Being and Time

Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), published in 1927 in Husserl’s Jahrbuch, is the book that made Martin Heidegger famous and set the course of twentieth-century continental philosophy. It is an unfinished work: Heidegger planned two parts of three divisions each and published only the first two divisions of Part One, some four hundred pages of dense, neologistic German that has been called the most difficult major book of modern philosophy. Yet its central question is the simplest and the oldest: what does it mean to be? We use the word “is” every moment; we understand it well enough to use it, and yet, Heidegger says, we have forgotten what it asks. The book sets out to recover the question, and — because the only entity that can ask it is the human being — to begin by describing, with extraordinary phenomenological care, the way in which we human beings exist, in our everyday lives, in our moods and our dealings with things and others, in our anxiety and in our relation to our own death. What emerges is a philosophy in which the human being is no longer a thinking substance, a subject confronting a world of objects, but a being thrown into a world it never chose, always already involved with things and people, always ahead of itself in projects and possibilities, and always finite — a being whose very being is time.

The Introduction announces the problem. Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have treated “being” as the emptiest and most self-evident of concepts: it is the most universal, indefinable, and obvious of all. Heidegger argues that each of these three prejudices is a symptom of the forgetting of the question. The whole history of Western metaphysics has asked about beings — what kinds of things there are, what their essence is, what the highest being is — but has not asked about the Being of beings, the sense in which they are at all. This difference, between beings and Being (the “ontological difference”), is the key to the book. To raise the question anew, we need a way of approaching it, and the only entity we can interrogate is ourselves, “the being that we ourselves in each case are, and which has among other possibilities of being that of questioning”. Heidegger calls this entity Dasein (literally “being-there”), deliberately avoiding “man”, “subject”, “consciousness” or “soul”, which carry the baggage of the tradition. The distinguishing mark of Dasein is that its own being is an issue for it: it always understands itself, in however vague a manner, in terms of its possibilities; it is not a thing with properties, but a being that exists, in the sense of standing out into possibilities. Heidegger’s method is phenomenology, which he reinterprets, following Husserl’s motto “to the things themselves”, as letting what shows itself be seen from itself as it shows itself — but which for him is also hermeneutic, an interpretation of what is at first hidden in the very way things appear.

The first division begins with Dasein as it is “proximally and for the most part”: not in philosophical reflection but in everyday life. The most basic fact about Dasein is that it is being-in-the-world. Heidegger insists that this is a single, unitary phenomenon: we do not first exist as isolated subjects and then enter into relations with a world; we are always already in a world, absorbed in it, not as water is “in” a glass — the two are indifferent to each other — whereas Dasein’s “being-in” means dwelling, being familiar with, being concerned with. The traditional philosophical problem of how a mind locked inside itself can know that an external world exists is a pseudo-problem, arising only because the philosophers began from a false picture. Kant famously called it a “scandal of philosophy” that no proof of the existence of things outside us has been given; Heidegger replies that the real scandal is that such a proof is still expected.

How does Dasein relate to the things in its world? Not primarily by contemplating them as objects with properties, but by using them. The things we first encounter are equipment (Zeug): the hammer, the door, the pen, the road, the street light — each of which is what it is only within a network of references to other equipment and to purposes (the hammer refers to the nails, the wood, the house to be built, the shelter of those who will live in it). When we are absorbed in using a hammer, we do not attend to it at all; it is “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) and withdraws from our notice. Only when it breaks, or is missing, or gets in the way, does it stand out as a mere object, “present-at-hand” (vorhanden) with properties we can describe. The scientist’s world of objects with measurable properties is therefore a derivative abstraction from the primary world of practical involvement, not the foundation of it. The world itself is not the sum of all objects, but the worldhood — the referential totality of significance within which anything can show up as what it is. It is never an object in the world, but the horizon within which objects appear.

Dasein is also, equally primordially, being-with (Mitsein) others. The world is always a shared world; the boat at the shore, the book I read, the field I walk past, all point to other people who made, own or use them. Even when no one else is present, Dasein is being-with, and its solitude is a deficient mode of it. And in everyday life, Dasein does not exist as an individual self but as das Man — “the they”, the “one” of “one does this, one doesn’t do that”. We read, judge, enjoy and withdraw as they read, judge, enjoy and withdraw; we find shocking what they find shocking. The “they” is nobody in particular, and everybody; it relieves each of us of the burden of choosing and being responsible, and in this way levels all differences and takes away the possibility of authentic self-ownership. Heidegger insists that this is not a moral reproach: das Man is an existential characteristic of Dasein, part of its positive constitution. But it is Dasein’s average, inauthentic mode of existence, and the possibility of becoming itself — of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit, literally “ownedness”) — is one it must win against the “they”.

