While working as an unsalaried associate professor at the University of Freiburg, teaching mostly courses in Aristotelianism and Scholastic philosophy, he earned his habilitation with a thesis on the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus in In , he came to know personally the Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl who had joined the Freiburg faculty, and who took the promising young Heidegger under his wing.
In , he married Elfriede Petri , an attractive economics student and Protestant with known anti-Semitic views, who would remain at his side for the rest of his life, despite the very "open" nature of the marriage. In , though, he was again called up for military duty , and, although he managed to avoid front-line service for as long as possible, he did serve as an army meteorologist near the western front during the last three months of the war.
After the end of the War, in , he broke definitively with Catholicism , and returned to Freiburg as a salaried senior assistant to Husserl until He did not approve of Husserl 's later developments, however, and soon began to radically reinterpret his Phenomenology.
In , he was elected to an extraordinary professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg , although whenever he could he made his way back to his " spiritual home " deep in the Black Forest, and he maintained a simple rustic cabin there for the rest of his life. During his time at Marburg, he had extramarital affairs with at least two of his students, Hannah Arendt - and Elisabeth Blochmann - , both philosophers in their own right, and both Jewish Arendt was later to achieve world fame through her commentaries on the evils of Nazism.
In , he published "Sein und Zeit" "Being and Time" , his first publication since , which soon became recognized as a truly epoch-making work of 20th Century philosophy. The book made Heidegger famous almost overnight and was widely read by educated men and women throughout Germany.
It earned him a full professorship at Marburg and, soon after, on Husserl 's retirement from teaching in , the chair of philosophy at Freiburg University which he accepted, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg.
He remained at Freiburg for most of the rest of his life , declining offers from other universities, including one from the prestigious University of Berlin. With Adolph Hitler 's rise to power in , Heidegger who had previously shown little interest in politics joined the Nazi party , and was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg his inaugural address , the "Rektoratsrede" , has become notorious.
During this period, he not only cooperated with the educational policies of the National Socialist government, but also offered it his enthusiastic public support , helping to legitimize the Nazi regime with his own worldwide prestige and influence. One of the most prominent victims of his malicious, and often unfounded, denunciations was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Hermann Staudinger.
Heidegger technically resigned his position at Freiburg in , and took a much less overtly political position thereafter, although he remained a member of the academic faculty and he retained his Nazi party membership until it was disbanded the end of World War II despite some covert criticism of Nazi ideology and even a period of time under the surveillance of the Gestapo.
During the later s and s sometimes referred to as "the turn" , his writings became less systematic and often more obscure , and he developed a preoccupation with the question of language , a fascination with poetry , a concern with modern technology , as well as a new-found respect for the early Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.
He himself always denied any "turn", arguing that it was simply a matter of going yet more deeply into the same matters. At the end of the War, Heidegger returned to Freiburg to face the accusations of the French occupying force and the University's own denazification commission. Yet, by asking the question of being, we can at least attempt to free ourselves from our historical conditioning. It means turning oneself into being in its disclosing withdrawal. Heidegger never claimed that his philosophy was concerned with politics.
Nevertheless, there are certainly some political implications of his thought. He perceives the metaphysical culture of the West as a continuity. It begins with Plato and ends with modernity, and the dominance of science and technology. He turns to the Presocratics in order to retrieve a pre-metaphysical mode of thought that would serve as a starting point for a new beginning. However, his grand vision of the essential history of the West and of western nihilism can be questioned.
Modernity, whose development involves not only a technological but also a social revolution, which sets individuals loose from religious and ethnic communities, from parishes and family bonds, and which affirms materialistic values, can be regarded as a radical departure from earlier classical and Christian traditions.
Christianity challenges the classical world, while assimilating some aspects of it, and is in turn challenged by modernity. Modernity overturns the ideas and values of the traditional Christian and classical culture of the West, and, once it becomes global, leads to the erosion of nonwestern traditional cultures.
Under the cover of immense speculative depth and rich ontological vocabulary full of intricate wordplay both which make his writings extremely hard to follow Heidegger expresses a simple political vision. He wants to overturn the traditional culture of the West and build it anew on the basis of earlier traditions in the name of being.
