ALTHOUGH IT MAY WELL BE the most important book in twentieth-century philosophy, Being and Time remains a fragment. “This astonishing torso,” as Herbert Spiegelberg called it, was judged by its own author to be an immature, premature thought-path. “The fundamental flaw of the book Being and Time is perhaps that I ventured forth too far too soon.”1 This remark alludes to the hastiness of the book’s publication. Heidegger began to think through the issues in the “war emergency semester” of 1919,2 began to write his book in 1923-1924 in the form of a long (and unpublished) journal article on the concept of time,3 and presented the structure of its first division in his lecture course of the summer semester of 1925.4 But he finished the final version of the first two divisions of the text in only a few months of 1926, under intense academic publishing pressure.5 The “first half” of Being and Time appeared as a separate volume in April 1927, and one month later, together with only one other text (Oskar Becker’s Mathematische Existenz) in Husserl’s Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung.
But why was the “second half” never published? Why was the text of this planned two-volume work, which Heidegger sketched in its entirety in an outline,6 interrupted in the course of its composition, even before the appearance of the first volume? In the following decades, Heidegger often told the story of this interruption, and usually referred in this context to the various misinterpretations of Being and Time as anthropology, ontology of the human being, and existential philosophy. The failure to recognize the book’s intention as fundamental ontology might well have been prevented or diminished with the timely appearance of the missing third division of Part One. We will cite the best-known story7 along with some important supplements, in order to gain some anecdotal indications of the content of the missing division.
Furthermore, the understanding of the “concept of existence” used in Being and Time is made difficult by the fact that the existential concept of existence appropriate to Being and Time [i.e., “man’s being-a-self, insofar as it . . . relates to being and to the relation to being”: GA 49, earlier on p. 39] was first developed in full in the division that as a consequence of the interruption of the publication was not communicated; for the third division of Part One, “Time and Being,” proved during the typesetting to be unsatisfactory. [“And at the same time, external circumstances (the excessive length of the Jahrbuch volume) fortunately prevented the publication of this section.”8] The decision to break up the text was made [in the first days of January 1927—T.K.] during a visit to Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg, where it became clear to me from our lively, friendly arguments based on the proof sheets of Being and Time that the elaboration I had attained thus far of this most important division (1.3) would have been unintelligible. The decision to break up the publication was made on the day that the news of the death of Rilke reached us. [“A conversation about Rilke on the same day made especially clear to me that the fundamental position of Being and Time was irreconcilably different from both Rilke and Jaspers.”9] [“The attempt”—in its first execution, T.K.—“was ‘destroyed,’10 but a new start was made, on a more historical path, in the lecture course of summer semester 1927.”11] Still, I was of the opinion at the time that I would be able to say everything more clearly over the course of the year. That was an illusion. So the succeeding years yielded some publications that attempted to raise the genuine question by circuitous routes. [GA 49, 40]
Being and Time (1927) . . . originated . . . as an initial way of making the question of being visible, as far as possible, from the ground up and at the same time in an actual execution—in the form that essentially leads beyond all former ways of posing the question and yet leads back into the confrontation with the Greeks and with Western philosophy. [GA 66, 413]
Precisely because the way of posing the question of the meaning of being (the truth of the projection of being—not of beings) is other than that of all of metaphysics up to now, this questioning could have shown what it achieves—although what was communicated often says what this questioning intends. For what was unsatisfactory in the section that was held back was not an uncertainty in the direction of questioning and its domain, but only an uncertainty in its proper elaboration. [GA 66, 414]
According to the outline, the final, “systematic,” third division on “Time and Being” was supposed to carry out “the explication of time as the transcendental horizon for the question of being” (SZ 39). One could have expected that this final division of Part One of Being and Time, at least in the transition to the “historical” Part Two with its “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology,” would emphasize the completely different form of its question of being as opposed to “all of metaphysics up to now.” Secure in its revolutionary direction of questioning, but inadequate in its proper elaboration—to the point of being unintelligible for intellects like Rilke and Jaspers: what exactly was unsatisfactory in the third division, which after repeated attempts to formulate it, was never to appear? Heidegger’s explanation in the “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ strikes us as a final summary of these attempts. In this context Heidegger is trying to deflect the misinterpretation of the “projection” of the understanding of being as an achievement of subjectivity. It can be thought only as the ecstatic relation to the clearing of being:
The adequate execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being and Time the third division of the first part, “Time and Being,” was withheld (cf. Being and Time, p. [SZ] 39). Here everything is reversed. The division in question was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics. The lecture “On the Essence of Truth,” thought out and delivered in 1930 but not printed until 1943, provides a certain insight into the thinking of the turning from “Being and Time” to “Time and Being.” This turning is not a change of standpoint from Being and Time, but in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the locality of that dimension out of which Being and Time is experienced, that is to say, experienced in the fundamental experience of the oblivion of being.12
The inadequacy of the withheld section lies in the way it speaks of the turn (Kehre). It fails in the attempt to carry out this turn with the help of the language of metaphysics, that is, the language of subject and object, which dominates the grammar of Western languages. That is why the later Heidegger seeks a transformation of the essence of language; he waits for a “language of being” that will indicate the appropriating event (Ereignis) of Seyn and Zeyt,13 an event that does not lie at our disposal. The younger Heidegger was already aware of this problem in Western language. Just before he outlines the general plan of Being and Time he remarks, “For the . . . task [of grasping beings in their being] we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’” (SZ 39). From his review article on “Recent Research on Logic” (1912) to his Habilitationsschrift on the Scotist doctrine of categories and meaning (1915—1916),14 the young Heidegger’s interest revolves around a “logic of philosophy” (as the title of a book by Emil Lask has it),15 which examines the peculiar phenomena at the margins of the ruling grammar of the subject-predicate relation, such as existential statements and impersonal sentences. The logic of philosophical concept formation, which for the neo-Kantian Lask is a transcendental logic, is developed by Heidegger into a phenomenological (hermeneutic-ontological) logic. Already in the war emergency semester of 1919 he replaces the well-known neo-Kantian impersonal expression for the transcendental difference—“It ‘is’ not, but it is valid (or more generally: ‘it values’)”—with newly coined impersonal expressions, which are now really supposed to express an ontological difference: “It ‘is’ not, but it’s worlding, it’s happening, it’s appropriating itself [es er-eignet sich].”16 Thus in Being and Time we find existential-ontological statements such as, “It [temporality] is not, but it temporalizes itself [es zeitigt sich].”17 Likewise, the horizon of this temporality “simply ‘is’ not, but rather it temporalizes itself.”18
Heidegger’s search for a nonobjectifying language of being in the framework of a phenomenological logic of philosophical concept formation becomes particularly clear in the dramatic closing hours of the 1919 war emergency semester.19 Here Heidegger tries to free the main methodological concept of phenomenology, the concept of intentionality, in its application to the primal-something (life in and for itself, lived experience), from all traces of a formal logical misinterpretation as a rigid dualism of subject and object. By objectifying life and handling it theoretically, this misinterpretation leads to a de-vivification, de-historicization, de-interpretation, and de-worlding of life. In its pure phenomenological formality, intentionality is simply a directing-itself-toward. As comportment as such, it is indicated in its pure moment of the formal “toward,” which Heidegger considers the heart, the center, the middle, the origin, the concealed source of life—the inner happening of its being. The toward (das Worauf) of this comportment is initially described as a unitary intentional relation from motivation to tendency and back, in an intentional “circular” motion of “motivated tendency or tending motivation.”20 In Being and Time, “the toward-which [das Woraufhin] of the primary projection” is the meaning of Dasein qua temporality, whose circular motion is redescribed as a thrown projecting of a prestructured context “according to which something becomes comprehensible as something [and] conceived in its possibility” (SZ 324, 151).
