![]() ![]() He was formulating his approach to the question of Being at the time when he overtly abandoned his Catholic faith (in 1919, at the age of thirty), and he failed to distinguish between the religious and the philosophical issue of Being. The force with which this issue gripped him made it hard for Heidegger to distinguish it from other issues. I felt as though for a moment I had gazed at the foundations of the world. It was not a matter of a system, but of existence. In almost painful brightness the things of the world lay revealed. As one student later described a Heidegger lecture: It was as if a gigantic lightning bolt cut through a sky clothed in darkness. His formulation of it, in his teaching and writing, made an immense impact on many of the most important twentieth-century European thinkers as well as on the general public. Heidegger had an extremely powerful grasp of this issue. In his early work, as expressed in Being and Time, he concentrates on man as the place ( Dasein ) where the question of Being is raised, and in his later work he focuses more directly on Being itself. Everything he wrote, even his commentaries on other writers, got pulled explicitly into that one overriding question. Martin Heidegger was taken by a single issue in his philosophical thinking, the question of Being. Harvard University Press, 474 pages, $24.50 ![]()
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