Like other thinkers of modernity, he adopts a Eurocentric perspective and sees the revival of German society as a condition for the revival of Europe or the West , and that of Europe as a condition for the revival of for the whole world; like them, while rejecting God as an end, he attempts to set up fabricated ends for human beings.
The greatness of what is to be thought is too great. He invokes the concept of the ancient polis. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the poems of Hesiod, and the tragedies of Sophocles, as well as the other ancient Greek texts, including the monumental political work of Thucydides, the History of the Peloponnesian War , express concerns with ethical behavior at both the individual and community levels.
Furthermore, the strength of Western civilization, insofar as its roots can be traced to ancient Greece, is that from its beginning it was based on rationality, understood as free debate, and the affirmation of fundamental moral values. Whenever it turned to irrationality and moral relativism, as in Nazism and Communism, that civilization was in decline. Therefore, Heidegger is likely to be mistaken in his diagnosis of the ills of the contemporary society, and his solution to those ills seems to be wrong.
Asking the question of being and, drawing our attention to this question is certainly his significant contribution is an important addition to, but never a replacement for asking moral questions in the spirit of rationality and freedom. The human being is the unique being whose being has the character of openness toward Being. But men and women can also turn away from being, forget their true selves, and thus deprive themselves of their humanity.
At the beginning of the tradition of Western philosophy, the human being was defined as animal rationale , the animal endowed with reason. Since then, reason has become an absolute value which through education brings about a gradual transformation of all spheres of human life.
It is not more reason in the modern sense of calculative thinking, Heidegger believes, that we need today, but more openness toward and more reflection on that which is nearest to us—being. The Gesamtausgabe , which is not yet complete and projected to fill about one hundred volumes, is published by Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main.
Below there is a list of the collected works of Martin Heidegger. English translations and publishers are cited with each work translated into English. Martin Heidegger — Martin Heidegger is widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20 th century, while remaining one of the most controversial.
The Quest for the Meaning of Being Throughout his long academic career, Heidegger was preoccupied with the question of the meaning of being. Every age, every human epoch, no matter however different they may be— Greece after the Presocratics, Rome, the Middle Ages, modernity—has asserted a metaphysics and, therefore, is placed in a specific relationship to what-is as a whole. From the First Beginning to the New Beginning Many scholars perceive something unique in the Greek beginning of philosophy.
From Philosophy to Political Theory Heidegger never claimed that his philosophy was concerned with politics. Sein und Zeit Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik Holzwege Krell and Frank A. I, Nietzsche I II, Nietzsche II Capuzzi in Early Greek Thinking. Was heisst Denken?
Translated as What Is Called Thinking? Wieck and J. Wegmarken Translated as Pathmarks. Der Satz vom Grund Unterwegs zur Sprache Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens Zur Sache des Denkens Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges Lectures from Marburg and Freiburg, Der Beginn der neuzeitlichen Philosophie winter semester, Aristoteles: Rhetorik summer semester, Platon: Sophistes winter semester, Prolegomena zur Geschite des Zeitbegriffs summer semester, Logik: Die frage nach der Wahrheit winter semester Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie summer semester Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas v.
Aquin bis Kant winter semester Einleitung in die Philosophie winter semester Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie summer semester, Aristoteles: Metaphysik IX summer semester, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Sein und Wahrheit winter semester, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache summer semester, Die Frage nach dem Ding. Being and Time —5.
A piece of data cited by Dreyfus helps to illuminate this idea. Each society seems to have its own sense of what counts as an appropriate distance to stand from someone during verbal communication, and this varies depending on whether the other person is a lover, a friend, a colleague, or a business acquaintance, and on whether communication is taking place in noisy or quiet circumstances. Such standing-distance practices are of course normative, in that they involve a sense of what one should and shouldn't do.
And the norms in question are culturally specific. This explains the following striking remark. This all throws important light on the phenomenon of world, since we can now see that the crucial for-the-sake-of-which structure that stands at the base of each totality of involvements is culturally and historically conditioned.
The specific ways in which I behave for the sake of being an academic are what one does if one wants to be considered a good academic, at this particular time, in this particular historically embedded culture carrying out research, tutoring students, giving lectures, and so on. Worlds the referential context of significance, networks of involvements are then culturally and historically conditioned, from which several things seem to follow.
