Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
Some books, like math theory textbooks, require careful study. And even then, much remains in the way of mastery. Being and Time falls squarely into that category, partly due to its complexity, and partly due to the fact that Heidegger did not care to write well. It isn’t a text that I would have read outside of a course focused only on it with a Heidegger expert, Professor Martin Hägglund. But it is a text well worth reading.
Heidegger is interested in the most elementary philosophical question: How do we experience everyday life as humans? And he doesn’t take an experimental approach. He uses formal logic to dissect the very nature of our being. His deep, philosophical analyses reminds one of experimental and theoretical frameworks, like Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 (fast and slow thinking), or Piaget’s theory of child development.
What stood out to me from Heidegger’s book is the notion of finiteness. He posits that any action we take in life has meaning only because our lives are finite. Taking an action always comes at the cost of time, and there is no way to recover that cost, regardless of who we are.
But Heidegger is not a normative thinker, asking us to focus our energies on good, worthwhile actions. Not in the slightest. He coolly accepts that we have little control over the circumstances in which are born and in which we live our lives. Instead, his book on being offers us an orthogonal choice: to care or not care about what we’re doing.