Despite the political controversy that enveloped his life, Heidegger was better known for his metaphysics. Heidegger tried to reorient philosophy. He thought that philosophy since the Greeks had been preoccupied with an off-key question: what exists and what you can know about what exists. Heidegger thought that the question made an unwarranted assumption.

The Platonic way of putting the question about being — as well as Descartes's way of putting it — presupposes a dualism of subject and object. Heidegger rejects this dualism since he rejects the notion of a world external to us as conscious spectators.

Heidegger instead focuses on the question “What is being?” The question derives from a more fundamental one: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Before Heidegger, few had addressed the question. For Heidegger, however, an answer is essential before any other philosophical questions commence.

Heidegger's answer to the question “What is Being?” reverts to what kind of being one is oneself. He attributes to Being the name Dasein — “being there.” This means that Dasein is a perspective from which action originates. Above all, Dasein knows that it is finite and mortal. From this insight arises angst or dread. But a complete awareness of our own mortality is required for us to have a direction or meaning. Self-awareness will result in a life created out of this dread and sense of finitude. In fact, an authentic life depends on realizing that you must make a meaning by your own actions. With his concepts of dread and authenticity, he is not far afield from Camus and Sartre, who had a concept of an authentic life.

The question of why there is something rather than nothing comes back to Dasein. Without Dasein choosing to make something out of nothing, there would be nothing. It sounds like Camus urging us to keep the absurd with us.