First, Dasein's everyday world is, in the first instance, and of its very essence, a shared world. Second, Being-with and Being-in-the-world are, if not equivalent, deeply intertwined. And third, the sense in which worlds are Dasein-dependent involves some sort of cultural relativism, although, as we shall see later, this final issue is one that needs careful interpretative handling.
Critics of the manner in which Heidegger develops the notion of Being-with have often focussed, albeit in different ways, on the thought that Heidegger either ignores or misconceives the fundamental character of our social existence by passing over its grounding in direct interpersonal interaction see e.
From this perspective, the equipmentally mediated discovery of others that Heidegger sometimes describes see above is at best a secondary process that reveals other people only to the extent that they are relevant to Dasein's practical projects. Moreover, Olafson argues that although Heidegger's account clearly involves the idea that Dasein discovers socially shared equipmental meaning which then presumably supports the discovery of other Dasein along with equipment , that account fails to explain why this must be the case.
Processes of direct interpersonal contact e. The obvious move for Heidegger to make here is to claim that the processes that the critics find to be missing from his account, although genuine, are not a priori, transcendental structures of Dasein. If not, then Heidegger's notion of Being-with is at best an incomplete account of our social Being.
In effect, this is a reformulation of the point that Dasein is the having-to-be-open , i. Dasein's existence ek-sistence is thus now to be understood by way of an interconnected pair of three-dimensional unitary structures: thrownness-projection-fallen-ness and disposedness-understanding-fascination. As Dasein, I ineluctably find myself in a world that matters to me in some way or another.
This is what Heidegger calls thrownness Geworfenheit , a having-been-thrown into the world. To make things less abstract, we can note that disposedness is the a priori transcendental condition for, and thus shows up pre-ontologically in, the everyday phenomenon of mood Stimmung.
According to Heidegger's analysis, I am always in some mood or other. Thus say I'm depressed, such that the world opens up is disclosed to me as a sombre and gloomy place. I might be able to shift myself out of that mood, but only to enter a different one, say euphoria or lethargy, a mood that will open up the world to me in a different way. For Heidegger, moods and disposedness are aspects of what it means to be in a world at all, not subjective additions to that in-ness.
Here it is worth noting that some aspects of our ordinary linguistic usage reflect this anti-subjectivist reading. Thus we talk of being in a mood rather than a mood being in us, and we have no problem making sense of the idea of public moods e. In noting these features of moods we must be careful, however. It would be a mistake to conclude from them that moods are external, rather than internal, states.
Nevertheless, the idea that moods have a social character does point us towards a striking implication of Heidegger's overall framework: with Being-in-the-world identified previously as a kind of cultural co-embeddedness, it follows that the repertoire of world-disclosing moods in which I might find myself will itself be culturally conditioned. Dasein confronts every concrete situation in which it finds itself into which it has been thrown as a range of possibilities for acting onto which it may project itself.
Insofar as some of these possibilities are actualized, others will not be, meaning that there is a sense in which not-Being a set of unactualized possibilities of Being is a structural component of Dasein's Being. Out of this dynamic interplay, Dasein emerges as a delicate balance of determination thrownness and freedom projection. The projective possibilities available to Dasein are delineated by totalities of involvements, structures that, as we have seen, embody the culturally conditioned ways in which Dasein may inhabit the world.
Understanding is the process by which Dasein projects itself onto such possibilities. Crucially, understanding as projection is not conceived, by Heidegger, as involving, in any fundamental way, conscious or deliberate forward-planning. The primary realization of understanding is as skilled activity in the domain of the ready-to-hand, but it can be manifested as interpretation, when Dasein explicitly takes something as something e. NB: assertion of the sort indicated here is of course just one linguistic practice among many; it does not in any way exhaust the phenomenon of language or its ontological contribution.
Another way of putting the point that culturally conditioned totalities of involvements define the space of Dasein's projection onto possibilities is to say that such totalities constitute the fore-structures of Dasein's practices of understanding and interpretation, practices that, as we have just seen, are projectively oriented manifestations of the taking-as activity that forms the existential core of Dasein's Being.
