Summary: Being and Time

Being and Time is an unfinished work, yet it aroused keen interest from the moment of its publication. It was quickly understood that a new way of doing philosophy had arrived; before our very eyes, a free-thinking mind was unfolding, forging its own terms, legitimising them, reaching 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 more to grasp the full scope of Being and Time's contribution, in all its radical and unprecedented novelty.

Having finished 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 of Heidegger—difficulties we can only urge you to overcome. The best way forward is probably to set them out briefly and try to clear these obstacles from the path.

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 policies initiated by the Nazis. What is particularly troubling is that he seems to have begun distancing himself from the party only after the defeat at Stalingrad—suggesting a purely opportunistic and pragmatic change of course.

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

All this must be borne in mind when reading Heidegger; we must not lapse into a blissfully naïve hagiography that ignores this dark side. He should be read as we read Céline—with all the caution and circumspection that this demands. But he must 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 bound up with the divide that has split philosophy since the twentieth century, setting so-called 'continental' philosophy against Anglo-American analytic philosophy. From the analytic standpoint, the doctrines of 'continental' philosophers—French, German, and others—such as Hegel, are held to be devoid of meaning. Philosophy, on this view, should devote itself to other tasks, such as the logical analysis of statements.

Heidegger has been a target 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 no meaning whatsoever and merely reveals a logical defect of language ¹.

A reader shaped by this tradition will struggle to embark on a journey into Heidegger's thought. The gulf separating these two conceptions of philosophy is so wide that the book will tend to slip from their hands. We can only urge such a reader to persevere, to engage with a wholly different way of doing philosophy, and thereby to overcome this final obstacle.

With these difficulties acknowledged, 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