Summary: Being and Time

Being and Time is an unfinished work, and yet it aroused keen interest as soon as it was published. It was quickly understood that we were faced with a new way of doing philosophy; before our very eyes, a free-thinking mind was unfolding, forging its own terms, legitimising them, going back to the most originary Greek thought while drawing on contemporary doctrines such as phenomenology.

Just as it took humanity several centuries to receive the works of Plato and Aristotle, to ponder them, to let them ripen and to make them its own, it will probably take several centuries to grasp the full scope of the contribution of Being and Time, in all its radical and unprecedented novelty.

After finishing the work, one can only agree with the judgement of one of its translators, Emmanuel Martineau: Sein und Zeit is the masterpiece of this century.

And yet many difficulties surround the reading and discovery of Heidegger, difficulties we can only urge you to overcome. The best way forward is probably to summarise them briefly and try to remove these obstacles.

First of all, Heidegger seriously compromised himself with the Nazi regime. He joined the party in 1933 and remained a member until the end in 1945. He gave his brother a copy of Mein Kampf and agreed to become rector of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1933, when Hitler came to power. Even though he resigned the following year, he nonetheless benefited in his academic career from the purge policy initiated by the Nazis. What is particularly troubling is that he seems to have started to distance himself from the party only after the defeat at Stalingrad, which suggests a purely opportunistic and pragmatic about-face.

As a result, a fierce debate has set in between Heideggerians and those who refused to see Nazism introduced into philosophy, such as Emmanuel Faye; the former have sometimes tended to play down the problem, or even to deny it. The publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014 finally brought the debate to a close, since in this collection we find reflections marked by an undeniable antisemitism, fully in line with the clichés of the time.

All this must be kept in mind when reading Heidegger; we must not lapse into a blissfully naïve hagiography that would deny this dark side. He has to be read as we read Céline, with all the precautions and prudence that this calls for. But he has to be read, on pain of missing one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. This dark side cannot efface his genius; these two aspects of one and the same man belong to different planes.

The second difficulty is linked to the divide that has split philosophy since the twentieth century, opposing on the one hand so-called ‘continental’ philosophy and, on the other, Anglo-American analytic philosophy. For those who adopt the analytic approach, the doctrines of ‘continental’ philosophers (French, German, and so on), such as Hegel, are in fact devoid of meaning. Philosophy, they hold, should devote itself to other tasks, such as the logical analysis of statements.

Heidegger has been one of the targets of this movement from the outset: in the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, Carnap mocks Heidegger’s statement the nothing nihilates, showing through logical analysis that this pseudo-metaphysical sentence has in fact no meaning at all and merely reveals a logical deficiency in language¹.

A reader influenced by this tradition will struggle to set out on a journey into Heidegger’s thought. The gulf that separates these two conceptions of philosophy is so wide that the book will tend to slip from his or her hands. We can only urge such a reader to persevere, to take an interest in a wholly different way of doing philosophy, and thereby to overcome this final obstacle.

Now that these difficulties have been raised, we can turn to the question: what is the general project that guided the writing of Being and Time?

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Heidegger: A Close Reading