2 - Martin Heidegger’sBeing and Time

When Martin Heidegger’s most famous book, Being and Time, was published in 1927, it caused a sensation and brought its author world fame. Like Immanuel Kant who had published his revolutionary work Critique of Pure Reason after a decade of silence, Heidegger had not published anything since his qualifying dissertation on Duns Scotus in 1916. Although Being and Time remained a torso – only a third of the originally planned two-volume work was published – to its readers, it appeared to have sprung from Heidegger’s head like the Greek goddess Athena sprung from Zeus’ head. Heidegger himself did his best to leave his early beginnings in a shroud of mystery. His early writings were only republished in 1972 and in the original plan of the Collected Edition of his works, the Gesamtausgabe, he excluded his early Freiburg lecture courses from 1919 until 1923. According to Heidegger’s self-interpretation, the story of Being and Time should start with his first lecture course of the winter semester 1923–4 at the University of Marburg. But as we know, an author is usually not the best interpreter of his own work.

Today the complex story of the genesis of Being and Time has been told in great detail, thanks to the pioneering work of Thomas Sheehan and Theodore Kisiel. They followed Heidegger’s trail in archives and unearthed a wealth of new material. The biggest fruit of their labors is the publication of the early lecture courses in the Gesamtausgabe and Kisiel’s magnum opus The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time.¹ Here Kisiel tells the story of Being and Time’s genesis in full, and any serious reader of Being and Time should work his way through this book. As early as 1922, Heidegger carefully planned a book on Aristotle’s philosophy to further his academic career. When he left for Todtnauberg in February 1926 to finally put together a publishable manuscript, he accidentally came up with a work called Being and Time. In my paper, I will try to shine some fresh light on the origins of the carefully planned accident that Being and Time perhaps was.

Early Beginnings: From a Well-Ordered World to the Discovery of Facticity

Where does the story of Being and Time begin? According to Heidegger, the starting point of philosophy is simply the “es gibt,” “it gives, there is.” The moment we open our eyes, there is a well-ordered world we experience – it is given to us. This is the basic fact of human life we cannot deny nor ignore nor get beyond. We have to accept the world as it is given to us and take it from there. “Es gibt” – the act of giving – implies three moments: someone or something (1) that gives this gift (2) to someone (3). To the young Heidegger, the someone behind the gift of the well-ordered world was God. As a philosopher, he came to the insight that there is no way we can experience anything on the other side of the gift and that we have to accept the “it gives” as the basic fact of our lives. It is from this experience that Being and Time ultimately sprang.

Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in the south German town of Meßkirch. His father was cooper and sexton of Saint Martin’s church, where Heidegger served as an altar boy from time to time. His mother was born and raised on a farm in nearby Göggingen, where Heidegger spent most of his holidays as a boy. His parents were neither poor nor rich; they were devout Roman Catholics. The well-ordered world of his childhood, he often described in his later “autobiographical writings,” was created by God who invested all being with meaning, sense, and purpose. The laws of nature, the laws of logic, and the principles of ethics spring from God as first cause of all being. One of the consequences of this – what I would like to call “Augustinian” world view – was Heidegger’s anti-modernist attitude as a student of theology. The principle of autonomy (Descartes, Kant) is the cause of the problems of the modern world. Body and Mind, the physical and the psychic world, are separate regions that cannot be reduced one to the other. God as first cause is the explanation of the connection between Body and Mind, Nature and Thought. The order of the different regions of being make the human understanding of being possible. On his long way of thought, Heidegger attempts again and again to come to grips with this primal understanding of being through phenomenological description of what is given to us and to describe the conditions of the possibility of this understanding.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the world of Meßkirch was still well ordered. But there were clouds on the horizon. Modern life and modern science were unstoppable. And the world as Heidegger knew it slowly disappeared: it was no longer given. From a biographical point of view, Heidegger’s move to Constance in 1903 marks the beginning of his intellectual education and the end of the idyll of the well-ordered Catholic world of his hometown. For boys from modest families, the financial support of Roman Catholic endowments was necessary to finish their high school education. In return, they were expected to study theology and later become priests. While visiting the gymnasium, Heidegger lived from 1903 until 1906 at the Konradihaus, the seminary where Conrad Gröber was rector. Gröber was not only Heidegger’s fatherly friend who gave him a copy of Brentano’s dissertation on Aristotle as a birthday present in 1907, but also later the Archbishop of Freiburg.

In Constance, Heidegger came to know a whole new world, and he also experienced the disharmony of the modern world in his everyday existence. The gymnasium was a modern humanist school, and most students were sons of the local bourgeoisie, most of the teachers were free thinkers – the seminary on the other hand resembled a monastery. Heidegger’s lifelong friend, Bruno Leiner, was the son of the town’s rich and famous pharmacist. The conflict between modernism and Catholic anti-modernism, between Catholic saints and theology on the one hand, the great men of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, modern science and literature on the other, determined Heidegger’s intellectual and philosophical development.

Heidegger’s later professor of theology, Carl Braig, formed the concept of modernism. He uses it to describe the point of view, popular among Protestant theologians, that after Kant’s rebuttal of rational theology, religion can only be grounded in the subjective feeling of the individual subject. Therewith, the door is opened for autonomy, psychologism, and materialism. Pope Pius X used the term “modernism” to indicate a movement within Catholic theology that mistook the eternal truths of Christian dogma for the products of subjective imagination and feeling. He also singles out Kant as the villain who through his critique of natural theology cut off our intellect from God.² Because Kant’s critical philosophy means a refutation of scholasticism, that is, a metaphysics that reaches its summit in rational theology, modernism can only be overcome by a return to this scholastic tradition. Neo-Scholasticism, based on the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, became the necessary fundament of Catholic theology. It is based on natural theology, and implies that all sciences – philosophy included – are ancillae theologiae. This means that scientific truth cannot contradict dogmas of Catholic faith. There is (“es gibt”) only one truth of which the condition of the possibility is faith. Heidegger internalized this conflict, and it took him some twenty-five years to find a solution.

From 1906 until 1909, Heidegger lived in Freiburg, where he graduated from the Berthold’s gymnasium in the summer of 1909. As expected, he began his novitiate with the Jesuits of Tisis in September, but after two weeks, he was dismissed for reasons of health. He subsequently moved to the seminary in Freiburg and continued his theological studies at the university. In February 1911, a deteriorating heart condition forced Heidegger to abandon all plans to become a priest. In October 1911, he registered in the new department of mathematics and physics. He took courses in mathematics, history, physics, and philosophy. In philosophy, Professor Heinrich Rickert became his most influential teacher.³ On July 26, 1913, Heidegger received a doctorate in philosophy with his inaugural dissertation, entitled The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism. Heidegger’s future looked promising. Philosophy Professor Arthur Schneider, who held the Catholic chair, and history Professor Heinrich Finke began grooming the talented young scholar for the Freiburg University’s chair of Catholic philosophy. A grant from the Catholic Church enabled Heidegger to start working on his qualifying dissertation. On the advice of his mentors, Heidegger decided to write on Duns Scotus’ doctrine of categories and meaning. At this time, he still thought his lifework would be taken up with a comprehensive presentation of medieval logic and psychology in the light of modern phenomenology. It therefore came as a great shock and bitter disappointment when a year after he had successfully completed his qualifying dissertation and obtained his veni legendi on July 26, 1915, the department of philosophy accorded the chair to Josef Geyser.

