Fil Cont-Heidegger - Supplements. From The Earliest Essays To Being and Time and Beyond 2002 PDF

Martin Heidegger
SUPPLEMENTS
From the Earliest Essays to
Being and Time and Beyond
edited by
J O H N VA N B U R E N
S t at e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s
Contents
Acknowledgments, vii
Abbreviations, ix
Editor’s Introduction, 1
Chapter One
CHRONOLOGICAL OVERVIEW:
Education, Teaching, Research and Publication, 17
John van Buren
Student Period: Education, 18
Student Period: Research and Publication, 21
Early Freiburg Period, 25
Marburg Period, 30
Chapter Two
PER MORTEM AD VITAM:
Thoughts on Johannes Jörgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life (1910), 35
John Protevi and John van Buren, translators
Chapter Three
THE PROBLEM OF REALITY IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY (1912), 39
Philip J. Bossert and John van Buren, translators
Chapter Four
THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY (1915), 49
Harry S. Taylor, Hans W. Uffelmann, and John van Buren, translators
vi SUPPLEMENTS
Chapter Five
THE THEORY OF CATEGORIES
AND MEANING IN DUNS SCOTUS, 61
Author’s Book Notice (1917), 61
John van Buren, translator
Conclusion: The Problem of Categories (1916), 62
Roderick M. Stewart and John van Buren, translators
Chapter Six
LETTER TO FATHER ENGELBERT KREBS (1919), 69
Chapter Seven
COMMENTS ON KARL JASPERS’
PSYCHOLOGY OF WORLDVIEWS (1920), 71
Chapter Eight
THE PROBLEM OF SIN IN LUTHER (1924), 105
Chapter Nine
PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS
IN CONNECTION WITH ARISTOTLE:
An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation (1922), 111
Chapter Ten
WILHELM DILTHEY’S RESEARCH AND THE
STRUGGLE FOR A HISTORICAL WORLDVIEW (1925), 147
Charles Bambach, translator
Notes, 177
Glossary, 199
Secondary Bibliography, 201
About the Contributors, 205
Editor’s Introduction
The English-speaking world has long had anthologies of Heidegger’s later essays
after Being and Time. Supplements adds for the first time in any language a com-
phrensive anthology of the most important of his recently discovered essays
before Being and Time, offering selections drawn from the long series of Hei-
degger’s experimental, constantly supplemental attempts at rethinking philoso-
phy that stretch from the earliest essays in the teens to those in the early twen-
ties preceding Being and Time and pointing beyond to the later writings, when
Heidegger’s famous “turn” took in part the form of a “return” to his earliest writ-
ings. It presents them under a title taken from the first 1974 publisher’s prospec-
tus for Heidegger’s Collected Edition (GA), which announced that certain texts
from the Early Freiburg Period, though not included in the edition’s original
plan due to their anomalous character, might nonetheless later be “published as
a supplement [Supplement].”1 The nine milestone selections—five of which were
generally not even known of in Heidegger scholarship until the mid-1990s
(chapters 2, 6, 8, 9, 10)—are representative of the Student Period (WS1909–10
to SS1915), the Early Freiburg Period (WS1915–16 to SS1923), and the first
years of the Marburg Period from WS1923–24 to 1926, when Being and Time
was composed.
As explained in detail below, this new primary source will serve scholars,
teachers, and students well when used as a supplemental companion volume to
early lecture courses such as the editor’s translation of Ontology—The Hermeneu-
tics of Facticity (OHF), Being and Time (available from State University of New
York Press in a new translation by Joan Stambaugh), and even later works such
as Contributions to Philosophy. References to these writings have accordingly been
provided. Finally, because Heidegger’s early experimental essays often make for
difficult reading and can at times seem quite inscrutable, this collection also has
been designed so that readers can, if they wish, use it in conjunction with the edi-
tor’s secondary works on the early Heidegger (YH, RHFS, and OHF). References
1
2 SUPPLEMENTS
to these and other secondary works listed in the secondary bibliography at the
end of the volume also have been provided.
Four of the selections were composed or published by Heidegger as free-
standing journal articles. The remaining six were composed in different genres: a
book notice, a supplemental conclusion to a dissertation, an introduction to a
planned book, transcripts of two talks, and a letter. However, except for the let-
ter, these too are presented in the genre of “essays,” able to stand on their own
with the proper editorial introduction and in the literal sense of “essays” as
“attempts” or “experiments” (essais) in thinking.
Previously unpublished chapters, which make up almost two-thirds of the
body of the volume, include chapter 1 (the editor’s “Chronological Overview”),
the translation in the first section of chapter 5 (“Author’s Book Notice”), and the
translations in chapters 6 (“Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs”), 8 (the talk “The
Problem of Sin in Luther”), 9 (the book introduction “Phenomenological Inter-
pretations in Connection with Aristotle”), and 10 (the talk “Wilhelm Dilthey’s
Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview”). While chapters 3 and 4
(the journal articles, “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy” and “The
Concept of Time in the Science of History”), as well as the second section of
chapter 5 (the supplemental book conclusion, “The Problem of Categories”)
appeared in journals twenty to thirty years ago, they have been thoroughly
revised and reedited in collaboration with the original translators. Even chapters
2 (the journal article “Per mortem ad vitam”) and 7 (the journal article “Com-
ments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews”), which originally were pub-
lished in English in the nineties, have been revised to bring them up-to-date with
current research and to standardize translations of key terms and stylistic con-
ventions in this collection.
In all cases, the attempt was made to provide a translation as interpretively
faithful as possible to the original German text, while respecting equally the con-
ventions of the English language. Translations are always interpretations “in a
nutshell,” Heidegger wrote in 1922 in one of his very first forays into the phi-
losophy of translation occasioned by the challenge of writing a planned book on
the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle (see chapter 9 of this book, p. 127).2
NARRATIVE OF CHAPTERS
Chapter 1: Chronological Overview

The opening chapter provides a detailed chronology of Heidegger’s education,
professional appointments, teaching, research, and publications and is divided
into four sections: Student Period: Education; Student Period: Research and Pub-
lication; Early Freiburg Period; and Marburg Period. Referring back to this
chronology, which also functions as a primary bibliography, subsequent chapters
offer representative selections of “essays” from these three periods. The selections
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 3
are flagged by daggers in the left margin of the chronology, so that when moving
to subsequent chapters the reader can conveniently return to the chronology for
philological and bibliographic information on the selection in question. The nar-
rative of chapters presented below, to which the reader can return, also provides
references to relevant secondary background material in the editor’s previous
publications (YH, RHFS, and OHF) and in other works listed in the secondary
bibliography at the end of this book.
The selections are presented not only as a set of “supplements” to Heideg-
ger’s other early writings, but also as a series of “supplements” in the spirit of his
own lifelong theme that his texts constituted a “path” of thinking about the rela-
tion of being, time, and human existence which was ever incomplete and under-
going supplementation with new attempts.3 Already in 1916 he wrote that “as
temporally conditioned cultural facts, the particular concrete sciences are never
complete but rather always on the way in their discovery of truth” and again in
1920 that “the path leading to the ‘things themselves’ treated in philosophy is a
long one” (see this volume, pp. 50, 74). Later in the first 1972 edition of Early
Writings, he suggested that this predicament was pronounced in the series of “my
early attempts” (Versuche) from the Student Period to Being and Time: “Stirring
at that time in but a dark and uncertain and helpless manner, the question of
what unifies the manifold meanings of being remained—throughout the many
overturnings, labyrinths, and perplexities—the unceasing impetus for the treatise
Being and Time which appeared two decades later.”4 Specifically regarding his
“attempts” after 1919, we read elsewhere: “. . . the path of questioning became
longer than I suspected. It demanded many stops, circuitous experiments, and
wayward excursions.”5 What we find in the opening chapter’s long chronology of
Heidegger’s research and publication and more specifically in the “essays” selected
from it for this volume, such as the conclusion “written as a supplement” (GA1
191) for the publication of Heidegger’s postdoctoral dissertation (chapter 5), is
precisely a path or series of supplemental “attempts” or “essays” from the early
teens to 1925, one that also “stops” for a time with Being and Time in the late
twenties and then, occasioned by the failed experiment of this never finished
work, pushes forward into the later texts with their new supplemental attempts
to rework his early thought.
Chapters 2–5: Student Period
Chapters 2–5 present essays from Heidegger’s Student Period at the University
of Freiburg.6 Chapter 2, the book review article “Per mortem ad vitam (Thoughts
on Johannes Jörgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life)” (1910), is drawn from
the first anti-modernist theological phase of Heidegger’s student years when, as
the chronological overview in the previous chapter outlines, he was studying for
the priesthood in the Department of Theology between WS1909–10 and
SS1911 and produced a series of book reviews, poems, and other texts that
4 SUPPLEMENTS
exhibit predominantly theological, moral, aesthetic, and cultural interests. Rep-

resenting the intellectual starting point of Heidegger’s development, these texts
basically put forth an anti-modernist Aristotelian–Scholastic position in which,
following the official stand of the Catholic Church at the time, Heidegger con-
demns what he perceives to be the subjectivist, historicist orientation of modern
philosophy and liberal culture as exemplified in figures such as Nietzsche, calling
for a historical return to the realism of medieval Aristotelian–Scholastic philoso-
phy with its commitment to an objective, timeless order of being based on God.
Using chapter 2 as a foil, chapters 3–5 offer essays from the second neo-
Scholastic philosophical phase of the student years from WS1911–12 to SS1915
which is sketched out in the chronological overview. During this second phase,
Heidegger, making an anxiety-ridden “turn” in his intellectual outlook and career
plans from the priesthood to the academic profession, first transfers to the
Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (WS1911–12 to
WS1912–13) as he considers a career as a high school teacher in mathematics
and then to the Department of Philosophy (SS1913 to SS1915) for a university
teaching career, generating a series of journal articles, book reviews, and disserta-
tions that crystallizes at the end of the Student Period in the project of an inno-
vative neo-Kantian, phenomenological neo-Scholasticism attempting to supple-
ment and critically renew medieval Scholasticism in the modern world by
synthesizing its logic of the categories of being with the systematic concerns of
contemporary neo-Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology, the philosophy of
history, philosophy of life, and German Idealism.
In chapter 3, “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy” (1912),
Heidegger’s first publication in a properly academic journal, the critical realism
of the contemporary thinker Oswald Külpe, as well as Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy, is used by Heidegger to explore the aggravated modern problem of the
intentional relation of consciousness to being. The article criticizes the “identi-
fication of being and being-perceived” in the traditional English empiricism of
Berkeley and Hume and in contemporary epistemology, arguing both histori-
cally for the enduring validity of “Aristotelian–Scholastic philosophy, which has
always thought in a realist manner,” and systematically for the need to synthe-
size this philosophical tradition with the “new epistemological movement” rep-
resented by Külpe and Husserl. “Positive, progressive work must be its main
concern,” Heidegger writes of Aristotelian Scholasticism (pp. 40, 48). Speaking
like a Thomist, an English empiricist, and a German phenomenologist all at
once, Heidegger maintains that the structure of the intentional “relation”
(Bezug) of consciousness to its “content” (Inhalt, Gehalt), i.e., being, lies in the
fact that after objects have stimulated the sense organs and nervous system, cre-
ating “sense impressions,” consciousness is able to abstract from the subjective
factors of these impressions and to “posit” and “define” the “real being” of the
“external world” by means of the “ideal being” of concepts or categories: “. . . a
being that is thought is in no way identical with being in thought. What is in
being here (in the phenomenal sense) is a concept whose content is intention-
ally referred to transcendent being. . . . Real being is thought by means of a con-
cept, but this in no way means that such being is taken inside the subject and
transformed into psychical being” (p. 43).
Chapter 4, “The Concept of Time in the Science of History,” which the
chronological overviews shows Heidegger delivering to the Department of Phi-
losophy in SS1915 as a trial lecture required for the postdoctoral degree (Habil-
itation) and license to teach in German universities (venia legendi) as a lecturer
(Privatdozent) and publishing it the following year as a journal article, now adds
an exploration of the very modern theme of the historical “actualizing” (Vollzug)
of the mind’s intentional “relation” to being and value, and it is Heidegger’s very
first publication to do so, such that he cited it later in Being and Time.7 It also is
his first work to pursue this theme through an in-depth contrast between the
qualitative, “significance”-charged, and “difference”-laden concept of time in the
historical sciences and the quantitative, neutral, and homogeneous concept of
time in the modern mathematical natural sciences (for this contrast, see also
chapter 10, pp. 170ff. and §§80–81 of Being and Time). In this regard, and as
can be seen in the chronological overview, Heidegger draws on his intensive stud-
ies in the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics from WS1911–12
to WS1912–13, his studies in the Department of Philosophy from SS1912 to
SS1915 with the philosopher of history Heinrich Finke and with the distin-
guished neo-Kantian philosopher Henrich Rickert on the transcendental logic of
the natural sciences and the historical human sciences, his continued studies after
SS1911 with the speculative theologian Carl Braig who introduced him to
Hegel’s historically oriented Idealism, and his independent studies of Dilthey’s
and Nietzsche’s philosophies of life and history from 1910 onward.8
Chapter 5, “The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus,”
comprises two texts also relating to Heidegger’s postdoctoral degree awarded in
SS1915. The first section, “Author’s Book Notice,” presents a notice on the 1916
publication of the postdoctoral dissertation “The Theory of Categories and
Meaning in Duns Scotus,” which he had submitted to the Department of Phi-
losophy the year before. It conveniently summarizes the dissertation, showing
that the expanding series of historical influences and systematic interests docu-
mented in the chronological overview from Heidegger’s first anti-modernist the-
ological phase to his second neo-Scholastic philosophical phase now momentar-
ily crystallized in the sweeping synthetic historical-systematic experiment of, first,
a regressive treatment of “the history of problems” focusing on Duns Scotus’
metaphysical theory of the “categories of being” in relation to his grammatical-
logical theory of meaning and, second, a critical systematic reconstruction of this
historical position within the conceptuality and concerns of contemporary phe-
nomenology and neo-Kantianism. As Heidegger stated much later, the result of
this neo-Kantian, phenomenological neo-Scholasticism was a metaphysical
“onto-logic” (GA1 55) of categories of being that approached these categories as
6 SUPPLEMENTS
a conceptual nexus of timeless ideal being by means of which intentional “judg-

ments” gain access to real being and which is itself grounded in the absolute
being of God.
The second section of Chapter 5, “Conclusion: The Problem of Cate-
gories,” presents the forward-looking conclusion “written as a supplement”
(GA1 191) to the dissertation for its publication. This supplemental conclusion
now adds an admission of deep “intellectual unrest” in the face of “the impres-
sion of a certain deathly emptiness” given by the treatment of categories in the
dissertation (p. 62). While restating the dissertation’s ontological separation of
the realms of “time and eternity, change and [the] absolute validity [of the cat-
egories of being], world and God,” Heidegger poses the perplexing problem of
understanding how the realm of the truth of ideal being and that of historical
actuality work together within an intimate living unity, arguing that this unity,
as glimpsed by medieval mysticism, constitutes the “authentic depth dimension”
of philosophy, and that future philosophy must aim at a “breakthrough to [its]
true actuality and actual truth” (pp. 66, 68). Drawing on his research into con-
temporary philosophy of value, life, and history, as well as into Hegel’s Idealism
and medieval mysticism, he poses the problem more specifically in terms of
three “requirements” that a theory of the categories of being must fulfill if it is
to avoid the impression of abstract emptiness: (1) demarcating the irreducible
categorial regions of being in their relation to the actuality of different kinds of
experienceable objects; (2) seeing the categories of being in their inseparable
intentional “relation” to “the subject” and not merely the “logical judging sub-
ject,” “the epistemological subject” with its “theoretical attitude” focused on in
his 1912 journal article on epistemology (chapter 3), but more deeply in line
with his 1915 talk on historical time (chapter 4), the subject as “living spirit,”
which is “historical spirit in the widest sense of the word” (p. 66); and accordingly
(3) “history,” as the process of the “actualizing” of the subject’s intentional rela-
tion to the content of the categories, “must become a determining element for the
meaning of the problem of categories” (p. 67). Here, as well as in the application
at the time for a research grant documented in the chronological overview, the
young self-professed phenomenological neo-Scholastic announces that he will
be dedicating his life’s work to these problems, suggesting that the answers are
to be found in a neo-Hegelian approach that sees the historical “actualizing” of
spirit’s “relation” to categorial meaning to be grounded in the “teleological”
unfolding of “the absolute spirit of God” and of the soul’s “transcendent rela-
tion” to God (pp. 66–67).
Chapters 6–10: Early Freiburg and Marburg Periods
The remaining five chapters, which comprise subsequent “essays” from the Early
Freiburg Period (WS1915–16 to SS1923) and the first years of the Marburg
Period (WS1923–24 to WS1925–26),9 tell the story that as the student-turned-
lecturer now attempted to fulfill the above three “requirements,” he eventually,

around 1919, abandoned his unstable neo-Scholastic onto-logic of timeless being
for a new fundamentally historical phenomenological ontology, left the Catholic
Church for free Protestantism, and now launched into a series of bold new exper-
iments investigating: (1) how the demarcation of the different categorial regions
of being, which make up the intentional “sense of the content” (Gehaltssinn) of
experience, hinges upon seeing these regions to be based on the “significance” of
the immediately experienced, practical world; (2) how the “subject” constituting
the deepest “sense of the relation” (Bezugssinn) to the categories of being has the
form of “factical life” in its practical situatedness and with its own categorial
structures; and (3) how historical time is the deepest “sense of the actualizing”
(Vollzugssinn) or “temporalizing” (Zeitigungssinn) 10 of the intentional relation to
the categorial content of the world and is the condition of the possibility of this
relation. The texts between 1919 and 1925 experimented with often poetic
descriptions of the dynamism of historical time as a “properizing event” (Ereig-
nis), “there is/it gives” (es gibt), “it worlds” (es weltet) (GA56/57 63–76); as a non-
objectifiable “be-ing” or “existing” (chapter 7 of this volume); as an open-ended
“kinesis” or “motion” (chapter 9 of this volume); as a “whiling” (Verweilen) or
“sojourning” (Aufhalten) in the “awhileness of temporal particularity” (Jew-
eiligkeit) (OHF 7ff./5ff.); and as a “happening” (Geschehen) (chapter 10 of this
volume). This series of self-supplementing experiments would lead to the most
ambitious “essay” of Heidegger’s early thought, namely, the composition in 1926
of the book Being and Time, which exhibited a recent marked turn to the para-
digm of Kant’s transcendental philosophy11 and now transformed this still little-
known figure into a leading European philosopher and the more familiar Hei-
degger we know today.
In this second but more dramatic confessional and philosophical “turn” in
his early development, which Hans-Georg Gadamer has called “the turn before
the turn,”12 Heidegger on January 9, 1919 wrote to his friend from the early
teens, Father Engelbert Krebs of the Department of Theology, that “epistemo-
logical insights extending to a theory of historical knowledge have made the sys-
tem of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity
and metaphysics—these, though, in a new sense” (p. 69). Then in February he
opened his lecture course in the special post-war semester with a revolutionary
call for “a completely new concept of philosophy” that would entail “the cata-
strophe of all (previous) philosophy,” echoing this call in WS1921–22 with talk
of “the end of philosophy” and “the genuine new beginning.”13 Accordingly, the
remaining chapters of this volume show that Heidegger now pursued (1) a regres-
sive “destruction”or “dismantling”14 of the history of Western ontology back to
the foundational dimensions of the practically significant world, factical life, and
historical time; (2) a reconstructive “appropriation” or “repeating” of this history
in a new beginning; and for the sake of this “systematic” reconstruction (3) a
series of critical appropriations of the ontologically rich traditions of primal
8 SUPPLEMENTS
Christianity (Augustine, medieval mysticism, Luther, Kierkegaard), Aristotle’s

