Already in the first pages of SZ Heidegger had left the human subject behind in favor of what he called the subjectivity of the subject,19 the essence of human being as the thrown-open clearing for meaningfulness. But Heidegger was concerned to avoid any impression that the origin of meaningfulness as such “is determined from out of thought.”20 Soon enough after Being and Time was published, Heidegger came to see that the transcendental approach of the book at least risked leaving the false impression that the already-aheadness of ex-sistence existentielly thrusts open the horizon or “creates” it sua sponte as if by a Promethean act of will. The real insight came sometime before December of 1930 (the lecture “On the Essence of Truth”) when Heidegger saw for the first time that the clearing—which is always already opened up whenever and wherever there is ex-sistence—is intrinsically hidden. As we shall see, this insight led to the change in Heidegger’s approach in the 1930s, when he abandoned the transcendental framework and adopted his seinsgeschichtlich (i.e., the “giving-of-the-clearing”) approach. This alteration of approach, which obviously was not programmed into the original project of Being and Time, is quite distinct from and not to be confused with the transition to SZ I.3, which had been already planned in 1926 as the change of focus from Da-sein to Da-sein. The scholarship has generally confused the two, a matter that we take up later in the next chapter when we study the Kehre.
We turn now to the issues that presented difficulties for Heidegger in the years 1927–1930 and prevented him from completing Being and Time in the form in which it was originally projected.
2. THE PROJECTED CONTENTS OF SZ I.3.
It could be argued that after writing Being and Time in Todtnauberg and Marburg in 1926, Heidegger spent the next fifty years formulating and reformulating, with varying degrees of clarity and success, what was to have been the subject matter of SZ I.3. Some evidence for that might be found in the title he chose for a public lecture in Freiburg as late as January of 1962: “Time and Being.”21 In any case it is clear that soon after the publication of Being and Time the project was in trouble. Heidegger had rushed his treatise into print prematurely under publish-or-perish conditions in an effort to win an appointment to
19. SZ 24.5–6
= 45.31
speaks of SZ I.1–2 as (in Kantian terms) an “Analytik der Subjektivität des Subjekts.”
20. GA 44: 179.6 = 175.33.
21. GA 14: 5–30 = 1–24.