When discussing Heidegger’s intellectual biography in his student years, it is important to remember that there was a strong Protestant and liberal influence at Freiburg University. After his decision to give up theology and consequently the priesthood, Heidegger was no longer under the obligation to attend specific lecture courses and seminars. Students of theology were not allowed to attend any courses outside the department of theology. As a student of mathematics, history, physics, and philosophy, Heidegger got his first real taste of academic freedom. The two people who had the greatest influence on his philosophical development, Heinrich Rickert and Edmund Husserl, were a Protestant and a free Christian.⁴

We find a first clear sign that Heidegger moved beyond the strict anti-modernist world view he defended in his earliest writings in a letter he wrote to his friend and colleague Father Engelbert Krebs on July 19, 1914. “The Motu proprio⁵ on philosophy is still missing. Perhaps as an ‘academic’ you could demand a better method, that all people, to whom having an independent thought may occur, will have their brain removed and replaced by ‘Italian salad.’”⁶ An obvious question is why did Heidegger get so upset by this decree of Pope Pius X? The answer is obvious: if the restriction imposed on theologians by the Motu proprio would be extended to Roman Catholic philosophers, Heidegger would no longer be able to follow his own train of thought. Financially, he was dependent on grants from Roman Catholic foundations, and they would have to take the papal guidelines into account. This would considerably diminish his chances of obtaining further endowments and put his continued existence as a philosopher at risk.

At this time, Heidegger was working on his qualifying dissertation on Duns Scotus’ theory of categories and meaning. In his book, he followed a two-way strategy: on the one hand, he used modern logic (Emil Lask, Rickert, and Husserl) to make fluid the solidified tradition of medieval scholasticism; on the other, he searched for solutions to modern philosophical problems in that same tradition. Here we already find the famous structure of Being and Time: the systematic analytic of being-there in the first part that was to be followed by a destruction of the history of ontology. The notion of “making fluid” (a clear sign of his intense study of Dilthey) shows how far Heidegger has come and how strong the influence of life philosophy on his thought had become. In his 1911 review of Friedrich Wilhelm Förster’s book Authority and Freedom, he still celebrated “the eternal treasure of truth” (GA 16: 7). The guarantee of this immutable and eternal treasure is the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. There can be neither development nor progress. In 1914, Heidegger had apprehended that human life in all its facets is an ongoing everyday transformation, a continued reappropriation of times past, and an ever-new projecting of the future. Even logic and mathematics are not completed and finished sciences; they too have their history. From here, it is a small but decisive step to the insight that religion in general and Christianity in particular are historical phenomena. As such phenomena, they bring the fundamental historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) of human life to light. Therefore, there can no longer be an eternal and immutable truth. God’s Word is not only spoken to all times, it is also spoken in time. Each generation has to breathe new life into the Word of God and find its own understanding of its meaning. Here I cannot go into all the details of this slow but ongoing development of Heidegger’s basic beliefs and philosophical convictions.⁷ Suffice to know that this transformation was accelerated by the most decisive event in Heidegger’s life.

On March 20, 1917, he married a young woman by the name of Elfride Petri, to whom he would dedicate almost 60 years later the Gesamtausgabe. She was a student of national economics with a strong philosophical interest. She attended Heidegger’s first lecture course on the history of medieval and scholastic philosophy and his seminar on Kant’s Prolegomena in winter semester 1915–16. As an old German saying teaches us, “where two confessions share a pillow, the devil sleeps in between”; the long and intense discussions between the fiancés would not bring Elfride into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church, and they ultimately led to Heidegger’s break with “the system of Catholicism.”⁸ On December 23, 1918, Elfride visited Father Krebs, who had mediated between Heidegger and his parents concerning his marriage to a Protestant and celebrated the marriage in the University chapel in Freiburg cathedral. Elfride was pregnant with her first child. The oldest son Jörg was later born on January 21, 1919. She and her husband had decided that they would not baptize him, as they had promised at their wedding as part of their wedding vows. After her visit, Krebs jotted the essence of their conversation down.

My husband no longer has his Catholic faith and I have not found it. Already at our wedding his faith was undermined by doubts. But I insisted on the Catholic marriage and hoped to find faith with his help. We read, discussed, thought and prayed a lot together, but the result is that we both now think foremost in a Protestant way, that is to say we believe in a personal God without any fixed dogmatic ties, we pray to Him in the spirit of Christ, but without Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy.⁹

There are no grounds to doubt the truthfulness of Elfride’s statement. From other sources, we also know that Heidegger studied Protestant theology (Troeltsch, von Harnack, Overbeck, and Schleiermacher, among others) from 1915 on. At the same time, he pursued his interest in mysticism. He also studied Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as well as Simmel and Bergson. We find traces of all this in The Phenomenology of Religious Life (GA 60).

Heidegger’s oldest student and lifelong friend, Heinrich Ochsner, gives us an important clue in a letter he wrote to an unnamed and unknown woman on August 5, 1917. “It is such a pity that you could not hear Heidegger’s exposition of the problem of the religious. This whole week I am still impressed by it. But perhaps we will read the second speech of Schleiermacher’s ‘On religion’ together. It contains the essence of Heidegger’s exposition.”¹⁰ It is the first clear evidence we have that Heidegger was studying Protestant theology at the time.

During his training as a meteorologist in the summer of 1918¹¹ in Berlin, Heidegger had enough time on his hands to attend lectures at the university and socialize with the theologian Deißmann and the phenomenologist Stumpf. All these different and apparent loose biographical pieces will fall into place when we add the missing link. On April 1, 1916, Husserl came to Freiburg as the successor of Rickert. He and Heidegger had been corresponding since 1914. From May 1916 on, Heidegger would learn daily through his close association and joint philosophizing with Husserl.¹² Through his apprenticeship in Husserl’s phenomenological “school,” Heidegger obtained the necessary tools to develop a phenomenology of religious life.

After the end of World War I, Heidegger returned to Freiburg in December 1918. On January 9, 1919, he wrote his famous and enlightening letter to Father Krebs. “Epistemological insights extending to a theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics – these, though, in a new sense.”¹³ It is important not to overestimate the importance of this sentence. Heidegger is breaking with the system of Catholicism, not with Catholic faith. This is also the reason why, all of his life, he remained so attached to the Benedictine Monastery in Beuron. Here he could still experience authentic religious life. It was one of the places where people still cared for the inner life and so preserved a place where the Divine and the Holy could be present. The last sentence of his letter is also remarkable. “I believe that I have the inner calling to philosophy and, through my research and teaching, to do what stands in my power for the sake of the eternal vocation of the inner man, and to do it for this alone, and so justify my existence [Dasein] and work ultimately before God” (italics in original).¹⁴ Heidegger did not become a philosopher because he needed to earn his keep; it was a vocation. It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to say that he felt God called him to philosophy. His need to justify his existence and work before God clearly shows the influence of Luther.

