# Being and Time [[Martin Heidegger]]'s 1927 masterwork — by wide consent the most important and most dangerous philosophy book of the 20th century: the foundation of [[Existentialism]] and post-war [[Continental Philosophy]], and the philosophical quarry from which the reactionary right still mines. ## The argument The question: what does it mean **to be**? Western philosophy, Heidegger charges, forgot the question, treating Being as just another (super-sized) entity. His way in is **Dasein** — the being for whom Being is an issue, i.e., us. The famous analyses follow: being-in-the-world (no Cartesian subject facing objects, but absorbed practical dwelling — the hammer ready-to-hand); **das Man** (the "They"), the anonymous everyone into whose chatter and averageness Dasein falls; **anxiety**, which discloses groundlessness; **being-toward-death**, the ownmost possibility that individualizes; **authenticity** as resolute owning of one's thrownness; and temporality — Dasein *is* time — with existence stretched between thrownness (the past one did not choose) and projection (the future one runs ahead into). The book famously breaks off unfinished. ## Why it matters for this KB Three afterlives. The **existentialist**: [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] built *[[Being and Nothingness]]* from it, and the authenticity vocabulary saturates modern culture, self-help included. The **deconstructive**: [[Jacques Derrida]] turned Heidegger's "destruction" of metaphysics into deconstruction — so both wings of the theory the right attacks descend from this book. The **reactionary**: thrownness, rootedness, the critique of das Man's leveling chatter, and the later technology essays grown from it supply [[Alexander Dugin]] and the [[New Right]] their philosophical depth — authenticity read as the destiny of peoples rather than persons. Whether the Nazi politics is implicit in the ontology (the rootedness, the resolute decision, the contempt for everyday liberality) or a betrayal of it is the permanently open question — see the [[Martin Heidegger]] page for the Black Notebooks evidence. The vault keeps both readings on file because the book's heirs do too. ## See also - [[Martin Heidegger]] — author page with the Nazi question - [[Existentialism]] / [[Continental Philosophy]] — the traditions it founded - [[Edmund Husserl]] — the teacher it transformed (and betrayed) - [[Alexander Dugin]] — the geopolitical appropriation