physics and practical philosophy, and Dilthey’s philosophy of life and history.
Chapter 6, the 1919 “Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs,”15 in which he
announces his profound confessional and philosophical turn, and chapter 7, the
1920 book review essay “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews,”16
belong to the first phase of Heidegger’s Early Freiburg Period, when he was a
lecturer at the University of Freiburg between WS1915–16 and SS1923, also
serving as Husserl’s assistant from 1919 onward. These texts are drawn from the
body of articles, lecture courses, and correspondence in the chronological
overview from 1916–1921 in which Heidegger, drawing on his Christian her-
itage in a new way, was especially interested in developing a “phenomenology of
religion”17 and using it to exploit the significance of the primal Christianity of
figures such as Luther and Kierkegaard for rethinking ontology historically
along the lines of the three requirements voiced in the 1916 supplemental con-
clusion to his postdoctoral dissertation. Employing the technical terms “sense of
relation,” “content,” and “actualizing” to explore factical life’s intentional rela-
tion to being, Heidegger’s article deals with Jaspers’ Kierkegaardian philosophy
of existence, its relation to Husserl’s phenomenology18 and contemporary phi-
losophy of life,19 the nature of concepts as formal indications,20 and the current
fundamental tasks of philosophy.
Chapter 8, the WS1923–24 talk “The Problem of Sin in Luther,”21 dates
from the very start of Heidegger’s Marburg Period, when he taught at the Uni-
versity of Marburg as an associate professor between WS1923–24 and SS1927
and then as professor from WS1927–28 to SS1928. Insofar as this two-part talk
given in Rudolf Bultmann’s seminar on St. Paul’s ethics explored Luther’s bibli-
cally based understanding of the dynamic being of man’s relation to God, it
derives from the first phase of the Early Freiburg Period mentioned above and
should be read with Heidegger’s 1919–20 article on Jaspers.
Chapter 9, the 1922 book introduction “Phenomenological Interpreta-
tions in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situ-
ation,”22 is drawn from the body of texts in the chronological overview from
1921 to 1924 in which Heidegger now takes a marked turn to a direct engage-
ment with the source of Western ontology in Aristotle, combining this with his
explorations of primal Christianity. The text is a draft overview introduction to
a large, projected but never published book on Aristotle (planned to be pub-
lished in Husserl’s phenomenological journal), which was to have systemati-
cally worked out Heidegger’s new historically oriented hermeneutical-phenom-
enological ontology by means of a critical, historical appropriation of Aristotle
especially23 but also of primal Christianity, medieval Scholasticism, and
Husserl’s phenomenology.
Chapter 10, the 1925 ten-part talk “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the
Struggle for a Historical Worldview,” is drawn from a group of texts in the
chronological overview from 1924 to 1925 and immediately before the 1926
composition of Being and Time, in which Heidegger turns to a systematic engage-

ment with Dilthey’s philosophy and Dilthey’s recently published correspondence
with his friend Count Yorck. A premonition of Dilthey’s and Yorck’s presence in
Being and Time, though without the heavily Kantian transcendental framework
that appears in Being and Time, this series of lectures investigates the significance
of Dilthey’s philosophy of history and its relation to Husserl’s phenomenology for
rethinking the question of being.
USING SUPPLEMENTS
Supplementing BEING AND TIME

In addition to reading this new source of Heidegger’s early thought on its own as
a presentation of his very first self-supplementing attempts to reformulate the tra-
ditional question of being on the basis of time, scholars, teachers, and students
can use it, along with early lecture courses before Being and Time such as the
SS1923 Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (OHF),24 as a companion vol-
ume to supplement Being and Time. Since its initial appearance in English trans-
lation in the early sixties, it was very difficult to study Being and Time in con-
nection with its rich history in the preceding decade and a half, simply because
few texts from this period were available either in German or English. The series
of “essays” in this book from the Early Freiburg and Marburg Periods provides
important first drafts, as it were, of Being and Time (see especially chapters 7, 9,
and 10), and the book as a whole is an overview of the longer history of its mak-
ing from the early years of the Student Period onward. These first drafts add to
Being and Time the following supplemental material lacking in it: (1) first ver-
sions of the historical destruction of Western ontology that was to have consti-
tuted the unpublished part 2 of Being and Time (see §8); (2) details of the criti-
cal appropriations of primal Christianity (New Testament, Augustine, medieval
mysticism, Luther, Kierkegaard), Husserl, Aristotle, and Dilthey, which are men-
tioned but not fully explained in notes, the exception being Dilthey, who is
treated in §77, though in nothing like the detail of the 1925 talk on Dilthey in
chapter 10 of this volume; and (3) the first and in many respects different ver-
sions of the systematic reconstruction of ontology presented in Divisions I and II
of part 1 and to be presented in the unpublished Division III of part 1, first ver-
sions that are referred to in notes in §§15 and 54 but not summarized. “The
author may remark,” the text reads, “that this analysis of the environing world
and in general the ‘hermeneutics of the facticity of Dasein’ have been presented
repeatedly in his lecture courses ever since the winter semester of 1919–20.”25
Moreover, specific themes and historical references in Being and Time can
be supplemented and followed up with the texts in this volume. For example, §1
on the theory of categories of being in the history of Western philosophy can be
supplemented especially with the texts from 1916 and 1922 on the same topic in
10 SUPPLEMENTS
chapters 5 and 9 of this volume; the references to Jaspers’ discussions in his Psy-
chology of Worldviews of a philosophical anthropology of human Dasein,26 the
“limit-situation” of death,27 and Kierkegaard’s concepts of “existence,” “tempo-
rality,” and the “moment”28 supplemented with the long 1920 article on Jaspers’
book in chapter 7; §43(a) on the problem of the external world with the 1912
article on the same topic in chapter 3 and the discussion of Dilthey’s approach to
this problem in chapter 10; the references to Luther’s critique of the concepts of
man and God in medieval Scholasticism (§3), to his powerful analysis of the anx-
iety-ridden human condition after the Fall in his Commentary on Genesis,29 and
to other Christian influences on Heidegger’s notions of “care,”30 “mood,”31 “anx-
iety,”32 “death,”33 and “conscience”34 exerted by the theological anthropology of
St. Paul, Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard’s “edifying writings” supplemented
with the 1924 exposition of Luther’s theological anthropology in chapter 8 and
with the first part of the 1922 text on the history of Christian and Aristotelian
anthropology in chapter 9; the truncated references to “Aristotle’s ontology”35 in
his metaphysical, psychological, logical, and practical writings and more specifi-
cally to his understanding of the “ontic priority” of human Dasein (§4), “desire”
or “care,”36 “mood” (§§29–30), “discourse” (§§7[a]–[b], 33–34), the environing
world of ready-to-hand equipment for practical dealings (§15), and “truth” as the
“unconcealment” brought about by intellectual virtues such as “practical wis-
dom” and “science” (§§44, 7[a]–[b]) supplemented with the long text on Aristo-
tle in chapter 9; §§76–77 on the science of history and the concept of historical
time in Dilthey and Yorck supplemented with the 1925 series of lectures on
Dilthey and Yorck in chapter 10, as well as with the 1916 article on the science
of history in chapter 4 that Being and Time cites in connection with the problem
of “time-reckoning”;37 and the references to Husserl’s phenomenology38 and the
briefly stated claim that phenomenology must become a historical, “destructive”
hermeneutical phenomenology of being (§7[c]) supplemented with the fuller
discussions of these topics in chapters 7, 9, and 10.
Supplementing Heidegger’s Later Writings
This book also can be used, along with the earliest lecture courses, as a compan-
ion volume to supplement Heidegger’s later writings after Being and Time, in
which he made his famous “turn” from Being and Time’s Kantian-transcendental
emphasis on human being to being itself and from its equally Kantian-transcen-
dental conception of being as constituted by static historical structures to a more
dynamic, differentiated conception of being as a difference-generating historical
“event” (Ereignis). Ever since Heidegger’s well-known letter of 1962 to William
Richardson brought attention to the turn from the “Heidegger I” of Being and
Time to the “Heidegger II” of the later writings,39 the lack of relevant texts again
made it difficult to study the historical genesis of this turn and to make sense of
Heidegger’s elliptical suggestions that “Heidegger II” was not only a turn to new
topics and sources but also in part a critical “re-turn” to his earliest attempts
before the “Heidegger I” of the Kantian-transcendental experiment of Being and
Time, as he now attempted to supplement and rewrite this unfinished, failed
experiment in later “essays” such as the 1936–38 Contributions to Philosophy—
On Event (cf. G65 §42 “From Being and Time to ‘Event’”).40 As we now know
from the recent publication in the Collected Edition of the full range of Heideg-
ger’s early texts before Being and Time and texts after Being and Time in the late
twenties and early thirties providing the details of the turn from “Heidegger I” to
“Heidegger II,” the later experimental texts critically reappropriated the nonan-
thropocentric, speculative, and mystical lines of thought in his 1915 postdoctoral
dissertation, which had focused on the relation of language (grammar) and the
categories of being and ultimately on an “inner Dasein . . . anchored in a pri-
mordial, transcendent relation of the soul to God” (p. 67). These later attempts
also experimented anew with the highly innovative texts after the Student Period
on the historical dynamism of factical life’s relation to being, returning for fresh
takes on early terms and themes such as “properizing event” (Ereignis); “it
worlds”; “there is/it gives”; the predominantly verbal sense of “be-ing”; “whiling”
and “sojourning”; historical “happening”; “mystery”; the terminological triad of
“content,” “relation,” and “actualization”; the nature of philosophical terms as
“formal indications”; the “end of philosophy” and a “new beginning”; philosophy
as a perpetual “turning,” “beginning,” or “path”; technology; and university
reform.41 Though Heidegger certainly also criticized the very philosophy of life
(Dilthey) and philosophy of existence (Kierkegaard, Jaspers) in which his
thought of the late teens and early twenties was framed,42 we nonetheless find
him as early as his SS1928 lecture course reintroducing the term “to world” from
KNS1919 and experimenting with it anew in relation to the pre-Socratics, telling
his students that it was used “already in my early Freiburg lecture courses.”43
Thus, along with early lectures courses such as the SS1923 Ontology—The
Hermeneutics of Facticity (OHF), Supplements adds to the later experimental texts
after “the turn” certain background material lacking in them: important early
themes and terminology to which these texts returned and thereby a filling out of
Heidegger’s claim that they constituted in part a return to his “essays” before Being
and Time. Translated later texts which, in making this claim, most clearly present
themselves as a return to the Heidegger before “Heidegger I” and can thus espe-
cially be supplemented with the present volume include On the Way to Language,44
which returns to the theme of the relation of language and being in the 1915 post-
doctoral dissertation (chapter 5 of this volume) and that of hermeneutics in the
early twenties (see chapters 4, 7, 9, and 10 of this volume, as well as OHF, “Trans-
lator’s Epilogue” 45), and On Time and Being, which also returns to the reading of
Aristotle’s notion of truth in the early twenties (see chapter 9 of this volume).46
Another candidate connecting later texts to those before Being and Time is the
anthology Pathmarks 47 which, though primarily intended to present later texts,
opens with the 1920 article on Jaspers’ Kierkegaardian philosophy of existence
12 SUPPLEMENTS
included in chapter 7 of this volume. The supplements (Nachträge) in this volume

also can be used with later texts such as Contributions [Beiträge] to Philosophy—
On Event which, though not explicitly relating themselves to the earliest texts,
nonetheless involve critical reappropriations of earlier themes and terminology,
including Heidegger’s early theological interests in his phenomenology of religion
(cf. GA65 405ff.). For example, Contributions returns to the technical term Ereig-
nis (“properizing event”) first introduced in KNS1919 (GA56/57) for characteriz-
ing the happening of factical life’s intentional relation to being; “indication”
(Anzeige) first introduced around 1920 (see chapters 7 and 9 in this volume); and
the triad of terms “relation” (Bezug), “content” (Gehalt), and “actualization” (Vol-
lzug), which first became technical terms also around 1920 (see chapters 7ff.).48
Similarly, essays in the English-language anthology The Question Concerning Tech-
nology 49 picked up much earlier discussions of technology in the late teens and
early twenties (see YH 320–22, 370), and those in Poetry Language Thought 50
returned to poetic terms such as “it worlds” and “it events” from KNS1919 and
“whiling” from SS1923 (OHF), as well as to the general theme of the relation
between philosophy and art that had concerned Heidegger since his student years.
Very little has been written about Heidegger’s early interest in art, but he
pursued in high school and during his university studies an avid interest in the
literature of Stifter, Hölderlin, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Dostoevsky, Rilke,
Trakl, and Greek tragedy.51 In fact, the report of Heidegger’s religion teacher on
his senior high school years complained that “at times he pursued German liter-
ature—in which he is very well read—a bit too much, to the detriment of other
disciplines.”52 During his student years he also took at least two university courses
in art history and published reviews of literary works and his own poems.53 His
interest in the relation of philosophy and art stretches from his first essay pub-
lished in The Academician in 1910 (chapter 2 of this volume) to his 1915 post-
doctoral dissertation, whose introduction underscored the importance of relating
the theory of the categories of being in medieval Scholastic philosophy to the
“total culture” of the Middle Ages and so promised a future “phenomenological
investigation of mystical, moral-theological, and ascetic literature in medieval
Scholasticism” (GA1 205). Accordingly, the supplementary “Conclusion” to the
dissertation for its book publication opened with a quote from the mystical Ger-
man poet Novalis and again touched upon medieval mystical literature (chapter
5 in this volume, pp. 62, 64 n. 4), just as the publication of the trial lecture on
the category of time Heidegger presented along with his dissertation opened with
a motto from the medieval mystic Eckhart (chapter 4, p. 49).
This interest extended into the Early Freiburg Period and then, after being
eclipsed in the Marburg Period culminating in Being and Time, beyond into the
later writings on the philosophy of art. At times taking up the neo-Kantian doc-
trine of the different spheres of categorial value, including aesthetic value, which
Heidegger explores at one point with the “poetic” neologism “‘it values’ for me”
(“es wertet” für mich), the lecture courses of KNS1919, SS1919 (GA56/57), and
WS1919–20 (GA58) and the notes for the lecture course on “The Philosophical
Foundations of Medieval Mysticism,” originally planned for WS1919–20 but
undelivered (GA60), continue in the same vein as the postdoctoral dissertation,
approaching the “life-worlds” in “art history” (e.g., Hölderlin’s translation of
Sophocles’ Antigone, the German Romantic poets, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Ste-
fan George, Rembrandt, Bach, and mystical literature) as primordial expressions
of the manner in which categorial sense manifests itself pretheoretically as an “it
worlds for me” and an “it events.”54 The 1920 essay on Karl Jaspers focuses on
Jaspers’ inappropriate “aesthetic attitude” (chapter 7 of this volume, pp. 88ff.).
The SS1921–22 lecture course discusses “the relationship between philosophy and
art” in terms of an “anology” between the primordial active sense of “philosophy”
as “philosophizing” and that of music as “making music” (musizieren) (GA61
46–50). The 1922 essay on the effective history of Aristotle in Western philoso-
phy again takes up from the postdoctoral dissertation the question of the rela-
tionship between “the hymnology and music of the Middle Ages, as well as its
architecture and plastic arts,” and “the philosophical and theological anthropology
of this era” (see chapter 9 of this volume, p. 125, n. 11). The SS1923 lecture
course again discusses the relation between “art history” and philosophy (GA63
36–57/OHF 29–45). When Heidegger comes to work up his lecture course man-
uscripts into the book Being and Time in 1926, the earlier discussions of art are
collapsed into a few ellipitical comments on how art and especially poetry have to
be understood in terms of the basic existential structures of human existence stud-
ied in ontology.55 But the earlier discussions were subsequently renewed in Hei-
degger’s later philosophy of art, so that the famous “turn” in his thought after
Being and Time is for this reason not just a novelty but also in part a “return.”
Note too that in fashioning in 1919 neologisms such as “it values,” “it
worlds,” and “it events,” which are takeoffs from a double reading of es gibt as
both “there is” and more literally “it gives” (GA56/57 65–68), the young Hei-
degger also was putting to work in philosophy his abilities as a published poet
since 1910. This literary crafting of new terminology for philosophy continues
through the early 1920s with neologisms such as his often enigmatic translations
of Aristotle’s key terms in 1921–22 (chapter 9 of this volume) and the highly
poetic term Jeweiligkeit (“the temporal particularity of awhileness”) in 1923–24
(GA63/OHF) to the recycling of earlier neologisms such as das Man (the “they”
or “everyone”) in Being and Time. This “poetic thinking” manifests itself again in
an emphatic style in the later writings, such as the Beiträge zur Philosophie,
Vorträge und Aufsätze, and Zur Sache des Denkens, and so here too, then, Hei-
degger’s “turn” after Being and Time, with its use of poetic vocabulary such as
Ereignis (“event,” “enownment”), Es gibt (“there is/it gives”), Welten (“worlding”),
Dingen (thinging), and Weilen (“whiling”), shows itself to be in part a “return” to
and radicalization of an earlier style of poetic thinking.56 Heidegger may have
been saying as much in a 1957 curriculum vitae that later served as the intro-
duction to the reprinting of his student writings in a single volume. Referring to
14 SUPPLEMENTS
the courses he took from his teachers in theology and art history, he stated that
“the decisive and therefore ineffable influence on my own later academic career
came from two men . . . the one was Carl Braig, professor of systematic theol-
ogy. . . . The other one was the art historian Wilhelm Vöge.”57
Supplementing the Rediscovery of Heidegger’s Earliest Thought
This book carries forward into the English-speaking world the work of supple-
menting the originally incomplete plan of Heidegger’s Collected Edition, which
was announced in the first publisher’s prospectus in the fall of 1974 but did not
include many of the early texts before Being and Time, including those presented
in chapters 2, 6, 8, 9, and 10 of this volume. The prospectus, issued on the occa-
sion of Heidegger’s eighty-fifth birthday, stated that the edition was intended “to
allow the path of the question of being to be seen in the sequence of its steps
more penetratingly than before. . . . Because the Collected Edition is meant to
show the movement of Heidegger’s path of thinking, the chronological principle
of the genesis of the texts forms the basis of each division.” Nonetheless, the
admission was made that “it remains postponed for a later decision whether the
lecture courses from the early Freiburg period (1916–1923) will also be pub-
lished as a supplement [Supplement] to the second division” containing the lec-
ture courses from the Marburg and Later Freiburg Periods. Moreover, the
prospectus’ plan for “Division III: Unpublished Essays” made no mention of
unpublished essays preceding the Marburg Period. Eventually, the fifth prospec-
tus of April 1984 announced that the literary executor, Dr. Hermann Heidegger,
had made the decision to include the lecture courses from the Early Freiburg
Period as a “supplement.” To date, ten of these courses have appeared in German
and one in English translation (OHF), with a number of others currently being
prepared for publication in English.58 Prospectuses also have announced plans to
supplement the Collected Edition with previously unpublished shorter texts pre-
ceding the Marburg Period, as well as with a fuller selection of those from the
Marburg Period itself, and a good number of these shorter texts, as well as early
correspondence, have been published either in the Collected Edition or outside of
it.59 With more than half of it consisting of selections from these shorter texts
added to the originally incomplete plan of the Collected Edition, this book is,
along with translations of early lecture courses, an important counterpart in the
English-speaking world to the ongoing work in the German language of supple-
menting the Collected Edition and thereby allowing the constantly supplemental
“sequence” of Heidegger’s texts “to be seen . . . more penetratingly than before.”
For this reason, as well as because Heidegger’s texts before Being and Time
are generally still little known in the English-speaking world, this book makes an
important contribution to the recent discovery of Heidegger’s earliest thought
and the ongoing labor of supplementing our still incomplete historical picture
and critical evaluation of it. After the publication of Being and Time, the large
corpus of earlier published and unpublished texts comprising course manu-

