- Length
- 592 pagesMacquarrie and Robinson, Being and Time, Blackwell, 1962
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Being and Time
The most influential philosophical book of the twentieth century in the continental tradition, published unfinished because a ministry in Berlin had refused its author a professorship on the ground that he had published nothing in a decade. It was dedicated to the teacher whose life's work it dismantled.
- Date
- 1927
- Author
- Martin Heidegger
- Region
- Marburg and Freiburg
- Language
- German
- 1962 English, Macquarrie and Robinson The first English version; in copyright Attested
- 1996 English, Joan Stambaugh Different English for nearly every technical term; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 34 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 27 years
Rushed into print to satisfy a ministry that had refused its author a chair for having published nothing, and never finished.
What the book says
An enquiry into the meaning of being, conducted by examining the one being for whom being is a question. Heidegger's starting point is that the tradition has treated existence as the most general and emptiest of concepts and has therefore stopped asking about it. His method is to begin with the entity that already has some understanding of what it is to be - a human being, which he calls Dasein to avoid every assumption carried by words like subject, consciousness or person. What the analysis finds is that we are not spectators who then encounter a world. We are already involved in it, dealing with things that show up as equipment for purposes, in a network of significance that only becomes visible when something breaks: the hammer is invisible while hammering and appears as an object when it snaps. We are also thrown - always already in a situation not of our choosing, with a mood that discloses how things stand - and mostly absorbed in what one does, in an anonymous everyday self. Authenticity comes through anxiety, which strips the world of its familiarity, and through anticipating death as the one possibility nobody can take over.
What it argues
That the question of what it means to be anything has been forgotten, and that recovering it requires starting from the kind of being we are rather than from consciousness or from objects. Heidegger's analysis reverses the usual order: theoretical knowing is not the basic relation to the world but a derivative one, arrived at when practical engagement is interrupted. Things show up first as ready to hand - useful, in a context, mostly unnoticed - and only become bare objects with properties when something goes wrong. The self is similarly reversed: not an isolated subject that must reach out to others, but from the start a being-with, so absorbed in shared practices that the everyday self is really anyone at all. What individuates is the anticipation of one's own death, the possibility that cannot be handed over, which discloses existence as finite and as one's own.
What it answered
Logical Investigations 1900-1901Edmund Husserl
Husserl on the starting point, and behind him the whole tradition from Descartes to Kant that had made a knowing subject the ground of philosophy. Heidegger's claim is that this tradition inherited its concept of being from the Greeks without examining it and then built on it for two thousand years, so the destruction of that inheritance - reading the tradition back to what it covered over - is part of the method rather than a preliminary to it.
What answered it
Totality and Infinity 1961Emmanuel Levinas
Levinas, and a great many others, but Levinas most fundamentally. Adorno attacked the vocabulary itself as a jargon that lends banality a false depth. Carnap used a sentence from Heidegger's inaugural lecture as his example of metaphysical nonsense, which set the terms of the analytic-continental split for decades. And after the war the question of the philosophy's relation to its author's politics became inseparable from reading it.
How it argues
By description in a vocabulary built from scratch, because Heidegger holds that the available words carry the assumptions he is trying to get behind. This is why the book is so hard: ordinary German words are hyphenated, split and pressed into technical use, and English translations disagree with each other at almost every term. The method is phenomenological in Husserl's sense - describe what shows itself, as it shows itself - applied to what is usually too close to be noticed, which is why the celebrated passages are about hammers, doorknobs and idle talk.
The moment
Marburg in 1926. The faculty had proposed Heidegger as the sole candidate to succeed Nicolai Hartmann in the chair of philosophy; the ministry in Berlin rejected the proposal on the ground that he had published nothing for ten years. The dean came to his study and told him he had to print something quickly. Husserl intervened with the publisher, fifteen proof sheets were set immediately, and two copies were sent to Berlin - which returned them marked inadequate. The complete text appeared in 1927, and half a year later the ministry reversed itself and offered him the chair.
How it travelled
Into everything French, then everything else. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Arendt, Gadamer, Derrida and Foucault all worked from it, and the vocabulary of authenticity, thrownness, being-toward-death and everydayness entered general intellectual speech. The English translation did not appear until 1962, thirty-five years late. In analytic philosophy it was long dismissed and has been read seriously since the 1980s, particularly by philosophers interested in skills, practices and the limits of representational accounts of the mind.
The strongest objection
Levinas', because it is directed at what the analysis makes impossible rather than at any step in it. If everything I encounter shows up within my understanding of being, and if the fundamental relation is my own existence being at issue for me, then another person appears as one more entity disclosed in my world - and nothing in the structure accounts for the way another human being interrupts that world by making a claim on me. Levinas' charge is that an ontology of this shape cannot generate ethics and will always subordinate the other to the same. Heidegger has an account of being-with, and the objection is that it describes a shared world rather than an encounter, which is the difference that matters.
Why read it
Not alone and not quickly. The sections on the world, on equipment and the broken hammer, and on anxiety and death are the ones most readers reach and are genuinely rewarding; the rest requires a course or a guide. Read Husserl first if you can, since the book is a reply to him. Expect the vocabulary to be an obstacle for a hundred pages and then to start doing work.
- First printed
- 1927
- First in English
- 1962
- Digitised
- No
The projected third division of Part One, which was to have addressed time and being directly, was written and destroyed; Heidegger later said the language of metaphysics had failed him. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation of 1962 and Stambaugh's of 1996 use different English for the central terms.
Both standard English translations are in copyright, as is the German. The vocabulary is famously untranslatable and the two versions disagree on nearly every technical term.
Where it stands
Live and inescapable, and impossible to discuss without its author's politics. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, served as rector of Freiburg, and the black notebooks published from 2014 contain antisemitic passages woven into the philosophical vocabulary, which has reopened the question of how far the thought and the politics can be separated.
On quoting this book
In copyright in German and in both English translations, which render the central terms differently. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the unwritten third division could have been completed, and whether its absence marks a philosophical failure or an accident of publication, has been argued since Heidegger abandoned it. How much the later turn repudiates this book is disputed. The translations disagree so fundamentally that English readers of different versions are not always discussing the same text. And the relation between the philosophy and the politics is the largest question of all - positions run from complete separation to the claim that the analysis of authenticity and destiny prepared the ground, and the black notebooks have moved the argument rather than settled it.