Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and the Phenomenology of War

Abstract

The article argues that Martin Heidegger’s "Being and Time" is a key source for the Phenomenology of War. Although Heidegger does not offer a phenomenological account of war himself, his ontology provides a conceptual framework for examining how war transforms human existence from within. The analysis focuses on Heideggerian concepts particularly relevant to wartime existence: Dasein, being-in-the-world, being-with, thrownness, fallenness, care, temporality, and being-towards-death. Drawing on these concepts, the article examines how war alters practical agency, disrupts ordinary temporal orientation, transforms relations of trust, solidarity, and enmity, and intensifies the experience of vulnerability and mortality. It argues that war does not create entirely new existential structures but constrains, intensifies, and reconfigures the structures through which Dasein understands itself and its world.