Formal indication thus becomes the “methodological secret weapon” in Heidegger’s logic of philosophical concept formation.21 In the published fragment of Being and Time it is mentioned about a half-dozen times without further explanation (SZ 53, 114,116f., 179, 231, 313—15; but also “provisional indication,” 14, 16, 41). Formal indication, as hermeneutic phenomenology’s guiding method for the phenomenology of the phenomenon in a distinctive sense (SZ 35), would have to become a main theme of the third division, to be explicated there in its hermeneutical logic. On the way to Being and Time, Heidegger passes through a series of formal indications, but each should be seen as a formal deepening of the prestruction (Praestruktion) of intentionality, which is understood as pure directing-itself-toward: as an intentionality with the three dimensions of relation sense, content sense, and actualization sense (1920—1922), supplemented with a unifying temporalization sense in 1922; as Da-sein (1923), being-in-the-world (1924), to-be (Zu-sein, 1925), ex-sistence (1926), and transcendence (1927-1929). Thus the pure formula for the structure of care in Being and Time, “ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-amid (entities encountered within-the-world)” (SZ 192), is clearly intentional, in the broader (pretheoretical) sense. The “new start” on Division III “on a more historical path,” in summer semester 1927, thus reaches the following conclusions by way of a series of formal indications: “Intentionality is the ratio cognoscendi of transcendence. Transcendence is the ratio essendi of intentionality in its diverse modes.”22 In Kantian terms, transcendence becomes the condition of the possibility of intentionality.23 As the basic trait of the ontological structure of Dasein, transcendence belongs to the existentiality of existence.24 “On a more historical path” one notices how strongly the features of the formal indications are expressed in a traditional “language of metaphysics.”
Finally, the entire series of formal indications will prove to have “the condition of its possibility in temporality and temporality’s ecstatic-horizonal character.”25 Intentionality, transcendence, existence: at their root they each indicate their temporal structure. What could be more formal in factical life than time? And as regards the function of indication: what could be more concrete and immediate in factical life, what could be nearer to us than time? Ecstatic time is both the ultimate formality of life (being) and the most intimate and immediate nearness of Dasein, facticity as such. In a note that belongs among the new attempts to begin Division III, Heidegger remarks: “temporality: it is not just a fact, but itself the essence of the fact: facticity. The fact of facticity (here the root of the ‘reversal of ontology’). Can one ask, ‘How does time originate?’ . . . Only with time is there a possibility of origination.... But then, what is the meaning of the impossibility of the problem of the origination of time?”26
“That the intentionality of ‘consciousness’ is grounded in the ecstatical unity of Dasein, and how this is the case, will be shown in the following Division” (SZ 363, note). This explicit reference to Division III is further evidence that it would have included a major methodological section on the sense-of-direction (Richtungssinn) of a formally indicative hermeneutics. The same §69 of Being and Time includes a similar reference, but this one refers not only to the “idea of phenomenology, as distinguished from the preliminary conception of it which we indicated by way of introduction [§7],” but also to the corresponding “existential conception of science” and its understanding “of the ontological genesis of the theoretical attitude.” “Yet a fully adequate existential Interpretation of science cannot be carried out until the meaning of being and the ‘connection’ between being and truth have been clarified in terms of the temporality of existence” (SZ 357). And this clarification is the “central problematic” (SZ 357) of Division III. As a preparation for these tasks of the following division, §69c (SZ 364ff.) develops “the temporal problem of the transcendence of the world,” that is, the problem of how the world temporalizes itself as the toward-which of the temporal ecstases into a horizonal unity in accordance with the “horizonal schemata”—the respective “whithers” of the ecstases. The temporal transcendence of the world is thereby founded ecstatically-horizonally. The ecstatical unity of temporality is also designated at the start of §69 as the cleared clearing of Dasein, which grounds the disclosedness of the there (cf. SZ 350f.). The clarification of the connection between being and truth thus begins with Dasein, whose fundamental characteristic is the understanding of being. In turn, the understanding of being is made possible by disclosedness, that is, disposed understanding—dynamically understood as thrown projecting (cf. §44c, SZ 230). The thrown projection that is Dasein in its ek-sistence is ultimately—and so finitely—grounded in ecstatical temporality, in the cleared clearing of the there. In this way time is used as the “preliminary name” for truth, which is now understood as disclosedness, clearing, and unconcealment. “Being [projected as time—T.K.] and truth ‘are’ equiprimordially” (SZ 230).
Placing it within the history of his development, Heidegger understands his lecture course of summer semester 1927 to be a “new elaboration of Division 3 of Part 1 of Being and Time” (ln).27 The course completes only part of the path indicated in Being and Time toward the correlation of being and truth before it is broken off because of the great detour it takes through the history of ontology. The “first and last and basic problem” of a phenomenological science of being is: “How is the understanding of being at all possible?” (15). More explicitly, “Whence—that is, from which antecedently given horizon—do we understand the like of being?” (16). The presupposed analytic of Dasein gives a first answer: “time is the horizon from which something like being becomes understandable at all. We interpret being by way of time (tempus). The interpretation is a Temporal [temporale] one. The fundamental subject of research in ontology... is Temporality [Temporalität]” (17). Ontology is not only a critical and transcendental science (cf. 17), but also a Temporal one (cf. 228), which is hence quite different from all other, so-called positive sciences. But it is like the positive sciences in one way. A positive science must objectify the entities that lie before it upon the latent horizon of their particular being,28 upon the whither of the “projection of the ontological constitution of a region of beings” (321)—their being what and how they are. Similarly, ontology must objectify being itself “upon the horizon of its understandability” (322)—that is, upon Temporality. Ontology becomes a temporal science “because Temporal projection makes possible an objectification [Vergegenständlichung] of being and assures conceptualizability, and thereby constitutes ontology in general as a science” (323). The fundamental act by which ontology constitutes itself as science is the objectification of being as such (cf. 281). This act has “the function of explicitly projecting what is antecedently given upon that toward which it has already been projected [and unveiled] in pre-scientific experience or understanding” (282). The explicit objectification “thematizes” (281), and “thematization objectifies” (SZ 363). This articulation of the basic concepts of a science, or explicit interpretation of its guiding understanding of being, determines the distinctive conceptual structure of the science, the possibility of truth that pertains to it, and its manner of communicating its true propositions (SZ 362f.). The true propositions of scientific ontology are a priori, transcendental, and Temporal (cf. 323f.). The phenomenological language of being as such is the language of Temporality, which is properly “the transcendental horizon for the question about being” (324). With this, the explicit goal of Division III, “the explication of time” as such a “horizon,” has been reached (SZ 39). Temporality (Temporalität) is the transcendental horizon of the understanding of being, especially when this understanding overtly questions being and thus itself becomes worthy of questioning.