The analysis of the “there” of Dasein, its disclosedness, has three structures. The first is state-of-mind or mood (Befindlichkeit, “how one finds oneself”): Dasein is always in some mood — bored, cheerful, anxious — which discloses to it, before any thought, that it is delivered over to its being, and how things stand with it. Mood reveals Dasein’s thrownness (Geworfenheit): that it finds itself in a world it did not choose, with a given past, body and situation, a bare “that it is and has to be”. Fear, which Heidegger analyses as being threatened by a particular thing, is a derivative mode. The second is understanding (Verstehen): not an intellectual grasp but a “knowing how”, a competence in being able to do things; Dasein is always projecting itself upon possibilities, and in this sense is always “ahead of itself”. The third is discourse or speech (Rede), the articulation of the intelligibility of the world, which takes shape in language; its degenerate forms are idle talk, gossip that spreads by repetition without grasping the matter, curiosity, the restless pursuit of the new for its own sake, and ambiguity, which makes it impossible to tell what is genuinely understood from what is merely said. Together these make up falling (Verfallen): Dasein’s tendency to be absorbed in the world and to flee from itself into the anonymity of the “they”. The idea has an unmistakable religious ancestry, in Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, but Heidegger insists that it carries no moral judgment.

The climax of the first division is the analysis of anxiety (Angst), the fundamental mood in which Dasein is brought face to face with its own being-in-the-world as such. Unlike fear, which has a definite object, anxiety has no object at all: “that in the face of which one has anxiety is nothing and nowhere”. In anxiety the familiar world loses its significance; things recede and sink into insignificance; and Dasein is individualised, thrown back upon itself as a being that must take over responsibility for its own existence. Anxiety reveals Dasein’s freedom — “for the freedom to choose itself and take hold of itself” — and at the same time its homelessness (“uncanniness”: Un-zuhause, not being at home). In one of the most famous passages, Heidegger reads an ancient fable of Hyginus in which Care (Cura) shapes a figure of clay and Jupiter gives it spirit; each of the gods claims the right to name it, and Saturn (Time) decides that Jupiter shall take its spirit at death, Earth its body, “but so long as it lives, Care shall possess it”. This leads him to name the being of Dasein as care (Sorge): a unity of three structures: existence (being ahead-of-itself in possibilities), facticity (already being in a world, thrown) and falling (being alongside things in the world). Dasein is a being that cares about its own being.

The second division asks how Dasein’s wholeness can be grasped, and how it can exist authentically. The answer lies in death. Dasein, as always “ahead of itself”, is always incomplete; and the one thing that will end its possibilities is its death. Heidegger’s analysis (§§46–53) is the most celebrated passage in the book. Death is not an event to be observed in others, or a point at which life stops: I cannot experience others’ deaths as my own, and no one can die my death for me. It is “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” — my ownmost, non-relational, not to be outstripped possibility. The “they” conceals this: “one dies” — but not yet, and not me. To exist authentically is to be being-towards-death: to anticipate death as a possibility that is always mine and always imminent, without evading it, and without actualising it (as suicide would), and thereby to be freed from the illusions of the “they” and to take one’s finite life as one’s own. Anxiety in the face of death reveals that Dasein’s time is limited and that it must choose.

What is it that calls Dasein back to itself from the “they”? Heidegger answers: the call of conscience. Conscience, however, does not tell us what to do, it says nothing: it is the voice of Dasein itself, summoning itself from its lostness to its ownmost potentiality-for-being. What it reveals is that Dasein is guilty in a primordial sense — not in a moral or legal sense, but as the “ground of a nullity”: Dasein is thrown, and has not laid the ground of its own being; in choosing one possibility, it necessarily fails to choose others. To respond to the call, to choose to be guilty in this way and to take over one’s own being, is resoluteness (Entschlossenheit): the authentic mode of disclosure, in which Dasein, individualised by anxiety and death, grasps its situation and acts.

