Being and Time

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927, is the most influential philosophical work of the twentieth century and one of the most difficult books ever written. Heidegger’s aim is as fundamental as philosophy gets: he wants to reopen the question of the meaning of Being itself – a question he believes Western philosophy has been evading since the Presocratics. To get there, he undertakes a detailed analysis of the being for whom the question of Being matters: the human being, which he calls Dasein (literally “being-there”). What results is a phenomenological account of human existence that reshaped philosophy, theology, literary theory, and psychology in ways still being worked out.

The Forgetting of Being

Heidegger’s starting point is a diagnosis: Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Kant, has addressed beings – things that are – without seriously asking what it means for anything to be at all. Being has been treated as obvious, self-evident, not in need of investigation. Heidegger wants to show that this apparently trivial question conceals the deepest puzzle in philosophy, and that our failure to take it seriously has distorted the entire tradition of Western metaphysics.

The investigation of Being requires a new method: phenomenology – attending to the structures of experience as they actually present themselves, without importing preconceptions from traditional metaphysics or the natural sciences. The phenomena Heidegger attends to are the structures of everyday human existence, and what he finds there is not what traditional philosophy expected.

Dasein: Being-in-the-World

The fundamental structure of human existence, for Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. This is not the Cartesian picture of a subject inside a mind somehow connected to an external world. Dasein does not first exist and then get acquainted with a world; being-in-the-world is its basic mode of existence. We always already find ourselves in a world that is meaningful, practical, and ready-to-hand before any theoretical reflection begins.

The primary mode of Dasein’s engagement with the world is not contemplation but use. The things we encounter first are not neutral objects with properties but equipment in a network of practical relations – the hammer is for hammering, the hammering is for building, the building is for dwelling. The world first shows up as an integrated whole of practical significance, and theoretical contemplation is a deficient mode of this practical engagement that occurs when equipment breaks down.

Thrownness, Fallenness, and Projection

Dasein’s existence is characterized by three interrelated structures. Thrownness: we always find ourselves already in a situation we did not choose – a particular body, language, culture, historical moment, and set of possibilities that are simply given. Projection: within these given possibilities, we are always understanding ourselves in terms of possibilities ahead of us – we are always “ahead of ourselves.” Fallenness: Dasein typically flees from the anxiety of its own situation into absorption in the anonymous public world of das Man (the “they”).

These three structures together constitute what Heidegger calls “care” – the basic structure of Dasein’s being. Care unifies the temporal structure of existence: thrownness corresponds to the past (having been), projection corresponds to the future (coming-toward), and the present is the moment of resolute action. Heidegger’s analysis of time grounds it not in objective clock-time but in the temporal structure of human existence itself.

Anxiety, Death, and Authenticity

Division Two introduces the existential themes for which Heidegger is most widely known. Anxiety (Angst) is distinguished from fear: fear is always fear of a specific thing, but anxiety is a more pervasive mood in which the world as a whole loses its comfortable, ready-to-hand character. In anxiety, Dasein is confronted with its own “uncanniness” – the fact that the familiar world is not ultimately grounding, that the comfortable public interpretations it has taken for granted are not necessary truths about its existence.

Being-toward-death is Heidegger’s analysis of how human existence is essentially finite. My death is not an event that will happen to me at some future time; it is a possibility that belongs to me now – the possibility of my ownmost, non-relational, certain, and indefinite impossibility. Genuinely confronting this possibility tears Dasein out of its absorption in das Man and forces it back onto its own possibilities. This confrontation is the basis for authenticity (Eigentlichkeit): taking over one’s own existence rather than drifting in the average public interpretation.

Conscience and Resoluteness

Conscience, for Heidegger, is not a moral voice telling us right from wrong but an ontological phenomenon: the call of Dasein to itself, summoning it out of lostness in das Man back to its own possibilities. The call is silent – it has nothing specific to say, only the wordless summons to take over one’s existence. Guilt (Schuld) is the existential condition of being always already thrown into a situation whose ground one cannot be oneself.