scripts, articles, talks, books, book reviews, poems, and correspondence soon fell
into oblivion, with the exception of Heidegger’s cursory, sometimes historically
inaccurate discussions of them in later autobiographical comments, anecdotal
accounts by his students such as Oskar Becker, Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, and Hannah Arendt who privately circulated them and held them in
very high esteem, and eventually Otto Pöggeler’s ground-breaking work Martin
Heidegger’s Path of Thinking in the early sixties which, by using Heidegger’s
unpublished manuscripts, for the first time systematically linked Being and Time
and later writings to Heidegger’s earliest thought (Pöggeler 1987).60 Then, with
the publication of the Collected Edition from the late seventies onward, the redis-
covery of these lost texts gained momentum in the nineties with a series of books
presenting historical studies, philosophical evaluations, and independent experi-
mental uses of Heidegger’s early thought that were for the first time based on the
whole of his early corpus and not just Being and Time.61 Five of the nine early
Heidegger texts in this volume (chapters 2, 6, 8, 9, and 10) were first discovered
in the eighties and then became known to Heidegger scholarship in the English-
speaking world only in the mid-nineties. Though it may itself need to be sup-
plemented when additional, important shorter texts planned for publication in
the Collected Edition appear in the future, as may be suggested by the chronology
of the large body of Heidegger’s early research and publications in chapter 1 of
this volume, Supplements nonetheless has, along with translated early lecture
courses, at the very least established a reliable textual basis in the English lan-
guage for scholars, teachers, and students to continue studying, evaluating, and
experimenting with Heidegger’s earliest “essays” before Being and Time. These
“dangerous supplements”62 promise not only to add to our previous understand-
ing of the development and significance of Heidegger’s thought but also to cor-
rect and supplant it in important ways.
Chapter One
Chronological Overview
Education, Teaching, Research, and Publication
JOHN VAN BUREN
The section that follows presents a chronology of Heidegger’s education, and the
remaining sections offer a chronology of his professional appointments, teaching,
research, and publications from the Student Period to the composition of Being
and Time in 1926 at the midpoint of the Marburg Period.1 The ordering of data
in entries on Heidegger’s texts is as follows: date of composition (or if not avail-
able, date of original publication), genre, original German title if different from
the title in the Gesamtausgabe, original publication, reprinting in the Gesamtaus-
gabe if applicable, and the published English translation if available. First refer-
ences to volumes in the Gesamtausgabe provide the volume’s title with the date of
publication in parentheses. Thereafter, only the volume number is given. Unless
otherwise indicated, the cited edition of these volumes is the first. When no pub-
lished English translation exists for a German text, an English translation of the
title has been inserted in parentheses. Daggers in the left margin flag texts that
can be found in subsequent chapters of this volume.
17
18 SUPPLEMENTS
STUDENT PERIOD: EDUCATION
1889. Martin Heidegger, born September 26 in Messkirch, Germany
Earliest Education
1895–1903. State grammar and middle schools in Messkirch
1903–1906. State Gymnasium in Constance with residence at the Catholic
archdiocesan Gymnasium Seminary in preparation for the archdioce-
san priesthood
1906–1909. State Berthold Gymnasium in Freiburg with residence at the
archdiocesan Gymnasium Seminary
1909. Organizes private high school circle for the study of German literature
7/13/1909. High school baccalaureate awarded with the highest possible
overall grade. Academic subjects: Religion, German, German Essay,
Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew, English, Mathematics (Algebra, Geom-
etry), History, Physics, Philosophy, Singing, Gymnastics. Statement of
intent regarding university studies: “theology.”
9/30/1909. Jesuit Novitiate at Tisis near Feldkirch, Austria, with dismissal
two weeks later for health reasons
University of Freiburg, Department of Theology

WS1909–10. Department of Theology at the University of Freiburg in prepa-
ration for the archdiocesan priesthood, with residence at the archdiocesan
Theological Seminary. Courses enrolled in: Encyclopedia of Theological
Disciplines, two hours (Rev. Julius Meyer);2 Introduction to the Sacred
Scripture of the Old Testament, four hours (Rev. Gottfried Hoberg); Exe-
gesis of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, four hours (Rev. Simon Weber);
General History of the Church, Part I, with Special Consideration of the
Post–Nicene Period, four hours (Rev. Georg Pfeilschifter); Theory of
Religion, three hours (Rev. Heinrich Straubinger); Logic, four hours
(Prof. Johann Uebinger, Department of Philosophy).
SS1910. Courses enrolled in: Messianic Prophesies, three hours (Hoberg);
Hermeneutics with the History of Exegesis, two hours (Hoberg);
Introduction to the Sacred Scripture of the New Testament, four
hours (Weber); General History of the Church, Part II, with Special
Consideration of the 16th Century, six hours (Pfeilschifter); Theory
of Revelation and the Church, three hours (Straubinger); Meta-
physics, 4 hrs. (Uebinger)
WS1910–11. Courses enrolled in: Introduction to Catholic Dogmatics:
Doctrine of God, four hours (Rev. Carl Braig); Exegesis of the Holy
Gospel According to John, four hours (Weber); General Moral Theol-
CHRONOLOGICAL OVERVIEW 19
ogy, Parts I–III, three hours (Mayer); Doctrine of Property, one hour
(Mayer); Catholic Canon Law, Part I: Introduction, Sources and Con-
stitution, four hours (Rev. Emil Göller); General History of the
Church, Part III: Age of Enlightenment, one hour (Pfeilschifter); His-
tory of the German Constitution from the 16th Century to the Present,
four hours (Prof. Georg von Below, Department of Philosophy); His-
tory of Medieval Mysticism, two hours (Rev. Joseph Sauer).
SS1911. Courses enrolled in: Theological Cosmology: Creation, Preserva-
tion, and Governance of the World, four hours (Braig); Special Moral
Theology, Parts I–II, four hours (Mayer); The Christian Art of the 19th
Century and the Present, one hour (Sauer); The Age of the Renaissance
(History of the Late Middle Ages), four hours (Prof. Heinrich Finke,
Department of Philosophy).
Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

WS1911–12. Withdraws from the Department of Theology and the Theo-
logical Seminary for health reasons, abandoning career plans for the
priesthood3; transfers to the Department of Natural Sciences and Math-
ematics with the initial intention of majoring in mathematics and tak-
ing the State Examination granting the degree required for a teaching
career in high schools; shortly thereafter, considers moving to the Uni-
versity of Göttingen to study with the phenomenologist Edmund
Husserl, but for financial reasons he remains in his new department at
the University of Freiburg with the intention of majoring in philosophy,
while attending courses also in the Departments of Philosophy, Theol-
ogy, and Classical Philology. Courses enrolled in for WS1911–12: Ana-
lytic Geometry of Space, one hour (Prof. Lothar Heffter); Exercises in
Analytic Geometry, one hour (Heffter); Differential Calculus, four
hours (Prof. Alfred Loewy); Exercises in Differential Calculus, one hour
(Loewy); Experimental Physics, two hours (Prof. Wilhelm Himstedt);
Experimental Inorganic Chemistry, five hours (Prof. Ludwig Gatter-
mann); Logic and Epistemology, four hours (Prof. Arthur Schneider,
Department of Philosophy). Seminar: Spinoza’s Ethics, no hours listed
(Schneider). Courses audited sometime after SS1911:4 Dogmatic The-
ology (Braig);5 Gospel of John (Prof. Eduard Schwartz, Classical Philol-
ogy);6 Hellenic Mystery Religions (Prof. Richard Reitzenstein, Classical
Philology); Art History (Prof. Wilhelm Vöge, Art History);7 Botany
(teacher unknown).8
SS1912. Courses enrolled in: Algebraic Analysis, three hours (Heffter); Exer-
cises in [Algebraic] Analysis, one hour (Heffter); Integral Calculus, four
hours (Loewy); Exercises in Integral Calculus, one hour (Loewy); Exper-
imental Physics, five hours (Himstedt); Introduction to Epistemology
20 SUPPLEMENTS
and Metaphysics, two hours (Prof. Heinrich Rickert, Department of

Philosophy); Epistemological Exercises in Theory of Judgment (Semi-
nar), no hours listed (Rickert).
WS1912–13. Courses enrolled in: Advanced Algebra, four hours (Heffter);
Theory of Differential Equations, four hours (Loewy); General History
of Philosophy, four hours (Schneider); Exercises in Epistemological
Problems, no hours listed (Schneider).
SS1913. Course enrolled in: The Age of the Renaissance, four hours (Finke).
Department of Philosophy
7/26/1913. Department of Philosophy recommends Heidegger for the doc-

toral degree in philosophy summa cum laude. Dissertation submitted
with a curriculum vitae9 on 6/30: “Theory of Judgment in Psycholo-
gism: Critical and Positive Contributions to Logic” (Die Lehre vom
Urteil im Psychologismus. Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik)
(GA1 59–188), directed by Schneider.10 Oral examination on 7/26 on
philosophy (Schneider) and the minor subjects of mathematics
(Heffter) and medieval history (Finke).
8/20/1913. Application to the Freiburg Archdiocesan Chancellery Office
for a Von Schaezler Grant in order “to dedicate himself to the study
of Christian philosophy and to pursue an academic career” through
work on the postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) and license to teach in
German universities (venia legendi) as a lecturer (Privatdozent).
Awarded on 9/29/1913 for the 1913–14 academic year with the
stated expectation that the applicant “would remain true to the spirit
of Thomistic philosophy.”11
WS1913–14. Auditing of Finke’s seminar on method in the science of his-
tory in preparation for the postdoctoral dissertation;12 auditing of
Rickert’s seminar in preparation for the postdoctoral dissertation.
Seminar paper therein on the limits of concept-formation in the nat-
ural sciences.13
SS1914. Auditing of Rickert’s seminar.14
9/20/1914. Application for a renewal of the Von Schaezler Grant in order
“to make possible the last step toward a career in the service of research-
ing and teaching Christian Scholastic philosophy” and “the Catholic
worldview.” Awarded for the 1914–15 academic year.
7/15/1915. Lecture titled “Question and Judgment” (Frage und Urteil) in
Rickert’s seminar.15
† 7/27/1915. Department of Philosophy recommends Heidegger for the post-
doctoral degree and license to teach in German universities as a lecturer.
Dissertation submitted with a curriculum vitae16 on 7/2/1915: “The

Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus” (Die Kategorien-
und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus) (GA1 189–398), directed by
Rickert.17 Required trial lecture presented on 7/27/1915 to the Depart-
ment of Philosophy: “The Concept of Time in the Science of History”
(Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft) (GA1 413–33; trans-
lated in chapter 4 of this volume).
8/5/1915. The University of Freiburg officially confers the rank of lecturer
with the right to begin giving courses in WS1915–16.
† 12/13/1915. Successful application for a third Von Schaezler Grant to work
on the publication of his expanded postdoctoral dissertation (supple-
mental conclusion to be found in GA1 399–411; translated in chapter
5 of this volume), as well as of “a nearly finished investigation on the
logic and psychology of late Scholasticism,” and thereby to facilitate
“his academic life’s work [being] oriented to making the wealth of ideas
inherited from Scholasticism applicable to the future intellectual strug-
gle for the Christian ideal of life in Catholicism.”
STUDENT PERIOD: RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION
Previously unpublished poems. “Fernes Land” (Distant Land), “Hast die

Sonne du verloren” (Have You Lost the Sun?), etc. In “I. Frühe unveröf-
fentlichte Gedichte” of GA81: Gedachtes (forthcoming). The publisher’s
prospectus does not state the precise years in which these early poems
were composed.
† March 1910. Book review essay. “Per mortem ad vitam (Gedanken über Jör-
gensens Lebenslüge und Lebenswahrheit),” Der Akademiker 2, no. 5
(March, 1910): 72–73. Reprinted in GA16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse
eines Lebenswege 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (2000), pp. 3–6.
Translated by John Protevi as “Per mortem ad vitam (Thoughts on
Johannes Jörgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life) in Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal 14–15 (1991): 487–91, with an introduction by
Hugo Ott, who first rediscovered these Der Akademiker articles in the
late 1980s (481–85); reprinted in revised form in chapter 2 of this vol-
ume with the generous permission of the journal.
May 1910. Book review. “Förster, Fr. W. Autorität und Freiheit. Betrachtun-
gen zum Kulturproblem der Kirche,” Der Akademiker 2, no. 7 (May,
1910): 109–10. Reprinted in GA16 7–8. Translated by John Protevi as
“Förster, Fr. W. Authority and Freedom: Observations on the Cultural
Problem of the Church,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14–15
(1991): 491–93.
22 SUPPLEMENTS
August 27, 1910. Newspaper article. “Abraham a Sankta Clara. Zur

Enthüllung seines Denkmals in Kreenheinstetten am 15. August
1910” (Abraham of Saint Claire: On the Unveiling of His Monument
in Kreenheinstetten, August 15, 1910), Allgemeine Rundschau.
Wochenschrift für Politik und Kultur 7, no. 35 (August 27, 1910): 605.
Reprinted in GA13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Hermann Hei-
degger (1983), pp. 1–3.
October 29, 1910. Poem. “Sterbende Pracht” (Dying Splendor), Allgemeine
Rundschau 7, no. 44 (October 29, 1910): 775. Reprinted in GA13 5.
December 1910. Book review. “Cüppers, Ad. Jos. Versiegelte Lippen. Erzäh-
lung aus dem irischen Volksleben des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Der Akademiker
3, no. 2 (December 1910): 29. Reprinted in GA16 9. Translated by
John Protevi as “Cüppers, Ad. Jos. Sealed Lips: The Story of the Irish Folk
Life in the 19th Century,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14–15
(1991): 495.
January 1911. Book review. “Jörgensen, Joh. Das Reisebuch. Licht und dunke
Natur und Geist,” Der Akademiker 3, no. 3 (January 1911): 45.
Reprinted in GA16 10. Translated by John Protevi as “Jörgensen, Joh.
Travelogue: Light and Dark Nature and Spirit,” Graduate Faculty Philos-
ophy Journal 14–15 (1991): 495.
March 1911. Essay. “Zur philosophischen Orientierung für Akademiker,” Der
Akademiker 3, no. 5 (March 1911): 66–67. Reprinted in GA16 11–14.
Translated by John Protevi as “On a Philosophical Orientation for Acad-
emics,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14–15 (1991): 497–501.
March 25, 1911. Poem. “Ölbergstunden” (Hours on the Mount of Olives),
Allgemeine Rundschau 8, no. 12 (March 25, 1911): 197. Reprinted in
GA13 6.
April 8, 1911. Poem. “Wir wollen warten” (We Shall Wait), Allgemeine
Rundschau 8, no. 14 (April 8, 1911): 246. Reprinted in GA13 6.
May 15, 1911. Book review. “Zimmermann, O., S. J. Das Gottesbedürfnis”
in Akademische Bonafatius-Korrespondenz (May 15, 1911), p. 214.
Reprinted in GA16 15.
July 1911. Poem. “Auf stillen Pfaden” (On Quiet Paths), Der Akademiker 3,
no. 6 (July 1911): 140. Reprinted in GA16 16.
1911. Unpublished Poem. “Julinacht” (July Night). In GA16 17.
† 1912. Essay. “Das Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie,” Philosophis-
ches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft 25 (1912): 353–63. Reprinted in GA1:
Frühe Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1978), pp. 1–15.
Translated by Philip J. Bossert as “The Problem of Reality in Modern Phi-
losophy” in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 4 (1973):
64–71, reprinted with extensive revisions by the original translator and

John van Buren in chapter 3 of this volume. The permission of the jour-
nal is gratefully acknowledged.
March 1912. Essay. “Religionspsychologie und Unterbewusstsein,” Der
Akademiker 4, no. 5 (March, 1912): 66–68. Reprinted in GA16 18–28.
Translated by John Protevi as “Psychology of Religion and the Subcon-
scious,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14–15 (1991): 503–17.
March 1912. Book review. “Gredt, Jos. O.S.B. Elementa Philosophiae Aris-
totelico-Thomisticae. Vol. I. Logica, Philos. nat. Edit. II.,” Der
Akademiker 4, no. 5 (March, 1912): 76–77. Reprinted in GA16 29–30.
Translated by John Protevi as “Gredt, Jos. O.S.B. Elements of Aris-
totelian-Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 1: Logic, Philos. nat. Edit. II,” Grad-
uate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14–15 (1991): 517–19.
March 17, 1912. Letter to Josef Sauer. In Ott 1988/1993, p. 73/70–71.
October–December 1912. Essay. “Neuere Forschungen über Logik” (Recent
Research in Logic), Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutsch-
land 38, no. 10 (1912), cols. 465–72; no. 11, cols. 517–24; no. 12,
cols. 565–70. Reprinted in GA1 17–43.
1912ff. Correspondence with Henrich Rickert. Martin Heidegger/Heinrich
Rickert: Briefe 1912 bis 1933 und andere Dokumente Aus den Nachlässen,
ed. Alfred Denker (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002).
January 1913. Book review. “Bibliothek wertvoller Novellen und Erzählungen.
Herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. O. Hellinghaus. Bd. IX,” Der Akademiker
4, no. 3 (January 1913): 45. Reprinted in GA16 31. Translated by John
Protevi as “Library of Valuable Novellas and Stories, vol. 9, O. Helling-
haus, ed.,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14–15 (1991): 519.
1913. Book review. “Kant Briefe in Auswahl. Herausgegeben und erläutert
von F. Ohmann,” Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutschland
39, no. 2 (1913), col. 74. Reprinted in GA1 45.
1913. Book review. “Nikolai von Bubnoff, Zeitlichkeit und Zeitlosigkeit,”
Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutschland 39, no. 4 (1913),
cols. 178–79. Reprinted in GA1 46.
June 30, 1913. Doctoral dissertation “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus.
Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik” (Theory of Judgment in Psychol-
ogism: A Critical and Positive Contribution to Logic), submitted on this
date to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg.
June 30, 1913. Curriculum vitae submitted with the doctoral dissertation.
Published as “Lebenslauf (1913)” with an accompanying English trans-
lation (“Curriculum Vitae 1913”) in Sheehan 1988, pp. 115, 106. Also
in Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert: Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933, p. 92.
24 SUPPLEMENTS
August 20, 1913. Letter of application to the Freiburg Archdiocesan Chan-

