The historical context of philosophy has often provided prescriptions through the construction of ontology during periods of turmoil. During the interwar period, Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" might have emerged in a similar context. Barbaric violence shattered trust in reason and the world painstakingly built by Western civilization, leading once again to the fundamental question, "What is Being?" (Heidegger 1985). Perhaps, as the rational and independent individual presupposed by Western philosophy—the subject Immanuel Kant desperately sought in "What is Enlightenment?"—was already fading, the question may have been more of a cry of despair (Kant 1784).