Thrownness and projection provide two of the three dimensions of care. The third is fallen-ness. Such fallen-ness into the world is manifested in idle talk roughly, conversing in a critically unexamined and unexamining way about facts and information while failing to use language to reveal their relevance , curiosity a search for novelty and endless stimulation rather than belonging or dwelling , and ambiguity a loss of any sensitivity to the distinction between genuine understanding and superficial chatter.
Each of these aspects of fallen-ness involves a closing off or covering up of the world more precisely, of any real understanding of the world through a fascination with it. Here, in dramatic language, is how he makes the point. In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This analysis opens up a path to Heidegger's distinction between the authentic self and its inauthentic counterpart.
Moreover, as a mode of the self, fallen-ness is not an accidental feature of Dasein, but rather part of Dasein's existential constitution. It is a dimension of care, which is the Being of Dasein. So, in the specific sense that fallen-ness the they-self is an essential part of our Being, we are ultimately each to blame for our own inauthenticity Sheehan So authenticity is not about being isolated from others, but rather about finding a different way of relating to others such that one is not lost to the they-self.
It is in Division 2 of Being and Time that authenticity, so understood, becomes a central theme. As the argument of Being and Time continues its ever-widening hermeneutic spiral into Division 2 of the text, Heidegger announces a twofold transition in the analysis. He argues that we should i pay proper heed to the thought that to understand Dasein we need to understand Dasein's existence as a whole , and ii shift the main focus of our attention from the inauthentic self the they-self to the authentic self the mine-self Being and Time Both of these transitions figure in Heidegger's discussion of death.
So far, Dasein's existence has been understood as thrown projection plus falling. The projective aspect of this phenomenon means that, at each moment of its life, Dasein is Being-ahead-of-itself, oriented towards the realm of its possibilities, and is thus incomplete.
Death completes Dasein's existence. Therefore, an understanding of Dasein's relation to death would make an essential contribution to our understanding of Dasein as a whole.
But now a problem immediately presents itself: since one cannot experience one's own death, it seems that the kind of phenomenological analysis that has hitherto driven the argument of Being and Time breaks down, right at the crucial moment. One possible response to this worry, canvassed explicitly by Heidegger, is to suggest that Dasein understands death through experiencing the death of others. However, the sense in which we experience the death of others falls short of what is needed.
We mourn departed others and miss their presence in the world. But that is to experience Being-with them as dead, which is a mode of our continued existence.
The greater the phenomenal appropriateness with which we take the no-longer-Dasein of the deceased, the more plainly is it shown that in such Being-with the dead, the authentic Being-come-to-an-end of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience. Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain.
What we don't have, then, is phenomenological access to the loss of Being that the dead person has suffered. But that, it seems, is precisely what we would need in order to carry through the favoured analysis. So another response is called for. Heidegger's move is to suggest that although Dasein cannot experience its own death as actual, it can relate towards its own death as a possibility that is always before it—always before it in the sense that Dasein's own death is inevitable.
Peculiarly among Dasein's possibilities, the possibility of Dasein's own death must remain only a possibility, since once it becomes actual, Dasein is no longer. And it is this awareness of death as an omnipresent possibility that cannot become actual that stops the phenomenological analysis from breaking down. The detail here is crucial. My death is mine in a radical sense; it is the moment at which all my relations to others disappear. When I take on board the possibility of my own not-Being, my own being-able-to-Be is brought into proper view.
Hence my awareness of my own death as an omnipresent possibility discloses the authentic self a self that is mine. Moreover, the very same awareness engages the first of the aforementioned transitions too: there is a sense in which the possibility of my not existing encompasses the whole of my existence Hinman , , and my awareness of that possibility illuminates me, qua Dasein, in my totality.
Indeed, my own death is revealed to me as inevitable, meaning that Dasein is essentially finite. Care is now interpreted in terms of Being-towards-death, meaning that Dasein has an internal relation to the nothing i. As one might expect, Heidegger argues that Being-towards-death not only has the three-dimensional character of care, but is realized in authentic and inauthentic modes.
