Appreciate Heidegger's phenomenal (see what I did there) insight into the human condition, and you will never look at life, time, the world, concern, other people, a hammer, language, reality, and death in the same way again. Make no mistake, this is still hard-core philosophy, but it is a book about the many banalities of the average human life, and thus, about the many hidden profundities of the average human life. But this also means that Being and Time is a primordially 'humane' book, for it was Heidegger who truly brought the existentialist consciousness to the fore of our developing consciousness as a species. It is a provocative assault, which may account for the polarizing reactions that Heidegger seems to evoke.
This means that the scope of ambition of Heidegger's project is staggering he intends to determine WHAT a human being IS, by HOW it is and this means that he not only takes on a nearly 2000-year-old philosophical tradition, but also a nearly 2000-year-old deeply embedded conception of what a human being is (and by extension, what a human being should be). 'To the phenomena themselves') and therefore refuses any recourse to anything that is outside the scope of what is immediately apparent in the one thing that human beings often overlook, that is to say, human existence itself.
Heidegger's main focus is on Being what does it MEAN to be? This is of course an old question, stemming from the days of Aristotle, but Heidegger is foremost a phenomenologist (i.e. Even if you are one of the many detractors, the fact remains that it is simply an outstanding monument to man's ability to think deeply, freshly, terrifyingly, and poetically about himself. The most important philosophical work of the 20th century, and a text whose influence will still be felt for some centuries to come, I am willing to reckon.
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