cellery Office for a Von Schaezler Grant to work on his postdoctoral
degree in the area of “Christian Philosophy.” Excerpts in Hugo Ott,
“Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger und das von Schaezler’sche
Stipendium,” Freiburger Diözesanarchiv 108 (1986): 154. Grant for the
1913–14 academic year awarded on September 29.
1913–14. Seminar paper on the limits of concept-formation in the natural
sciences in Heinrich Rickert’s seminar of WS1913–14. In Martin Hei-
degger/Heinrich Rickert: Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933, pp. 77–79.
1914. Excerpts from the doctoral dissertation. “Die Lehre vom Urteil im
Psychologismus” (Theory of Judgment in Psychologism), Zeitschrift
für Philosophie und philosophischer Kritik 155 (1914): 148–72; 156
(1915): 41–78.
1914. Publication of doctoral dissertation under the same title, Die Lehre
vom Urteil im Psychologismus. Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik
(Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1914). Reprinted in GA1 59–188.
1914. A slightly revised version of the above-cited “Lebenslauf (1913).”
“Lebenslauf ” in Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus, p. 111.
Reprinted in GA16 32. Translated by Therese Schrynemakers as “Cur-
riculum Vitae,” Listening 12 (1977): 110.
1914. Book review. “Franz Brentano, Von der Klassifikation der psychischen
Phänomene. Neue, durch Nachträge stark vermehrte Ausgabe der betref-
fenden Kapitel der Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt” (Franz
Brentano, On the Classification of Psychical Phenomena: New Expanded
Edition of a Chapter From Psychology From an Empirical Point of View),
Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutschland 40, no. 5 (1914),
cols. 233–34. Reprinted in GA1 47–48.
1914. Book review. “Charles Sentroul, Kant und Aristoteles” (Charles Sen-
troul, Kant and Aristotle), Literarische Rundschau für das katholische
Deutschland 40, no. 7 (1914), cols. 330–32. Reprinted in GA1 49–53.
1914. Book review. “Kant-Laienbrevier. Eine Darstellung der Kantischen Welt-
und Lebensanschauung für den ungelehrten Gebildeten aus Kants Schriften,
Briefen und mündlichen Äußerungen. Zusammengestellt von F. Groß” (A
Kant Reader: Portrait of His View of the World and Life Designed for the
Non-Expert and Drawn from His Writings, Correspondence, and Oral
Remarks, ed. F. Gross), Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutsch-
land 40, no. 8 (1914), cols. 376–77. Reprinted in GA1 54.
July 19, 1914. Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs. In Ott 1988/1993, p.
83/81. Translated also in Sheehan 1988, p. 113.
September 20 and November 23, 1914. Letters to the Freiburg Archdiocesan
Chancellery Office for a second Von Schaezler Grant to continue work-
ing on his postdoctoral degree “in the service of Christian Scholastic phi-
losophy and the Catholic worldview.” Excerpts in Ott, “Der Habilitand
Martin Heidegger und das von Schaezler’sche Stipendium,” pp. 155–56.
Grant for the 1914–15 academic year awarded on November 18.
1915. Book review. “W. Wundt. Probleme der Völkerpsychologie,”
Philosophisches Jahrbuch 28 (1915): 88–90. Reprinted in GA16 33–35.
January 13, 1915. Article. “Das Kriegstriduum in Meßkirch” (Messkirch’s
Wartime Triduum), Heuberger Volksblatt 17 (January 13, 1915).
March 1915. Poem. “Trost” (Consolation), Heliand 6 (March 1915): 161.
Reprinted in GA16 36.
July 2, 1915. Postdoctoral dissertation “Die Kategorien- und Bedeu-
tungslehre des Duns Scotus” (The Theory of Categories and Meaning
in Duns Scotus), submitted on this date to the Department of Philos-
ophy at the University of Freiburg. In GA1 189–398.
July 2, 1915. Curriculum vitae submitted with the dissertation. Published
as “Lebenslauf (1915)” with an accompanying English translation
(“Curriculum Vitae 1915”) in Sheehan 1988, pp. 116–17. Also in
GA16 37–39.
July 15, 1915. Lecture in Heinrich Rickert’s seminar at the University of
Freiburg. “Frage und Urteil” (Question and Judgment) in Martin Hei-
degger/Heinrich Rickert: Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933, pp. 81–90. Also in
GA80 (forthcoming).
† July 27, 1915. Trial lecture presented to the Department of Philosophy as
a requirement for the postdoctoral degree and license to teach. “Der
Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Published under the same
title and in a slightly revised version in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und
philosophische Kritik 161 (1916): 173–88. Reprinted with Heidegger’s
marginalia in GA1 413–33. Translated by Harry S. Taylor and Hans
W. Uffelmann as “The Concept of Time in the Science of History” in
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 9 (1978): 3–10;
reprinted with extensive revisions by John van Buren in chapter 4 of
this volume. The permissions of the original translators and the jour-
nal are gratefully acknowledged.
EARLY FREIBURG PERIOD
Lecturer, University of Freiburg
WS1915–16. Lecture course. “Die Grundlinien der antiken und scholastis-

chen Philosophie” (Basic Outlines of Ancient and Medieval Philoso-
phy), two hours. No publication announced.
26 SUPPLEMENTS
WS1915–16. Seminar. “Über Kant, Prolegomena” (On Kant’s Prolegomena).

No publication announced.
December 13, 1915. Letter to the Freiburg Archdiocesan Chancellery Office
for a third Von Schaezler Grant to work on the publication of the post-
doctoral dissertation, as well as of a related investigation dealing with
“the logic and psychology of Late Scholasticism” and thereby to make a
contribution to “the future struggle for the Christian ideal of life in
Catholicism.” In Ott, “Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger und das von
Schaezler’sche Stipendium,” pp. 156–59.
1916. Poem. “Einsamkeit” (Loneliness), Heliand 7 (1916): 161. Reprinted
in GA16 40.
SS1916. Lecture course. “Der deutsche Idealismus” (German Idealism), two
hours. No publication announced.
SS1916. Seminar. “Übungen über Texte aus den logischen Schriften des
Aristoteles (mit E. Krebs)” (Exercises with Texts from Aristotle’s Logical
Writings [co-taught with E. Krebs]). No publication announced.
Summer 1916. Poem. “Abendgang auf der Reichnau.” In Das Bodenseebuch
1917. Ein Buch für Land und Leute, vol. 4 (Constance: Reuss and Itta,
1916), p. 152. Reprinted in GA13 7. Translated by William J. Richard-
son as “Eventide on Reichnau” in William J. Richardson, Through Phe-
nomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. 1.
† 1916. Publication of the postdoctoral dissertation under the same title Die
Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr,
1916) and with the inclusion of the supplemental conclusion, “Schluß.
Das Kategorienproblem.” Reprinted in GA1 399–411. Translated by
Harold J. Robbins as “Duns Scotus’s Theory of the Categories and of
Meaning,” Ph.D. dissertation, DePaul University, 1978. Supplemental
conclusion translated by Roderick M. Stewart as “The Problem of Cat-
egories” in Man and World 12 (1979): 378–86; reprinted with extensive
revisions by the original translator and John van Buren in chapter 5 of
this volume. The permission of the journal is gratefully acknowledged.
WS1916–17. “Grundfragen der Logik” (Basic Problems in Logic), two
hours. No publication announced.
January 7, 1917. Letter to the medievalist Martin Grabmann. In Hermann
Köstler, “Heidegger schreibt an Grabmann,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch
87 (1980): 98–104.
SS1917–WS1918–19. No teaching due to conscription into war service.
† 1917. Author’s book notice. “Selbstanzeige. Die Kategorien- und Bedeu-
tungslehre des Duns Scotus,” Kant-Studien XXI (1917): 467–68.
Reprinted in GA1: Frühe Schriften, p. 412. Translated by John van Buren
as “Author’s Book Notice” in chapter 5 of this volume.
1917. Informal talk. “Über das Wesen der Religion” (On the Essence of
Religion). In GA60: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, ed. Matthias
Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube (1995), pp. 319–22.
GA60 translated by Jennifer Gossetti as Phenomenology of Religious Life
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
1917–19. Notes on phenomenology of religion and medieval mysticism that
were to be used in the canceled lecture course of WS1919–20, “Die
philosophischen Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Mystik” (The Philo-
sophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism). In GA60 301–37.
June 15, 1918ff. Correspondence with Elisabeth Blochmann. Martin Hei-
degger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918–1969, ed.
Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillerge-
sellschaft, 1989).
Assistant to Edmund Husserl

January 7, 1919. Edmund Husserl submits a letter of request to the Ministry
of Education that Martin Heidegger be appointed to a salaried assist-
antship to the chair of philosophy that he had been occupying since
1916 at the University of Freiburg. Request granted the following year.
† January 9, 1919. Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs. Bernhard Casper first dis-
covered and published this letter in his article “Martin Heidegger und
die Theologische Fakultät Freiburg, 1909–1923,” Freiburger Diözesan-
Archiv 100 (1980): 541; Hugo Ott then published a slightly corrected
version in Ott 1988/1993, pp. 106–107/106–107. Translated by John
van Buren as “Letter to Engelbert Krebs (January 9, 1919)” in John van
Buren, “The Young Heidegger,” Ph.D. dissertation, McMaster Univer-
sity, 1989, pp. 573–74; presented in revised form in chapter 6 of this
volume with the permission of Hermann Heidegger, executor of his
father’s literary estate.
KNS 1919. Lecture course. “Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltan-
schauungsproblem” (The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of
Worldviews), two hours. In GA56/57: Zur Bestimmung der Philoso-
phie, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel (1987), pp. 1–117. GA56/57 translated
by E. H. Sadler as Toward the Definition of Philosophy (London:
Athlone Press, 2001).
SS1919. Lecture course. “Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wert-
philosophie” (Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of
Value), one hour. In GA56/57 119–203.
SS1919. Lecture course. “Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademis-
chen Studiums” (On the Essence of the University and Academic Stud-
ies), one hour. In GA56/57 205–14.
28 SUPPLEMENTS
SS1919. Seminar. “Einführung in die Phänomenologie im Anschluß an

Descartes, Meditationes” (Introduction to Phenomenology in Connec-
tion with Descartes’ Meditations). No publication announced.
WS1919–20. Lecture course. “Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie” (Basic
Problems in Phenomenology), two hours. Published as GA58: Grund-
probleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander (1992).
WS1919–20. Seminar. “Übungen im Anschluß an Natorp, Allgemeine Psy-
chologie” (Exercises in Connection with Natorp’s General Psychology).
April 1920. Talk on Oswald Spengler in Wiesbaden. No publication
announced.
† 1920. Book review essay. “Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltan-
schauungen” in Hans Sahner, ed., Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion (Munich: R.
Piper & Co. Verlag, 1973), pp. 70–100. Reprinted in GA9: Wegmarken, ed.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1976), pp. 1–44. Translated by John
van Buren as “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews” in Mar-
tin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. Will McNeill (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1998); reprinted in revised form in chapter 7 of this volume.
The permissions of the German publisher, Klostermann, and Cambridge
University Press for the roughly simultaneous appearance of this translation
in Pathmarks and the present volume are gratefully acknowledged.
April 21, 1920ff. Correspondence with Karl Jaspers. Martin Heidegger and
Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1920–1963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans
Saner (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990).
SS1920. Lecture course. “Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Aus-
drucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung” (Phenomenology
of Intuition and Expression: Theory of Philosophical Concept-Forma-
tion), two hours. Published as GA59: Phänomenologie der Anschauung
und des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung, ed.
Claudius Strube (1993). Translated by E. H. Sadler as Phenomenology
of Intuition and Expression (London: Athlone Press, forthcoming).
SS1920. Seminar. “Kolloquium im Anschluß an die Vorlesung” (Collo-
quium in Connection with the Lecture Course). No publication
announced.
WS1920–21. Lecture course. “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Reli-
gion” (Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion), two hours. In
GA60 1–156.
WS1920–21. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übungen für Anfänger im
Anschluß an Descartes, Meditationes” (Phenomenological Exercises
for Beginners in Connection with Descartes’ Meditations). No publi-
cation announced.
SS1921. Lecture course. “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus” (Augustine

and neo-Platonism), three hours. In GA60 157–299.
SS1921. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übungen für Anfänger im Anschluß
an Aristoteles, de anima” (Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in
Connection with Aristotle’s De anima). No publication announced.
August 19, 1921. Letter to Karl Löwith. In Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto
Pöggeler, eds., Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 2: Im
Gespräch der Zeit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), pp. 27–32. Translated
by Gary Steiner in Richard Wolin, ed., Martin Heidegger and European
Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 235–39.
WS1921–22. Lecture course. “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu
Aristoteles. Einführung in die Phänomenologische Forschung. Ein-
leitung” (Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristo-
tle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Lead-in), two hours.
Published as GA61: Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles.
Einführung in die Phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Walter Bröcker and
Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (1985, 2d ed., 1994).
Anschluß an Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen II” (Phenomenological
Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Husser’s Logical Investiga-
tions, vol. 2). No publication announced.
SS1922. Lecture course. “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristote-
les. Ontologie und Logik” (Phenomenological Interpretations in Con-
nection with Aristotle: Ontology and Logic), four hours. To be pub-
lished as GA62: Phänomenologische Interpretation ausgewählter
Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu Ontologie und Logik, ed. Günther Neu-
mann (forthcoming).
SS1922. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übungen für Anfänger im
Anschluß an Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen II, 2. Untersuchung”
(Phenomenological Exercises in Connection with Husserl’s Logical
Investigations, vol. 2, 2nd Investigation). No publication announced.
June 30, 1922. Curriculum vitae sent to Georg Misch. In GA16 41–45.
† Autumn 1922. Introduction to a planned book on Aristotle. “Phänomenol-
ogische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen
Situation).” First published and edited by Hans-Ulrich Lessing with an
introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Dilthey Jahrbuch 6 (1989):
229–74. Translated by John van Buren as “Phenomenological Interpre-
tations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneu-
tical Situation” in chapter 9 of this volume. The permissions of the edi-
tor of the Dilthey Jahrbuch, Frithjof Rodi, and Heidegger’s literary
executor, his son Herman Heidegger, are gratefully acknowledged, as
30 SUPPLEMENTS
are valuable translation suggestions by Michael Baur in his earlier trans-

lation of this text in Man and World 25 (1992): 355–93.
October 20, 1922 to November 18, 1924. Correspondence with Erich
Rothacker. In “Martin Heidegger und die Anfänge der ‘Deutschen
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte’:
Eine Dokumentation,” ed. Joachim W. Storck and Theodore Kisiel,
Dilthey Jahrbuch 8 (1992): 192–218.
WS1922–23. Seminar. “Übungen über: Phänomenologische Interpretatio-
nen zu Aristoteles (Nikomachische Ethik VI; De anima; Metaphysik VII)
(privatissime)” (Exercises: Phenomenological Interpretations in Con-
nection with Aristotle [Nicomachean Ethics 6; De anima; Metaphysics 7]
[private]), two hours. No publication announced.
Anschluß an Husserl, Ideen I” (Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners
in Connection with Husserl’s Ideas, vol. 1). No publication announced.
SS1923. Lecture course. “Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität),” one
hour. Published as GA63: Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität, ed.
Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (1988, 2d ed., 1995). Translated by John van
Buren as Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1999).
SS1923. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übungen für Anfänger im
Anschluß an Aristoteles, Ethica Nicomachea” (Phenomenological Exer-
cises for Beginners in Connection with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics).
SS1923. Seminar. “Kolloquium über die theologischen Grundlagen von
Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, nach aus-
gewählte Texten, für Fortgeschrittene (mit Ebbinghaus)” (Colloquium
for Advanced Students on the Theological Foundations of Kant’s Reli-
gion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Selected Texts [co-taught with
Ebbinghaus]). No publication announced.
SS1923. Seminar. Continuation of “Übungen über: Phänomenologische Inter-
pretationen zu Aristoteles” from WS1922–23. No publication announced.
MARBURG PERIOD
Associate Professor, University of Marburg

WS1923–24. Lecture course. “Einführung in die phänomenologische
Forschung” (Introduction to Phenomenological Research), four hours.
Published as GA17: Einführung in die Phänomenologische Forschung, ed.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1994).
WS1923–24. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übung für Anfänger: Husserl,

Logische Untersuchungen II.1” (Phenomenological Exercises for Begin-
ners: Husserl’s Logical Investigations, vol. 2, Investigation I). No publi-
cation announced.
WS1923–24. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übung für Fortgeschrittene:
Aristoteles, Physik B” (Phenomenological Exercise for Advanced Stu-
dents: Aristotle’s Physics B). No publication announced.
WS1923–24. Essay. “Wahrsein und Dasein (Aristoteles, Ethica Nicomachea
Z)” (Being-True and the Being-There of Dasein [Aristotle, Nico-
machean Ethics Z]). In GA80 (forthcoming).
December 7, 1923. Talk at the Kant Society in Hamburg. “Aufgaben und
Wege der phänomenologischen Forschung” (The Tasks and Paths of
Phenomenological Research). Not announced for publication.
† February 14 and 21, 1924. Two-part talk in Rudolf Bultmann’s theology
seminar, “The Ethics of St. Paul,” at the University of Marburg (pre-
ceded by Heidegger’s shorter discussion on January 10 of the topic of liv-
ing in faith in connection with Romans 6). ”Das Problem der Sünde bei
Luther.” Heidegger’s manuscript not scheduled for publication and pre-
sumably lost. Student transcript first published in Bernd Jaspert, ed.,
Sachgemäße Exegese: Die Protokolle aus Rudolf Bultmanns Neutesta-
mentlichen Seminaren 1921–1951 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1996), pp.
28–33. Translated by John van Buren as “The Problem of Sin in Luther”
in chapter 8 of this volume, with the permission of the publisher.
SS1924. Lecture course. “Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie”
(Basic Concepts in Aristotelian Philosophy), four hours. In GA18:
Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. Mark Michalski (2001).
SS1924. Seminar. “Fortgeschrittene: Die Hochscholastik und Aristoteles
(Thomas, de ente et essentia; Cajetan, de nominum analogia)” (Advanced
Students: Late Scholasticism and Aristotle [Thomas, On Being and
Essence; Cajetan, On the Analogy of Names]). No publication announced.
July 25, 1924. Talk for the Department of Theology at the University of
Marburg. “Der Begriff der Zeit.” Published as Der Begriff der Zeit: Vor-
trag vor der Marburger Theologenschaft Juli 1924, ed. Hartmut Tietjen
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989). Also in GA64: Der Begriff der Zeit,
ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (forthcoming). Translated by
Will McNeill as The Concept of Time (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1992).
1924. Essay composed in connection with the above talk. “Der Begriff der
Zeit.” In GA64 (forthcoming).
WS1924–25. Lecture course. “Interpretation Platonischer Dialoge
(Soϕivsthv~, Fivlhbo~)” (Interpretations of Plato’s Dialogues [Sophist,
Philebus] ), four hours. Published as GA19: Platon: Sophistes, ed.
32 SUPPLEMENTS
Ingeborg Schüßler (1992). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and

André Schuwer as Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997).
WS1924–25. Seminar. “Übungen zur Ontologie des Mittelalters (Thomas,
de ente et essentia, summa contra gentiles)” (Exercises on the Ontology of
the Middle Ages [Thomas, On Being and Essence, Summa contra gen-
tiles]). No publication announced.
December 1–8, 1924. Lecture series for the Kant Society in Elberfeld-Bar-
men, Cologne, and Dortmund based on the above similarly titled essay
in WS1923–24. “Dasein und Wahrsein nach Aristoteles (Interpretatio-
nen von Buch VI der Nikomach. Ethik)” (The Being-There of Dasein
and Being-True in Aristotle [Interpretations of Book VI of the Nico-
machean Ethics]). In GA80 (forthcoming).
† April 16–21, 1925. A series of lectures at the Hessian Society for Art and Sci-
ence in Kassel. “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der Kampf um
eine historische Weltanschauung.” Heidegger’s manuscript not announced
for publication and presumably lost. Walter Bröcker’s transcript, first dis-
covered, edited, and introduced by Frithjof Rodi, is published in Dilthey-
Jahrbuch 8 (1992–1993): 123–30, 143–80. Also in GA80 (forthcoming).
Translated by Charles Bambach as “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the
Struggle for a Historical Worldview” in chapter 10 of this volume with the
permission of the journal’s editor, Frithjof Rodi. On April 15, Heidegger’s
announcement of and introduction to the lecture series were published in
the Kassler Post and have been reprinted in GA16 49–51.
SS1925. Lecture course. “Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Prolegomena zur
Phänomenologie von Geschichte und Natur,” four hours. Published as
GA20: Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Petra Jaeger (1979,
3rd ed., 1994). Translated by Theodore Kisiel as History of the Concept
of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
SS1925. Seminar. “Anfangsübungen im Anschluß an Descartes, Medita-
tiones” (Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Descartes’ Medita-
tions). No publication announced.
October 15, 1925. Informal talk. “Zum Hochzeitstag von Fritz und Liesel
Heidegger” (On the Wedding Day of Fritz and Liesel Heidgger). In
GA16 52–54.
1925ff. Correspondence with Hannah Arendt. Martin Heidegger and Han-
nah Arendt, Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere Zeugnisse, ed. Ursula Ludz
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988, 2d ed., 1999).
1925–1927. Notes. “Aufzeichnungen zur Temporalität (Aus den Jahren
1925 bis 1927)” (Notes on Temporality [From the Years 1925 to
1927]), Heidegger Studies 14 (1998): 11–26.
WS1925–26. Lecture course. “Logik” (Logic), four hours. Published as