Heidegger started teaching again in the so-called war emergency semester of 1919. If we take a closer look at the lecture courses he taught between 1919 and 1923, it becomes evident that he was working out his phenomenological method through a phenomenology of religious life.¹⁵ As we have seen above, Heidegger had lost faith in dogmatism – be it of the Roman Catholic or one of the many Protestant varieties. Dogmatism with its obsession for clear and final answers goes against the natural movement of life. It offers an unchanging interpretation of religious experience. Instead of opening up the vista of immediate experiences of the Divine and the Holy, dogmatism closes the door on any possible lived experience and throws away the key. To break through this closure, Heidegger needs to scrape off layer after layer of solidified dogmatic statement to get to the beating heart of the underlying lived and immediate experience of the Divine and the Holy. For all his shouting, the dogmatist cannot hear the gentle call of God’s voice. Heidegger is searching for those pivotal moments in the history of Christianity where lived experience of the Divine erupts and is expressed immediately.¹⁶ However tremendous these eruptions may be, they are soon absorbed and therefore deformed by dogmatism, orthodoxy, and scholasticism. Heidegger is using religious life to develop his phenomenological method. This should not blind us to the fact that his ultimate goal is a phenomenology of human life as it is lived and expresses itself. We could almost say that he is trying to come to grips with his own religious life. At the same time, his focus on religious life betrays the strong influence of Jaspers and his psychology of limit situations.

In his philosophical autobiography, Jaspers reminisces about how he met Heidegger for the first time in the spring of 1920. After a birthday party, he visited Heidegger’s study and was impressed by the intensity of his Luther studies.¹⁷ He and Heidegger share the prejudice that human existence shows itself most clearly in the extremes of the limit situations (death, love, faith, sickness). In the following years, Heidegger would free himself from this presupposition. In Being and Time, being-there no longer shows itself first and foremost in limit situations but in the averageness of everyday life. Human life has the tendency to fall away from itself and follow in the clear and familiar footsteps of the Anyone instead of living its own life. But however that may be, it has now become obvious why he focused on primal Christianity, Augustine, medieval mysticism, Luther, and Kierkegaard. Hard work taught Heidegger that it is not enough to move beyond crystallized dogmatism. Nor does it suffice to clarify our own hermeneutic situation. It does not even help much to read the New Testament or the works of Kierkegaard. Human life, language, and thought are historical to the bone. No writing can ever be innocent because every expression of immediate lived experience mediates and thus transforms the experience. A phenomenological description of lived experience that keeps the experience alive is the proverbial needle Heidegger tries to find in the haystack of phenomenology. What makes a phenomenology of religious lived experience so difficult is its double movement. The first step is the clarification of our hermeneutic situation. The second step is the destruction of the hermeneutic situation of the author. Heidegger’s phenomenological method is specifically designed to meet these requirements, and it took him some six years to work it out. The key elements of his method are hermeneutic situation, formal indication, content sense, relation sense, actualization sense, destruction, and lived experience. Two things are very important. Heidegger is convinced that the method of phenomenology can only be learned through concrete phenomenological descriptions of phenomena. Only by doing phenomenology can we learn what it is. But at the same time, phenomenology is not a method; it is philosophy itself.¹⁸ This means that philosophy as Heidegger understands it is only possible as phenomenology and is a way of living our life. Philosophy should do justice to the fundamental historicality of human existence and therefore follow the two-way strategy mentioned above: it should clarify its own hermeneutic situation through a destruction of a tradition and simultaneously clarify the hermeneutic situation of that tradition through a destruction of the present. In other words, in phenomenology and philosophy, we circle ever closer around the truth but we may never touch it. Thus they reflect the finitude of human existence.

From Christian Religion to Aristotle

In January 1922, Paul Natorp wrote to Husserl to inquire after Heidegger. Natorp would be retiring shortly and Nicolai Hartmann would be taking his place, leaving the junior position in philosophy at Marburg University vacant. Heidegger had already made a name for himself as an outstanding teacher. The rumour of the “hidden king” was circulating in student circles throughout Germany.¹⁹ To have any real chance of obtaining the post, Heidegger needed to publish something urgently or at least to come up with a publishable manuscript. He took three weeks off and labored over his manuscripts. The fruit of his labor was a typescript addressed to Natorp and Georg Misch at Göttingen University, which has become famous under the title of the “Natorp-Bericht.” It is a very interesting text and a major step toward Being and Time. Ultimately, it would lead to Heidegger’s appointment at Marburg University in 1923. In the “Natorp-Bericht,” or “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle. Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation,” as it is called in full, Heidegger founds and develops the hermeneutic situation in which Aristotle’s texts are to be interpreted. The first part is a kind of research report summarizing his work of the previous three years. Heidegger also breaks new ground and finds a solution to the problem of fusing the historical with the systematic approach in phenomenology. He outlines the double-pronged program of a fundamental ontology and a destruction of the history of ontology. The averageness of the public “Anyone” and fallenness are juxtaposed with the possibility of a more original seizure of my own death in order to define an ontological way of access to the temporality and historicality of human being-there. Heidegger designates existence as the countermovement against falling. Here existence has the meaning of life’s most unique and authentic possibility. In the second part, Heidegger discusses the problem of an original retrieval of Greek philosophy rooted in alētheia, logos, and physis. He also gives an interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics VI that centers on the different ways in which the soul “trues” (wahrnimmt). Phronēsis is the interpretative insight into a concrete situation of action coupled with resolute decision and truth as countermovement to concealment.

The “Natorp-Bericht” is an introduction to a book on Aristotle that was scheduled for publication in volume 7, 1924–5 (Being and Timewould be published in volume 9) of Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. This may come as a surprise, since he had been working on a phenomenology of religious life since 1915. Why Aristotle? Where did he come from and what did Heidegger find in his philosophy?

To find an answer to these questions, we need to take a step back and approach Heidegger’s philosophical development from another angle. Heidegger’s work is a collection of paths of thinking. This is also the reason why his work can be interpreted in such different ways. When Heidegger returned home in the winter of 1918, an era had come to an end, and in many ways he had become homeless. He had lost his Catholic faith and not found the answers he needed in the Protestant tradition. He didn’t believe in Neo-Scholasticsm nor in Neo-Kantianism. Germany was no longer an empire; it had become a republic and was a shambles. Life as he had known it had come to an end.

According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of Heidegger’s oldest and most brilliant students, after his return from the battlefields, Heidegger came face to face with the existential question of how modern science and enlightenment could be reconciled with Christian existence.²⁰ But Gadamer failed to understand how radical Heidegger really was. Heidegger asked himself the most basic question of human life: who am I? This question unfolds itself into three different ones that are yet intertwined. The first question (a) is – as we read in his letter to Krebs – what is philosophy? The second question (b) is what is the essence of Modern Times? And the third question (c) is what does it mean to be a Christian? These three questions come together in a fourth (d): is it still possible to be a philosopher and Christian in this day and age?²¹ One could argue that Being and Time is the answer to that final question.

What Is the Essence of Philosophy?

As a philosopher, Heidegger needs to define what the essence of philosophy is. The idea of philosophy is a constant theme in his early Freiburg lecture courses. In his War Emergency Course of 1919, he says:

The idea of science ... means for the immediate consciousness of life an intervention that changes it in some way; it involves a transition to a new attitude of consciousness and therewith its own form of movement of life. Undoubtedly this intervention of the idea of science in the context of the natural consciousness of life can only be found in an original, radical way in philosophy as primal science.

