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Heidegger's Being and Time


Reiner Schürmann


Introduction: situating Being and Time


The common thesis: Being and Time and the philosophy of subjectivity


Since its appearance in 1927, it has remained unclear what kind of book Being and Time is. Between the wars there were at least two prominent misreadings. The first we might call the "existentialist misunderstanding". Being and Time was read as if Heidegger wanted to express certain moods of absurdity predominant after the catastrophes that followed World War I. This is the reading from which Sartre took his lead, selecting some themes from Being and Time—Being-towards-death, dread, etc.—and developing them into a so-called "ontology of human existence".1 The second misreading could be labeled the "anthropological misunderstanding" of Being and Time. Husserl wrote on the first page of his copy of Being and Time: "Ist das nicht Anthropologie?". The names under which this type of reading long survived are Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Erich Rothacker. Certainly one must concede that Being and Time lies at the origin of what was called existentialism and that it significantly modified philosophical anthropology; yet, strictly speaking, it belongs in neither of these two categories.

Since the 1950s, a new thesis has emerged.2 What Heidegger aimed at overcoming in Being and Time was the traditional understanding of man as one entity, one res, among others—endowed, not with chlorophyll as some plants, nor with wings or fins as some animals, but with "animal rationale". Man is that living being that possesses reason (or speech, since this is the Latin version of Aristotle's ζῷον λόγον ἔχον). Quite correctly, Being and Time was and continues to be seen as an attack against the uncritical division of things into those that are merely physical and those that also have a mind, into extended things and thinking things. This view, also correctly, emphasizes the concept of Dasein to show that it is polemically oriented against the picture whereby what is proper to man is wholly constituted by man's "specific difference" within a greater genus.