GA21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. Walter Biemel (1976, 2d
ed., 1995).
WS1925–26. Seminar. “Anfänger: Phänomenologische Übungen (Kant,
Kritik der reinen Vernunft)” (For Beginners: Phenomenological Exer-
cises [Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason] ). No publication announced.
WS1925–26. Seminar. “Fortgeschrittene: Phänomenologische Übungen
(Hegel, Logik, I. Buch)” (Advanced Students: Phenomenological Exer-
cises [Hegel’s Logic, Book 1). No publication announced.
March–November 1926. First draft of Divisions I and II of part 1 of Sein
und Zeit,18 these divisions appearing in print with revisions in April of
the following year under the title Sein und Zeit. Erste Hälfte (Being and
Time. First Half ) in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische
Forschung, vol. 8 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1927), pp. xi–438. Reprinted
as GA2: Sein und Zeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1977).
Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson as Being and
Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Also translated by Joan Stam-
baugh as Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997).
Chapter Two
PER MORTEM AD VITAM
Thoughts on Johannes Jörgensen’s

Lies of Life and Truth of Life (1910)
JOHN PROTEVI AND JOHN VAN BUREN, TRANSLATORS
In our day, everyone talks much about “personality,” and the philosophers find
new concepts of value. Apart from critical, moral, and aesthetic evaluation, they
operate also with “evaluation of personality,” especially in literature. The person
of the artist moves into the foreground. Thus one hears much about interesting
people. Oscar Wilde the dandy, Paul Verlaine the “brilliant drunkard,” Maxim
Gorky the great vagabond, the Overman Nietzsche—all interesting people. And
when in the hour of grace one of these interesting people becomes conscious of
the great lie of his gypsy’s life, smashes the altars of false gods, and becomes a
Christian, then they call this “tasteless, revolting.”
Johannes Jörgensen took this step. It was not the urge for sensation that
drove him to conversion—no, it was a deeper, more bitter seriousness.
This powerful struggle to free himself from a perverted and deceitful phi-
losophy, tireless searching and building, the ultimate step to the summit of truth:
For bibliographic and other background information on this 1910 book review essay
from the first theological phase of Heidegger’s Student Period, when he was studying for the
priesthood in the Department of Theology at the University of Freiburg, see pp. 3–4, 21.
35
36 SUPPLEMENTS
these mark the moodful vitality of the sixty-eight small pages of this inconspicu-
ous little book Lies of Life and Truth of Life.1
At age 18, Jörgensen was an atheist, and soon he swam in the currents of
free thinking, which around the seventies Georg Brandes—Denmark’s Heine—
had put into motion: free research and free thinking had become the battle cry
of the modern Danish literati. The spirit of Nietzsche and Zola became all-pow-
erful. Denmark’s greatest atheist, J. P. Jakobsen, too weak for life and not sick
enough for death, dragged himself through his wretched existence, and with this
model of decadence Jörgensen set about his learning.
In beauty the artist has his heart, and there also is his art. But what did they
find beautiful, those who knew only one law, one aim? The unhappy author of
Niels Lyhne gives the answer: “What is wild I find beautiful, untamed and untam-
able nature, the ardent, never-satisfied passion of men of the Renaissance.” The
purest Cesara Borgia enthusiasm of a Nietzsche. They praise to the skies the
graven images of horror and sin. The Golden Calf Fama and the Babylonian
Venus stood on the alters.
And what’s the point of their poetry? To flatter the lusts of the people.
“Consider,” says the stranger in the profound parable of “The Shadow” in Para-
bles,2 “consider that we others live as you write . . . we are as you form us. . . . We
are chaste if you are, immoral if you will it.” Such were the men who shrugged
off “supernaturalism.” The enemies of obscurantism, the great “personalities,”
who wildly brought their egos to full development, their life was an intoxication.
And further and further they drifted downward to the point where they loved
death and despair and “called decay holy.”
Among those who sacrificed happiness for truth—so they said—stood Jör-
gensen. Often in balmy summer nights he had looked up longingly at the white,
pure stars. And now and then, when the mad frenzy faded, the call came from afar
out of the deepest depths of his tortured inner life: “Oh, tired soul, come here!”
And again the night sank in, leaden, without stars, the night of death. “My
life would be chaotic, as the life of my comrades—a chain riveted together with
one link of joy and ten links of sorrow, one ring of gold and ten rings of lead. . . .”
Until that morning came, when God had to help. A strong hand struck
him. He saw. The Darwinist was shaken. With iron consistency he marched
onward, upward. His extremely sharp, almost caustic criticism made the long,
arduous path to life easier for him.
Happiness is possible only through a life of deceit. Will Ibsen be proven
right in this statement? No, he contradicts a fundamental biological law. Truth
must naturally lead to happiness, deceit to destruction. That is the fertile ulti-
mate principle. Depart from truth, and it will punish you for your violation. And
yet who had more rigorously sought truth, who had indeed thrown all prejudices
overboard, smashed all chains, who had indeed created their convictions with the
“spiritual and moral sovereignty of the ego”? As we saw above, did the great “per-
sonalities” find happiness? No, despair and death. See that line of witnesses as
PER MORTEM AD VITAM 37
though they had gone astray and held a revolver to their heads. So none of them
had the truth. So individualism is the false standard of life. Therefore banish the
will of the flesh, the teachings of the world, of paganism.
And again a biological prerequisite.
Higher life is conditioned by the destruction of lower forms. For growth,
the plant needs inorganic matter. The animal can live only through the death of
the plant, and so on up the ladder. If you want to live spiritually, to gain your sal-
vation, then die, kill the baseness in yourself, work with supernatural grace, and
you will be resurrected. And thus he rests now in the shadow of the cross, this
strong-willed, joyously hopeful poet-philosopher: a modern Augustine.
This thin book about conversion provides an interesting contribution to
the psychology of the free thinker. He does not want to believe, he wants to tram-
ple down truth, he wants his moods and passions.
Unfortunately, space does not permit me to represent in extenso the phases
of conversion of the great Dane, to look into the first waking seeds in his earlier
writings, beginning with the Travelogue.3 One more word from a literary point of
view. The composition of his works lacks rigor. But they are all the more deeper
on account of this. Moodful dreaminess, muted impressionism, seriousness,
stateliness, restrained summoning, and admonition is entirely his style, just as
generally the writings of those from the northern countries—I recall Selma
Lagerlöf—show something ponderous, quiet, fabulous. Something else charac-
terizes Jörgensen: he uncovers again and again our great indestructible connec-
tions to the past. With the mystics of the Middle Ages he gladly tarries. For the
Poverello, his peace-filled poet’s heart glows. Let us love this frank Dane, let us
immerse ourselves and live in his lovely books.
Chapter Three
The Problem of Reality

in Modern Philosophy (1912)
PHILIP J. BOSSERT AND JOHN VAN BUREN, TRANSLATORS
In his characteristic manner, the witty Frenchman Brunetière writes concerning the
problem of the external world: “Je voudrais bien savoir, quel est le malade ou le mau-
vais plaisant, et je devrais dire le fou, qui s’est avisé le premier de mettre en doute ‘la
réalité du monde extérieur,’ et d’en faire une question pour les philosophes. Car la ques-
tion a-t-elle même un sens?” [“I should very much like to know which sick person or
sorry jokester—and I must also say fool—it was who first got it into his head to
doubt the reality of the external world and make it a question for philosophers.
Does such a question even make any sense?”]1 In this case, the critical thinker who
coined the phrase “the bankruptcy of science” did not look deep enough. His
appeal to “common sense,” a subject about which Kant recorded some rather
pointed views,2 lags far behind any methodically scientific treatment of our ques-
tion. If one distinguishes the naive (though, for practical life, fully adequate) view
that presumes to grasp the “real” at a single glance from the reflective, methodically
executed positing and definition of realities in science, one is faced with a certain
For bibliographic and other background information on this 1912 journal article
from the second neo-Scholastic philosophical phase of Heidegger’s Student Period, when
he abandoned plans for the priesthood and transfered to the Department of Natural Sci-
ences and Mathematics at the University of Freiburg, see pp. 4–5, 22.
39
40 SUPPLEMENTS
problem. The necessary precondition for developing a deeper understanding of a

problem that cries out to be resolved is precisely that one make an all-out effort to
free oneself from the leaden weight of allegedly self-evident truth.
In order to gain a historical basis for the discussion of this problem, I might
briefly note that the thought of Greek philosophy was oriented toward a critical
realism.3 The Neoplatonists, the philosophers in the Middle Ages, and those in
the modern era thought in a realist manner as well. Though a wide variety of
views concerning the definition of the real can be found, there was agreement
concerning the positing of something trans-subjective. It was not until Berke-
ley4 that the position of realism became shaky. With his formula of esse-percipi,
that is, the identification of being and being-perceived, he asserted the identity
of the physical and psychical. The existence of an independent world of physi-
cal bodies transcendent to consciousness was nullified. From a psychological
standpoint, Berkeley was indeed still a realist in that, along with the substance
of the soul, he also assumed the existence of a multitude of minds. His succes-
sor, Hume, then thought this sensationalism through to its final consequences.
The basic concepts of substance and causality were stripped of their objective,
real characteristics in that each was reduced to a “bundle of perceptions,” which
was in turn traced back to a subjectively felt force on the basis of which the asso-
ciatively conjoined reproductions of certain simultaneous perceptions are
thought of as being in an objective relation. Kant, who sought to overcome the
dangerous one-sidedness of English empiricism and wanted to safeguard a uni-
versal and necessary kind of knowledge that would within certain limits be valid
for all human beings, could do no better than to posit a mysterious “thing in
itself.” And when one realizes that ultimately Kant applied his transcendental
method only to formal sciences in that he investigated how pure mathematics,
the natural sciences, and metaphysics (in a rationalist sense) were at all possible,5
it becomes clear that the problem of reality simply had no place in his episte-
mology. While Kant toward the end of his life did try to bridge the gap between
metaphysics and physics, it was no longer possible for him to find a solution.
And it is quite evident that philosophy immediately after Kant, eventually cul-
minating in the extravagant idealism of Hegel, moved further and further away
from reality and an understanding of how it can be posited and defined. When,
after the downfall of Hegelian philosophy, the individual sciences forcefully tore
themselves away from the tutelage of philosophy and threatened to completely
stifle it (one need only consider the precarious position and dependent function
of philosophy in positivism), the only salvation seemed to be “back to Kant.”
Thus it is that philosophy today lives in the spirit of Kant but is no less influ-
enced by the English and French empiricist movements. There is good reason to
see the true spiritus rector of contemporary philosophy in Hume.6 Hence, the
THE PROBLEM OF REALITY IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY (1912) 41
dominant epistemological trends are characterized by conscientialism (immanen-

tism) and phenomenalism, views that attempt to show that a definition of the
real or, for that matter, according to the first view, even the mere positing of an
external world independent of consciousness, is inadmissible and impossible.
Simultaneously with this flourishing of modern philosophy, the empirical
research of the natural sciences has undauntedly continued its work in the spirit
of a healthy realism that has brought splendid achievements.
Is the conflict confronting us here between philosophical theory and the
praxis of the natural sciences a real one? Or is it perhaps the case that, as “disci-
plines which mull over formalistic notions,” the “standpoint of actuality”7 and
phenomenalism have perhaps outlived their time? An epistemological investiga-
tion seeing its task to be the application of the transcendental method to already
established sciences—that is, in our case, attempting to answer the question, how
are empirical natural sciences possible?—will have to give, on the basis of its
results, an affirmative answer to the above question. In light of what has been said
thus far, it is understandable how O. Külpe could write in the conclusion of his
The Philosophy of the Present in Germany that “at the threshold of this philosophy
of the future . . . stands the problem of reality.”8 It is this professor of philosophy
in Bonn who seems more than any other to have dedicated his distinctive
research to the above problem. In his more recent works, he touches upon it time
and again. At the philosophical congress this year in Bologna, he delivered a
paper on the history of the concept of reality.9 And in a work appearing last year,
Epistemology and the Natural Sciences, he provides a positive discussion of the
problem of reality with particular reference to the natural sciences.10
As already noted, the undeniable, epoch-making state of affairs of the nat-
ural sciences has brought our problem to the focus of interest. When the mor-
phologist defines the structure of plants and animals, when the anatomist
explains the internal structure of living creatures and their organs, when the cel-
lular biologist undertakes the study of the cell, its construction, and develop-
ment, when the chemist delves into the elements and combinations of chemical
compounds, and when the astronomer calculates the position and orbit of the
celestial bodies, the researchers in all of these various individual sciences are con-
vinced that they are not analyzing mere sense data or working on pure concepts
but rather positing and defining real objects that exist independently of them and
their scientific research.
How is this understanding of reality [Realisierung] or, more precisely, this
positing and defining of trans-subjective objects, possible? The positive solution
to this problem that has been raised will have to be preceded by a critical inves-
tigation that lays down foundations and determines if it is at all justifiable to
attempt to transcend the actuality of consciousness, i.e., to posit and define real-
ities, and such an investigation comes down to a debate with conscientialism and
phenomenalism. Consequently, the whole problem can be condensed into the
following four precisely defined questions (EN 9ff.):
42 SUPPLEMENTS
1. Is positing the real justifiable?

2. How is positing the real possible?
3. Is defining the real justifiable?
4. How is such defining possible?
In order to proceed in a methodical manner, we will begin with a consid-

eration of the first and third questions, and in treating the other two, we will
return to Külpe’s above-mentioned work.
II
1. By way of introduction, we mentioned Hume’s significance in the develop-
ment of modern epistemology. In our own time, English empiricism has under-
gone a diversity of modifications. Richard von Schubert-Soldern has worked out
a theory of solipsism and considers it a self-evident fact requiring no additional
proof. The consciousness of the knower, and this alone, is the object of knowl-
edge. This philosophy of immanence finds its chief representative in Schuppe. He
explains his position and attempts to justify it in his The Logic of Epistemology.11
All being [Sein] is being-conscious [Bewußt-Sein]. The concept of consciousness
includes both the conscious subject and the object of consciousness, but these
two moments are only separable by abstraction. The result of this is the inextri-
cable concatenation of thought and being. Related to this philosophy of imma-
nence is the empirio-criticism of Avenarius who, in his three major works,12 sets
himself the goal of determining the one true concept of the world. Finally, note
must be taken of E. Mach,13 the founder of so-called sense-data monism. He has
best developed his ideas in the work, Essays on the Analysis of Sense Data. A thing,
a body, and matter are nothing other than a context of elements (sense data), that
is, nothing other than colors, tones, and so on in addition to the so-called dis-
tinguishing features that are perceived.14
With the refutation of conscientialism, realism would at least represent a
possible position. This refutation would go the surest route if it turned its atten-
tion primarily to an emphasis on the core of conscientialist thought, namely, the
principle of immanence.15 The negative arguments for the “standpoint of actual-
ity,” which are supposed to undermine the positive arguments usually brought
forth in support of realism (e.g., the application of causal laws to the contents of
consciousness as such), all suffer from the same logical mistake, namely, they are
based upon a principle of immanence that is in fact what first needs to be proven.
Closer consideration is warranted for the direct, positive arguments that Klimke
narrows down to three: the a priori argument, the empirical argument, and the
methodological argument.16
The first argument attempts to see a contradiction in the concept of being
as something independent of thought. When one thinks about this kind of real-
ity, it becomes dependent on thought and thus on the actuality of consciousness.
However, a being that is thought is in no way identical with being in thought.

