Quora answer: Was it really necessary for Heidegger to struggle so much with language in order to express the ideas in Being and Time?
First of all Heidegger’s Being and Time is not so different from other German Philosophers. Try reading Kant, Hegel, Husserl, really just pick anyone of them. They are demanding. The real difference is that for Heidegger language really matters and has something to say itself, via its word roots and the multiple meanings of words and the meanings of words that are close cognates even with other Germanic languages. So Heidegger is taking German root words and their meanings seriously and turning it into a technical vocabulary and allowing what language has to say to influence what he says in his philosophy. He has problems inherited from Kant, Hegel, and Husserl that he is working on and he takes seriously what the German language has to “say” about that. He uses the German roots he finds apropos and he converts them into a technical vocabulary to talk about his solutions to the philosophical problems he is attempting to puzzle though. Being and time is just the beginning. It only gets denser from there on in his work, as he listens more and more carefully to what Language has to say . . .