Being and Time
존재와 시간
Martin Heidegger's main work, published in 1927 as a "first half" in volume 8 of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung edited by Edmund Husserl. Setting out to raise again the question of the "meaning of being" that Western philosophy had forgotten, it analyses the structure of the being that asks this question, the human being or "Dasein", which lives thrown into a world, in care and towards death. The second half never appeared and the work remained a fragment. It became a starting point for existentialism, hermeneutics and modern French philosophy; Marcuse tried to join it with Marxism, while Adorno and Lukács attacked its language and its politics. The key concept itself is treated in the separate entry Dasein.
In depth
Why is it called a watershed of twentieth-century philosophy?
Being and Time is counted, in the German Wikipedia's phrase, among the "works of the century" of twentieth-century philosophy. Heidegger's question is the "meaning of being in general". We constantly say "I am" and "it is there" and vaguely understand that something is, but we never ask what "is" means. Heidegger held that since Aristotle Western philosophy had thought of being only as a thing lying before us, a substance that stays in the present, and so had missed the relation between being and time. The two words of the title contain this diagnosis.
The book belongs to the history of Nietzsche's reception for two reasons. First, Heidegger restated in the language of ontology the question raised by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who opened the way to the philosophy of existence: how an individual can take over his own life in a world whose meanings have collapsed. The English Wikipedia, citing Richard Wolin, notes that the book implicitly adopted the critique of mass society epitomised earlier by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Second, from the mid-1930s Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche again and again and read him as the last thinker of Western metaphysics, a reading that passed into the French reception of Nietzsche. Being and Time is where that road starts.
How was it written and what does it cover?
According to the German Wikipedia the book was written under time pressure. Heidegger had been an extraordinary professor at Marburg since 1923 but had published nothing for almost ten years, and he needed to produce something to win a chair at Freiburg. He condensed the material built up in his lectures into a system and published it in 1927 as a "first half" in volume 8 of the yearbook edited by his teacher Husserl, to whom the book was dedicated. According to the English Wikipedia, Heidegger, then a member of the Nazi Party, agreed in 1941 to remove the dedication to the Jewish Husserl; it was restored in the 1953 edition. The plan called for two parts of three divisions each, but only the introduction and two divisions of part one appeared. In the seventh edition of 1953 Heidegger dropped the label "first half", conceding that the work would stay unfinished.
The analysis begins with the word "Dasein" in place of "human being". Dasein is always already thrown into a world (thrownness), understands that world and projects itself towards possibilities (projection), and usually lives absorbed among things and people (falling). A hammer is first met not as a lump of iron and wood but as a tool "for" driving nails. Heidegger calls the unity of these three moments "care" (Sorge) and finds the meaning of care in "temporality". The book breaks off just where it was to pass from temporality to time in general and then to the meaning of being. These concepts are explained in more detail in the entry Dasein.
What do "the they" and being-towards-death mean?
The most widely read part of the book is its analysis of everyday life. Everyday Dasein lives handed over to "the they" (das Man), the anonymous others who are nobody in particular. We enjoy ourselves as they enjoy themselves, judge literature and art as they judge, and even withdraw from "the crowd" as they withdraw. Heidegger summed up this state in one sentence: "Everyone is the other, and no one is himself."
Jeder ist der Andere und Keiner er selbst.
The way out of this anonymity runs through anxiety and death. Anxiety makes the everyday web of meanings collapse and brings Dasein before itself. Death is my own possibility, which no one can take over for me, so in the resolve that runs ahead towards death Dasein can take over its life "authentically". Heidegger insisted that these concepts were not value judgements, but as the German Wikipedia points out, the attacks on "the they" and on idle talk and the appeals to authenticity could easily be read within the Conservative Revolution's mood of hostility to mass society and liberal democracy.
In the chapter on historicity (§76) Heidegger took up the distinction between monumental, antiquarian and critical history from the second of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations and interpreted it as rooted in the historicity of Dasein. Nietzsche is not yet the protagonist in this book, but his question of the relation between history and life is already built into its structure.
How did Marxists read it?
The responses split in two. Herbert Marcuse, Heidegger's student, tried to extend the book's analysis of existence towards Hegel's philosophy of history and the dialectics of Marx and Engels. That attempt is "Heideggerian Marxism", and in One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse later recast the concepts of inauthenticity and falling as a critique of the consumer world of late capitalism. This line is treated more fully in the entry Dasein.
Criticism targeted the language and the politics. In The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) Theodor W. Adorno called Heidegger's style a "jargon" that quietly bent everyday words to spread a certain way of thinking. As the English Wikipedia summarises, he accused Heidegger of evading ethical judgement by presenting "authenticity" as a value-free technical term. In The Destruction of Reason György Lukács placed Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in the continuation of the philosophy of life, on the line of irrationalism running from Schelling and Nietzsche to the Nazis. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarks that some of Lukács's arguments against Heidegger resemble Adorno's critique.
How the book connects with Heidegger's collaboration with the Nazis in 1933 is still disputed. Some read it politically, pointing to its lack of any ethics and to passages that overlap with the vocabulary of the Conservative Revolution; other scholars reply that the book contains no Nazi concepts and call such readings retrospective. Jean-Paul Sartre built on the book in Being and Nothingness, but Heidegger himself rejected the existentialist interpretation in his "Letter on Humanism" of 1946. In his own eyes the book was still too centred on the human being, and after the so-called "turn" he approached being by another road.