Heidegger’s Being and Time, A Primer

A demystifying introduction to Martin Heidegger’s early magnum opus.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. It turned the world of philosophy upside down and inaugurated existentialist phenomenology, existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, and deconstruction.

Although Heidegger published the manuscript prematurely (in order to qualify for an academic position), and then abandoned the project before completing the ambitious plan outlined in this first volume, what we do have is a grandiose display of thinking unlike anything that came before him.

People get hung up on all the words that Heidegger makes up or appropriates as technical terms — part of how he constructs a theoretical universe that is hard to pierce. But when it comes right down to it, Heidegger is naming things that are very common sense, and arguably he is a common sense philosopher, a newfangled pragmatist. Demystifying Heidegger is part of my goal here.

Overview

In Being and Time, Heidegger sets out to destroy the traditional metaphysics of presence and clear the grounds for his kind of ontology.

Destruction (Destruktion) refers to a critical dismantling of traditional philosophical concepts to uncover the foundational assumptions that have shaped Western thought.

Metaphysics of presence describes the dominant tradition in Western philosophy, from Plato onwards, which Heidegger argues privileges what is immediately present, stable, and available, often overlooking temporality and the underlying conditions that make such presence possible.

His main problematic is how to discover the structure of Being, beginning with his analysis of Being as thrown-in-the-world and ending with an analysis of Being-towards-death and temporality as the essence of Dasein. This is the end point of much philosophizing, so understanding it requires some work. Let’s get started.

1.

Heidegger’s central concern in Being and Time is to understand the structure of Being. This is the overarching question that drives his entire inquiry. He doesn’t ask what beings are, but rather what it means for something…