Let's begin with the authentic mode. We can think of the aforementioned individualizing effect of Dasein's awareness of the possibility of its own not-Being an awareness that illuminates its own being-able-to-Be as an event in which Dasein projects onto a possible way to be, in the technical sense of such possibilities introduced earlier in Being and Time.
It is thus an event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of-which, a possible way to be. More particularly, given the authentic character of the phenomenon, it is an event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of- itself.
Heidegger now coins the term anticipation to express the form of projection in which one looks forward to a possible way to be. Given the analysis of death as a possibility, the authentic form of projection in the case of death is anticipation. Indeed Heidegger often uses the term anticipation in a narrow way, simply to mean being aware of death as a possibility.
But death is disclosed authentically not only in projection the first dimension of care but also in thrownness the second dimension. The key phenomenon here is the mode of disposedness that Heidegger calls anxiety. Anxiety, at least in the form in which Heidegger is interested, is not directed towards some specific object, but rather opens up the world to me in a certain distinctive way. When I am anxious I am no longer at home in the world.
I fail to find the world intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense one to do with intelligibility in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of a world without me the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world is revealed to me. Heidegger has now reinterpreted two of the three dimensions of care, in the light of Dasein's essential finitude. But now what about the third dimension, identified previously as fallen-ness? Since we are presently considering a mode of authentic, i.
This is an issue that will be addressed in the next section. First, though, the inauthentic form of Being-towards-death needs to be brought into view. In everyday Being-towards-death, the self that figures in the for-the-sake-of-itself structure is not the authentic mine-self, but rather the inauthentic they-self. It is in this evasion in the face of death, interpreted as a further way in which Dasein covers up Being, that everyday Dasein's fallen-ness now manifests itself.
To be clear: evasion here does not necessarily mean that I refuse outright to acknowledge that I will someday die. However, the certainty of death achieved by idle talk of this kind is of the wrong sort. One might think of it as established by the conclusion of some sort of inductive inference from observations of many cases of death the deaths of many others.
The certainty brought into view by such an inference is a sort of empirical certainty, one which conceals the apodictic character of the inevitability with which my own death is authentically revealed to me Being and Time In addition, as we have seen, according to Heidegger, my own death can never be actual for me, so viewed from my perspective, any case of death, i.
Thus it must be a death that belongs to someone else, or rather, to no one. Inauthenticity in relation to death is also realized in thrownness, through fear , and in projection, through expectation. Fear, as a mode of disposedness, can disclose only particular oncoming events in the world. To fear my own death, then, is once again to treat my death as a case of death. This contrasts with anxiety, the form of disposedness which, as we have seen, discloses my death via the awareness of the possibility of a world in which I am not.
The projective analogue to the fear-anxiety distinction is expectation-anticipation. A mundane example might help to illustrate the generic idea.
When I expect a beer to taste a certain way, I am waiting for an actual event—a case of that distinctive taste in my mouth—to occur. By contrast, when I anticipate the taste of that beer, one might say that, in a cognitive sense, I actively go out to meet the possibility of that taste.
In so doing, I make it mine. Expecting death is thus to wait for a case of death, whereas to anticipate death is to own it. In reinterpreting care in terms of Being-towards-death, Heidegger illuminates in a new way the taking-as structure that, as we have seen, he takes to be the essence of human existence.
Human beings, as Dasein, are essentially finite. And it is this finitude that explains why the phenomenon of taking-as is an essential characteristic of our existence. An infinite Being would understand things directly, without the need for interpretative intercession.
We, however, are Dasein, and in our essential finitude we must understand things in a hermeneutically mediated, indirect way, that is, by taking-as Sheehan What are we to make of Heidegger's analysis of death? Sartre argues that death is the end of such possibilities. A nihilation which itself is no longer a part of my possibilities. Thus death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibilities which is outside my possibilities.
Sartre , If Sartre is right, there is a significant hole in Heidegger's project, since we would be left without a way of completing the phenomenological analysis of Dasein. For further debate over Heidegger's handling of death, see Edwards' , , unsympathetic broadsides alongside Hinman's robust response.
