The reversal is above all not an operation of interrogative thought; it is inherent in the very matter designated by the headings: "Being and Time," "Time and Being." For this reason, the passage cited from the "Letter on Humanism" reads: "Here the Whole is reversed." "The Whole": this means the matter [involved] in "Being and Time," "Time and Being." The reversal is in play within the matter itself. Neither did I invent it nor does it affect merely my thought. Up to now I know of no attempt to reflect on this matter and analyse it critically. Instead of the groundless, endless prattle about the "reversal," it would be more advisable and fruitful if people would simply engage themselves in the matter mentioned. Refusal to do so obliges one ipso facto to demonstrate that the Being-question developed in Being and Time is unjustified, superfluous and impossible. Any criticism of Being and Time starting in this fashion, however, must obviously first be set straight.
One need only observe the simple fact that in Being and Time the problem is set up outside the sphere of subjectivism — that the entire anthropological problematic is kept at a distance, that the normative issue is emphatically and solely the experience of There-being with a constant eye to the Being-question — for it to become strikingly clear that the "Being" into which Being and Time inquired can not long remain something that the human subject posits.8 It is rather Being, stamped as Presence by its time-character, [that] makes the approach to There-being. As a result, even in the initial steps of the Being-question in Being and Time thought is called upon to undergo a change whose movement cor-responds with the reversal.
And yet, the basic question of Being and Time is not in any sense abandoned by reason of the reversal. Accordingly, the prefatory note to the seventh unrevised edition of Being and Time (1957) contains the remark: [This] "way still remains even today a necessary one, if the question about Being is to stir our There-being." Contrary [to what is generally supposed], the question of Being and Time is decisively ful-filled in the thinking of the reversal. He alone can ful-fill who has a vision of fullness.9
8 [Translator's note. For the translation of Dasein by "There-being," see below, p. 34, note 17.]
9 [Translator's note. The translation offered here is at best a reasonable facsimile of the ergänzen-Ganze correlation in the German. Someone has suggested: " . . . is decisively whol-ified. He alone can whol-ify who has a view of the whole " Very Heidegger, but not very English I]