(GA 56/57: 3–4)

Heidegger acknowledges Husserl’s project of philosophy as a strict science. Until 1929, he held onto the thought that phenomenological philosophy had to be a primal science. Heidegger clearly rejects the influential thesis that every philosophy can only be a world view. In a world view, the spiritual unrest, which is so characteristic of human life, quietens down in a construction of eternal norms and values. Both the Neo-Kantians and the philosophers of life tried to develop such world views.

The idea of philosophy is that it is a primal science. Heidegger uses “idea” in the original Kantian meaning and not in the Platonic-Neo-Kantian sense. This implies that primal science as an idea of philosophy is not constitutive for philosophy; it is only regulative and a never- ending task. In his lecture course, Heidegger states phenomenology is the investigation of life in itself. In this sense, it is the opposite of a world view.

Phenomenology is never closed off, it is always provisional in its absolute immersion in life as such. In it no theories are in dispute, but only genuine insights versus the ungenuine. The genuine ones can be obtained only by an honest and unreserved immersion in life itself in its genuineness, and this is ultimately possible only through the genuineness of a personal life.²²

A personal life is always my life of someone. In his personal life, Heidegger is an academic teacher, and as such he has to be a “spiritual guide.” Real spiritual life can only be lived, and the student should partake in this particular form of life. Only by doing philosophy under the guidance of a teacher like Heidegger can we learn what philosophy is. We cannot define nor look at it from the outside; we need to live the philosopher’s life. This is the existentialist core of Heidegger’s philosophy that made it so easy to mistake his work for existentialism. It also explains why students were so attracted to his teaching.

What Is the Essence of Modern Times?

In his lecture course, Heidegger also takes part in the intense debate on the status of science and world views, to which Max Weber’s famous talk “Science as Calling” was one of the most important contributions. World War I had left Germany in chaos. Armed gangs ruled the streets, and the country was in a state of revolutionary upheaval. In Munich, well-meaning writers like Toller and Mühsam founded a soviet republic after several weeks of civil war. They thought that the millennium of light, beauty, and reason had finally begun. Politics had to take care of the happiness of the citizens and make it possible for them to lead meaningful lives. The world should any day become a flower bed. Weber offered in his Munich talk a sober and profound analysis of his time. At first sight, his talk seems to be about the scientific ethos; in reality, he tries to answer the question how a meaningful life is possible in the rationalized civilization of his time. Weber makes it clear that science has to be devoid of value judgments. Science can teach us whether a means can achieve a certain goal. It can also analyze the possible inner contradiction of our goal and examine whether or not it conflicts with other goals we have set ourselves. However, science cannot teach us whether or not it is meaningful to aspire to certain goals.²³ Science cannot bear the responsibility for our value judgments. This is the liberation that the enlightenment has brought us. Sapere aude! Human beings should think for themselves and live their own lives. Unfortunately, we let slip this freedom because science has become our fateful destiny. The technical uses of science have changed our life, destroyed the enchantment of our world, and proven how destructive they can be in World War I.²⁴ Science has lost all its old illusions. It is no longer “the way to true being, the way to true art, the way to true nature, the way to the true God and the way to true happiness.”²⁵ Science has become meaningless because it has no answer to the only question that is of the utmost importance to us: “What we should do, how we should live?”²⁶ As Friedrich Nietzsche would say, we killed God with the rationalization of our world, although we did not know what we were doing.

According to Weber, our civilization has become so rationalized that we expect scientific answers to our vital questions. We do not make use of the liberty science leaves us to answer ourselves questions of value and meaning, but we demand the certainty of scientific answers. We hide behind the pseudoscientific world views that the prophets of the pulpit provide us with, and do not accept responsibility for our own lives. These prophets react to the disenchantment of our rationalized world by putting the last true magic left to us – our personality and freedom – in the irons of pseudo-rationality. They create the illusion of science and mislead their readers and listeners. Weber opposes this deceit with a dualism. We must, on the one hand, approach the world scientifically and, on the other hand, respect the mystery of the human person.²⁷ God has disappeared from our disenchanted world. If God still exists somewhere, then He can only exist in the soul of individual human beings. The living faith is not of this world and demands “the sacrifice of the intellect.”²⁸ Weber emancipates personal and responsible life from the custody of science. As a scientist, he factually leaves people to their fate. How should we live, what should we do? To these questions, no scientific answer is possible. Heidegger accepts Weber’s critique of world views, but he does not want to leave us to our fate. He tries to develop a new concept of science that should make scientific answers to our most intimate and important questions possible. Two things follow from this. First, Heidegger has to develop philosophy as a strict science in such a way that it can provide insight into the facticity of our individual lives. Second, he has to show that meaningfulness is given with the bare fact of our existence. A reinterpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology will enable Heidegger to achieve both these goals in his early Freiburg lecture courses.

What Does It Mean to be a Christian?

What does it mean to be a Christian? The decisive insight that formed Heidegger’s path of thinking is that Christian religion is not a world view but imitation. A Christian follows in the footsteps of Christ.

In his courses on the phenomenology of (Christian) religion, Heidegger tries to get to the origins of the religious experience. Religion puts us in touch with the fullness of our existence as human beings. As he put in a letter to Elisabeth Husserl:²⁹

We must again be able to wait and have faith in the grace which is present in every genuine life, with its humility before the inviolability of one’s own and the other’s experience. Our life must be brought back from the dispersion of multiple concerns to its original wellspring of expansive creativity. Not the fragmentation of life into programs, no aetheticising glosses or genial posturing, but rather the mighty confidence in union with God and original pure, and effective action. Only life overcomes life and not matters and things, not even logicised “values” and “norms.”

This original Christian experience was expressed through the vocabulary and conceptuality of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy had developed its most important categories and concepts from factic life itself. But the original life experience of the Greeks was different from the Christian experience of life. From this follows a double covering up. Original Christian life experience is covered up by the Greek conceptuality used to express it. At the same time, our Christian world view blinds us to the original Greek life experience. This is why Heidegger spends so much time developing his method of destruction. We cannot distinguish between Greek and Christian life experience as long as we do not know what is original and genuine in both these life experiences. But since there is no such thing as “a view from nowhere,” the only way to get to the original life experience is a scraping off of the layers of the non-original expression of this original life experience. As we can see in his courses of the phenomenology of religion and Augustine, Heidegger tries to actualize the original life experience in his own life. Originally, Heidegger believed that the all-controlling place science occupies in the modern world was a consequence of the Greek’s contemplative worldview. For the Greeks, the highest purpose and activity in human life is pure thought. As a kind of antidote, he used the Christian ideal of life: care (Sorge). A Christian should not admire and enjoy the wonders of the world but rather care about himself and the state of his eternal soul.

Heidegger studied Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) as a means to uncover original and genuine Christian life experience. But in Aristotle – the all-important philosopher of the Middle Ages and scholasticism – he found a phenomenology of human life and to his surprise the moment of care and a kairological experience of time. According to Aristotle, being human means to have logos. While he has logos, his primal way of being is to behold (noein). As beholding living beings, humans collect entities in their being and discover the sense and meaning of being. This beholding unfolds itself into five different ways that each experience senses in different ways and thus opens up different regions of being: nous (pure beholding), sophia (authentic inspective understanding), phronesis (solicitous circumspection), techne (productive working procedure), and episteme (inspectional demonstrative determination).

