This book reproduces the text of the course of lectures given under the same title during the summer semester of 1927 at the University of Marburg/Lahn.
Mr. Fritz Heidegger provided the handwritten prototype. The typewritten copy and the manuscript were collated by the editor. The passages not yet deciphered by Mr. Fritz Heidegger—above all, the insertions and marginal notes on the right side of the manuscript pages—had to be carried over so as to fill out the text. The completed copy was then additionally compared with a transcription of the lectures by Simon Moser (Karlsruhe), a student of Heidegger’s at that time. In doing so it became evident that we were dealing here with a set of shorthand notes whose accuracy was very good, which the notetaker had transcribed by typewriter. After its completion Heidegger read over this transcription several times and furnished it here and there with marginalia.
The text printed here was composed under Heidegger’s direction by putting together the manuscript and the transcript following the guidelines given by him. The handwritten manuscript contains the text of the lectures, worked out, occasionally also consisting of captionlike references, and divided into parts, chapters, and paragraphs. Nevertheless, during the actual lecturing Heidegger departed from the manuscript to the extent of often giving to the thought a revised formulation or expounding more broadly and with greater differentiation a thought that had been recorded in an abbreviated form. Similarly, while and after making the written copy, he inscribed on the pages of the manuscript insertions specified on the right side and marginalia that had been formulated more fully in the oral lecture. Transformations, deviations, and expansions that arose in the course of the delivery of the lectures were recorded in the stenographic transcript and could be worked into the manuscript for publication.
Among the materials taken over from the transcript there are also the recapitulations at the beginning of each two-hour lecture. Where they were not concerned with mere repetitions but with summaries in a modified formulation and with supplementary observations, they were fitted into the lecture’s course of thought.
All items taken over from the transcript were investigated for authenticity by testing their style. Occasional errors of hearing could be corrected by comparison with the handwritten copy.
Still, the relationship of the transcript to the manuscript would be inadequately characterized if it were not mentioned that numerous remarks contained in the manuscript were omitted during the oral delivery, so that in this regard the transcript must yield to the manuscript.
In preparing the manuscript for publication, the editor endeavored to intertwine transcript and manuscript so that no thought either set down in writing or conceived during the lectures has been lost.
The text of the lectures was reviewed for publication. Expletives and repetitions peculiar to oral style were removed. Nevertheless, the aim remained to retain the lecture style. An ampler division of the often quite lengthy paragraphs seemed useful, so as to make possible a differentiated survey of the contents.
Explanations by Heidegger inside quotations and their translations are set in square brackets.
The course of lectures puts into practice the central theme of the third division of part 1 of Being and Time: the answer to the fundamental-ontological question governing the analytic of Dasein, namely, the question of the meaning of being in general, by reference to “time” as the horizon of all understanding of being. As the structure of the course shows, the “Temporality of being” is laid bare not by resuming immediately where the second division of Being and Time concluded, but by a new, historically oriented approach (Part One of the lectures). This lets us see that and how the treatment of the question of being and of the analytic of Dasein pertaining to it arises from a more original appropriation of the Western tradition, of the orientation of its metaphysical-ontological inquiry, and not actually from motives germane to existential philosophy or the phenomenology of consciousness. Although of the three parts originally conceived in the “Outline of the Course” the limited number of lecture hours permitted only a development of Part One and the first chapter of Part Two, the many anticipations of the later chapters provide an insight into those parts that were not developed. Anyhow, for the discussion of the theme of “Time and Being,” chapter 1 of Part Two is decisive. The text here published also does not facilitate in its unfinished form an understanding of the systematic ground-plan of the question of being as it showed itself for Heidegger from the standpoint of his path of thought at that time. At the same time, the course contains the first public communication of the “ontological difference.”
I owe cordial thanks to Mr. Wilhelm von Herrmann, Lic. theol., for his aid in the laborious task of collation as well as for his helpful dictation of the manuscript for publication and his aid in reading the proofs. My thanks go further to Mr. Murray Miles, Cand. Phil., and Mr. Hartmut Tietjen, Cand. Phil., for their careful and conscientious help with the proofs.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann