Being and time

The philosophical project that unfolds in Being and Time resists any simple definition and any reduction to a position. None of the usual interpretive techniques seem to help one approach this unusual text, even the effort to situate it in the context of a larger tradition and other texts is difficult. At the outset however, one might get the impression that Being and Time can be located in a long and well-defined metaphysical tradition: it opens with its dedication to Heidegger's teacher, Husserl, moves to a citation from Plato's Sophist , and then, in the "Introduction," mention is made of a wide range of philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, Suarez, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Husserl. While it might seem that by doing this Heidegger locates his own work with reference to other works that have come to define a sort of orthodox philosophical canon, one soon learns that these references provide almost no help in situating the project of Being and Time . Adding to the sense that all of the markers that might orient the reader of this text offer no help whatsoever, one finds that the abundance of neologisms populating Being and Time constantly remind one that Heidegger finds the language of philosophy that he has inherited insufficient for "the business of philosophy [namely] to preserve the power of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself" (GA 2, 220/ BT, 211). Even the key terms of Husserl's phenomenology"”a philosopher and a methodology to which Heidegger pays explicit homage"”are largely abandoned in Being and Time . So, in the "Introduction""”when one is searching for an orientation or context with which one might approach this text"” one finds an unsettled and quite complicated sense of just how one is to enter into the philosophical project of Being and Time . From the beginning Being and Time seems determined to disorient its readers. In its efforts to set itself apart from philosophical traditions and languages, and to resist any easy appropriation into well-established contexts, Being and Time quietly announces the radicality of its own intentions.