Now we can take a step back. Greek, Christian, and modern ways of life are all possible ways of being human (Dasein). So the structure of being human that makes these three different ways of actualizing human life possible becomes the phenomenon Heidegger tries to uncover. This is the purpose of the existential analytic in Being and Time: to uncover the fundament of three fundamental ways of being human. As a phenomenologist, Heidegger can only describe actual phenomena. This is the reason why these three “existentiell” ideals of being human determine his existential analytic.

The interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy became an unavoidable task for Heidegger. He was a phenomenologist avant la lettre. Not only had he developed his concepts out of human life experience, but he had also analyzed the basic structure of human life as being-in-the-world. Human beings have the logos and behold the being of entities. His philosophy determined the conceptuality of Christian and modern life experience.

Is It Still Possible to Be a Christian in Our Day and Age?

The answer to this question is obviously yes, although the real imitation of Christ was only taking place in such unique places as Beuron. But Heidegger was a philosopher – he had given up theology and the priesthood way back in 1911 – and a Christian philosophy is a round square. His starting point is life, such as it expresses itself, and not a holy book. The philosopher digs ever deeper in the fundaments of human life experience. Although every a priori structure that underlies a genuine way of being human is in itself historical, Heidegger still believed that, beneath all these historical structures, a nonhistorical structure could be uncovered.

Heidegger’s final course at Freiburg university as a Privatdozent,³⁰ “Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity,” is an important step on the way to Being and Time. As the title indicates, Heidegger develops his ontology as a hermeneutics of facticity. Facticity is the being of our own being-there. Here Heidegger uses being-there for the first time as a formal indication of the central phenomenon of phenomenology. It indicates the particular whileness that each of us is and has. After a historical overview of the history of hermeneutics, Heidegger interprets hermeneutics not as a science of interpretation but as explicating communication. Hermeneutics is not so much a method for interpreting texts as it is a way to understand human life in its everyday form and expressions. Its goal is the self-understanding of being-there. Since interpretation is an outstanding possibility of the being of factual life itself, hermeneutics is an essential possibility of facticity. In order to keep the term being-there ontologically neutral, we must deconstruct the traditional concepts of human being such as rational animal and person. Existence is being-there’s most unique and most intense possibility. It is being-there’s ability to hold itself awake and be alert to itself in its ultimate possibility. After a discussion of the contemporary state of philosophy, Heidegger comes to his phenomenological analysis of being-there.

The being of being-there is determined as being in a world. In order to characterize the everyday world and to develop the formal indication of being-there as being-in-the-world, Heidegger formulates the trio of questions, which we also find in Being and Time: (1) What does a world mean? (2) What does in a world imply? (3) How does being in a world appear? Only the first question is worked out in any detail in the course. We encounter world in three different ways as environment, with-world, and self-world. Environment is a meaningful context that discloses the being of entities as equipment. Our everyday openness toward entities is made possible by the fundamental phenomenon of care. Because in the everydayness of our lives we are first and foremost concerned with entities, the potential authenticity of our being-there is at the same time concealed. Heidegger calls this potential authenticity discovery. In Being and Time, the meaning of disclosedness and discovery will be reversed.

When Heidegger assumed his post as professor of philosophy at Marburg University, he continued to follow the same paths of thought. He still labored over his book on Aristotle’s philosophy. But he also found a new path of thought: the concept of time. He had already dealt with this topic in his formal “test lecture” as part of his Habilitation in July 1915 titled “The Concept of Time in Historical Science.” Yet, when he began to walk down this path, another central element of Being and Time fell into place. Heidegger presented a public address, “The Concept of Time,” nine years later on July 25, 1924, to the Marburg Theological Society. It contains the core structure of Being and Time. The central topic of the lecture is the question what is time? Heidegger analyzes first the everyday concept of time. Time is related to movement. Aristotle and Albert Einstein agree that time exists only because of the events that happen within it. In natural science, time is measured by a now that is so much later than an earlier now and so much earlier than a later now. Yet, as Augustine has shown, we can measure time only through our disposedness. Time is closely related to the being-there of human beings.

Heidegger picked this theme up in his famous summer semester 1925 lecture course on the History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena Toward the Phenomenology of History and Nature (GA 20).³¹ In this course, he develops a new research program that ultimately will result in the book Being and Time. It is a logical continuation of his earlier work on early Christianity, Aristotle, Plato, and Dilthey. The question of the meaning of being has become the fundamental problem of Heidegger’s phenomenology. This question enables him to show the link between the systematic part of his research, the hermeneutics of factic life experience, and the historical part, the destruction of the philosophy of Aristotle, Augustine, and Descartes. Heidegger explains this link in the subtitle of the course. The prolegomena offers an interpretation of the history of the concept of time as an introduction to the phenomenology of history and nature. As Kisiel pointed out, Heidegger reworks the roots of his early philosophical work in this course.³²

History and nature are the subject matter of the two main groups of science: the humanities and natural science. According to Heidegger, phenomenology should not make the mistake of the Neo-Kantians and Dilthey, looking at reality through the eyes of science, because in this way they fall prey to scientific prejudice. Phenomenology is an original discovering of history and nature in their different realities (GA 20: 2). This is only possible if we can discover history and nature within a horizon through which they can also be distinguished (GA 20: 7).³³ Such horizon can, according to Heidegger, only be disclosed by way of the history of the concept of time. “The history of the concept of time is ... the history of the question of the being of beings” (GA 20: 8).³⁴ Because the being of beings was understood by the Greeks as presence and this view also determines the way we understand the being of beings, the history of the concept of time is really a destruction of the history of ontology and metaphysics.

During his WS 1924–5 lecture course on Plato (GA 19), Heidegger’s main discovery was that the question of the stranger from Elea: “What is being?” should be the starting point of radical phenomenological research. The consequences of this ontological turning become visible in the lecture course on the history of time.³⁵ “The question of being as such, however, when it is put in a sufficiently formal manner, is the most universal and emptiest, but perhaps also the most concrete question, which a scientific inquiry can ever raise” (GA 20: 186).³⁶ To ask this question in a phenomenological way, we have to make a being as being visible in its being. Through this radicalization of phenomenology in its own most possibility, the questioning of Plato and Aristotle becomes alive again. Phenomenology is: “the repetition, the retaking of the beginning of our scientific philosophy” (GA 20: 184). Heidegger next shows that the question of the meaning of being has a threefold structure. We can distinguish between (1) that which we want to know, (2) that which is asked (the being of beings), and (3) that which is questioned (the being in question; GA 20: 195). Posing the question of being is a way of being of a specific being, which is characterized by an implicit understanding of being and that in its being cares about its being (GA 20: 405). Heidegger formally indicates this being as being-there. A phenomenology of being-there is a necessary preparation for the question of the meaning of being because being-there has an explicit relation to being.³⁷

The ontological turn in his phenomenology poses four problems for Heidegger. First, what is the question of the meaning of the being of beings (GA 20: 200)? As we will see, this question is really posed by being-there itself which in its being cares about its being (GA 20: 185).³⁸ It is only through our own being that we have access to being. Being concerns us; we are involved in it. Second, what is being-there? The answer to this question is the hermeneutics of primal facticity that Heidegger developed from 1923 on. The being of being-there is not only historical (Dilthey, Yorck) but is thoroughly temporal. Third, what is the reason the question of being was forgotten? The forgetfulness of being is a consequence of being-there’s falling in to the world and the “They” in its everydayness and ends in the crisis of modernity.³⁹ Finally, this implies that a solution to this crisis can only be found when being-there retrieves its authenticity – that means, it poses the question of being again (GA 20: 179–80).

