Sein und Zeit
1927
- espace et temps
- ontologie
- existentialism
- space and time
- dictionaries, indexes
- dasein
- ontology
- zeit
- fundamentalontologie
- metaphysics
The story
What is the meaning of being?" This is the central question of Martin Heidegger's profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism -- as well as existentialism and much of postmodern though.
What it’s like
Dense, unhurried, and austere: this is a book to read at a wooden desk with a lamp on and the house quiet, the kind of text where a single paragraph can take an evening. The prose is German philosophy in translation at its most deliberate, full of hyphenated coinages, italicised terms, and long recursive sentences that circle a question rather than answering it. Nothing here is visual in the usual sense, so the sensory world is conceptual: a grey interior of argument, with the occasional bright flash of a concrete image (a hammer in use, a street, the weather of everyday worry) that lands like a window opening in a stone room. The mood is sober, cool and contemplative, with a steady undertow of unease about how ordinary life hides its own depths. Its arc is intellectual rather than personal, moving from the question of what it means to be at all toward the finitude and temporality of human existence. There is no violence, sexual content, or fear beyond existential disquiet; the intensity is entirely cerebral and asks for sustained attention. It suits readers who want rigorous, slow philosophy, students of phenomenology and existentialism, and anyone who enjoys a demanding book that rewards patience.
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