Carel develops an analysis that productively connects Heidegger's and Freud's accounts of death, despite Heidegger's open antipathy towards Freud's theories in general. In some of the most difficult sections of Being and Time , Heidegger now begins to close in on the claim that temporality is the ontological meaning of Dasein's Being as care.
The key notion here is that of anticipatory resoluteness, which Heidegger identifies as an or perhaps the authentic mode of care. As we have seen, anticipation is the form of Being-towards in which one looks forward to a possible way to be. Bringing resoluteness into view requires further groundwork that begins with Heidegger's reinterpretation of the authentic self in terms of the phenomenon of conscience or Being-guilty.
The authentic self is characterized by Being-guilty. This does not mean that authenticity requires actually feeling guilty. Rather, the authentic self is the one who is open to the call of conscience. The inauthentic self, by contrast, is closed to conscience and guilt. It is tempting to think that this is where Heidegger does ethics.
However, guilt as an existential structure is not to be understood as some psychological feeling that one gets when one transgresses some moral code.
Having said that, however, it may be misleading to adopt an ethical register here. For Heidegger, conscience is fundamentally a disclosive rather than an ethical phenomenon. What is more important for the project of Being and Time , then, is the claim that the call of conscience interrupts Dasein's everyday fascination with entities by summoning Dasein back to its own finitude and thereby to authenticity. To see how the call of conscience achieves this, we need to unpack Heidegger's reformulation of conscience in terms of anticipatory resoluteness.
In the by-now familiar pattern, Heidegger argues that conscience Being-guilty has the structure of care. However, there's now a modification to the picture, presumably driven by a factor mentioned earlier, namely that authentic Dasein is not fallen.
Since conscience is a mode of authentic Dasein, fallen-ness cannot be one of the dimensions of conscience. So the three elements of care are now identified as projection, thrownness and discourse. What is discourse? It clearly has something to do with articulation, and it is tempting to make a connection with language, but in truth this aspect of Heidegger's view is somewhat murky.
But this might mean that intelligibility is essentially a linguistic phenomenon; or it might mean that discourse is intelligibility as put into language. There is even room for the view that discourse is not necessarily a linguistic phenomenon at all, but rather any way in which the referential structure of significance is articulated, either by deeds e. But however we settle that point of interpretation, there is something untidy about the status of discourse in relation to fallen-ness and authenticity.
Elsewhere in Being and Time , the text strongly suggests that discourse has inauthentic modes, for instance when it is manifested as idle talk; and in yet other sections we find the claim that fallen-ness has an authentic manifestation called a moment-of-vision e. Regarding the general relations between discourse, fallen-ness and authenticity, then, the conceptual landscape is not entirely clear.
That is why the unitary structure of reticence-guilt-anxiety characterizes the Being of authentic Dasein. So now what of resoluteness? But why do we need a new term? There are two possible reasons for thinking that the relabelling exercise here adds value. Each of these indicates a connection between authenticity and freedom.
Each corresponds to an authentic realization of one of two possible understandings of what Heidegger means by human existence see above. The first take on resoluteness is emphasized by, for example, Gelven , Mulhall and Polt In ordinary parlance, to be resolved is to commit oneself to some project and thus, in a sense, to take ownership of one's life.
Seen like this, resoluteness correlates with the idea that Dasein's existence is constituted by a series of events in which possible ways to be are chosen. At this point we would do well to hesitate. The emphasis on notions such as choice and commitment makes it all too easy to think that resoluteness essentially involves some sort of conscious decision-making.
This occurrence discloses Dasein's essential finitude. What goes for Dasein also goes for many of Heidegger's other concepts. Sometimes this makes Being and Time a very tough read, which is not helped by the fact that Heidegger, more than any other modern philosopher, exploits the linguistic possibilities of his native language, in his case German. Although Macquarrie and Robinson, in their Blackwell English edition, produced one of the classics of modern philosophical translation, reading Being and Time can sometimes feel like wading through a conceptual mud of baroque and unfamiliar concepts.
That said, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death".
Crudely stated, for thinkers like St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, it is through the relation to God that the self finds itself. For Heidegger, the question of God's existence or non-existence has no philosophical relevance.
The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in "becoming who one is" in words of Nietzsche's that Heidegger liked to cite.
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