Heidegger highlights elements of human being that have been overlooked traditionally or are currently misunderstood. In choosing our way, moreover, we also release other entities in their meaning. He approached the question of being by examining the being of human “being” (or Dasein, to use Heidegger’s term), because we must always determine our own being or possibilities, and thus must understand being itself in some manner. Heidegger was especially concerned to understand the meaning or intelligibility of “being,” because everything we deal with in some way “is.” This concern led to his first and still most significant publication, Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time), in 1927. Heidegger studied the works of the leading German professors during his student and early teaching years (roughly 1910–1925), but he was most influenced by Edmund Husserl, the founder of the “phenomenological” attempt to describe and discuss matters exactly as they present themselves to us, and to clarify who we are and what we take for granted when we allow things to show themselves to us for observation or use. Those who studied with or were significantly influenced by him include many of the best known thinkers of the past seventy-five years: Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans Jonas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacob Klein, Alexandre Kojève, Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Leo Strauss. Heidegger (1889–1976) is arguably the foremost philosopher of the twentieth century and surely the foremost in the continental or European tradition. There can be no substitute for confronting his works directly. A summary can point to several basic phenomena he discusses, but one inevitably first understands these phenomena in ways that Heidegger does not intend. Martin Heidegger’s work is difficult because of its novelty and complexity.
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