Being and Time Dennis J. Schmidt praises the "range and subtlety" of "Being and Time", and describes its importance by quoting a comment the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made in a different context, "from here and today a new epoch of world history sets forth." Heidegger has become common background for the political movement concerned with protection of the environment, and his narrative of the history of Being frequently appears when capitalism, consumerism and technology are thoughtfully opposed. Michael E. Zimmerman writes that, "Because he criticized technological modernity’s domineering attitude toward nature, and because he envisioned a postmodern era in which people
Nikolas Kompridis University, Kompridis worked with the influential philosopher and Frankfurt School social theorist Jürgen Habermas while a post-doctoral fellow at Goethe University. Following his time with Habermas he wrote a book responding to what he saw as serious shortcomings and inconsistencies in his mentor's work. In "Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future", Kompridis argues that Habermasian critical theory, which has in recent decades become the main paradigm of that tradition, has largely severed its own roots in German Idealism, while neglecting modernity's distinctive relationship to time and the utopian potential of critique. While drawing on many of Habermas'