Being and Time
Sein und Zeit — Heidegger's unfinished analytic of Dasein and the question of being
Tradition: Continental philosophy / phenomenology / fundamental ontology
Being is the question; Dasein is the being whose being is in question for it; time is the horizon of meaning
Being and Time is the most ambitious work of twentieth-century continental philosophy. Heidegger sets out to ask anew the forgotten "question of the meaning of being" — what does it mean to say that something *is*? — by analysing the being of the entity for whom this question itself can be a question, namely Dasein (the human "there-being"). Through extended phenomenological analyses of being-in-the-world, the structure of care, anxiety, death, conscience, and temporality, the book argues that time is the horizon of any possible understanding of being. Divisions I and II of the planned three were published; the rest was never completed in the form Heidegger planned, and his thought "turned" (die Kehre) in the 1930s toward a different — more "poetic" — engagement with the question of being.
Author
Editions cited
- Being and Time (Joan Stambaugh, revised Dennis Schmidt, SUNY, 2010)
- Being and Time (John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 1962)
School Embodiments
Heidegger studied with Husserl and dedicates Being and Time to him. The hermeneutic phenomenology developed here transforms Husserlian transcendental phenomenology into a fundamental ontology — the single most influential development in the phenomenological tradition.
"Higher than actuality stands possibility. The understanding of phenomenology lies solely in seizing hold of it as a possibility." (Being and Time §7)
Sartre, Marcel, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty all read Being and Time as foundational. Sartre's Being and Nothingness is in part an extended dialogue with this book. Heidegger himself rejected the existentialist label, but the influence is direct.
"Dasein is in each case mine to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine." (Being and Time §9)
The treatment of temporality as the horizon of being — with the past, present, and future ecstases as co-constitutive — anticipates the process philosophical concern with becoming over being.
"Temporality is the meaning of the being of that entity which we call 'Dasein'." (Being and Time §65)
Heidegger's 1929 Kantbuch reads Being and Time itself as a fulfillment of the Kantian project. The structure of Division I's analysis of being-in-the-world is unmistakably transcendental.
"The world is not a thing but a structure of Dasein's being." (paraphrasing §14, §18)
A weaker classification but a genuine resonance with the later Heidegger's "hermeneutic" tradition; the connection to esoteric Western traditions of the reading of being runs through Heidegger's later engagements with Hölderlin and the pre-Socratics.
"Being is the transcendens pure and simple." (Being and Time §7)
Derrida, Foucault, and Vattimo read Heidegger as the principal modern source for the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The thesis that Western philosophy has forgotten the question of being is one of postmodernism's starting points.
"This question has today been forgotten." (Being and Time, opening sentence)
Continental-philosophical tradition.
Internal Tensions
The book's unfinished status is its own tension: Division III, which was to elaborate the temporal meaning of being in general (not just of Dasein), was never published. Heidegger judged in retrospect that the conceptual framework of Sein und Zeit could not carry the question through to its end. The 1930s "turn" (Kehre) moves in a different register — poetic, mythic, suspicious of subjectivity. The reading of Being and Time also has to grapple with Heidegger's Nazi affiliation in the same period; his admirers and critics have argued ever since over whether the philosophy is implicated, indifferent to, or warning against the politics.
I. Time
The book's title is a thesis: time is the horizon of any understanding of being. Division II analyses temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as Dasein's ecstatic-horizonal structure — past, present, and future are not points on a line but co-constitutive modes of Dasein's standing-out. Ordinary clock-time is a derivative levelling-off of original temporality (§81). Time Ontological Status is Emergent in this strong Heideggerian sense.
Attributes
II. Space
Space is analysed in §22–24 as constituted by Dasein's concerned engagement with the world — the nearness or remoteness of things is first practical, not geometric. Heidegger criticises Cartesian geometric space as derivative from the lived, oriented spatiality of being-in-the-world.
Attributes
III. Matter
The ready-to-hand (zuhanden) and present-at-hand (vorhanden) distinction reorganises the philosophy of matter: things are first encountered as tools-for-purposes within a referential context, and only secondarily (and via a breakdown) as mere material objects. Matter is relational; substance-ontology is a derivative philosophical posture.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Dasein is the Heideggerian observer — embodied, plural, active, fundamentally temporal, defined by care (Sorge). Knowledge is immediate (gained through engaged understanding rather than detached cognition) and finite. The famous analysis of being-toward-death (§46–53) treats mortality as constitutive of authentic existence. Metaphysical agency is None in the Abrahamic sense; Dasein is its own project.
Attributes
V. Energy
Not Heidegger's thematic. The framework treats energy as emergent within the totality of contexts of involvement; no fundamental physical-energetic ontology is developed.
Attributes
VI. Information
Truth is unconcealment (alētheia), not correspondence — a thoroughly relational, situated conception of information. Personal information is not conserved: being-toward-death is the radical finitude that defines authentic Dasein. The question of post-mortem persistence is not engaged.
Attributes
Films that reference this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Being and Time resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 23 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.