Temporality (Temporalität) is the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) that is interpreted in the existential analytic, when it is thematized in its function as condition of possibility of the pre-ontological and ontological understanding of being, and thus of ontology as such (cf. 324, 388). In this function, Temporality is “the most original temporalizing of temporality as such” (302). As the most original temporality, it is the most radical—the temporality that is fundamentally factical down to its abyssal ground, that is, the “appropriating event” (Er-eignis), if we may here use the later Heidegger’s favorite word. But in 1927 Heidegger hesitates to push forward into the concealed depths of temporality, “above all with regard to its Temporality,” and even to enter “the problem of the finiteness of time” (307f.).
To what extent is a negative, a not, involved in Temporality in general and, conjointly, in temporality? We may even inquire to what extent time itself is the condition of possibility of nullity in general.... Closer consideration shows that the not and also the essential nature of the not, nullity, likewise can be interpreted only by way of the nature of time and that it is only by starting from this that the possibility of modification—for example, the modification of presence into absence—can be explained.... We are not well enough prepared to penetrate into this obscure region. [311f.]
A reason for this lies in the incompleteness of the analyses of Temporality as a whole as “temporality with regard to the unity of the horizonal schemata belonging to it” (307). The horizon of ecstatic temporality is understood more precisely as the horizonal schema of the corresponding ecstasis. For every ecstasis, as a removal-to, also has in it an anticipation of the formal structure of the “whither” of the removal, which is never an indefinite removal into nothingness. This anticipated whither of the ecstasis is the horizonal schema that belongs to it (cf. 302). In Being and Time (SZ 365), the horizonal schemata are expressed prepositionally, that is, in a meaninglike way, following the model of meaning as the pre-structured toward-which (SZ 152): the for-the-sake-of (the ecstasis of the future as coming-toward), the in-the-face-of-which of thrownness or the to-which of abandonment (past, Ge-wesenheit), the in-order-to (present). But in Summer Semester 1927, Heidegger intends to designate the horizonal schemata with the Latin expressions for the “tenses” (Tempora) of time. “Here, in the dimension of the interpretation of being via time, we are purposely making use of Latinate expressions for all the determinations of time, in order to keep them distinct in the terminology itself from the time-determinations in the previously described sense” (305). Praesens is used instead of “present” (Gegenwart), and praesens now means the horizonal schema of the present. More precisely, praesens (instead of the in-order-to) is supposed explicitly to “constitute the condition of possibility of understanding handiness as such” (305).
As the condition of possibility of the “beyond itself,” the ecstasis of the present has within itself a schematic prefiguration of the where out there this “beyond itself” is.... Praesens is not identical with present, but, as basic determination of the horizonal schema of this ecstasis, it joins in constituting the complete time-structure of the present. Corresponding remarks apply to the other two ecstases, future and past (repetition, forgetting, retaining). [306]
But Heidegger treats only the ecstasis of the present in regards to praesens, and says nothing at all about the other ecstases in regards to their presumably Latinized tenses and schemata, the futurum and praeteritum. Yet praesens in particular is not independent; it stands in an inner Temporal connection with the other Temporal schemata. “In each instance the inner Temporal interconnections of the horizonal schemata of time vary also according to the mode of temporalizing of temporality, which always temporalizes itself in the unity of its ecstases in such a way that the precedence of one ecstasis always modifies the others along with it” (307). In a summary of the prepositional nexus of Being and Time, Heidegger had already emphasized that the relations of the in-order-to can be understood only “if the Dasein understands something of the nature of the for-the-sake-of itself” (295). An in-order-to (present) can be revealed only insofar as the for-the-sake-of (future) that belongs to a potentiality-for-being is understood.
But the futurum, as the condition of possibility of understanding the self of Dasein, does not come under consideration at all, not even in its inner connection to praesens. With his exclusive treatment of praesens, Heidegger apparently leaves room for the domination of a metaphysics of constant presence, which understands the being of beings only “in the horizon of productive-intuitive comportment” (165) and which is interpreted up to its epochal conclusion in the contemporary age of technology. In this way the most brilliant insights of the analytic of Dasein, for example, insights into the existential priority of the future and into the historicity of Dasein, are not followed further, up to the fundamental horizon of the most radical temporality. Heidegger’s break with the Platonic thesis of recollection had been indicated in his transformation of Pindar’s saying, “become what you [always already] are,” into “become what you have to be”; in Being and Time the directive is “be what you will be” (cf. SZ 145), “become what you yourself are not yet at all” (cf. SZ 243), or “become what you can be” (cf. the statements on “resoluteness,” SZ 305f.). But this transformation is not taken farther, into the uttermost Temporal horizon and into its abyssal implications. The levels of Dasein’s historicity—for example, how, in the resolute repetition of the destiny of the change of generation, the past perfect of precedented Dasein takes the form of the future perfect of a community—remain uninvestigated in the Temporality of their modes of being.
Hence the historiological-practical science of Christian theology, which takes as its object the traditional and repeated happening of revelation for the community of faith, is corrected only in a formally indicative way by philosophical concepts and is no longer understood in a philosophically scientific way, that is, Temporally.29 With the renunciation of the language game of Temporality, the dream of philosophy as Temporal science—that is, the objectification of being itself on the horizon of time—comes to an end. The thought that philosophy cannot be a science at all thus becomes the main theme of Introduction to Philosophy, the lecture course of Winter Semester 1928-1929.
