Heidegger asked the question he thought everyone else had forgotten: what does it mean to be? Not to be a thing, or a mind, or a social role, but to exist at all: to be thrown into a world not of your choosing, understanding yourself only partially, moving toward a death that cannot be shared or deferred. Being and Time, published in 1927, analyzes the structure of human existence through anxiety, care, temporality, and authenticity: the possibility of owning one's life rather than letting it be lived by convention and distraction. It changed phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language. In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party and became Rector of Freiburg University. He never adequately explained this. His later work, on technology, language, and the withdrawal of Being, is read and argued over. The question of how the most important ontologist of the century could have done what he did has no satisfying answer.
Being and Time appeared in 1927, when Heidegger was thirty-seven and teaching at Marburg. Written under pressure to produce publications, it transformed twentieth-century philosophy. Its central question, the meaning of Being, had not been seriously asked since the Greeks, Heidegger argued, and answering it required taking apart the tradition that had forgotten it.
Words
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