In the introduction of his lecture course, Heidegger discusses the meaning and task of phenomenological research. This cannot be an ordinary introduction in which the main results of phenomenology are neatly presented, since phenomenological research must always be repeated by us (GA 20: 32). In other words, an introduction to phenomenology falls under Husserl’s famous maxim: “to the things themselves” (GA 20: 104).

Heidegger’s introduction is a repetition of Husserl’s phenomenological “breakthrough.” Heidegger will try to show that his hermeneutic ontological phenomenology is a consequence of taking Husserl’s maxim “to the things themselves” seriously. In his course, he transforms Husserl’s three fundamental and revolutionary breakthroughs: intentionality, categorical intuition, and the a priori into care, understanding, and time (GA 20: 420, 355, 99).

Phenomenology’s first major discovery is intentionality (GA 20: 34). To discover what intentionality is, we need to get to the thing itself and not be deceived by traditional philosophical opinions. We need to uncover the structure of intentionality. The result of this process will be that care is the fundamental structure of being-there. Factually, it is a fact that there is being-there. The primal phenomenon for Heidegger is the structure of being-there. His phenomenology could be described as a structural analysis in which the structure of being-there is described through formal indication and existential concepts. Heidegger only describes structures and functions. He wants to discover of what being intentionality is the structure and how it is this structure. This is only possible if we examine intentionality in its factic historical reality. This leads us to Husserl’s second discovery: categorical intuition (GA 20: 63). Categorial intuition is “a concretion of the basic constitution of intentionality” (GA 20: 98–9). It makes the structures within which we discover beings visible. In categorial intuition, the categorial is first grasped as an element of a being and only later is it determined as a category. In other words, we always already live in the categorial. Life explains and understands itself. We live in a world that always already is filled with meaning. Implicitly we understand the structure of life because we are involved in it and care about it. We grasp the categorial by living our lives. “It is not so much that we see the objects and things, but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse; we see what one says about the matter” (GA 20: 75). Only in a new approach can we make the categorial explicit and develop a doctrine of categories. The task of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology is the explication of the structure of our lived experience. “There is no ontology alongside a phenomenology. Rather, scientific ontology is nothing but phenomenology” (GA 20: 98).

This leads us to Husserl’s third discovery – the a priori. Categories are earlier than any experience. “The a priori to something is that which already always is the earlier” (GA 20: 99). Here Heidegger establishes for the first time a link between the problem of time and its relation to being. Heidegger follows Dilthey and takes his distance from Kant and Husserl. The a priori is historical and is not beyond time. The a priori that is grasped through categorial intuition is a formal indication of a dynamic structure of being-there.

We live in categorial structures like being-in-the-world, being-with, and existence, within which we discover and meet beings. “We shall see that our comportments, lived experiences taken in the broadest sense, are through and through expressed experiences; even if they are not uttered in words, they are nonetheless expressed in a definite articulation by an understanding that I have of them as I simply live in them without regarding them thematically” (GA 20: 65).⁴⁰ Life articulates itself and discloses beings in their being. We are in a world because it worlds for us. The primal something is that there is being-there. This is as the primal form of intentionality truth as unconcealment (aletheia) and it has a logical structure (logos). The world is the a priori of all the beings that we discover within it. It is at the same time an always-receding horizon. In this lecture course, Heidegger uses Husserl’s phenomenon of appresentation from the unpublished manuscript of Ideas II.⁴¹

Heidegger only uses the concept of appresentation in this course. Later it will be replaced by meaningfulness: “We always already live in an understanding of the ‘is’ without being able to say more precisely what it actually means” (GA 20: 194). In every aspect of our factic life experience, we have an implicit understanding of being. This implicit understanding, that is being-there, must be made explicit as the primal form of intentionality. In every experience of the being of an entity, being itself is also experienced. The world appresents things and thus lets them be present, encountered, and discovered. That which is primarily given is for Heidegger the world as intentional structure and not the things within it: the primary appresentation is the meaningfulness and not the thing or object. This brings us to the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Heidegger uses the term “meaningfulness” to indicate the link between the primal phenomenon of factic life and the meaning of words (GA 20: 275). The expression meaningfulness is not the best, but Heidegger could not come up with anything better (GA 20: 275).⁴² His main concern is the relation between being and language. The world is always already filled with meaning, and that is why we can discover meaning in it and talk about it. There is always and everywhere meaning. Originally, we experience the unconcealment of our being-there, that is, the primal facticity, as a logical structure. Because we are always already in the truth, Heidegger can avoid Natorp’s critique of phenomenology. The structure of meaning within which we live can be expressed in words. “Live” has here the double meaning of living (leben), and experiencing(erleben). We can now take the next step. This meaningfulness can only be if the meaning of the world is understood. For this reason, Heidegger calls understanding a more primal phenomenon of “being-in-the-world” than meaningfulness (GA 20: 288). Understanding appresents the world. Understanding is fundamentally a relation that belongs to our “being-in-the-world.” “Understanding is the primary being-relationship of Dasein to the world and to itself” (GA 20: 286). In everyday life, we are always already familiar with the world and ourselves. Getting around (Umgang) with myself is as primal as getting around with the world. I discover myself in discovering the world. I always already have myself in a self-world (GA 20: 350). In other words, I am not a pure I but far more a hermeneutical situation. This is what Heidegger formally indicates as disposition (Befindlichkeit). “Disposition expresses a way of finding that Dasein is in its being as being in each instance its own there, and how it is this there” (GA 20: 352). In disposition, we discover both how we are and that we are. In understanding, we realize the possibilities of being that are given to us in discoveredness and disposition. “Understanding as disposed disclosure and having disclosed the world is as such a disclosive self-finding” (GA 20: 356). Understanding always intends the world, being-with-others, and our own being-there. The self-, with-, and surrounding world are equiprimordial. Understanding is the fundamental form of all knowledge (GA 20: 281). So now we come to a second meaning of appresentation in order of knowledge that is contrary to its meaning in the order of being. Understanding appresents the world through the presentation of beings in the world (perception). Both forms of appresentation have a common base that we could call primary appresenting (GA 20: 347). In ontological appresentation, the world appresents the beings, and appresent understanding concerns the world itself. In understanding, appresenting the world and our “being-in” are appresented. At the end of the course, Heidegger will show that understanding is the lumen naturale of being-there (GA 20: 411). We can see ourselves and the world. We are, as it were, a between or a clearing in the massive being of nature. In understanding, we are beyond ourselves (intentionality) and already with and in being. Heidegger also uses understanding in its other meaning. We can say a carpenter understands his trade, which means that he is good at his job. Understanding here means having an ability. This ability is having the possibility to do something. Being-there is nothing other than a can-be. “I am, that means, I can” (GA 20: 412).

The world cannot only appresent things; it can also appresent the being-there of others and myself. A field appresents the farmer that ploughed it. A nightgown on a chair appresents the lover that wore it. Although others may be physically absent, they can be appresented by things. The world appresents, for instance, beings as equipment that can be used in a certain way. A hammer is for hammering, a knife is made for cutting. All equipment is appresented in structures of meaningfulness. The structure of the appresentation of other being-there is different. The others are not appresented as suitable for a certain kind of use. We meet them in the how of their going about the world. Even when we meet them in person, they are appresented “in a concern or non-concern according to their in-being” (GA 20: 331).⁴³ The world appresents the being-there of others in their functioning. A human being is what he does. In this way, Heidegger reduces the being of being-there to a functioning. The existential analytic of being-there is understanding the structure of the functioning of being-there. Heidegger’s analytic is a form structuralism and not so much a form of ontology. He replaces the concept of substance with that of function.