Finally, Heidegger asks what makes care possible, and finds the answer in temporality (Zeitlichkeit). Care’s three structures correspond to the three dimensions of time: Dasein is ahead of itself (future), already in (having-been, past), alongside beings (present). Authentic temporality is not the “now-sequence” of clock time, a line of points through which a present moves, but the unity of a future that comes toward Dasein (in anticipation of death), a past that Dasein takes over (“repeats”, Wiederholung), and a present of decisive action (the “moment of vision”, Augenblick). Time is not something Dasein is in; Dasein is temporal, and it is this temporality that makes its understanding of Being possible. The ordinary concept of time — the endless sequence of nows — is derived from the primordial temporality by levelling it. Dasein is also historical: it inherits a “heritage” of possibilities from its community, and its fate is bound up with the destiny of its generation. These passages, as readers have long noted, are ominous, and Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism in 1933 has darkened the reception of the book, though scholars dispute how far its philosophy is implicated.

The book breaks off before reaching its goal, the explicit exposition of the meaning of Being in terms of time, and the planned third division, “Time and Being”, was never published; its place was taken by the later essays of Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre), which abandoned the transcendental analysis of Dasein for a more poetic meditation on the history of Being. But the impact of the published part was immediate and immense. Sartre‘s Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition, Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Levinas’s ethics, Derrida’s deconstruction, Foucault’s histories and the existential psychotherapy of Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss all begin from it. Analytic philosophers, from Carnap’s mockery of “the Nothing nothings” to Hubert Dreyfus’s admiring reconstruction of “being-in-the-world” as skilled coping, have been compelled to respond. For its readers, the book is at once a work of exacting ontology and a description of what it feels like to be a mortal creature: to wake up already in a world, to be carried along by the crowd, to be shaken by a mood that makes everything seem strange, and to hear, in the silence of anxiety, the question of what one’s own life is to be.

Some of the book’s most characteristic claims need a closer look, because they are the ones that readers carry away. The first is the analysis of truth. In the traditional view, truth is the agreement of a judgment with a thing — adaequatio intellectus et rei. Heidegger argues that this presupposes something more basic. For a statement to agree with a state of affairs, the state of affairs must already have been uncovered, made accessible, and what uncovers it is Dasein, in its concern with the world. Truth in the primordial sense is therefore aletheia, the Greek word for truth, which he reads as “unconcealment” (a-lētheia, un-forgetting): the letting-be-seen of beings as they are. Dasein is “in the truth” because its disclosedness opens a clearing in which beings can appear; but Dasein is also “in untruth”, since what is uncovered is always only partly uncovered, and much remains covered over, and falling constantly distorts it. This idea, developed in the later essays on the “essence of truth”, runs through Heidegger’s whole career.

The second is the claim about language and the history of philosophy. Heidegger insists, in an inheritance from Dilthey and the German hermeneutic tradition, that Dasein is always interpreting: it understands the world by projecting possibilities, and what it understands it can articulate in discourse. This “hermeneutic circle” — we can only understand the parts of a text in terms of a whole we already have some grasp of, and the whole in terms of the parts — is not a vicious circle to be avoided, but the very structure of understanding: “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way.” The task of the book’s Introduction, accordingly, is to prepare for a “destruction” (Destruktion, a dismantling, not a demolition) of the history of ontology, the stripping away of the sedimented concepts that have hardened since the Greeks, in order to recover the original experiences from which they came. Heidegger planned to carry this out in Part Two, with studies of Kant’s doctrine of schematism, of Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa, and of Aristotle’s treatise on time; but the third division and Part Two remain unwritten, and the project was taken up in lecture courses (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) and later works. The line he wanted to draw, from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Kant to Hegel, is a single history of the “forgetting of Being”, in which beings were understood in terms of presence — what is constantly and unchangingly there — and time was obscured.

