], what he actually meant is not that truth is relative, but that there is no meaning unless there is a mind to perceive it.

In Section 2, Heidegger turns to the problem of time. He wrote: “Being cannot be grasped except by taking time into consideration ... [T]he central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time” [p.40].

Here Heidegger seemed to be on the verge of making the intellectual leap that would have revealed profound philosophical truths about time. But instead, what he meant by time was mortality and death. Death, he says, is the end of Dasein—its completion. Thus, instead of advancing our concept of time, he helped lay the foundations for existentialism; Sartre acknowledged his contribution by titling his book Being and Nothingness.

Before starting Being and Time, it's helpful to read one of the many introductions to his work in order to understand his basic ideas. Heidegger's writing is not difficult to read, but it's abstract and full of untranslated Greek, Latin, and German phrases. Heidegger himself recommended his own Introduction to Metaphysics, but George Steiner's Martin Heidegger is a popular alternative.

From Steiner you will learn that Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, apparently as a career move to help solidify his appointment as rector at the University of Freiburg. He resigned as rector in 1934, but remained a party member until the end of the war. It didn't look as good on his résumé as he seems to have hoped, however, and his critics, trying to tar him as a Nazi, have combed through his works trying to find antisemitic remarks. The best they could come up with was one sentence from his 1200-page ‘black notebooks,’ expressing sorrow and envy:

World Jewry is ungraspable everywhere and doesn't need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.

Steiner thinks where there's smoke there's fire, and all the innuendo implies something unsavory about Heidegger, yet fails to provide anything substantial. Among Heidegger's supporters was Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was clear that Heidegger, while possibly caught up in the nationalist fervor of the 1930s, cared more about his career than politics. Ironically, while Victor Farias and others were trying to vilify him, other philosophers, openly calling themselves communists and Marxists, got a free pass.

Of the Nazis, Heidegger later wrote in a letter: “One had to throw them a crumb here and there in order to keep freedom of teaching and speaking.” He was at heart a detached academic who seemed to feel it was unnecessary or unseemly to defend himself. There is no politics in his book: no Heil Hitlers, no fascism, and no mention of any desire to conquer the world. His weaknesses were ambition, naïveté and a desire to continue teaching even under a despotic regime instead of fleeing. His only crime was to underestimate the danger around him, both from Hitler and from his attackers.

What could Heidegger have accomplished without these attacks, which led to his ban from teaching between 1945 to 1951? Perhaps he would have finished his three-part work. Maybe he could have made that intellectual leap he seems continually on the verge of making in Being and Time, and saved us fifty years of existentialist gloom and postmodernist drivel. It is a morality tale of the sad necessity of defending one's work at all costs against politically motivated attacks.

It is also the tale of how ideas, and ideas missed, can change the course of a civilization. Today, it often seems the only way to contribute to the history of ideas is to throw your idea out on the Internet and let somebody else steal it. So great ideas are kept private and we only see the mundane, the silly, and the commercial. At work we train ourselves never to give anything worthwhile to the masters we despise. In earlier times, maybe it was different, and Heidegger sowed the seeds for both existentialism and postmodernism. In Being and Time, as in Introduction to Metaphysics, where he asks the question that every schoolchild asks—why is there something instead of nothing?—he reveals his genius at asking the most fundamental questions. He failed to find satisfactory answers to any of them, but it is a testament to his genius that he came so close.

mar 29, 2015; updated nov 29, 2015