REINER SCHÜRMANN
The common view, then, locates Being and Time within the tradition of the philosophy of subjectivity. On this reading, Being and Time would renew our understanding of the human subject—not through "existentialist" descriptions, nor through "anthropological" findings, but through a re-articulation of the relation between man and the world. To state it simply: Dasein means that man cannot be understood without his world, and correlatively that the world is always man's world. This signals the end of a solipsistic subject.
Let us investigate this common view a little further, since it is certainly not wrong, but insufficient. As you may notice, out of the 83 sections of Being and Time, 75 deal with an analysis of what Heidegger calls "Dasein", for which there seems to be no English equivalent. Eight sections, at the beginning, seem to constitute a somewhat broader introduction. Needless to say, after having labored through those very dense 75 sections, the first eight are often more or less forgotten. The common view states, still correctly, that Heidegger did not undertake the existential analytic for its own sake, but for the sake of what was sketched out in the first eight sections, the so-called "question of Being". Being is, so we are told, always man's Being—hence "Da-sein". Thus Heidegger renews the philosophy of subjectivity by exhibiting its ontological foundations, by means of "fundamental ontology".
What the common view cannot account for is that Being is not "always that of Dasein". Therefore, fundamental ontology does not simply show how Dasein grounds itself transcendentally. Or, stated otherwise, Being and Time does not merely clarify the "ontological" (and we would have to see what that word means in each context) meaning of intentional acts (which Husserl and Scheler already opposed to a philosophy of man that sees him as substance, thing, ens creatum, etc.) or the ontological foundation of the "person".
Thus, the common view holds that Being and Time "begins" with the de-substantialized subject. Indeed, Being and Time would only carry further this process of de-substantialization that had already begun with Kant and Hegel and was pushed further by Schelling and Kierkegaard. For all these authors the subject is actually no longer a res, a given thing.3 Heidegger's point of departure is the notion of subject as "process" (Vollzug), and in this respect he could be said to belong to the post-idealist tradition. Such is his "place in the history of philosophy".4 Roughly speaking, Hegel broke with the metaphysical tradition that views the subject as one being among other beings, instead sublating the subject in the infinite process of the spirit mediating itself and all things. Schelling, from this perspective, discovered the finitude of this spirit, its facticity, its "thrownness" even, since he saw finite spirit as being "thrown" (this is Heidegger's term) into existence, i.e. as not the master of its Being. Likewise, Kierkegaard described this facticity in terms of the imminence of death, dread, etc., but still in relation to an absolute. Heidegger, then, incorporates the facticity into the essence of man himself; Dasein is thrown into the world, but there is no thrower. In its process (Vollzug), the subject, considered in itself, is now utterly finite. This, as we shall see, is the meaning of "wholeness" or "totality" (Ganzheit). Ganzheit is not the sum total of traits belonging to Dasein, but its finite autonomy; its utter facticity, with no recourse to an infinite subject. Thus the title of
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