In this respect Steiner compared it to Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia (1918), Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (1921), Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans (1922), and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925).

The critic George Steiner argues that Being and Time is a product of the crisis of German culture following Germany's defeat in World War I. Almost all central concepts of Being and Time are derived from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard, according to Christian Lotz. Similarly, Hubert Dreyfus likens Division II of the volume to a secularized version of Kierkegaard's Christianity. Caputo notes that Heidegger made a systematic study of Luther in the 1920s after training for 10 years as a Catholic theologian. The book is likened to a secularized version of Martin Luther's project, which aimed to turn Christian theology back to an earlier and more “original” phase. The human condition is portrayed as 'essentially a curse.” Wolin cites the work's extended emphasis on “emotionally laden concepts” like guilt, conscience, angst and death. Wolin writes that Being and Time is 'suffused by a sensibility derived from secularized Protestantism” and its stress on original sin. 'Elitist complaints about the 'dictatorship of public opinion' were common currency to the German mandarins of the twenties,' according to J. Richard Wolin notes that the work 'implicitly adopted the critique of mass society” epitomized earlier by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The book attempts to revive ontology through an analysis of Dasein, or 'being-in-the-world.' It is also noted for an array of neologisms and complex language, as well as an extended treatment of ' authenticity' as a means to grasp and confront the unique and finite possibilities of the individual. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual history has been compared with works by Kant and Hegel. Being and Time had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. 1962: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinsonĥ89 (Macquarrie and Robinson translation)ĩ78-1-4384-3276-2 (State University of New York Press edition)īeing and Time ( German: Sein und Zeit) is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism.

Being and time joan stambaugh