Being and Time

If aliens land and ask me what it’s like to be a human, I’ll give them Heidegger’s first book, Being and Time. Of course, that might prompt them to destroy all humans out of frustration at the difficulty of his writing, but if they persevere, they will find the best description of what it’s like to live out your time on this planet (One Hundred Years of Solitude comes in second).

Heidegger’s Being and Time is the contemporary classic work in transcendental philosophy. Whereas Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology took a Cartesian (René Descartes) point of departure, Heidegger’s phenomenology remained faithful to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In this way, Heidegger’s Being and Time may be understood as addressing all three divisions of philosophical metaphysics from a more contemporary than Kant's point of view. However, Being and Time focuses primarily on cosmological and psychological metaphysics.

Many scholars, including Heidegger himself, have exerted significant effort to make Heidegger’s Being and Time appear as if it were an island regarding philosophical influence. However,… show more.

In Being and Time Heidegger shifts his inquiry from the traditional question 'what is time?' to the question of temporality: 'what does it mean to be as time?' Like Bergson before him, Heidegger considers time as closely tied with human existence. But, for him time is not an internal experience of the consciousness, but rather includes aspects of our existence in the world. I am particularly inspired by his interpretation that goes against our intuitive common view of time where it is closely linked with cosmology, but at the same time offers a view of temporality that is compelling and… show more.