44
ON TIME AND BEING

thought in Appropriation, so that Being and time, too, in a way continue to be thematic.

The passages in Being and Time were mentioned in which "It gives" was already used without being directly thought in relation to Appropriation. These passages appear today as half attempts—attempts to work out the question of Being, attempts to give that question the adequate direction. But they themselves remain inadequate. Thus our task today is to. see the themes and motives in these attempts which point to the question of Being and are determined by that question. Otherwise, one easily makes the mistake of regarding the investigations of Being and Time as independent studies which are then rejected as insufficient. Thus, for example, the question of death is pursued solely within the boundaries and motives which result from the intention of working out the temporality of Dasein.

Even today it is very hard to imagine the scope of the difficulties which stood in the way of asking the question of Being, its point of departure and its development. Within the framework of the Neo-kantian philosophy of that time, a philosophy had to fulfill the claim of thinking in a Kantian way; critically, transcendentally, if it was to find an audience as a philosophy. Ontology was a word of scorn. Husserl himself who came close to the true question of Being in the Logical Investigations—above all in the VI—could not persevere in the philosophical atmosphere of that time. He came under the influence ofNatorp and turned to transcendental phenomenology which reached its first culmination in the Ideas. The principle of phenomenology was thus abandoned. Philosophy's invasion (in the form of Neo-kantianism) of phenomenology caused Scheler and many others to leave Husserl. It remains an open question whether and how this secession followed the principle of "back to things of thought."

All of this has been mentioned in order to clarify possible questions about the manner of procedure of the lecture. This procedure can be called phenomenological if one understands by phenomenology not a particular school of philosophy, but rather something which permeates every philosophy. This something can best be


Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture "Time and Being" (GA 14) by Martin Heidegger