What is in being here (in the phenomenal sense) is a concept whose content is
intentionally referred to transcendent being. The psychical existence of a concept
and the ideal being of the content of this concept are completely different things.
Real being is thought by means of a concept, but this in no way means that such
being is taken inside the subject and transformed into psychical being. In my
opinion, Geyser is not wrong when he writes: “The whole alleged difficulty is
nothing but the dazzling sophism of dialectical pseudo-logic.”17 One need only
draw out the consequences of this procedure in which one identifies the act and
the content of a concept, and it then becomes clear that, given the correctness of
the above assumption, all intellectual life would be condemned to come to a
standstill. If the act were essential to the content, then for this content to be
repeatedly thinkable in an identical manner it would require that at each partic-
ular time the same act and also the same accompanying milieu of consciousness
should appear. However, the fact of the continuous flux of psychical happenings
shows this to be an impossible demand, in that each moment of time presents us
experientially with a different picture of our psychical life.
The empirical argument contains the claim that only the facts of con-
sciousness are in fact given, and that out of these facts all knowledge is imma-
nently constructed without a moment of transcendence in one direction or
another. However, the simple summation of the data of consciousness (who is
supposed to be doing the summation and recognizing the summation for what it
is?) produces no knowledge. Simply stringing together perceptions and ideas one
after another according to no particular principle can only lead to a chaotic pic-
ture. Rather, we find it to be the case that certain fundamental principles for all
knowing, namely, basic principles of logic, steer our knowledge along immutable
and absolutely valid courses of thought. But, say the conscientialists in order to
block our way, these real laws in the connection of our acts of thought also are
psychical matters of fact, i.e., causal laws of psychical events, and hence no argu-
ment against our position. It is here that once again the erroneous identification
of the psychical act and the logical content comes to the surface. The funda-
mental principles of logic are not inductively based and thus are not valid only as
the causal laws of subjective psychical events. Rather, we see in them immediately
evident, objective, ideal principles “whose content exhibits the most general rela-
tions between intentional thought and objects [in the logical sense].”18 Finally,
this empirical argument comes into conflict with psychological experience, for
the awareness involved in having the contents of consciousness present to oneself
already implies that one goes beyond the given sphere of one’s consciousness per
se. Moreover, this given sphere of consciousness can never provide one with the
primordial fund of experience. The latter can only be uncovered by an abstract-
ing activity of thought that transcends what is immediately given.19 And besides,
how can the degree of certitude required for scientific knowledge be reached
merely by having facts of consciousness at one’s disposal?
44 SUPPLEMENTS
Certainly, says the third methodological argument, the goal of science is the
absolute certitude and universal validity of its propositions. It is, however, impos-
sible for these propositions to be based on arbitrary presuppositions and
hypotheses that have been brought into play. The only certain unshakeable foun-
dation can be provided solely by what is immediately and irrefutably given in
consciousness. In reply to this, it need only be remarked that certitude cannot be
predicated of simple facts (nor of judgements considered as psychical acts). Facts
simply are or are not. Only knowledge can be certain and, as we saw above,
knowledge cannot be obtained from the data of consciousness alone. Concern-
ing this kind of certitude postulated especially by Mach, Külpe writes, “Certainty
of this kind is, of course, unshakeable; however, this is not because it proves itself
in argumentation, not because it withstands and prevails over opposition to it,
but because argumentation and opposition are in no way possible for it.”20
2. For conscientialism, whose attempted justification we have just shown to
be unsound, our problem basically does not even exist. Not quite so radical, how-
ever, is the epistemological position of phenomenalism. It considers the positing
of the real to be both possible and necessary, but only that much. Any definition
of this reality is forbidden in the rule book of phenomenalism. An unknown X,
i.e., a mysterious thing in itself, functions as the substrate for the sense data
aroused in the subject from the outside. The classic representative of phenome-
nalism is Kant. According to him, the transcendental conditions of the knowledge
found in intuition and understanding have the kind of genetically a priori, sub-
jective character he attempted to demonstrate in his “Transcendental Doctrine of
Elements.”21 Consequently, we know things only in terms of the subjective veils of
their appearance to us. Quite apart from the fact that, as would indeed seem to be
the case with just a cursory glance at the problem, the inference from the a priori
character and subjectivity of the pure forms of intuition and understandings to the
position adopted by phenomenalism is not valid, the claim that these forms have
a modifying function in a subjectivistic sense remains nothing but an utterly dog-
matic assumption. It will be ever impossible to provide justification for this pre-
supposition. Kant himself gave up his thesis that only what is intuited can be an
object of thought, and that consequently the understanding has no specific object,
when he made the pure concepts of the understanding and their deduction the
object of his investigations. When he writes, “We shall therefore follow up the
pure concepts to their first seeds and dispositions in the human understanding, in
which they lie prepared, till at last, on the occasion of experience, they are devel-
oped, and by the same understanding are exhibited in their purity, freed from the
empirical conditions attaching to them,”22 this intellectual labor can only be real-
ized on the presupposition that what is not intuited, namely, “pure concepts,” also
can be an object of thought. And it is just as possible, contrary to Kant’s position,
to think without categories. Külpe rightly notes: “Even the unordered, chaotic
matter of sensory impressions, which is presupposed by Kant as the stuff of sen-
sory knowledge, can in fact be thought, although definitely not represented and
certainly not experienced. If thought was necessarily tied to the use of categories,
then such chaos could in no way be thought” (K 85). Furthermore, concepts,
judgments, and conclusions are raised to the level of objects of thought in logic,
and thus here, as in the case of the formulation of general laws, one thinks objects
that are not intuited. Hence, the empiricist contention of Kant concerning the
intuitive nature of all objects of thought is not tenable. The “given,” what we find
in our experience, no doubt provides the material foundation for thinking about
the reality that manifests itself in this “given,” and it is the definition of this real-
ity, and not merely of its appearance, that is the goal of science. When, in Kant,
experiential material is worked on by the understanding, this actually operates in
a manner that runs opposite to any understanding of reality. Instead of the sub-
jective additions to the object of knowledge being eliminated, this object under-
goes an increased subjectification by means of the categories. Knowing distances
itself even further from its true object.
It is not difficult to see that a correct explanation of the relation between
experience and thought is of fundamental importance for the possibility of defin-
ing the realities one has posited. The sensationalism of modern psychology has
stripped thought of its independent status. In actuality, however, what is proper
to thought is an activity independent of the activity of sensation and the process
of association. It rules over the fund of empirical material by taking it up and
working on it in accordance with objective, universally valid, and ideal principles.
It stands over this material as an activity that analyzes it and adds to it. Külpe is
in agreement with us when he writes: “If one asks what constitutes the lawfulness
of thought if it does not affect its object in any way, it can be answered that
thought is directed toward, and accommodates itself to, its objects. The laws of
thought are the laws of its objects, and therefore the Copernican revolution Kant
claims for his theory of knowledge [namely, that objects are supposed to accom-
modate themselves to thought] does not hold for thought.” “One can indeed
define thought in terms of the fact that it has the possibility of thinking some-
thing whose existence and essence is independent of this thinking and of the
thinking subject” (K, 98, 97).23
With the repudiation of conscientialism and phenomenalism, the positing
and defining of realities is shown to be possible. However much these two epis-
temological movements are seen to exclude an understanding of reality, they have
nonetheless indirectly impelled us toward a deeper grasp of our problem and to
a more securely founded solution for it. Two questions now come to the fore that
will be considered for a positive treatment of our problem: How is the positing
of real objects possible? How is defining them possible?
3. The goal of understanding reality is to take the given, i.e., what we find
in our experience, and define it as it is in itself by eliminating from it the know-
ing subject’s modes of understanding and additions that modify it. The spatio-
temporal conditions of the objects of experience, their coexistence and succession,
the gaps in perception, and the relations among the contents of consciousness that
46 SUPPLEMENTS
force themselves upon us and are not determinable by our will—all of this reveals
indisputably a lawfulness independent of the experiencing subject. The positing of
realities transcendent to consciousness is demanded above all by the fact that one
and the same object is immediately communicable to different individuals.
Geyser, who devoted a detailed and penetrating investigation to our topic,
although doing so in a different context, writes appropriately: “This communica-
tion is a fact, and it is utterly basic to the possibility of any universally valid sci-
ence of experience.”24
It would be a hasty move to assert, after the manner of naive realism, that
the contents of perception in the form in which they present themselves to us are
objective realities. The organs of sensation—more particularly, the peripheral
fibers into which the sensory nerves branch out—are stimulated by mechanical,
physical, and chemical influences. The sensory nerve fibers then convey the pro-
duced stimuli to certain nerve centers and thereby make us conscious of events
in the external world. Facts such as the presence of a stimulus threshold and limit
or disturbances in the physiological organization of the senses (e.g., total or par-
tial color blindness, differences in visual acuity) clearly indicate that not only the
existence of perceptions but also their contents are essentially dependent upon
subjective factors, and that in the contents of perception we thus have before us
phenomenal formations produced with help of the subject. Even if the relata
between which the lawful relations of perceptions hover undergo subjective mod-
ifications on the basis of the laws bound up with the characteristic energy of our
senses, the relations themselves must nevertheless be posited as objectively real
laws. The abstraction of subjective moments, in which the negative task that
belongs to the special act of understanding reality consists, and the extraction of
objective states of affairs from the world of the actuality of our consciousness can
only be accomplished by experience and thought. Pure thought is not a compe-
tent court for decisions about ideal and real being. Only experience can give us
information about whether real objects exist, though not in such a way as to be
the sole, absolute authority for deciding this question. Sense impressions as such
are not themselves reality. They cannot without further ado be used for defining
reality. Hence, it is only where empirical and rational moments work together
that our experience rings true. If the external world is posited as the cause of our
sensations, then there is a mixed criterion at work. Külpe does not believe that
this particular criterion, which has acquired such special significance since
Schopenhauer, is completely appropriate, in that “the true motive of scientific
realism would remain unrecognized and the impression would be given that the
nature of the objective causes could be inferred from the subjective effects” (EN
24). A causal relation between the external world and sense impressions must
undeniably exist, but this says nothing at all about the qualities of the causes that
stimulate our senses. As scientific experience has shown, sensory stimuli (occur-
rences of motion) are not comparable to such perceived objects as color, tone,
smell, and taste. Clearly, in order to stave off a mistaken view, Külpe has given
expression to the above criterion in a different, obviously more precise form when
he sees the external world as “the basis of the externally determined, lawful rela-
tions of our sense impressions.” Using an analogy to a physical phenomenon
(forced motion), he defines these relations as something compelling and “forced
upon us.” That this is still a causal relation is clear.
4. The following special question now emerges: How is it possible to define
these realities, i.e., the compelling factors? Such defining is regulated in its con-
tent by the observed relations, i.e., it must be such that the relata are presented
as capable of bringing about real events. Külpe explains the idea succinctly: “Nat-
ural substances are perfect examples of capacities which allow the real relations,
states, and changes bound up with them to occur” (EN 27). A conclusive, ade-
quate definition of the realities that have been posited as existing will always
remain an ideal goal for sciences of reality. Even if all experienceable relations
could be exhibited, it still must be kept in mind that there are dependent reali-
ties that, even with the most refined instruments to aid our sense organs, we can
never reach in our sensory knowledge. And can the true nature of realities be
unambiguously defined? Nonetheless, there still remains a broad field to be cul-
tivated by science. In addition to material progress, the history of sciences unam-
biguously exhibits an advancement in the regulative definition of its objects.
However, must not the kind of definition of reality pursued in the spirit of
critical realism come to a halt before that barrier which is apparently thrown up
by the principle of the subjectivity of sensory qualities? It is true that, when we
heed this principle, realities lose their intuitive character, but this does not elim-
inate these realities as such. It does mean, however, that a break must be made
with the epistemological dogma of sensationalism, which states that all knowl-
edge remains tied to what can be intuited. The actual practice of sciences of real-
ity does not know this prejudice.25
In view of the contemporary trend of thought that is already permeated
with pragmatist concepts (scientifically quite shallow ones), Külpe also is looking
for an answer to the question about whether critical realism has noteworthy sig-
nificance from this point of view as well, though for science this is by itself admit-
tedly not the decisive point of view. Justifiably, the answer turns out to be affir-
mative. Külpe shows in his exceedingly vivid manner of presentation that in the
last analysis the opposing viewpoints of conscientialism and phenomenalism
shunt the tasks of sciences of reality and their fulfillment onto a dead-end track.
He writes: “There is nothing more unproductive than the overly restrictive
accounts of those researchers of nature who continually assure us in the spirit of
this [conscientialistic] theory of knowledge that they obviously do not want to
associate any realist views with their adoption of realist expressions. They import
into their accounts a viewpoint foreign to the very field they are investigating, and
forget that caution is the mother not only of wisdom but of inaction as well. Only
those who believe that a real nature can be defined will devote their energies to
gaining knowledge of it” (EN 38).
48 SUPPLEMENTS
Even if one cannot agree with Külpe throughout, and above all not con-
cerning his concept of “inductive” metaphysics, its hypothetical character, and its
justification, his merit will remain in having placed epistemology once again
before its authentic task after it had strayed so far off its proper path.26 Aris-
totelian–Scholastic philosophy, which has always thought in a realist manner, will
not lose sight of this new epistemological movement. Positive, progressive work
must be its main concern.
Chapter Four
The Concept of Time in the

Science of History (1915)
HARRY S. TAYLOR, HANS W. UFFELMANN,

AND JOHN VAN BUREN, TRANSLATORS
Motto: Time is what changes and diversifies itself, eternity

remains simple.
—Meister Eckhart
For some time a certain “metaphysical drive” has awoken in academic philoso-
phy. Remaining with simple epistemology will no longer suffice. The persistence
in epistemological problems, which is born of a legitimate, energetic awareness
of the necessity and value of critique, does not allow the ultimate questions
about the goal of philosophy to arrive at their immanent meaning. Hence, the
tendency toward metaphysics, which is one moment covered over and the next
manifestly seeing the light of day. One will have to interpret that as a deeper
See pp. 5, 20–21, 25 for bibliographic and other background information on this lecture
from Heidegger’s Student Period, which was presented to the Department of Philosophy at
the University of Freiburg in 1915 and then published the following year as a journal article.
Heidegger’s subsequent marginalia in the latter have been included in endnotes marked in the
body of the essay by superscripted letters in lower case and presented at the end under the title
“Marginalia” so as to distinguish them from the notes in the original publication.
49
50 SUPPLEMENTS
grasp of philosophy and its problems and see therein the will of philosophy to
power, though certainly not to power in the sense of the violent intellectual
forces of the so-called “worldview of natural science.”
Critical consciousness is too tenaciously alive in modern science and phi-
losophy for them to want to master our culture with ungrounded or poorly based
claims to power—so tenaciously alive that while recognizing the indispensability
of an ultimate metaphysical grounding (the Platonic uJpovqesi~ [hypothesis]),
they indeed still apply a major part of their energy to dealing with epistemolog-
ical problems, i.e., logical problems in the wider sense. For there can be no mis-
take that numerous problems in theory of science still await a solution, despite
the fruitful research precisely in this field during the last decades. The natural sci-
ences, like the cultural sciences, have been rendered problematic with regard to
their logical structure. In fact, one of the main results of this research is precisely
their sharp demarcation over against each other and the logical grounding of
their autonomy. But there are still enough particular problems that must be
solved before the comprehensive task of establishing a general theory of science
can be tackled in the future. One such particular problem will be made an object
of investigation in what follows.
Some brief general indications regarding science and the theory of science
should be given in advance so that the goal and peculiar character of such inves-
tigations remain at all times present.
Science is a context of kinds of theoretical knowledge that is ordered and
grounded through principles. Such knowledge is set down in judgments; these
judgments are true, they are valid. Strictly speaking, what is valid is not the act
of judgment carried out by the individual researcher in the acquisition of knowl-
edge but rather the sense of the judgment—its content. Conceived of in terms of
the idea of its completion, each science is a self-subsisting context of valid sense.
As temporally conditioned cultural facts, the particular concrete sciences are
never complete but rather always on the way in their discovery of truth.
The manner in which knowledge in the individual sciences is discovered,
i.e., the method of research, is determined by the object of the respective science
and the points of view under which it is examined. The methods of research in
the different sciences work with certain basic concepts, and it is the logical struc-
ture of these concepts that theory of science has to reflect on. The formulation of
this question in theory of science leads from the particular sciences into the
domain of the ultimate basic elements of logic: the categories. For the researcher
in a particular science, such investigations in theory of science easily give the
impression of a certain self-evidence and thus unproductivity. However, this hap-
pens only insofar as he expects from such investigations new subject matter for his
particular scientific field. The investigations cannot, of course, provide this
because they move in a completely new dimension. Consequently, they become
meaningful for the researcher in a particular science if and only if he forgets him-
self as this kind of researcher—and philosophizes.
THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY (1915) 51
Bringing into relief the logical foundations of methods of research in the

particular sciences is thus the concern of logic as theory of science. This can-
not be developed in its entirety in what follows; rather, a certain particular cat-
egory (a basic logical element)—the concept of time—will be singled out and
its structure clarified. What will ultimately be shown is that a central concept
is made a problem here, and that its solution also should shed light on the
whole logical character of the particular sciences that apply this category. The
question now is, on what path can we be most certain of arriving at knowledge
of the logical structure of the concept of time in the science of history? When
we speak of a special logical structure that belongs to this concept of time, we
mean that its content is determined in a peculiar manner by very specific ulti-
mate categorial elements. This determination of the concept “time in general”
into the concept of “historical time” is what must be brought into relief. It will
be presented through the fact that the science of history applies the concept of
time in a manner corresponding to its tasks. Accordingly, we will be able to
read off the structure of the concept of time in history from its function in the
science of history; this peculiar function should in turn be able to be under-
stood on the basis of the goal of the science of history. Therefore, the path we
will follow in solving our problem of a logical characterization of the concept
of time in the science of history proceeds from the goal of the science of his-
tory via the resulting function of the concept of time and to the structure of
this concept. The problem can be formulated in the following summary man-
ner: What structure must the concept of time in the science of history have in order
for it to be able to begin to function as a concept of time in a manner correspond-
ing to the goal of this science? Thus we will not be presupposing a particular
philosophical theory about the science of history and investigating what struc-
ture of the concept of time fits in with it but rather proceeding from the sci-
ence of history as a fact, studying the factual function of the concept of time in
it, and from this defining the logical structure of the concept. Should we arrive
at a solution to this problem as so formulated, then if we have recognized the
concept of time in the science of history as one of its central concepts, it should
be possible to determine something general about the logical structure of his-
tory as a science.
The peculiarity of the structure of the concept of time in the science of
history will undoubtedly emerge more clearly if it can be brought into relief in
contrast to a different structure of time. In order to make this possible, we
shall, before dealing with our actual problem, briefly characterize the concept
of time in the natural sciences—and, more precisely, in physics. With respect
to the concept of time in physics, we now formulate the problem in the same
manner as we did in relation to the concept of time in the science of history
and ask: What structure must the concept of time in physics have in order for it to
be able to begin to function as a concept of time in a manner corresponding to the
goal of physics?
52 SUPPLEMENTS
We first need to clarify the goal of physics as science. The best way to do this is
by bringing into relief the basic trend of physics that has come to light ever more
clearly in the course of its history from Galileo to the present.
Ancient and medieval philosophy of nature1 sought to investigate the
metaphysical essence and hidden causes of the appearances that impose them-
selves on us in immediate reality. In contrast to this metaphysical speculation
about nature, Galileo’s science signifies something fundamentally new in its
method. It seeks to gain mastery over the diversity of appearances by means of
laws, and how it arrives at laws—this is its strangely new accomplishment.
Because the basic tendency of physics can be seen most clearly in this method
of gaining knowledge of laws, this method can be explained by using a classic
example, namely, Galileo’s discovery of the law of gravity. The old way of exam-
ining nature would have proceeded by attempting, through the observation of
the individual instances of the appearance of gravity, to draw out what was com-
mon to all appearances of gravity, in order then to infer from this the essence of
gravity. Galileo did not begin with observation of individual instances of the
appearance of gravity but rather with a general assumption (hypothesis) that
runs: Bodies—having lost their support—fall in such a way that their velocity
increases in proportion to time (v = g · t), that is, bodies fall with equally accel-
erated motion. The initial velocity is 0, the final velocity v = g · t. If we use the
g
mean velocity –2 · t, then we have a uniform motion. The basic definitional for-
mula for this is s = c · t: the distance travelled is equal to the product of veloc-
g
ity and time. In our case c = –2 · t. The insertion of this value into the last for-
g
mula yields s = –2 · t . Galileo tested this equation against concrete instances, and
2
it was confirmed by them. Thus the above assumption, from which the law was
obtained in a purely deductive manner and subsequently experimentally con-
firmed, is valid. The entire train of thought was intentionally depicted in detail
in order to demonstrate that nowhere in the whole examination was there talk
of this or that particular body, this or that duration of time, this or that space
of a falling body. The assumption v = g · t, which subsequently becomes a law
by way of a conclusion drawn on the basis of the experiment that verifies it, is
a general one about all bodies.
Thus two peculiar features are found in this new method: (1) An assump-
tion is set up that makes it possible to grasp conceptually appearances in a par-
ticular field—here this means appearances of motion. (2) The assumption does
not posit a hidden quality as the cause that explains the appearances but rather
contains mathematically understandable—i.e., measurable—relations between
the ideally conceived moments of the appearances. This manner of formulating
problems that Galileo for the first time consciously used has in time gained dom-
inance in the individual branches of physics (mechanics, acoustics, theory of
heat, optics, magnetic theory, theory of electricity). In each of these fields of
physics, one seeks equations in which the most general lawful relations regarding
processes can be applied to the respective fields.
But modern physics has not stopped here. It has discovered basic laws
that permit, on the one hand, the inclusion of parts of acoustics and theory of
heat in mechanics and, on the other, optics, magnetism, and the theory of radi-
ant heat in the theory of electricity. Today, the numerous special fields of
physics have been reduced to two: mechanics and electrodynamics or, as it also
is put, the physics of matter and the physics of ether. As hotly as the battle
between the mechanical and the electrodynamic “worldviews” (!) has raged, the
two fields will, as Planck says, “in the long term not at all be able to be sharply
demarcated.”2 “Mechanics requires for its foundation in principle only the con-
cepts of space, time, and that which moves, whether one considers this as sub-
stance or state. And neither can electrodynamics do without these same con-
cepts. This is why a sufficiently generalized mechanics could also well include
electrodynamics, and there are in fact many favorable signs that these already
partially overlapping fields will eventually be unified into a single field—that
of a general dynamics.”3
It is with this that the goal of physics as a science must be brought into
relief. Its goal is the unity of its picture of the physical world, tracing all appear-
ances back to the basic mathematically definable laws of a general dynamics, to
the laws of motion of a still undetermined mass. Now that we know what the
goal of physics is, we can formulate our second question: What function is appro-
priate for the concept of time in this science?
Stated briefly, the object of physics is the lawfulness of motion. Motions
run their course in time. What exactly does this mean? “In” time has a spatial
meaning; however, time is obviously nothing spatial—indeed, we always con-
trast space and time. But it is just as clear that motion and time are somehow
related. In a passage from his Discorsi, Galileo speaks precisely of an “affinity
between the concepts of time and motion.” “For just as the uniformity of
motion is determined and comprehended through the equality of the times and
spaces . . . , so through this same equality of the segments of time we can also
comprehend increase in velocity (acceleration) which has come about in a plain
and simple manner.”4 In the relation between motion and time, what is clearly
at issue is measurement of motion by means of time. As a quantitative determi-
nation, measurement is the concern of mathematics. Theoretical, i.e., mathe-
matical, physics forms the foundation of experimental physics. Thus if we wish
to obtain precise concepts of motion and time, we must examine them in their
mathematical form.
The position of a material point in space is determined by the spatial point
with which it coincides. Let us assume now that space is empty except for the
material point whose position is to be determined. But space is infinite—each
point in space is equal to every other and likewise each direction to every other.
Thus it is impossible to determine the position of the material point in question
54 SUPPLEMENTS
without another point in relation to which its position can be determined. Such
a reference point must always be presupposed. All determinations of position are
valid relative to it and therefore never absolute. The determination of a position
results from our thinking of three straight lines placed through the reference
point and running perpendicular to each other—the x, y, and z axes. The posi-
tion of point P is now determined by the distances from the coordinate axes—
the coordinates x, y, and z. Let us assume a point P lying on a spatial curve. We
now examine it in terms of its motion, i.e., we study its positions, how they fol-
low after each other temporally. At each second we read off the clock, we can take
three measurements, i.e., register the determinate values of x, y, and z, which
determine the position of point P at time t. The values of x, y, and z are depen-
dent on the particular time t, that is, they are functions of time [x = x (t); y = y
(t); z = z (t)]. If the value of time t changes by an infinitesimally small value, the
values of the coordinates are likewise changed. If we now assign all possible
sequential values for t, then the coordinates as constant functions of t mark out
the inclusive concept of all temporally sequential positions of point P. We call this
inclusive concept of all positions motion.
“If we want to describe the motion of a material point,” says Einstein,
“then we give the values of its coordinates as functions of time.”5
All other basic concepts in the theory of motion, such as velocity, uniform
motion, acceleration, and irregular motion, are defined by particular relation-
ships between quantities of space and time. The concrete sensible qualities of the
defined phenomenon in question are dissolved and elevated entirely into the
realm of mathematics.
As objects of physics, motions are thus measured by means of time. It is the
function of time to make measurement possible. Because motions are always treated
in physics with respect to measurability, it is not the case that they are only occa-
sionally brought into relation with time, and that there are kinds of knowledge
in physics where consideration of time as such is held in suspension. Rather, as
the equations of motion have shown above, time forms a necessary moment in
the definition of motion. It is in this necessary connection with time that motion
is first able to be grasped conceptually in mathematical physics. Since we now
know that time is a condition of the possibility of defining the object of physics,
i.e., motions, we can forthwith answer our last question about the structure of
this concept of time. In the equations of motion x = x (t), y = y (t), and z = z (t),
time is presupposed as an independent variable in such a way that it is constantly
changing, i.e., flows uniformly from one point to the next with no jumps. Time
presents a series with a single direction in which each point of time differs only
through its place as measured from the initial point. Because the one point of
time differs from the preceding one only in that it follows after it, it is possible
to measure time and thereby motion. As soon as time is measured—and only as
time that is measurable and to be measured does it have a meaningful function
in physics—we determine a “so many.” The registering of the “so many” gathers
into one the points of time that have until then flowed by. We as it were make a
cut in the time scale, thereby destroying authentic time in its flow and allowing
it to harden. The flow freezes, becomes a flat surface, and only as a flat surface
can it be measured. Time becomes a homogeneous arrangement of places, a scale,
a parameter.
Before we conclude our examination of the concept of time in the natural
sciences, an objection still needs to be considered. One could point out that in
the discussion so far the newest theory in physics—the theory of relativity—has
not been taken into account. The conception of time resulting from it “surpasses
in boldness everything previously achieved in speculative natural science and
even in philosophical theories of knowledge.”6
But we usually overlook the following: As a theory in physics, the theory of
relativity is concerned with the problem of measuring time, not with time itself.
The theory of relativity leaves the concept of time untouched and in fact only con-
firms to a greater extent the character of the concept of time in the natural sciences
which was brought into relief above, i.e., its homogeneous, quantitatively deter-
minable character. Nothing more clearly expresses the mathematical character of
the concept of time in physics than the fact that it can be placed alongside three-
dimensional space as a fourth dimension and can, along with this space, be treated
with non-Euclidean geometry, i.e., one with more than three dimensions.
If we now wish to proceed to a description of the structure of the concept
of time in the science of history, it at first glance seems quite doubtful whether a
new problem can in any way be formulated here. For in the science of history,
time is likewise an arrangement of places in relation to which the events in ques-
tion are assigned their particular places in time and thereby historically estab-
lished. Frischeisen-Köhler has recently written that “in certain circumstances it is
sufficient to record an event in time to turn a concept formed on principles in
the natural sciences into a historical one.”7 Thus the concept of “the famine in
Fulda in the year 750” designates a quite definite individual event and is accord-
inglya a historical concept.
Here we face an alternative: either the above-mentioned concept is not a
historical concept insofar as it is not understandable why the mere determination
of the time should turn a universal concept into a historical one, since even
processes of motion in physics are determined as to their time; or, we do have
before us a historical concept—which is in fact the case. But then the determi-
nation of time found in it must be a quite peculiar one that can be understood
only from out of the essence of the science of history.
At least this much has become clear: a problem lies hidden in the concept
of time used by the science of history. It thus makes sense and is legitimate for
us to question after the structure of the historical concept of time. This struc-
ture can only be read off from its function in the science of history, and in turn
this function can only be understood on the basis of the goal and object of the
science of history.
56 SUPPLEMENTS
II
In dealing with the science of history, it may seem that this path from the goal of
the science to the function of its concept of time and from there to the structure
of this concept of time is a detour. We can reach our goal much easier and
quicker in the science of history if we remember that there exists in the method-
ology of the science of history a special auxiliary discipline that deals specifically
with determining time in the science of history: historical chronology. Here the
peculiar character of the historical concept of time would immediately come to
light. Why this course is not being taken can be explained only at the end of our
analysis. We will then also be in a position to understand the only essential
moment in chronology that is of relevance for the historical concept of time. We
will thus follow the path already mapped out and first attempt to find out some-
thing about the goal of the science of history.
Here we are immediately confronted with a difficulty insofar as complete
agreement among historians about the goal and object of the science of history
has not been reached. Thus whatever we determine here about this problem can-
not claim to be conclusive and complete. However, this fact cannot put our
actual problem in jeopardy if we are identifying only those moments in the con-
cept of the science of history that will allow us to understand the function of the
concept of time in it.
The object of the science of history is human beings—not as biological
objects but rather to the extent that their achievements in the realms of mind and
body actualize the idea of culture. This creation of culture in its fullness and mul-
tiformity runs its course temporally, undergoes development, is subject to the
most diverse transformations and reorganizations, takes hold of what is in the
past in order to work with it further or combat it. The creation of culture by
human beings within and in unison with the associations and organizations (the
state) created by them is basically the objectificationb of the human spirit. This
objectification of spirit that actualizes itself in the course of time is of interest to
the historian not in its entirety at each particular time, as though the historian
wanted in each case to record everything that in any sense happened at the time.
It has been said that it is only what is historically effective that interests the his-
torian. Eduard Meyer, who has given this qualification, elaborates on it and cor-
rectly explains it as follows: “The selection depends on the historical interest the
present has in some effect, in the result of a development.”8
An interest is, however, always determined on the basis of a point of view,
guided by a norm. The selection of the historical from the fullness of what is
given is thus based on a relation to values. Accordingly, the goal of the science of
history is to depict the context of the effects and development of the objectifica-
tions of human life in the singularity and uniqueness of these objectifications,
which are able to be understood through a relation to cultural values. But one
essential characteristic of every historical object still has not been touched on.
The historical object is, as historical, always past—strictly speaking, it no longer