Being-there is as being-in-the-world at the same time a being-with-others (GA 20: 328). I am in the world with others and others are in the world with me. We are in the world together. This being-with-others implies that we depend upon each other. “The worldhood of the world appresents not only world-things – the environing world in the narrower sense – but also, although not as a worldly being, the co-Dasein of others and my own self” (GA 20: 333).⁴⁴ From the being of being-there, we must understand our “being-in,” our “being-with,” and the “in each case mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) as ways of ex-istence. Here we find one of the reasons why Heidegger gave a central role to the formal indication of existence in Being and Time.

We now come to a crossing on Heidegger’s path of thinking. Particular whileness (Jeweiligkeit) is a formal indication of the temporality of being-there. Being-there is the being that has to be as my being (GA 20: 206).⁴⁵ Having-to-be is a formal indication of a dynamic structure that comprises both a must and a can.⁴⁶ In Being and Time, having-to-be will disappear in the dynamics of existence. With “having-to-be,” Heidegger has discovered the most fundamental structure of being-there. In being-there, there is a fundamental relation to being: the primal form of intentionality. Being-there is the being that is characterized by an implicit understanding of being and that appresents being. Heidegger can refer to a fundamental insight of Parmenides at the beginning of the history of philosophy. Being-there understands in its being the being of beings (GA 20: 200).⁴⁷ Being-there cares about its being. Being-there intends to be being and this intention of being-there is in itself care. Heidegger thus destructs Husserl’s understanding of intentionality as a pure form of consciousness.

Heidegger’s course on the history of the concept of time is an important step on the way to Being and Time. But there are still some important structures missing, like existence, thrownness, and mineness. During the final hour of the course, Heidegger stumbles upon a phenomenon that we can consider to be the missing link in his phenomenology. “Not ‘time is’ but ‘Dasein qua time temporalizes its being’” (GA 20: 442). When Heidegger tries to come to grips with this phenomenon, he will make use of Kant’s doctrine of schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason and the existential vocabulary he had avoided for so long. Being-there temporizes and actualizes in time its being. In other words, being-there exists in the three dimensions of time that correspond with the history of factic life experience: historical consciousness (Dilthey) that characterizes modern times (the past), Greek life experience of being present (the present), and the kairos experience of early Christianity and Aristotle’s practical philosophy. Together they form the there as a sequence of hermeneutical situations in which being-there is always mine. In this there, being-there appresents being. Conversely, being appresents being-there in the course of history in its three different ways. Being can only be understood from the ways in which it realized itself in time. Time is the transcendental horizon of the question of the meaning of being.

On November 5, 1925, Heidegger began his lecture course on logic. This winter semester 1925–6 lecture course, the last one Hannah Arendt attended, is a milestone on the way to Being and Time. It moves toward the interface where language is born. Heidegger wants to develop a philosophical logic that can discover existentials and their hermeneutically indicative sentences. In the first part of the course, he rehearses his own prior steps toward such a logic. After a discussion of Edmund Husserl’s critique of psychologism, he criticizes the Neo-Kantian sense of truth as the validity of judgment. To get to the essence of truth, it is necessary to return to Aristotle’s prejudicative truth of “nous” or simple apprehension. This truth of intuition binds Aristotle and Husserl together in a juxtaposition of Greek and German thinking.

After this course, Heidegger gathered his manuscripts and left for Todtnauberg, where he would write the first 175 pages of Being and Time. In 1925, Heidegger came under increasing pressure from the philosophy department to finally publish another book. Nicolai Hartmann left Marburg to become Max Scheler’s colleague at the University of Cologne. The University of Marburg wanted Heidegger to be his successor, but his lack of publications was the reason for the Ministry of Science, Art, and National Education in Berlin to remain reluctant in appointing Heidegger. Just before the Christmas break, Heidegger changed the subject matter of his course. Instead of a further destruction of Aristotle’s concept of truth, Heidegger developed a phenomenological interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (GA 21: 194).⁴⁸This brings us to two questions: (1) why did Heidegger choose logic as the subject matter of the course, and (2) why did he switch from Aristotle to Kant?

In his previous course on the history of the concept of time, Heidegger had offered his students a destruction of Husserl’s phenomenology based on his concept of phenomenon. In this course, he will destruct Husserl’s concept of logic. The term “phenomenology” consists of both “phenomenon” and “logic.” Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a first draft of the history of the concept of time that Heidegger announced in his program for research.⁴⁹ This part should have become the first chapter of the unpublished second part of Being and Time (40).

As a phenomenologist, Heidegger had been studying for years the structure beneath intuition and intentionality. In this lecture course, he will no longer use Husserl’s terminology of appresent and appresentation. He will try to show that the structure of understanding in its profoundest sense lies beneath intuition and makes it possible. Husserl’s principle of all principles is intuition, that is, the giving and having of an entity in its bodily presence. Heidegger shows that, underlying intuition, there is a more fundamental understanding of that intuition that at once understands itself. The primary form of simple apprehension is a having of something as something in the ways we can use it. We discover entities first as pieces of equipment, which are given in their in-order-to. The “as” of primary understanding is the original articulation of my getting around and dealings with the world. In this way, we acquire the habits of our habitat that constitute our most immediate having. The “as” of primary understanding makes it possible for us to explicate in assertions the structure of our being. The “as” of primary understanding can thus become the hermeneutic “as.” Assertion is a demonstrative letting see or uncovering. Heidegger can now distinguish between worldly assertions that let entities see in their being and categorial assertions or existentials that indicate the being of being-there.

Identification or proof is an intentional matter. It is carried out; and thereby, without any reflection on its part, it attains to a clarification of itself. If this moment of unreflected self-understanding, which lies in the intentional performance of identification, is specially apprehended of and by itself, then it is to be taken as what we call evidence.

Evidence is the self-understanding act of identification. This self-understanding is given with the act itself, since the intentional sense of the act intends something identical qua identical; and thereby, in and with its intending, it eo ipso clarifies itself ... Evidence is not an act that accompanies proof and attaches itself to it. Evidence is the very enactment of, or a special mode of, proof.

(GA 21: 107–8)⁵⁰

In intuition, we are not only with the entity that is given in intuition; we also know that what we thought was given in intuition (“the table is white”) is identical to the entity that we intuit in its bodily presence (“the white table”). “Truth as an identity is a relation between the meant and the intuited” (GA 21: 109). The judgment “the table is white” is true because the relation between table and being white can be demonstrated in the intuition of the bodily present white table. The identity of table and being white is intuited. Understanding is the condition of the possibility of intuition. Here in the heart of the problem of truth, Heidegger will come across the phenomenon of time. He will analyze the understanding that is the a priori of intuition with help of Aristotle’s doctrine of truth. First, he will sketch the history of the concept of intuition and introduce Kant as a spokesperson for the thesis that knowledge is intuition (GA 21: 114–15).