But already in the course of his final Marburg lectures, concerning Leibniz’s logic and the principle of sufficient reason, it becomes gradually clear to Heidegger that philosophy itself is more originary in its logic and ontology than any science, due to its radicalization on the basis of originary temporality, and is thus completely different from science. With its new elaboration of ecstatic-horizonal temporality as nihil originarium (cf. 196, 210),30 one could see The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic as the second (and last) “start on a more historical path” toward “the problem of ‘Time and Being’ indicated in Being and Time” (208). But Heidegger no longer speaks of the third division, but rather of the not yet published “second part” (168) of Being and Time as the place where the tasks projected in §69, in particular the radical turnabout from intentionality to transcendence, are carried out. For “on a more historical path” the tasks have now multiplied in their scope and extent. After The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the analytic of the Temporality of being now includes the Temporal exposition of the problem of being, that is, the distinction of the basic problems of phenomenological ontology that are comprised in the question of being: the problems of (1) the ontological difference; (2) the regionality of being and the unity of the idea of being; (3) the basic articulation of being; (4) the veridical character of being (cf. 154, 158, 152f.). But the Temporal analytic, which constitutes fundamental ontology along with the analytic of Dasein and its temporality, becomes in its execution “at the same time the turning-around, where ontology itself expressly turns back to the metaphysical ontic in which it implicitly always remains” (158). This overturning pertains to the inescapable ontical founding of ontology, which Aristotle had already recognized in his double concept of ontology as first philosophy and theology.31 Relying on Max Scheler’s concept of metasciences, such as metanthropology, Heidegger designates metaphysical ontic as “metontology.” The double concept of philosophy as fundamental ontology and metontology “is only the particular concretion of the ontological difference, i.e., the concretion of carrying out the understanding-of-being. In other words, philosophy is the central and total concretization of the metaphysical essence of existence” (158). On the basis of fundamental ontology, metontology poses the basic ontical-existentiell questions of concrete Dasein in its particular world, in the midst of beings as a whole, as in Kant’s metaphysica specialis “according to the concept of the world”: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (178f.). Metontology, as a metaphysics of the ontical primal phenomenon of human existence in its exceptional position in the cosmos, does not only thematize the global questions of “life conduct” and “worldview” in ethics, politics, practice, technique, and faith (cf. 157). Metontology also considers the regional questions of the difference between human existence and non-Dasein beings, such as the “worldless” stone and the animal, which is “poor in world”;32 particular questions concerning Dasein, such as its “being factically dispersed into bodiliness and thus into sexuality” (137); historical questions, such as a metaphysics of myth (209) and the metaphysics of other worldviews.33
To what extent does the new elaboration of ecstatic-horizonal temporality in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, in which Temporality is never mentioned, point to this conversion of the Temporal analytic into the new task of a metontology? In contrast to the presentation in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, originary temporality is ruled by the ecstatic being-toward-itself in the mode of the for-the-sake-of itself (cf. 213). “This approaching oneself in advance, from one’s own possibility, is the primary ecstatic concept of the future” (206). The for-the-sake-of is thus the distinguishing mark of Dasein, “that it is concerned with this being, in its being, in a specific way. Dasein exists for the sake of Dasein’s being and its potential-to-be.... It belongs to Dasein’s essence to be concerned in its being about its very being” (186). The for-the-sake-of-itself formally determines an ontological circuit that transcends beings—the “circle” (215) of self understanding, of freedom, of selfhood and its binding obligations. “Freedom gives itself to understand, freedom is the primal understanding, i.e., the primal projection of that which freedom itself makes possible” (192). But what does freedom make possible? The world, “the wholeness of beings in the totality of their possibilities” (180), which gets its specifically transcendental form of organization from the particular for-the-sake-of in each case (cf. 185). The world temporalizes itself primarily from the for-the-sake-of, from the ecstasis of the future, and is grounded in the ecstatic unity and wholeness of the temporalized horizon (cf. 211f.). Heidegger now speaks of an “ecstematic” unity of the horizon, that is, a systematic unity that is temporalized by the unity of the ecstases (cf. 208). This horizonal unity weighted toward the future is the “temporal condition for the possibility of world” (208). Because this horizon is not an entity, it cannot be localized anywhere. It shows itself only in and with the ecstases as their ecstema. It is “not at all primarily related to looking and intuiting, but by itself means simply that which delimits, encloses, the enclosure.... It ‘is’ not as such, but it temporalizes itself” (208). Or better: it’s worlding!—to use an expression that Heidegger revives now, having coined it in 1919 (cf. 170-73). With this formulation, Heidegger wants to convey that the world is not an entity, but a temporal How of being. The world, the unity of the temporal horizon, is “nothing that is, yet something that ‘is there’ [etwas, was es gibt]. The ‘it’ that gives this non-entity is itself no being, but is the self-temporalizing temporality. And what the latter, as ecstatic unity, temporalizes is the unity of its horizon, the world. . . that which simply arises in and with temporalization. We therefore call it the nihil originarium” (210).
It’s worlding, it’s giving, it’s temporalizing itself: these are the impersonals of sheer facticity. “The primal fact, in the metaphysical sense, is that there is anything like temporality at all” (209). Sheer facticity is the nihil originarium, and the product of the “peculiar productivity intrinsic to temporality” is “precisely a peculiar nothing, the world” (210). Thus the primal fact of temporality is no factum brutum, but rather “primal history pure and simple” (209), “the primal event [ Urereignis]” (212). The impersonal sentence “it’s appropriating itself [es er-eignet sich]” already makes an appearance in 1919 as the principium individuationis, that is, the principle of facticity as such.34 But in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger emphasizes the ontical aspect of the “happening of transcendence,” in which “beings are already discovered as well” (217). The metaphysical primal history of Dasein as temporality also documents the completely “enigmatic” tendency to understand beings as intratemporal, extratemporal, and supratemporal (212). Of course, “the event of the world-entry of beings” happens only as long as there exists historical Dasein, which as being-in-the-world gives beings the opportunity to enter the world. “And only when [being-in-the-world] is existent, have [present-at-hand] things too already entered world, i.e., become intraworldly” (194). “There is time, in the common sense, only with the temporalization of temporality, with the happening of world-entry. And there are also intratemporal beings, such that transpire ‘in time,’ only insofar as world-entry happens and intraworldly beings become manifest for Dasein” (210). The thorough elaboration of world-entry is in part Heidegger’s answer to the basic metaphysical problem of the ontological relation between realism and idealism (SZ §§43, 44c) in his confrontation with Max Scheler (131f.), which he inserts in this lecture course on the occasion of Scheler’s death. Intraworldliness and intratemporality do not belong to the essence of the present-at-hand in itself, which remains the same entity that it is and as which it is, “even if it does not become intraworldly, even if world-entry does not happen to it” (194). The happening of the world-entry of beings is only the transcendental condition of possibility for the fact that extant entities reveal themselves in their in-itselfness, and thus “for [extant] things announcing themselves in their not requiring world-entry regarding their own being” (195; cf. 153). The fact that we are called to let beings be what and how they are is another sign of the facticity and thrownness of temporal Dasein, whose powerlessness in the face of beings is disclosed in transcendence and in world-entry (cf. 215). The freedom of transcendence is at the same time the binding character of the ground.
To sum up what we have said in temporal terms: “The ecstematic temporalizes itself, oscillating as a worlding. World entry happens only insofar as something like ecstatic oscillation temporalizes itself as a particular temporality.... The entrance into the world by beings is primal history pure and simple” (209). The explication of the oscillating vectors of world-entry is not completely new in Heidegger. In a decisive closing statement in the war emergency semester of 1919, he said, “But this means that the sense of the something as the experienceable implies the moment of ‘out towards,’ of ‘direction towards,’ ‘into a (particular) world,’ and indeed in its undiminished ‘vital impetus.”’35 The oscillating rhythm of the primal spring of life, in its motivated tendency or tending motivation, is to be found in the oscillation of time.36 In the summer semester of 1928, Heidegger recognizes Bergson’s ontical language of the élan of time as the source of ontologically directed expressions—for example, the being of the ecstases “lies directly in the free ecstatic momentum.... Temporality is the free oscillation of the whole of primordial temporality; time expands and contracts itself. (And only because of momentum is there throw, facticity, thrownness; and only because of oscillation is there projection)” (207f.). Thrown projection, instead of motivated tendency, is now the basic movement of Dasein. The basic projection of transcendence, which finds its possibility in the unity of ecstatic oscillation, now becomes “the upswing, regarded as [swinging] toward all possible beings that can factically enter there into a world” (209). World-entry is, to begin with, an ecstatic happening of worlding, that is, the unitary oscillation of the removal (raptus) of the ecstases into a unitary horizon. Oscillating or swinging from the ecstatic unity of time, the horizon is not an objectification; it may not be represented as “anything thing-like, present at hand” (cf. 208).
