Heidegger: Being and Time

The early existential analytic

A course on the thought of Martin Heidegger.

What you will learn

  • Grasp the question of the meaning of Being and why Heidegger says it was forgotten.
  • Understand the ontological difference (beings vs. Being) and why Dasein is the entity through which the question must be asked.
  • Understand being-in-the-world as Dasein's basic state — not subject-and-object but absorbed involvement.
  • Grasp ready-to-hand vs. present-at-hand, and what the broken tool reveals.
  • Understand das Man (the 'they') and how it shapes everyday selfhood.
  • Grasp leveling-down, idle talk, and the loss of the self into anonymity — without reading it as mere snobbery.
  • Understand anxiety (Angst) as objectless dread that discloses Being-in-the-world as such.
  • Grasp being-toward-death as Dasein's ownmost possibility — and why facing it can individualize and free.

Course outline

  1. The Question of Being — Heidegger reopens the oldest and most forgotten question — not what things are, but what it means that anything IS at all — and finds we must ask it through the one being who can: ourselves.
  2. Being-in-the-World — We are not minds in boxes peering out at a world of objects. We are always already absorbed in a world of work — and Heidegger proves it with a hammer.
  3. Das Man — The 'They' — Who are you, in your average day? Mostly not 'I' but 'one' — you do what one does, want what one wants. Heidegger names this anonymous master das Man, the 'they.'
  4. Anxiety and Being-toward-Death — A dread that has no object, in which the world goes uncanny — and the one possibility that is unmistakably my own: my death. For Heidegger, facing it is not morbid but the door to a life that is mine.
  5. Conscience, Authenticity, Resoluteness — A silent call — not morality, not guilt over deeds — summons you out of the 'they' to your own existence. To answer it is what Heidegger means by being authentic: not better behaviour, but owning the…
  6. Care and Temporality — One name holds the whole analytic together — care — and beneath it lies the deepest claim of all: that the being of the human, and the meaning of Being itself, is to be sought in TIME.

Works read in this course

  • Being and Time — Heidegger's 1927 masterwork — the unfinished analytic of Dasein and the attempt to reopen the question of the meaning of Being.
  • Introduction to Metaphysics — A 1935 lecture course opening on the deepest question — why is there anything at all? — and the 'oblivion of Being.'
  • History of the Concept of Time — The 1925 lecture course (GA20) that is, in effect, an early draft of Being and Time.
  • The Basic Problems of Phenomenology — The 1927 lectures (GA24) that take up the questions Being and Time left unfinished.

Part of the Simposeum course library.