In the second part of his lecture course on the decisive beginning of philosophical logic and the roots of traditional logic, Heidegger will destruct Aristotle’s logic (GA 21: 127). On the one hand, Heidegger introduces his students to the method of phenomenological destruction. To get access to Aristotle’s original thinking, all the prejudices and misunderstandings that accumulated over the centuries must be destructed. On the other hand, Heidegger destructs Aristotle’s thought so it becomes clear what he thought, and we can explain how these prejudices and misunderstandings could arise (GA 21: 128). Aristotle is not only the father of philosophical logic, he is also at the origin of scholastic logic. Heidegger will deal with two important prejudices concerning Aristotle’s logic: (1) Aristotle supposedly claimed that the place of truth is judgment, and (2) he supposedly taught that truth is the correspondence of thinking and the entity (GA 21: 128).

After the Christmas break, Heidegger abandons the original outline of his course. Instead of Aristotle’s question of truth, he discusses Immanuel Kant’s doctrine of schematism. This interpretation of Kant would ultimately result in his later book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Heidegger shows that the original self-affection of the mind is time. Time gives itself unthematically as the constant precursory encounter that lets entities be. It lets entities be seen and makes our intuition of entities possible. The making present of an entity as something is a comportment of being-there, for being-there is itself time.

At the end of the lecture course, Heidegger summarizes the results of his interpretation of Kant. He wants to make clear that Kant implicitly makes use of a concept of time that is not a sequence of “now-moments” and that can only be explained from the temporality of being-there. “Time is an original pure and general self-affection” (GA 21: 400). That which time affects, is a manifold of intuitions, a manifold given as a sequence of “nows.” It is not grasped thematically by the “I think.” The sequence of now-moments is a horizon that, through its constant intending, shows something. The now is a pointing in a direction where something can be encountered and so essentially a form of intentionality. The now is in a sense waiting for something that it can make present. Knowledge in the Kantian sense is, according to Heidegger, that now as a synthesis of the “I think” and the manifold of intuitions that are given in a sequence of “now-moments.” Behind the synthesis of knowledge, we find intentionality as the making present of something. This making present of something is the now as that in which something becomes present. Because Kant made a strict and clear distinction between time and the “I think,” the structure of intentionality remained invisible for him and therefore also the principal connection between time and the “I think.” The making present expresses itself in the now. “Making-present is ... a factical presenting” (GA 21: 402). The present, understood as an existential, is a formal indication of the structure of being-there.

During the final hour of his course, Heidegger takes a terminological decision that will have far-reaching consequences: “We designate the ever-temporal [jeweilige], authentic ontological possibility of factical human existence (however that possibility be chosen and determined) as Existenz” (GA 21: 402). Heidegger replaces the formal indication of being-there’s having-to-be with existence. Why he does so, he unfortunately does not explain.⁵¹ A little later he remarks, “If Gegenwart [present] constitutes a mode of time and, as a mode of time, determines the meaning of the being of human existence (insofar as human existence is being at home with the world), then time itself must be understood as the basic existential of human existence” (GA 21: 403). In Being and Time, Heidegger will no longer call time an existential. This shows how fluid his terminology is at the time. What is the essential difference between “having-to-be” and “existence” as formal indication of being-there? “Having-to-be” implies the primacy of possibility. Being-there is essentially a possibility and so a “can-be.” This formal indication has one big disadvantage. Heidegger wants to overcome Aristotle’s “ousological” doctrine of being. Being is not an entity. “Having-to-be” implies, however, an entity that has to be. Being-there threatens to become an entity that has the special quality of “having-to-be” instead of the entity that has the logos. Heidegger, however, wants to disclose being-there not as an entity but as a structure of movement. Being-there is not an entity. It is essentially intentionality. Existence is a more appropriate formal indication because “being-out-toward” is a kind of “ek-sistence” or “standing-out,” being beyond oneself. Heidegger can of course at the same time turn traditional ontology upside-down because existence becomes the essence of being-there. As existence, being-there has no essence in its traditional sense but always a range of possibilities it can be.

Heidegger ends his lecture course with a sketch of a phenomenological chronology. What is time (GA 21: 205)? Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is focused on this question. In the first step of his interpretation, Heidegger discloses the intentional function time has in the Critique of Pure Reason as a “being-toward.” This function hides itself in the making present of entities in their categorial structures and is made visible in the second step of his interpretation. Third, Heidegger can then disclose time in a phenomenological analysis. “The ontological transition from the pre-theoretical relation to the world, to a pure [theoretical] making-present, is itself a mode of temporality – and it would be absolutely impossible if human existence were not itself time” (GA 21: 407). Being-there is time. Heidegger first raised the question “is being-there time?” in his 1924 lecture on the concept of time (GA 64: 125). The “is” does not have the function of the copula; it is a formal indication that should make being-there as phenomenon understandable (GA 21: 410). Being-there is time, which means being-there’s being is determined by time and actualizes itself in the temporal structure of the three tensors (GA 21: 409). Being-there has the structure of care, that is, being-ahead-of-itself as being involved with the world. As being-involved-with the world, being-there makes entities present and temporalizes its being in presentness. As thrownness, a term Heidegger does not use yet in the lecture course, being-there actualizes the a priori of its facticity in historicity. As being-toward-death, being-there expects its own-most possibility and actualizes its being futurity (GA 21: 412). The three existential or temporal structures through which being-there actualizes its being form the horizon within which being-there exists. “The structures of human existence – temporality itself – are not at all like an ever-available framework for something that can be merely-present. Rather, in keeping with their most proper sense, these structures are possibilities for human existence to be, and only that” (GA 21: 414).

Being-there has always already decided which possibilities it will actualize, either authentically or inauthentically. Heidegger analyzes the structure of being-there still to a large extent with the help of Aristotle’s theory of dunamis, energeia, and entelecheia. Time as the a priori enables being-there to be its own most possibility (GA 21: 414). Being-there is never at hand but always delivered over to itself, that is, always already in the world and beyond itself with other entities. Every possibility being-there actualizes always contains the possibility to give up this actualization. In its “having-to-be,” being-there is responsible for itself and the way it actualizes its being. At the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy, we find the foundation of ethics. We can take one more step on our way to Being and Time before we let Heidegger take his manuscripts to Todtnauberg where he would write the first part of his magnum opus in March 1926. The starting point of a phenomenological chronology is the question of the meaning of being. The condition of the possibility of the givenness of being is time (GA 21: 410). Being is the primal facticity. There just is being and not not-being. As the primal facticity, it is at the same time the primal intentionality and, as such, the fundamental structure of being-there. Being-there is actualized in time as meaningfulness. The temporality of being-there unfolds itself in the three tensors of historicity, presentness, and futurity. In other words, being can only be experienced within the horizon of temporality. This means being can only be understood if it can be experienced in the three dimensions of temporality at the same time. In one moment, kairos, being-there is disclosed in its temporality and being. This kairological moment can only be grounded in the mineness of being-there. The existential analytic of being-there in Being and Time will become a kairology.

It is important to keep in mind that Being and Time is both a book and a research program. From 1919 on, with harbingers in his dissertation and qualifying dissertation, Heidegger found his own path of thinking. The many pathways he followed came together in 1926 in the book called Being and Time. His research program “Being and Time” did not end there and would ultimately lead him beyond the book Being and Time. In this sense, we may call Being and Time a carefully planned accident.