The transcendence of Dasein is an upswing into the possibilities of the world, which itself is “the free surpassive counter-hold of the for-the-sake-of” (193). Transcendence means leaping over the beings that in each case factically and factually exist, to “an excess of possibilities, within which Dasein always maintains itself as free projection” (192). Dasein is always “farther” than any factual entity. In its “domain” of the understanding of being there lies the inner possibility of enrichment: “Dasein always has the character of being-richer-than, of outstripping” (211). It is, in its originary temporalizing, an effusive exuberance of possibilities. Transcendence, according to Plato, is epekeina tes ousias: “The for-the-sake-of, however, (transcendence) is not being itself, but surpasses being, and does so inasmuch as it outstrips beings in dignity and power” (219, Heidegger’s rendition of Republic 509b). “The freedom toward ground is the outstripping, in the upswing, of that which carries us away and gives us distance” (221). Yet we must also emphasize the unfreedom of finite transcendence: “On the basis of this upswing, Dasein is, in each case, beyond beings... but it is beyond in such a way that it, first of all, experiences beings in their resistance, against which transcending Dasein is powerless” (215).
Since 1919, when Heidegger characterized philosophy as the pretheoretical primal science of originary life, he gave a vacillating answer to the question of whether phenomenological philosophy should be a primal science, or even any science at all. For philosophy, as primal science, is unlike any other science, because it is supposed to be supratheoretical or pretheoretical—a nontheoretical science, which seems to be a square circle. Already in the Winter Semester of 1919-1920 (according to unpublished student transcripts) Heidegger remarks that philosophy, as “originary science,” is not a science at all “in the real sense,” for every philosophy presumes to do more than mere science. And in the next semester he traces this “more” back to the original motive of philosophizing, that is, the disquieting of life itself.
This pre- and supratheoretical “more” is “thematized” again in the Winter Semester of 1928-1929, at the end of the phenomenological decade of Heidegger’s development (1919-1929). As the successor of Husserl, Heidegger takes up anew the theme of the scientificity of philosophy in this first of the later Freiburg lecture courses, which bears the title Introduction to Philosophy. Philosophy is not a science among others, but is more originary than any science. “Philosophy is indeed the origin of science, but for this very reason it is not science—not even a primal science” ( 18 ).37 Because it gives science its possibility, philosophy is something more, something else, something higher and more originary. This “something else” is related to transcending, of which science as such is incapable. Or better: philosophy is something deeper, more radical, and more essential because philosophizing is “an existing from the essential ground of Dasein, [i.e.] becoming essential in transcendence” (218).38 It is not a science at all—not out of lack, but out of excess, because through the understanding of being it is a constant inner friendship (philia) with things, and is thereby truer to the matters at stake and “more scientific than any science can ever be” (219). Therefore the expression “scientific philosophy” is not just superfluous, like the term “round circle,” but also a deceptive misunderstanding (cf. 16, 22, 219, 221).
Philosophizing as explicit transcending, as explicitly letting transcendence happen, is grounded in the “primal fact” (223, 205) of the understanding of being, the thrown projection of being. Transcending is, first, the surpassing of beings, which happens in science on the basis of the prior, nonobjective, background projection of the ontological constitution of beings; on this basis, beings in themselves come to appear and can be articulated as openly lying before us (positum). “Against the background [this means horizon!] of the being that is projected in the projection, the entity that is thus determined first comes into relief” (196). But in this projection of the fundamental, positive concepts of the sciences, being itself remains unconceived, and at first even inconceivable. Nevertheless, the understanding of being is “nothing other than the possibility of carrying out the distinction between beings and being-in short, the possibility of the ontological difference” (223). There remains the radical possibility of developing the understanding of being into a conceiving of being, that is, into a question about what being itself is, and how such things as the understanding of being and transcendence become possible. This self-articulating transition from the preconceptual understanding of being to the questioning will to conceive is philosophy as explicit transcending.
Philosophy is now sharply delimited from science, which is the cognition of beings as positum in a demarcated domain. “Neither being as such nor beings as a whole and as such, nor the inner connection between being and beings [in transcendence—T.K.] is ever accessible ... to a science” (224). “Transcendence is nothing that could lie before us like an object of science” (395). Being itself is no positum, but is like a nothing, and is close to the nonentities of the world and freedom. What, then, is the language of being, onto-logos (200f.), if it is not scientific language? For the propositional truth of science is founded “on something more originary that does not have the character of an assertion” (68). Philosophy as onto-logy, “the thematic grasping and conceiving of being itself” (200), in essence becomes a problem that cannot be solved until we can “unveil the full, inner direction of the essence of philosophizing” (217). Significant in the edition of these 1928-1929 lectures is a single paragraph on time as the transcendental horizon of the question of being, that is, on the schematic-phenomenological construction of the concept of being by way of time at the heart of Division III. This paragraph, as the editors note, was not read out loud in the lecture course (218n).39 Even the discussion of the “construction of the problem of being” or the “construction of transcendence” (cf. 394, 396, 400), which occasionally surfaces in Heidegger’s lecture-manuscript (the basis for GA 27), is not to be found in the more extensive student transcripts of the course. Instead, philosophizing as questioning about the concept of being becomes an everlasting, ever failing, inexhaustible task—a task that “leads us again and again into situations from which there seems to be no exit” (216). And the question of being, which “leads us anew into abysses” (205), is only one path to philosophy, the path via science. But in order to make the full concept of philosophy intelligible, this path must be supplemented by two further paths: via worldview and via history.
A goal common to both paths is important for our purposes. Being and Time had already expressed the transcendence of being-in-the-world and thereby the transcendence of the world (cf. SZ §69c). “If transcending means being-in-the-world, and if this in each case means taking a stance in the world, a worldview, then explicit transcending—philosophizing—means an explicit development of a worldview” (354f.). Philosophy as worldview is a stance, in the distinctive sense of what the Greeks called ethos (cf. 379), and which the later Heidegger will identify with the hermeneutic relation of being-human as the Brauch (tradition, custom, usage, practice) that develops from our dwelling in the world, the habit of a habitat.40 “Philosophy is not one worldview among others, not one stance among others, but the stance that comes from the ground of transcendence, the grounding stance pure and simple” (SM 678; cf. GA 27, 397). In philosophizing, as explicitly letting Dasein’s transcendence happen from its ground, the most originary possible stance takes place (396). “Only in explicitly letting transcendence happen, in the breaking-open of the inner breadth and originality of transcendence, do the concrete possibilities of the [concrete] stance [of factical existing] open up. But these concrete possibilities for the stance [of factical worldviews] are not determined on the path of philosophy, but [in each case] from the particular Dasein itself” (397; cf. SM 679). Developing a particular stance and promulgating it as a standard is not the task of philosophy as the fundamental stance, which expresses the conditions of possibility and the presuppositions of the primal act of taking a stand in the world, that is, the “form” of its actualization (cf. 390). At the most, and at best, philosophy can be the “occasion” for the possibilities of a stance to break open for the factically existing human being in their basic traits, in a free and nonbinding way; the individual’s own coming to a stance and attaining a stance can then be sharpened in free choice and decision (SM 679 = GA 27, 397; also 381). The more originary the fundamental stance of philosophizing Dasein, the freer and less binding is each act of allowing a stance to take place in the Dasein of others. And the less bindingly the fundamental stance takes place, the better it can awaken the stance in others.