exists. Between it and the historian stands a temporal distance. The past always
has meaning only when seen from a present. What is past is not only no longer
when viewed by us—it was also something other than us and our context of life
today in the present. So much is already clear: time has an utterly original mean-
ing in history. Only where this qualitative otherness of past times presses forth
into the consciousness of the present does a historical sense awaken. Insofar as the
historical past is always an otherness of objectifications of human life, and we
ourselves always live in such an objectification and create such objectifications,
the possibility is always in advance given for us to understand the past, since it
cannot be something incomparably other. However, the temporal gulf remains
between the historian and his object. If he wishes to depict this gulf, he must in
some way have the object before him. It is necessary to overcome time—by cross-
ing over the temporal gulf, to move from the present into the past, immerse one-
self in it, and live in it. The requirement of overcoming time and depicting a
past—a requirement necessarily co-given in the goal and object of the science of
history—will for its part be possible only insofar as time itself begins to function
here in some manner. John Bodin, already in 1607, included a separate chapter
on time in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. We find there the
sentence: “Those who think they can understand histories [the plural case is
noteworthy] without chronology are as much in error as those who wish to
escape the windings of a labyrinth without a guide.”9
We can most reliably study the function of time involved in the overcom-
ing of time necessary for the science of history if we direct our attention to the
methodology of the science of history with which it gains access to the past and
depicts it historically. It would take us too far afield to investigate all of the details
of the function of time within the methodology of the science of history, uncov-
ering the relations of its basic concepts to the main concept guiding it. Rather,
we only need to characterize a few especially noticeable concepts and procedures
of the method of the science of history that illustrate the function of the concept
of time here. Thus a moment will be provided that is at least adequate for ana-
lyzing the structure of the concept of time.
The initial foundational task of the science of history is that it must first
of all guarantee the factuality of the events it is to depict. “Perhaps the greatest
service of the critical school in our science, at least the one most important with
respect to its method,” writes Droysen, “is to have achieved the insight that the
foundation of our studies is the testingc of the ‘sources’ from which we draw. It
is in this way that history’s relation to the past is brought to its scientifically defini-
tive stage.”10
Thus the “source” makes possible scientific access to historical reality. It is
from it that this reality is in the first place built up. But this is possible only if the
source is secured in its value as a source, i.e., if its authenticity is demonstrated.
And that happens through criticism. Let us suppose, for example, that the
58 SUPPLEMENTS
authenticity of a document is to be demonstrated. This might happen by seeking

a decision about its “official” character. “Documentary testimonies from an office
functioning in an orderly manner will at particular times display definite charac-
teristics. The inclusive concept of all these characteristics at a particular time con-
stitutes what is meant by official character.”11 Thus the concept of time lies hid-
den in the concept of official character.
But to the demonstration of the official character of a document, i.e.,
diplomatic criticism, must be added legal-historical criticism and general histor-
ical criticism, i.e., the document in question must be compared to the legal and
general cultural circumstances of the time to which it is supposed to belong. For
example, the pseudo-Isidorian decrees were proved fraudulent by showing the
individual papal letters to be anachronisms. We know that it was Pope Gregory
the Great who for the first time used the title “servus servorum Dei” at the start
of his letters. Previous popes already refer to themselves by the same title in the
letters in question in the Isidorian collection. We know further that up until the
end of the fourth century, popes did not date their letters according to the
Roman consuls, yet this happens in the Isidorian letters in question. The decrees
supposedly stemming from the first centuries presuppose certain ecclesiastical-
legal circumstances that emerged only later. Thus criticism shows that, with
respect to their form and content, the letters do not at all display the stamp of the
time in which they are supposed to have emerged but rather that of a later time.
The scientific use of a source demands that the time of its emergence be deter-
mined, because its value as evidence depends on how far it is temporally removed
from the historical fact to which it is supposed to be a testimony. “The method
most commonly used is a comparative investigation into what epoch it is to which
the source in question initially corresponds in its form, style, and content—in
short, in its total character . . . for each time displays in all its creations and
expressions a character which is different from that of other times and which we
may well recognize.”12 In written sources it is above all handwriting and lan-
guage—“these most malleable expressions of the spirit of the time”—that make
it possible for us to determine the time.
The concept of time plays a no less essential role in the second main task
of the method of history: bringing into relief the context of the facts which are at
first individually established. What is initially necessary here is to understand cor-
rectly the significance of the particular facts within their context, i.e., to interpret
correctly the relevant content of the sources.
An interesting example of this comprehensive function of the concept of
time in history is offered by Troeltsch’s recent study of Augustine.13 Troeltsch
shows that Augustine was “in fact the conclusion and culmination of Christian
antiquity, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner and people’s tri-
bune. It is from this point of view that he must in the first place be understood.”14
On the other hand, Troeltsch characterizes Christian antiquity in its conclusion
from the point of view of Augustine. This characterization then makes it possi-
ble for him to demarcate the second period in the history of Christianity from
the first. Here Troeltsch writes regarding differentiations of the great periods of
Christianity: “. . . they must be made according to the fact that the Christian
Church belongs to general cultural contexts at particular times.”15
These examples should suffice for us to be able to see right away the essen-
tial element in the historical concept of time. Historical times differ qualitatively.
It is the “guiding tendencies” (Ranke) of a time, an age, that direct us regarding
how it is to be demarcated over against another.
Thus the concept of time in the science of history has nothing of the
homogeneous character of the concept of time in the natural sciences. This is
why historical time cannot be expressed mathematically by a series, since there is
no law that determines how the times follow after each other. In the time of
physics, temporal moments differ only in terms of their place in the series. His-
torical times do indeed come after one another—otherwise, they would not in
any sense be times—yet in the structure of its content, each isd a time that is
other. The qualitative element in the historical concept of time means nothing other
than the condensation—crystallization—of an objectification of life given in history.
Thus the science of history does not work with quantities. Yet what else are his-
torical dates? In the concept of “the famine in Fulda in the year 750,” the num-
ber 750 by itself means nothing to the historian. He is not interested in the num-
ber as a quantity, as an element that has its particular place in the series of
numbers from one to infinity, is dividable by 50, and so on. The number 750,
and every other historical date, has meaning and value in the science of history
only by considering the content in question that is historically significant.16 Tre-
cento, quattrocento could not be further from being quantitative concepts. The
question of “when” has entirely different meanings in physics and in history. In
physics, I would ask when the weight on the Atwood gravity machine would reach
a certain place on the scale, i.e., after how many beats of the seconds pendulum.
If I ask about the “when” of a historical event, then I am asking about its placee
in a qualitative historical context, not about a “how many.” But, on occasion, the
historian does also pose the question of “how many.” Thus it will later be of inter-
est to military history to know how long the Mackensen army needed to push its
offensive from the Carpathian Mountains right up to the Russian-Polish quad-
rant. However, the quantitative determination—about 12 weeks—does not by
itself have value and meaning for the historian but rather only insofar as from it
we can judge the tremendous combat strength of our allied troops, the sureness
of the whole operation in reaching its goal, and on the other side the Russian
army’s power of resistance. Historical dates are convenient numerical markers,
but they are without meaning when considered by themselves, since for any
number another could equally be substituted by simply shifting the starting
point of counting. And precisely the beginning of the time-reckoning in calen-
dars shows that this reckoning always starts at a historically significant event
(founding of Rome, birth of Christ, Hedschra).
60 SUPPLEMENTS
Historical chronology, an auxiliary discipline in the science of history, is of

significance for a theory of the historical concept of time only from the point of
view of the beginning of its time-reckoning. For example, it is said that establish-
ing the beginning of the year on January 1 was at first displeasing to the Chris-
tians, “because January 1 had no relation to the Christian religion whatsoever.”17
Therefore, the Church moved the Feast of Circumcision to this day in order to
give it a religious significance. It was always on significant holidays—Easter,
Christmas—that the beginning of the year was established. This shows that in
the science of history anything to do with numbers and counting regarding time
is determined qualitatively through the way in which the beginning of the count-
ing is established. It can be said that the principle of concept-formation in his-
tory shows itself even in the beginning of time-reckoning: a relation to values.18
Recognizing the fundamental meaning of the concept of time in history
and its complete otherness vis-à-vis the concept of time in physics will make it
possible for theory of science to penetrate further into the authentic character of
the science of history and to ground it in theory as an original, intellectual
approach that is irreducible to other sciences.
MARGINALIA
a. In what sense is individual = historical?

b. Means what? Are “associations” objectifications?
c. This is not “ascertaining facts.”
d. What does “is” mean here? It does not have to do with objective qualities.
e. What does “place” mean here?
Chapter Five
The Theory of Categories

and Meaning in Duns Scotus
AUTHOR’S BOOK NOTICE (1917)

This investigation into the history of problems ultimately has a systematic goal: the
theory of categories, whose fundamental establishment and organic development
has today been made one of the clearly recognized tasks of philosophy. As an
investigation into the history of problems, it takes as its theme the philosophy of
the Scholastic Duns Scotus, so that through one of the most intellectually com-
plete and rich models of medieval Scholastic thought, a deeper understanding of
this thought itself can be gained from the point of view of the general problem of
categories and of logic and the common evaluation of medieval Scholasticism and
its logic opposed. In doing this, the major emphasis in Part I (the theory of cat-
egories) is laid on what is a basic requirement for any treatment of the problem
of categories: demarcating different domains within objects in general. In the first
place, the most general determinations of objects in any sense and the individual
domains (logical, mathematical, physical, psychical, and metaphysical reality)
See pp. 5–6, 20–21, 25–26 for bibliographic and other background information on
the following two texts at the end of Heidegger’s Student Period: “Author’s Book Notice,”
which summarizes the published contents of Heidegger’s 1915 postdoctoral dissertation,
“The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus”; and “Conclusion: The Problem
of Categories,” which was “written as a supplement” for the publication of the dissertation.
61
62 SUPPLEMENTS
had to be subjected to a description that read them off. Part II (the theory of
meaning1) provided the opportunity to present in more detail a particular sphere
of objects, that of meanings, and thereby to draw out basic theses about acts and
the sense of acts of meaning and knowledge in their interrelation and further-
more about the basic forms of meaning in general (the “categories of meaning”).
The concluding chapter attempts, in a forward-looking manner, to lay out the
structure of the problem of categories and the potential path to its solution.
CONCLUSION: THE PROBLEM OF CATEGORIES (1916)

Roderick M. Stewart and John van Buren, translators
Motto: We seek the unconditioned [Unbedingte] everywhere

and only ever find conditioned things [Dinge].”
—Novalis, Fragments 2
The authentic goal of this investigation as an investigation into the history of a

problem requires with systematic necessity as a conclusion—in addition to a look
back at the main points having resulted and an overview of them in which they
are reworked and evaluated—a look forward at the systematic structure of the
problem of categories. However, what we are able to deal with here is not much
more than bringing into relief essential potencies of this problem and their contexts,
the fundamental setting in motion and actualization of which has not yet been
realized in the treatment of the problem up to this point. This is also the reason
why the systems of categories having been attempted until now have been unable
to avoid the impression of a certain deathly emptiness.
In the preceding, where the task was at first to present a certain historical
shaping of the problem of categories while at the same time lifting it up to the
systematic level, it was not feasible to put forth at the beginning fundamental
theses with definite content, for their being more penetratingly related to a spe-
cial formation of the problem would surely have been questionable without a
prior acquaintance with this special formation. Moreover, the kind of problem
necessarily involving taking up a fundamental position and often ranging broadly
would have heavily burdened the above presentation that aimed at a simple sys-
tematic understanding and would have disagreeably interfered with it by con-
stantly introducing open questions. In contrast, this is now the appropriate place
to give the intellectual unrest a chance to speak that until now has remained sup-
pressed and that the philosopher must experience each time he studies the his-
torical formations of his world of problems.
But bringing into relief the essential potencies of the problem of categories
can be carried out only to the extent that these potencies are analyzed in isolation
and one after another. Thus it is all the more crucial to emphasize from the out-
set that these potencies reciprocally condition one another and that what is appar-
THE THEORY OF CATEGORIES AND MEANING IN DUNS SCOTUS 63
ently immediate and unmediated is always something mediated. What we estab-

