Indeed, to my mind, the nature and extent of Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism only becomes philosophically pertinent once one has begun to understand and feel the persuasive power of what takes place in his written work, especially Being and Time. 'I ate the rest of the cake because I was depressed.The hugely important matter of the relation between Heidegger and politics is the topic for another series of blogs entries. These are really two separate ideas, and could be correctly framed by inserting the conjunction 'because' and dropping the awkward phrase 'the reason being that': 'I ate the rest of the cake, the reason being that I was depressed.' There is another occasional, but incorrect, usage where the word 'being' is used as part of a kind of additional dangling phrase that's trying to do the job of a conjunction: 'The ship's captain, being taller than the rest of the crew, was able to reach the swinging cask.' It sometimes appears to start an adjectival phrase, which is a phrase that describes something. Note: There is one rather uncommon usage of the word 'being'. The normal and more common form of the present tense in AmE is the present continuous:īritE does the same thing, but the simple present shows up a bit more, just as a variation in usage.

'What kind of work do you do?' 'I feed animals at the zoo.' 'How do you get to work?' 'I ride the bus.' In fact, the simple present tense is only regularly used in one way - to reflect an ongoing, regular activity. Modern American English relies heavily on present continuous tense verb forms instead of the more mundane present tense. For example: Imperfect I was _being_ careful Note: The verb 'to be' is an additional, unique case where the word 'being' can appear to form these same tenses, but the verb is intransitive. So, the word 'being' shows up most commonly in these two tenses, in the passive form of the verb. Then, the sentences from earlier in these two tenses change to: Imperfect I was _being_ fed Instead of the active form of the verb, 'to feed', we can switch to the passive form, 'to be fed'. Note that 2 of these, the Imperfect and the Present Continuous, use the present participle form of the verb itself, 'feeding'. Present Continuous I am _feeding_ the baby one in which someone does the verb to something) to show the effect of different tenses more clearly: I chose an ordinary transitive verb (one which takes an object, i.e. You are probably familiar with a variety of tenses, but just in case you don't remember their names, here are some refresher examples, for the verb 'feed'. It is helping to create a form of the verb called the present continuous tense. The word 'being' is serving as what's called a present participle in these examples.

Being & time by martin heidegger