Philosophy as a wake-up call and as the occasion for free decision and interpretation—this is philosophy’s exhortative function, which Aristotle already designated as protreptic. This function of philosophy is connected to two temporally determined and interwoven features of the transcendence of Dasein: its freedom and its historical particularity. Philosophizing—letting transcendence happen from its ground—
means precisely the development of that transcendence of Dasein which we call freedom.... The essence of philosophizing consists in its development of the leeway and space of free movement [Spielraum] into which concrete, historical Dasein, which is in each case guided by a particular stance, can enter. The fact that philosophy develops the leeway [=freedom] for the particular attainment of a stance means that philosophizing is essentially linked to the future. Just as myth is an essential and necessary recollection for philosophy, the future of its questioning is its real strength. But the present disappears, for the present is always only the tip of the moment that takes its power and its wealth from futural recollection.... With futural remembrance, we indicate the distinctive historical position that the metaphysical essence of philosophy bears within it. [SM 680f.; cf. GA 27, 398]
Philosophy is the liberation of the particular Dasein (401). Philosophizing, as letting the particular leeway happen for the moment of decision and the possibilities that are temporalized at this moment, is itself the primal action of letting-be (cf. 205), of release (Gelassenheit)—“a primal action of the freedom of Dasein—yes, the happening of the space for the freedom of Dasein itself” (214), “a ‘deed’ of the highest and most originary sort, which is possible only on the basis of the innermost essence of our existence—freedom” (103). “In the letting-happen of transcendence as philosophizing there lies the originary release of Dasein, man’s trust in the Da-sein within him and in its possibilities” (401). “This entity [called] Da-sein ... in and through its being, lets such a thing as a ‘there’ [a field of openness and disclosure] first be” (136).
And this “there” is always particular, in each case mine, in each case ours, and this means in each case historical. Dasein never exists in general, so “philosophy does not occur in general, as such, somewhere, in some indefinite Dasein or in itself” (SM 682 = GA 27, 399). “Dasein never exists in general; as concrete, it exists in a particular circumstance and, depending on these circumstances, in each case secures for itself the essential and inessential situations [of action]” (227; cf. SM 407). The explicit and decisive leap into worldview as a stance is necessarily the leap into one’s own historicity, into concrete historical circumstances, into the specific historicity of one’s own questioning from the whole of one’s own historical situation (cf. 400). In a radical sense, philosophy leaps into the historicity of its factical Dasein, in order to attain originality and strength and to be what is essential (cf. SM 682f.). The fact that the essential and originary is revealed only in historical concretion is a difficulty that is considered along the third path to the full essence of philosophy. This difficulty is nothing other than the problem of the essence of philosophical truth as opposed to scientific truth, and thus the problem of the essence of truth as such. This problem of truth belongs together with the problem of being (in the first path) and the problem of the world (in the second path) within the architectonic of philosophy. More precisely, each of these problems constitutes the whole of philosophy (cf. SM 683).
In this first of the late Freiburg lecture courses, in the Winter Semester of 1928–1929, Heidegger breaks off some old directions of his path of thinking. But the course also forges the way for new directions that Heidegger’s development will follow in the coming decade:
1. First, this lecture course documents the first signs of the often halting and even silent abandonment of the conceptual constellation “horizon—transcendence—Temporality,” which had formed the original core of the projected third division of Being and Time. In December 1928, Heidegger begins tentatively and provisionally to distance himself from the book Being and Time and to interpret its thought-path as a dead end. In “On the Essence of Ground” (his article for the Husserl Festschrift, composed October 1928, around the time of the first draft of Introduction to Philosophy) he speaks, without explicitly mentioning Division III, of Being and Time’s “sole guiding intention ... the entire thrust, and the goal of the development of the problem”: “what has been published so far of the investigations on ‘Being and Time’ has no other task than that of... attaining the ‘transcendental horizon of the question concerning being’ [on the basis of time—T.K.].”41 Yet he still emphasizes that “in the present investigation, the Temporal interpretation of transcendence is intentionally set aside throughout.”42 This even though Heidegger’s personal copy of the 1929 edition includes two handwritten marginalia that still recognize Temporality as the condition of possibility of temporality: “the essence of the ‘happening’—temporalization of Temporality as preliminary name for the truth of be-ing [Seyn].”43 In the Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938) temporality, or “the originary unity of the ecstatic remotion that clears and conceals itself,”44 is understood as the first beginning’s transition to the grounding of the time-play-space of the site of the moment (cf. GA 65, 18, 29, 294). In order to complete this passage of transition, it was necessary “above all to avoid any objectification of be-ing, both by withholding the ‘Temporal’ interpretation of be-ing and by attempting to make the truth of be-ing ‘visible’ independently of this interpretation (freedom toward ground in ‘On the Essence of Ground’).”45 In the Summer Semester of 1930, for example, freedom and not the unitary horizon of Temporality is designated as “the condition of the possibility of the manifestness of the being of beings, of the understanding of being.”46 Nevertheless, one could always still “identify” freedom and temporality by means of mediating concepts such as “possibility.”
As we noted, in Introduction to Philosophy the objectifying language of the “transcendental horizon of time” is mostly held back. It is not without critical questions and reservations that Heidegger introduces the long-familiar, “commonplace piece of self-evidence”47 of the single yet threefold “horizon” of time in his phenomenological interpretation of the essence of radical boredom, in Winter Semester 1929–1930. According to this self-evident notion, if we wish to gather all beings together at once, in all three perspectives—respect (present), retrospect (past), and prospect (future), “the perspectives of all action and inaction of Dasein”48—then in order to do this, we introduce and assume an original, unifying, and fully disclosed horizon of time.
