HEIDEGGER'S BEING AND TIME


Heidegger's book, Being and Time, becomes clear. The meaning of the subject's Being is time; the subject's Being cannot be referred back to anything other than Dasein, out of which it would then "enter" into time. All these quasi-theological constructions are indeed eradicated by Being and Time

The conclusion of the "common view" is that Being and Time can indeed be viewed as a work of the philosophy of the subject.5 It is the final work of such a philosophy, since in Being and Time the subject becomes radically autonomous, accomplishing itself. In Heidegger's terminology, thrownness (Geworfenheit) and project (Entwurf) are structures of Dasein. Being and Time, in other words, is the attempt to understand the subject completely out of itself, neither in comparison with other things nor in relation to some supreme subject.

All this is correct, but this thesis does not operate with the understanding of the word "Being" that Heidegger explicitly works out. "Being" is not primarily man's (Dasein's) Being. To balance the common thesis, we have to take a brief look at where Being and Time really begins. It is important to understand clearly that in Being and Time Heidegger is preoccupied with the question of Being as such— whatever that will turn out to mean—and only therefore with the question of Dasein.6 This is important, among other things, for the unity of Heidegger's writings. William Richardson introduced, in 1963, the distinction between Heidegger-I and Heidegger-II: the young Heidegger, from this interpretation, was preoccupied with questions of existence, of the subject, and the latter with that of Being qua Being.7 Although Heidegger does speak of a "turn" or reversal (Kehre) in his writings, he explicitly denies a break in his thought and says that he never abandoned the intent of Being and Time.8 It is true, though, that when he speaks of Being and Time in later publications he always refers to the first eight sections. Thus, these first 40 pages are proof that Heidegger's work is a unity, that there are not "two Heideggers". This also makes it quite clear that, more or less explicitly, we will have to take into account the later writings when interpreting Being and Time.

Being and Time as retrieval

The first thing one notices when opening Being and Time, is that it takes up a philosophical issue not from Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, or Husserl (aside from the dedication to Husserl), but from Plato, whose Sophist provides the epigraph for the book. The first paragraph of Being and Time speaks of the "question of Being" and says that it "sustained the avid research of Plato and Aristotle" (SZ 2, JS 1). The first section is entitled "The Necessity of an Explicit Retrieval [Wiederholung] of the Question of Being" (ibid.).1' Rather than continuing the tradition of German Idealism and of transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger's book wants to retrieve something that, according to him, "ceased to be heard as a thematic question of actual investigation" (ibid.) from Plato and Aristotle onward. From the outset, Heidegger situates Being and Time in continuity with Greek Antiquity rather than with modernity and contemporary philosophy. Being and Time is thus altogether a retrieval, albeit in a complex way, as I will explicate in the following paragraphs.


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Reiner Schürmann - On Heidegger's Being and Time