Resoluteness is Dasein’s authentic response to the call of conscience: a clear-eyed, anxiety-sustaining readiness to take over one’s situation. The resolute Dasein does not know in advance what to do – it must be responsive to the concrete demands of its situation – but it faces those demands from a position of authentic self-possession rather than anonymous public drifting.

Verdict: The Inescapable Difficulty

Being and Time is genuinely difficult in ways that go beyond mere technical vocabulary. The difficulty is substantive: Heidegger is trying to say something that everyday language was not designed to express, and his neologisms and hyphenated compounds are attempts to capture structural features of existence that ordinary discourse systematically obscures. The effort of reading is repaid in proportion to what you bring to it.

Its influence on subsequent philosophy has been enormous: existentialism (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty), hermeneutics (Gadamer), deconstruction (Derrida), and phenomenological psychology all emerge from engagement with Heidegger’s analysis. For the reader willing to work, Being and Time offers an account of human existence – finite, anxious, thrown into a world it did not choose, capable of either authentic or inauthentic self-possession – that is both philosophically rigorous and experientially resonant in a way few philosophical works achieve.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Heidegger’s main question in Being and Time?

Heidegger wants to reopen the question of the meaning of Being itself – what it means for anything to be at all. To approach this question, he undertakes a phenomenological analysis of Dasein (the human being), since Dasein is the being for whom its own being is a question. The analysis of Dasein is meant as a preparatory investigation that will eventually ground a full account of the meaning of Being.

What is Dasein?

Dasein is Heidegger’s term for the human being, literally meaning “being-there.” He avoids standard terms like “subject” or “consciousness” because they carry philosophical baggage he wants to avoid. Dasein names the being whose characteristic feature is that its own being is an issue for it – it always understands itself in some way and cannot be indifferent to its own existence.

What does Heidegger mean by authenticity?

Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) means taking over one’s own existence rather than drifting in the anonymous public interpretations of das Man. It is not heroic individualism but a structural feature of existence: the resolute, anxiety-sustaining readiness to own one’s situation – including one’s thrownness, finitude, and death – rather than covering it over with comfortable public understanding.

What is das Man?

Das Man (usually translated “the they” or “the one”) is the anonymous public average – “one does this,” “one thinks that,” “they say.” It is not a specific group of people but the structural tendency of Dasein to interpret itself and the world through the leveled, average, publicly shared understanding rather than through its own possibilities. Fallenness into das Man is the normal condition of everyday existence.

What is Heidegger’s analysis of death?

Being-toward-death is not about the biological event of dying but about death as an existential structure: the most proper, non-relational, certain, and indefinite possibility of Dasein. My death cannot be shared or transferred. Genuinely anticipating this possibility – rather than covering it over with the public understanding that “one dies eventually” – individuates Dasein and opens the possibility of authenticity.

What is the political controversy around Heidegger?

Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and served as rector of Freiburg University, lending philosophical prestige to the Nazi movement. His recently published “Black Notebooks” contain anti-Semitic passages. The question of how his political commitments relate to his philosophy remains genuinely contested – most scholars hold that the philosophy is separable from the politics, but this is disputed.

What is the difference between fear and anxiety in Heidegger?

Fear is always fear of a specific, identifiable threat in the world. Anxiety (Angst) is a more pervasive, indeterminate mood in which the comfortable character of the world as a whole is suspended. In anxiety, Dasein does not know what it is anxious about – the threat is the openness of its own existence. Anxiety is philosophically important because it discloses Dasein’s freedom and finitude in a way that ordinary absorbed engagement conceals.

Which translation of Being and Time should I read?

The Macquarrie and Robinson translation (Harper and Row, 1962) established the standard English terminology and remains widely used. The Stambaugh translation (SUNY, 1996, revised 2010) is more accurate and philosophically precise but uses different terminology. For first-time readers, the Macquarrie-Robinson version with its marginal German terms is probably the better starting point, supplemented by a good introduction like Michael Gelven’s commentary.