Let us concede for a moment ... that the full horizon of time is the condition of possibility for the manifestness of beings as a whole ... What does it mean to say that time is a horizon? ... It is hard to say what horizon means here, or how this—namely functioning as a horizon—is possible in terms of the essence of time.... The temporal horizon is in each case playing a role in every manifestation of beings as a whole ... Yet this then entails that the temporal horizon can play a role in manifold ways which are still entirely unfamiliar to us, and that we do not have the slightest intimation of the abysses of the essence of time.... How does time come to have a horizon? Does it run up against it, as against a shell that has been placed over it, or does the horizon belong to time itself? Yet what is this thing for, then, that delimits (horizein) time itself? How and for what does time give itself and form such a limit for itself? And if the horizon is not fixed, to what is it held in its changing? These are central questions.49
The assumption of a temporal horizon will become still more questionable in the basic experience of the most radical boredom. The mood of radical boredom is precisely the oscillation between the empty expanse of the temporal horizon and the peak of the moment of vision (Augenblick). The moment is the acute vision of Dasein’s resoluteness toward being-there, which in each case, as existing, is in the fully grasped situation of action, as this particular, singular, and unique being-there.50 “The moment of vision ruptures the entrancement of time, and is able to rupture it, insofar as it is a specific possibility of time itself. It is not some now-point ... but is the look of Dasein in the three [temporal—T.K.] perspectival directions.”51 The entrancement of time is ruptured, and can be ruptured only by time itself, by the moment of vision that belongs to temporality. Thereby time itself has now become still more enigmatic for us, “when we think of the horizon of time, its expanse, its horizonal function—among other things as entrancement—and finally when we think of the way in which this horizon is connected to what we call moment of vision.”52
Whence the necessity of this relation between expanse and peak, between horizon and moment of vision, between world and individuation, and why does it arise? What kind of “and” is it that links these terms? Why must that expanse of the entrancing horizon ultimately be ruptured by the moment of vision? And why can it be ruptured only by this moment of vision, so that Dasein attains its existence proper precisely in this rupture? Is the essence of the unity and structural linking of both terms ultimately a rupture? What is the meaning of this rupture within Dasein itself? We call this the finitude of Dasein and ask: What does finitude mean?53
These questions reach in their origin back to the question of the essence of time.54 As the basic question of metaphysics, it is the question about being and time. Is time itself finite, and is a being that is finite in its ground and essence still a question that belongs to metaphysics? A note from around the time of the Contributions (1936–1938), written by Heidegger in the copy of Being and Time that he kept in his cabin, in the section on the “Design of the Treatise” (SZ 39), gives the third division on “Time and Being” a new direction. This note lists three tasks that must be carried out regarding “the difference bound to transcendence”: “The overcoming of the horizon as such. The return into the source. The presencing out of this source.”55 But it was not until the Feldweg-Gespräche (1944-1945, GA 77) that Heidegger thoroughly overcame and deconstructed the transcendental-horizonal construction of metaphysics: beyond the horizon and the objects that stand opposed to it, the objects that the horizon embraces, there comes toward us the free expanse of an enveloping open, a “regioning region” in whose “while” things come to last for a while, instead of appearing as objects.56
2. Philosophy is not a science, but a directing, exhorting protreptic. The course of Winter Semester 1929-1930 emphasizes this point from a unique perspective in Heidegger’s very last treatment of formal indication. In contrast to scientific concepts, all philosophical concepts are formally indicative. “The meaning-content of these concepts does not directly intend or express what they refer to, but only gives an indication, a pointer to the fact that anyone who seeks to understand is called upon by this conceptual context to undertake a transformation of themselves into their Dasein [into the Da-sein within them—T.K.] .”57 A formally indicative concept “merely directs us toward our proper and peculiar task.”58 But when concepts are generic and abstract, rather than proper to the unique occasion on which they are to be interpreted, “the interpretation [is deprived] of all its autochthonous power, since whoever seeks to understand would not then be heeding the directive that lies in every philosophical concept.”59 Yet the kind of interpreting that seeks out one’s own facticity in each case is not “some additional, so-called ethical application of what is conceptualized, but ... a prior opening up of the dimension of what is to be comprehended.”60 The concepts and questions of philosophizing are in a class of their own, in contrast to science. These conceptual questions serve the task of philosophy: not to describe or explain man and his world, “but to evoke the Dasein in man.”61
Among Heidegger’s still unpublished “Supplements to Being and Time” is found a preface to the third edition of the book, drafted in the middle of 1930, which announces a completely new elaboration of the published first half of Being and Time and, furthermore, a second half which would contain only the third division of Part One. But in 1931, the third edition of the first half appeared unchanged. The book project titled Being and Time had now finally failed, although Heidegger communicated his decision of a definitive break only to a few confidants in personal letters:
November 14, 1931, Heidegger to Rudolf Bultmann: “My own attempts, especially in the midst of these baseless times, become even pettier than they already are. In the meantime, I wear the mask of someone who ‘is writing his second volume.’ Behind this shield I can do whatever I like, that is, what I feel an inner necessity to do.”62
September 18, 1932, Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochmann: “People think that I am writing SZ II, and are even talking about it. That’s all right with me. SZ I was once a path for me that led me somewhere, but now this path is no longer trodden and has become overgrown. That is why I can no longer write SZ II. I am not writing any book at all.”63
December 16, 1932, Heidegger to Bultmann: “It is difficult for me to say anything about my own efforts. My inner bearing has become much more ancient, the more clearly I see over the passing years that the task posed for me in SZ is the task of contesting the ancient question of being.”
An overgrown path that can no longer be traveled, yet a necessary path full of tasks for further thought. “The path through SZ [is] unavoidable, yet it is a dead end [Holzweg]—a path that suddenly stops.... SZ—only a transition, which [stands] undecided between ‘metaphysics’ and the event of appropriation.”64 With the Contributions (1936–1938), Heidegger begins increasingly to apply a fundamental critique or “destruction” to the publication Being and Time. Correspondingly, in 1941 he could write:
We take “Being and Time” as the name for a meditation whose necessity lies far beyond the activity of an individual, who cannot “invent” this necessity but cannot master it either. We thus distinguish the necessity named “Being and Time” from the “book” with this title. (“Being and Time” as the name for an appropriating event in be-ing itself. “Being and Time” as the formula for a meditation within the history of thinking. “Being and Time” as the title of a treatise that tries to carry out this thinking.)65
1. Textual references. In the earliest editions of Being and Time (until the sixth edition) one finds a footnote to §68d on “The Temporality of Discourse” (SZ 349) that gives us an insight into the thematic structure of the very first draft of Division III—that is, the “systematic” draft that was supposedly completely unintelligible to intellects like Rilke and Jaspers. The footnote reads, “Cf. Division Three, Chapter II of this treatise” and refers to problems that in part are already indicated in §69 as substantive themes to be treated in Division III, such as the development of the problem of the connection in principle between being and truth on the basis of the problematic of temporality. But in §68d the elaboration of this basic problem of phenomenology now becomes the presupposition for “the analytic of the temporal Constitution of discourse and the explication of the temporal characteristics of language-structures.” Central to an ontological explication is the widely dispersed grammar of the verb “to be” in the articulation of the variations of its conjugation. For discourse does not primarily temporalize itself in one particular ecstasis. The verb is grounded in the whole of the ecstatic unity of temporality. Furthermore, the three tenses are mingled with “the other temporal phenomena of language—‘aspects’ and ‘temporal stages.’” In particular, contemporary linguistics, which is obliged to carry out its analyses with the help of the vulgar concept of time, cannot even pose the “problem of [the] existential-temporal structure of the aspects [Aktionsarten]” (SZ 349).