The third is the account of everydayness and the self. The “who” of Dasein, Heidegger says, is not to be found by looking for a subject behind its acts, as if there were a fixed core that has experiences. In everyday life the self is the “they-self” (das Man-selbst): I am who the public world takes me to be, a bank clerk, a mother, a citizen. In authentic existence the self is not a different substance but a different mode — a “modification” of the they — in which Dasein takes over its existence as its own. The word “authentic” (eigentlich) comes from the German eigen, “own”; to be authentic is to own one’s life, to make choices as one’s own, rather than as “one” does. It is not a state achieved once and for all: Dasein is always, in a sense, fallen, and authenticity is a moment of resolute grasp, followed by a return to everydayness. Neither does authenticity have a determinate content: the call of conscience says nothing, it provides no list of values; it summons Dasein to its own possibilities, and the content must be chosen. Critics from Karl Löwith to Theodor Adorno have seen in this “decisionism”, empty of any ethical criterion, a worrying vacuity that left Heidegger’s followers (and Heidegger himself, in 1933) vulnerable to the call of destiny and the nation; defenders reply that the book is a fundamental ontology, not an ethics, and that the formal indication of authenticity is a condition of any ethics.

The fourth is the treatment of death, because it is the part of the book that most readers know. The existential analysis of death, Heidegger insists, must be distinguished from the biological, the medical and the religious. It does not ask what happens after death, or whether there is an afterlife; it asks how death is a part of Dasein’s being now. To be human is to be a being which “is” its end — “as soon as a human being is born, he is old enough to die” (a line he quotes from the medieval Ackermann aus Böhmen). The “they” talks of death as a common event that happens to everybody and tells us not to worry; Heidegger sees this as a flight from the one possibility that is mine alone. The authentic relation to death is “anticipation” (Vorlaufen), a living-forward-toward-death that is not morbid brooding but an acknowledgment of finitude, freeing me for my own possibilities. Death individualises (no one can die for me), and it is a possibility in which my other possibilities are all at stake. Whether this is a coherent or adequate account of death has been much debated. Critics have objected that Heidegger neglects the death of others — Emmanuel Levinas turned this into the basis for an ethics, in which my responsibility begins with the face of the other who may die — and that he misdescribes our sense of death as a possibility, which seems to be, in fact, the impossibility of possibility. Others have admired the way the analysis makes our mortality the source, not the enemy, of meaning.

The fifth is the discussion of temporality and historicality. Heidegger’s attack on the “vulgar” concept of time as a series of “nows” is one of the book’s great achievements. Aristotle defined time as the number of motion according to before and after, and that definition, through Augustine, Kant and Bergson, lies behind the ordinary view that time is a line of instants, flowing from future through present to past. Heidegger argues that this “world-time” is derived from a more basic “ecstatic” temporality, in which the three dimensions — future, having-been, present — are not points on a line but ways Dasein “stands out” (ek-stasis) from itself. The future has priority: Dasein is first of all what it can be, and it comes toward itself from its possibilities; the past is not what is over and gone but what Dasein has been and continues to be, in the manner of a heritage; the present is the moment in which Dasein acts in a situation. Because Dasein is a finite temporalising, it can be historical: it takes over from the past the possibilities that are its heritage, and passes them on to the future. In the final chapters Heidegger discusses Dilthey and Count Yorck and criticises the view that history is a science of the past: history is primarily the unfolding of Dasein’s own being, in a community, a “generation” with a shared destiny. It is this passage, with its talk of “fate” and “destiny” (Schicksal and Geschick), “heritage” and “repetition”, that has most disturbed readers, in the light of Heidegger’s later political involvement.

How should we read the book today? It is easy, as one of its first reviewers put it, to be both impressed and repelled by its style, with its coinages, its hyphenated compounds, its ponderous German syntax, its refusal to define terms in advance. Heidegger believed that philosophy had to develop its own language, since ordinary and traditional language were saturated with the metaphysical prejudices he was trying to overcome. Some of his neologisms have entered English as technical terms: “being-in-the-world”, “thrownness”, “the they”, “authenticity”, “the ready-to-hand”. But the best way to read Being and Time, perhaps, is not as a system to be learned but as a sustained exercise in attention: to the way a hammer vanishes in use, the strangeness of a mood that has no object, the voice of a crowd one echoes without thinking, the silence in which one’s own death becomes real. Many readers have said that, whatever they think of the philosophy, the book changed how they see their lives.

In conversation

• The hammer — ready-to-hand equipment that disappears in use.
• Das Man — the anonymous “they” in whom we lose ourselves.
• Being-towards-death — finitude as the condition of authenticity.