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It is perhaps not so evident that Being and Time is also a book about the crisis. The word "crisis" itself appears infrequently, and is never used with the same pathos or so clearly in the context of a pervasive crisis of culture as it is by Husserl.¹ Indeed, the tone of Being and Time reveals little of the urgency of Husserl's Crisis-text. This bare fact tells us something important about both the style of Heidegger's crisis-philosophy and the crisis he depicts. First, Heidegger's reflections on the crisis are not conceived within the same "do or die" framework which marks Husserl's thought. In reading Being and Time, one does not get the impression that there is an impending collapse of European culture, nor that this present age is a period of radical choice between reason and irrationality. The citation from Plato's Sophist at the outset of Being and Time suggests that the crisis of the "forgetfulness of Being" is not a particularly recent phenomenon.² It will be indicated in the discussion of Heidegger's view of the genesis of the crisis that he believes its history to be a long one, intimately connected with philosophy, and that this connection seems to arise from the beginning of thought itself.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-2470-6_8

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