Verbal action is grammatically divided into three basic types: 1) momentaneous, instantaneous, iterative; 2) continuous, ongoing, lasting, imperfect; 3) perfect, complete, perfecting. Above we have already encountered an experiential variant of this division: the three types of boredom, variously based on a limited constant time, a wavering-fleeting time, and the time of Dasein as a whole, which is entranced as a horizon. For horizonal time as Temporality is an ontological, transcendental, or a priori perfect “which characterizes the kind of being belonging to Dasein itself” (SZ 85).66 “Each ecstasis as such has a horizon that is determined by it and that first of all completes that ecstasis’ own structure.”67 The open horizon where each ecstasis ends is a perfective sign of the finitude of temporality, for “this end is nothing but the beginning and starting point for the possibility of all projecting.”68 The enabling of the transcendental perfect has the character of a prior letting-be (Seinlassen) (SZ 85), or better, releasedness (Gelassenheit), where the perfective suffix is both active and passive, in the ambiguity of the middle voice: it means both already-having-let-be-in-each-case and letting-be. Thus we have a series of perfective existentials in Being and Time: thrownness, dis-posedness,69 discoveredness, fallenness, resoluteness, etc. The perfect expresses an action that has somehow become definitive and that is always still in the further process of becoming. The perfect is used only when the effect of earlier activity is still at work. Heidegger comments, for example, that in perception, understood in terms of intentionality, what is central is neither perceiving nor the perceived; instead, perceivedness is the enabling center of the intentionality of perception, the sense of its intentional direction, which is neither subjective nor objective and which, as what makes perception possible, can ultimately be understood only on the basis of the essence of time.70
2. Archival reference. Along with the manuscript of the lecture course of Winter Semester 1925–1926 in the Heidegger Archives in Marbach, there is a file of some 200 pages wrapped in a sheet marked “I.3.” A selection of about 30 pages from this text has been published,71 but these include none of the many pages—and an entire file—that are marked with the number “69.” For the entire folder is a collection of notes that refer to the themes, and even to particular chapters, of the unpublished Division III, and which were probably written in 1926-1927. A summary of the classification of the notes indicates a division into about six chapters in the missing division. Chapter 1 would have probably borne a title such as “Phenomenology and the Positive Sciences” and would have treated the method of ontological (as opposed to ontical) thematization. “Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and Worldliness” is the explicit title of Chapter 4, which would have taken its themes primarily from §69c of Being and Time. One also finds remarks, expressions, and turns of phrase throughout this text that do not appear in Heidegger’s known lectures and publications: for example, the division of awaiting into “expectative—presentative—perfective”; “moments of existence” such as “the formally futural” and “the formally perfect”; the claim “time is a self-projection upon itself (its horizonal [aspect], its ecstatic [aspect]).” A thorough study of the entire file can deepen our knowledge of the direction and goals of the missing Division III, and enrich the attempt to reconstruct it.72
—translated by Richard Polt in consultation with the author
Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1971), 7. (This translation and others have occasionally been modified; such modifications will not be noted individually.)
Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, tr. Ted Sadler (London: Athlone, 2000).
Cf. Theodore Kisiel, “Why the First Draft of Being and Timewas Never Published,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 20 (1989): 3–22. Heidegger’s 70-page journal article entitled Der Begriff der Zeit was finalized in November 1924 and appears in Der Begriff der Zeit, GA 64. (“GA” will refer to volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, published in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio Klostermann.)
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
Cf. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 477-89.
Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 63f. (German page 39f.). Henceforth cited as “SZ” followed by the German pagination.
Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, GA 49, 39f.
Besinnung, GA 66, 413.
Zur Erläuterung von SZ, manuscript, 1941.
Substantial notes pertaining to this first draft were however preserved. See the Appendix to this chapter.
Besinnung, GA 66, 413f. The lecture course in question is The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” tr. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 249f.
These obsolete spellings of Sein (being) and Zeit (time) are used by Heidegger in some texts, beginning in the later thirties, to indicate his nonmetaphysical understanding of being and time. (Trans.)
“Neuere Forschungen über Logik” and Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, both in Heidegger, Frühe Schriften, GA 1.
Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre: Eine Studie über den Herrschaftsbereich der logischen Form (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1911).
Cf. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” chapter 1.
SZ 328; cf. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 204.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 208.
Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 90-99.
Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 99.
Cf. Theodore Kisiel, “Die formale Anzeige: Die methodische Geheimwaffe des frühen Heideggers,” in Markus Happel (ed.), Heidegger—neu gelesen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997).
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 65.
Cf. ibid., 314f.
Cf. ibid., 162.
Ibid., 268.
Heidegger, “Unbenutzte Vorarbeiten zur Vorlesung vom Wintersemester 1929/1930: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit,” Heidegger Studies 7 (1991), 9.
Within this section, parenthetical references are to The Basic Problems of Phenomenology unless otherwise indicated.
Heidegger never speaks of a horizon of being; the term is reserved in this context for a horizon of time or of the world. But a horizonal temporality is mentioned for the very first time in Being and Time in relation to the horizonal schema of the as-structure, the “if-then” schema (SZ 359), that is, the what and how of the being of an entity, in accordance with which the genesis of theoretical comportment occurs by way of a modification of the understanding of being.
Cf. “Phenomenology and Theology,” a lecture held in 1927-1928, in Pathmarks.
Within this section, parenthetical references are to The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic unless otherwise indicated.
Cf. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 158, 178; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 19f.
Cf. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 261f.
Cf. Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27. A translation of this text, Introduction to Philosophy, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 63; cf. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 209.
Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 97.
Cf. ibid., 99, 80–83, 51.
Within this section, parenthetical references are to GA 27 unless otherwise indicated.
Cf. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 221.
The two sentences about a “transcendental horizon” before the paragraph in question were not read out loud, either. I have compared the GA 27 edition with a much more extensive transcript by Simon Moser, and have supplemented and improved my citations from the edited version using explanatory expressions from the Moser transcript (henceforth “SM”). (A copy of this Moser transcript is to be found in the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at the Duquesne University Library.)
“A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 32-33.
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” tr. William McNeill, in Pathmarks, 371, note 66.
Ibid., note 67.
Ibid., 123, note a; cf. 132, note a.
Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA 65, 234. Cf. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 165.
Beiträge zur Philosophie, GA 65, 451. Cf. Contributions to Philosophy, 317.
Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, tr. Ted Sadler (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 205.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 145.
Ibid.
Ibid., 146.
Cf. ibid., 169, 149.
Ibid., 151.
Ibid., 152.
Ibid., 170.
Cf. ibid., 171.
Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY, 1996), 35.
Cf. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, tr. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 65ff.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 297; and on p. 296: “our understanding must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings and properly transform itself into the Da-sein in us.”
Ibid., 293.
Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 296.
Ibid., 174.
The letters to Bultmann are to be published in Rudolf Bultmann / Martin Heidegger: Briefwechsel, ed. Andreas Großmann and Klaus Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, forthcoming).
Martin Heidegger, Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel, 1918–1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar : Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 54.
Der Weg: Der Gang durch SZ, unpublished typescript, 1945.
Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, GA 49, 27.
Cf. Heidegger’s handwritten note on SZ 85: Being and Time, tr. Stambaugh, 79.
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 306.
Ibid., 308.
Befindlichkeit, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “state-of-mind” and Stambaugh as “attunement.” (Trans.)
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 68ff.
Heidegger, “Aufzeichnungen zur Temporalität (Aus den Jahren 1925 bis 1927),” Heidegger Studies 14 (1998): 11-23.
Cf. Dietmar Köhler, Martin Heidegger: Die Schematisierung des Seinssinnes als Thematik des dritten Abschnittes von “Sein und Zeit” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993).