lish individually in the following receives its full sense only within the totality.
If we conceive of the categories as elements and means for interpreting the
sense of what is experienceable—of what is an object in any sense—then what
ensues as a basic requirement for a theory of categories is characterizing and
demarcating the different domains of objects into spheres that are categorially irre-
ducible to one another. We attached importance to the fulfillment of this task
already in the whole structure of the preceding investigation.3 Thus what we
needed to achieve at the same time was destroying the impoverished and unprob-
lematic appearance up to now of the logic of medieval Scholasticism. This was
done by bringing into relief the elements of definition that foundationally char-
acterize individual domains of objects. The fact that these elements extend to the
ultimate categorial sphere of objects (the transcendentals) then provided the
regions being separated with a fundamental unifying integration. What was
required here was a rigorously conceptual and in a certain sense one-sided pre-
sentation with conscious suspension of more deeply ranging contexts of meta-
physical problems.
These contexts of problems can be understood to be ultimately decisive for
the problem of categories only if we recognize a second basic task of any theory
of categories: situating the problem of categories within the problems of judgment
and the subject. Even this side of the problem of categories was at the very least
touched on in Scholastic logic. Admittedly, our presentation of Duns Scotus’ the-
ory of judgment tended in a different direction: it was supposed to characterize
the domain of the logical, and here the essential relation of judgment to the cat-
egories remained for the time being completely shrouded in darkness. Nonethe-
less, the theory of meaning in Duns Scotus did permit an avenue of access to sub-
jectivity (by which not individuality but the subject in itself is meant). Duns
Scotus’ task, i.e., the analysis of a certain stratum of acts—the modus significandi
[mode of meaning]—forced him to enter into the sphere of acts in general and to
establish certain fundamental things about the individual strata of acts (modus
significandi, intelligendi, essendi [modes of meaning, understanding, and being])
and their relations to one another.
Precisely the existence of a theory of meaning within medieval Scholasti-
cism reveals a refined disposition for attentively listening in on the immediate life
of subjectivity and its immanent contexts of sense without having acquired a pre-
cise concept of the subject. We might be tempted to “explain” the existence of such
“grammars” by making reference to the industry of medieval schools and their tra-
ditions. This kind of “explanation,” generally preferred in the science of history
but highly dubious for problems in intellectual history, does indeed have a certain
degree of justification, even in our case. However, when we are concerned with a
living understanding of a “time” and the effective intellectual accomplishments in
it, what becomes necessary is an interpretation of its sense that is guided by concepts
of ultimate goals. Usually employing the facile label “construction,” one is in the
64 SUPPLEMENTS
habit of superciliously dismissing this kind of forehaving and plan [Vorhaben] with
a wave of the hand as unhistorical and thus worthless, failing to see—in conse-
quence of a fundamental ignorance about the essence of historical knowing and
of concept-formation in history—how much merely piling up as many “facts” as
possible on top of one other actually leads away from the living life of the histor-
ical past and in a curious manner comes close to being a leveling construction
which suspends the kind of sense that unifies and provides goals.
Because of its regress to a fundamental sphere of problems having to do with sub-
jectivity (the strata of acts), the theory of meaning is, in spite of its immediate
schematic character, especially significant for a philosophical interpretation of
medieval Scholasticism in connection with the problem of categories. The investi-
gation of the relation between the modus essendi [mode of being] and the “subjec-
tive” modi significandi [modes of meaning] and intelligendi [understanding] leads to
the principle of the material determination of every form, which for its part includes
in itself the fundamental correlation of object and subject.4 The essential intercon-
nection between the object of knowledge and knowledge of the object is expressed
most clearly in the concept of “verum” [true] as one of the transcendentals, i.e., the
determinations of objects in general. Nevertheless, there are still two things missing
here that are intrinsically bound up with understanding the problem of knowledge:
first, consciously incorporating the problem of judgment into the subject-object
relation and, second, bringing categories into relation with judgment.
Because these contexts of problems have not yet received a basic clarifica-
tion even today when realism is embraced, we need to provide a deeper discus-
sion of this task which, besides that of demarcating domains of objects, is a fun-
damental one for a theory of categories. In doing so, we also are given the
opportunity to point at least in very general outline to the necessity of a meta-
physical solution of the problem of knowledge.
A category is the most general determination of objects. Objects and objec-
tivity [Gegenständlichkeit] have, as such, sense only for a subject. In this subject,
objectivity [Objektivität] is built up through judgments. Consequently, if we
want to conceive of categories in a decisive manner as determinations of objects,
then we must establish their essential relations to the forms that build up objec-
tivity [Gegenständlichkeit]. Thus it was no “accident” but rather grounded in the
innermost core of the problem of categories that this problem arose in both Aris-
totle and Kant in some sort of connection with predication, i.e., with judgment.
This might mean that the categories would have to be reduced to mere functions
of thinking, but the possibility of such a move does not make any sense at all for
a philosophy that has acknowledged problems having to do with sense. And pre-
cisely transcendental idealism, which in its present form should not without fur-
ther ado be identified with Kantian epistemology and the way it is formulated,
emphasizes from the outset that all thinking and knowing is always thinking and
knowing of an object. It is then with reference to this that we ought to gauge what
is involved in explaining categories as mere “forms of thinking.”5
Even the most general determinations of objects, which in terms of their

content are faded, i.e., reflexive categories, cannot be fully understood without
reference to the judgments that constitute objectivity [Objektivität], i.e., a univer-
sal theory of objects that is only “objective” and does not include the “subjective”
side necessarily remains incomplete. All differences are certainly differences in
objects but, indeed, on the other hand, only as differences that are known and
judged to be such. The reason for a multiplicity of domains of validity within the
totality of categories lies primarily though not exclusively in the multiplicity of
regions of objects, in each case conditioning a corresponding structured form of
fashioning judgments, and it is from the latter that the categories can be “read
off ” for the first time in their full content.
It is then only by starting from judgment that even the problem of the
“immanent and transeunt [lying ‘outside of thinking’] validity” of the categories
can be solved. It does not make any sense to speak of immanent and transeunt
validity without taking into consideration “subjective logic.” Immanence and
transcendence are relational concepts that acquire a clear meaning only by estab-
lishing that with reference to which something is thought of as immanent or tran-
scendent. It is indisputable “that all transeunt validity stands or falls with the
recognition of objects,”6 only it is precisely a problem what kind of objectivity
[Gegenständlichkeit] this can only be if we take into consideration that objectivity
has sense only for a judging subject and that without this subject we could never
manage to bring out the full sense of what we designate by the term “validity.”
Whether validity means a peculiar kind of “being” or an “ought” or neither of
these but can only be understood through deeper groups of problems contained in the
concept of living spirit 7 and doubtlessly closely connected with the problem of value
is something we will not decide here.
The close connection between the problem of the categories and that of
judgment permits us then once again to make the form-matter relation and the
meaning-differentiating function of matter into a problem. The form-matter
duality is today such a crucial means of treating epistemological problems that
a fundamental investigation into the value and limits of this duality has
become unavoidable.
Of course, a definitive clarification of this question can in no way be
attained by remaining within the logical sphere of sense and the structure of this
sense. At best we are led to an exponential growth (Lask’s theory of levels of
forms) that undeniably accomplishes the important task of illuminating the
structural multiplicity of the logical itself, but nevertheless precisely compounds
still more the problem of the meaning-differentiating function of matter and
shifts it into a new sphere without adequately taking into account the funda-
mental difference between sensory and nonsensory matter.
We cannot at all see logic and its problems in their true light if the context
from which they are interpreted is not a translogical one. Philosophy cannot for
long do without its authentic optics: metaphysics. This signifies for theory of truth
66 SUPPLEMENTS
the task of an ultimate metaphysically teleological interpretation of conscious-

ness. Value already lives in consciousness in a primordially original manner inso-
far as consciousness is a living deed that is filled with sense and actualizes this
sense. One has not in the least understood consciousness if it is neutralized into
the concept of a blind, biological factuality.
Within the wealth of directions of the formation of living spirit, the theo-
retical attitude is only one kind of approach, and for this reason it is a funda-
mental and fatal error of philosophy as “worldview” if it contents itself with a
spelling out of actuality and does not—and this is its most authentic vocation—
aim beyond an always provisional synopsis that gathers up the whole of what is
knowable and at a breakthrough to true actuality and actual truth. It is only with
this orientation to the concept of living spirit and its “eternal affirmations” (F.
Schlegel) that epistemological logic will be protected from becoming limited
exclusively to the study of structures and will make logical sense even in its ontic
meaning into a problem. A satisfactory answer will then for the first time become
possible as to how nonactual and “unreal” “transcendent” sense ensures us true
actuality and objectivity.
As radically as Lask has brought into relief structural problems in theory of
judgment and that of categories, he himself was just as inexorably brought from
the context of his problems to metaphysical problems without his perhaps being
fully conscious of these latter problems. And precisely in his concept of objects
“characterized by being beyond oppositions” lies a fruitful element in which epis-
temological theories that are in many respects divergent can now be brought
together. But here we should not overlook the difficulties involved with the prob-
lems of opposition and value, i.e., overlook the problem of the ontic interpreta-
tion and logical understanding of “objects.”8
In this kind of transcendental-ontic understanding of the concept of an
object, the problem of the “application” of categories no longer makes sense, and
this becomes more certain the more resolutely one takes seriously the funda-
mental meaning of the principle of immanence (not to be understood “individu-
alistically”), whose necessary ultimate grounding—which can only be carried out
metaphysically—will in my opinion have to be provided from out of the concept
of living spirit we have roughly indicated. Provided that one even acknowledges
the problem of the application of categories as a possible problem, it is surely here
if anywhere that the merely objective manner of treating the problem of categories
in logic must be seen to be one-sided.9
The epistemological subject does not signify the metaphysically most
meaningful sense of spirit, to say nothing of its full content. And only if it is sit-
uated within this full content will the problem of categories attain its authentic
depth dimension and enrichment. Living spirit is as such essentially historical spirit
in the widest sense of the word. The true worldview is far removed from the merely
fragmentary existence of a theory detached from life. Spirit can be conceptually
grasped only when the total fullness of its accomplishments, i.e., its history, is
lifted up within it, and with this constantly burgeoning fullness that is in the
process of being philosophically conceptualized a continually developing means
for gaining a living conceptual grasp of the absolute spirit of God is provided.
History and its teleological interpretation in philosophy of culture must become
a determining element for the meaning of the problem of categories if we want to
think differently about working out the cosmos of categories in order to go
beyond an impoverished schematic table of categories. This is, in addition to
demarcating the domains of objects and including the problem of judgment, a
third basic requirement for a promising solution to the problem of categories.
Looking at the matter the other way round, it is from the point of view of such
a broadly oriented theory of categories that the conceptual means and goals can
for the very first time be supplied for conceptually grasping the individual epochs
of the intellectual history of spirit in a living manner. To the extent that it is going
to be more deeply treated, the problem of the “medieval worldview,” touched on
in the Introduction and of special interest in connection with the present inves-
tigation, lacks to this day the proper conceptual foundation in philosophy of culture
which can for the first time provide clarity, certainty, and unity concerning the
whole. The peculiar will-to-life and refined spiritual composure of such a period
call for the openness of an empathetic understanding in conformity with it and of
a broadly—i.e., philosophically—oriented evaluation. For example, the concept
of analogy discussed in this investigation10 in regard to the problem of metaphys-
ical reality appears at first glance to be an utterly faded and no longer meaning-
ful schoolbook concept. However, as the dominant principle in the categorial
sphere of sensible and supersensible reality, it contains the conceptual expression
of the qualitatively filled and value-laden experiential world of medieval man that
is related to transcendence. It is the conceptual expression of the particular form
of inner Dasein that is anchored in a primordial, transcendent relation of the soul
to God and lived precisely in the Middle Ages with an unusual reserve. The mul-
tiplicity of relations in life between God and soul, between the here-and-now and
the beyond, are subject to change in virtue of the increasing distance or proxim-
ity (in a qualitatively intensive sense) between them at particular times. The
metaphysical linkage accomplished through transcendence is at the same time a
source of manifold oppositions and thus the source of the most abundant thriv-
ing of the immanent personal lives of individuals.
Transcendence does not mean a radical distancing from and loss of self—
rather, there is here precisely a life-relation that is built on a certain correlativity
and as such does not have a single inflexible directional sense but is to be com-
pared to the flow of experience running back and forth between mutually
attracted spiritual individuals, though here we have of course not taken into con-
sideration the absolute superior value of the one term of the relation. The scale
of values does not therefore gravitate exclusively toward the transcendent but
rather is as it were reflected back from the fullness and absoluteness of the tran-
scendent and comes to rest in the individual.
68 SUPPLEMENTS
Thus what also is found throughout the whole of the medieval worldview—
just because it is so radical in its conscious teleological orientation—is a whole
world of multifarious differentiations of value. The possibilities of experience and
the fullness of experience resulting from this for subjectivity are accordingly con-
ditioned by that dimension of spiritual life that stretches into the transcendent and
not like today by the breadth of its fleeting content. In this attitude of life running
its course broadly on the surface of things, the possibilities of mounting uncer-
tainty and complete disorientation are much greater and almost limitless, whereas
in contrast the basic development of the form of life of medieval man from the
outset did not in any way lose itself in the breadth of content of sensible reality
and anchor itself there. Rather, it subordinated this very sensible reality—as some-
thing in need of being anchored—to the necessity of a transcendent goal.
What is opened up in the concept of living spirit and its relation to the
metaphysical “origin” is an insight into its basic metaphysical structure in which
the uniqueness, the individuality, of its acts is joined together in a living unity
with the universal validity, the subsisting-in-itself, of sense. Looking at this from
the side of the objects involved, what stands before us is the problem of the rela-
tion between time and eternity, change and absolute validity, world and God, a
problem that in terms of theory of science finds itself reflected in history (forma-
tion of values) and philosophy (validity of values).11
If we keep in mind the deeper essence of philosophy as worldview, then
even the conception of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages as a Scholas-
ticism that stood in conflict with the mysticism of this period must be exposed as
a fundamental error. Scholasticism and mysticism belong together essentially in
the medieval worldview. The two pairs of “opposites”—rationalism-irrationalism
and Scholasticism-mysticism—do not coincide with one another. And when one
attempts to equate them, such an attempt is based on an extreme rationalization
of philosophy. Philosophy as a rationalistic construction detached from life is
powerless—mysticism as irrational experience is without a goal.
The philosophy of living spirit, of active love, of reverent intimacy with
God, the most general directions of which we were only able to indicate roughly,
and especially a theory of categories guided by the basic tendencies of this phi-
losophy, stand before the great task of a fundamental critical discussion of that
system of historical worldview that is the most powerful one regarding fullness as
well as depth, wealth of experience and concept-formation and as such lifted up
into itself all of the fundamental motives previously at work in philosophical
problems—that is, a critical discussion of Hegel.
Chapter Six
Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs (1919)
JOHN VAN BUREN, TRANSLATOR
January 9, 1919
Dear Professor,
The past two years in which I struggled for a fundamental clarification of
my philosophical position and put aside all specialized academic tasks have led to
conclusions I would not be able to hold and teach freely, were I bound to a posi-
tion outside of philosophy.
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.
I firmly believe that I—perhaps more than your colleagues who officially
work in this field—have experienced what the Catholic Middle Ages bears within
itself regarding values and that we are still a long way off from a true apprecia-
tion of them. My investigations in the phenomenology of religion, which will
draw heavily on the Middle Ages, should show beyond a doubt that in trans-
forming my basic philosophical position I have not been driven to replacing
See pp. 6–8, 27 for bibliographic and other background information on this letter
announcing Heidegger’s confessional and philosophical turn at the start of his Early
Freiburg Period.
69
70 SUPPLEMENTS
objective appreciative judgment of and deep respect for the life-world of Catholi-
cism with the angry and coarse polemics of an apostate.
Thus it will in the future be important for me to remain in contact with
Catholic scholars who understand and acknowledge the problems in this field
and are able to sympathize with those with different convictions.
It is therefore especially important to me that I not lose the benefit of your
invaluable friendship—and I would like to thank you deeply for it. My wife, who
first talked with you, and I too would like to keep the very special trust we have
shared with you. It is difficult to live as a philosopher—inner truthfulness regard-
ing oneself and in relation to those for whom one is supposed to be a teacher
demands sacrifices, renunciation, and struggles which ever remain unknown to
the academic technician.
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.
Sincerely and gratefully yours,

Martin Heidegger
P.S. My wife sends her warmest regards.

Chapter Seven
Comments on Karl Jaspers’

PSYCHOLOGY OF WORLDVIEWS (1920)
A “fitting” orientation for a positive and illuminating critical review of this

work published by Jaspers is not available in the current inventory of our sci-
entific and philosophical knowledge. Making such an admission right at the
outset may serve as an appropriate indication of the originality and significance
of Jaspers’ achievement. This critical review will attempt to orient itself in a fit-
ting manner to the immanent intentions of Jaspers’ work and follow up on
them. Some preliminary reflections on the scope of this course of inquiry and
on the range of its claims also will help us characterize the actual object to be
dealt with in the following comments and will thus be far from an otiose dis-
cussion of possible methods.
Jaspers’ work developed out of a concern with psychology as a whole (5),
and psychology is supposed to allow us to see “what the human being is” (ibid.).
The psychology of worldviews, which is a “part” of the whole of psychology with
its own specific nature and function, attempts to mark out the “limits of our psy-
chical life,”1 and thereby provide a clear and comprehensive horizon for our psy-
chical life. Marking out such limits is more precisely a type of observation in
See pp. 8, 28 for bibliographic and other background information on this book
review essay from the first part of Heidegger’s Early Freiburg Period.
71
72 SUPPLEMENTS
which we comprehensively examine the being of the human mind in its sub-
stantial totality and classify its ultimate positions. And this means “marking out
that domain of which we already possess a conceptual understanding at present”
(6). Psychology of worldviews is only one way of acquiring a “basis” for under-
standing the whole of our psychical life, the other way being given in “general
psychology” (a doctrine of principles and categories, a methodology for gaining
knowledge in psychology). According to the way it is undertaken by Jaspers, this
type of observation giving us an understanding and overview of the basic capac-
ities and tendencies of the psychical life of the mind as a whole already in itself
has—apart from being evaluated in terms of its primary purpose—a positive sig-
nificance for knowledge in psychiatry as well as in the human sciences. For it
expands our “natural” psychological understanding, rendering it more receptive
and versatile, i.e., more perceptive regarding the nuances, dimensions, and dif-
ferent levels of our psychical being.
But the concrete tendency of Jaspers’ work—its concern with the whole of
psychology, with acquiring the fundamental domain of psychology and its hori-
zon of principles—should in fact already be seen as “philosophical.” Psychology
of worldviews is not supposed to develop a positive worldview and impose it on
others. Rather, by understanding and classifying the positions, processes, and
stages of our psychical life, this type of observation is meant to provide us with
“clarifications and possibilities which can serve as means to our self-reflection (in
our worldviews)” (Foreword). It is in this way that the aforementioned direction
of Jaspers’ inquiry, namely, gaining access to psychology as a whole, is assigned
its ultimate goal. The way the first set of tasks gets carried out is simultaneously
the way to fulfill the second set of real, philosophical tasks. In turn, this orienta-
tion to the goal of philosophizing, which is described by Jaspers in a particular
manner, provides fundamental guidance for his preoccupation with the problem
of psychology.
This review intends to deal with the principles at work in Jaspers’ book.
Thus we will not be focusing on particularities in the content of this text, or on
the individual components of Jaspers’ classificatory schemata, so that we can, for
instance, modify these and replace them with others. Our goal is not to add sup-
plementary content or insert missing “types.” Rather, what is important is to
characterize the “how” of this philosophical review in regard to its basic approach
and in relation to the problems it intends to broach. In providing this character-
ization, we will simultaneously be limiting the range of claims we can make.
The basic approach of this review lies in its attempt to free up the real ten-
dencies of Jaspers’ work. In doing so, it seeks to bring into sharper focus both the
primary direction in which Jaspers’ problems tend and the basic motivations for
this direction. Here we will determine to what extent Jaspers’ approach to his
tasks, his choice of methods, and his way of employing these methodological
means to carry out his tasks are really in keeping with the underlying tendencies
of his inquiry and the directions in which these tendencies discernibly point us.
KARL JASPERS’ PSYCHOLOGY OF WORLDVIEWS (1920) 73
We also will examine whether the motivations and tendencies of Jaspers’ inquiry
have themselves been shaped radically enough in line with the tentative orienta-
tion to philosophizing lying at the basis of his inquiry. Accordingly, every type of
review oriented to fixed standards will remain out of play for us. Jaspers’ obser-
vations will not be confronted with the aid of a finished philosophy established
on some secure foundation or evaluated in terms of their distance from a con-
summate objective systematics in the field of philosophical problems. Nor are
they to be assessed in relation to a fixed ideal of scientific and philosophical rigor
in methodology. Where such standards have become available in one’s philoso-
phizing, a type of review oriented to fixed standards is not only justifiable but
may also even be urgently needed, and all the more so when the work under dis-
cussion is experienced as unsettling, provocative, and challenging. But this kind
of review has been ruled out at present insofar as Jaspers’ investigation will not
be judged with the help of such ideas as the “the absolute validity of truth,” “rel-
ativism,” and “skepticism.” This type of assessment will be avoided precisely
because the following comments endeavor to sharpen our consciences regarding
the need to inquire into the genuine sense of “intellectual history” and return
radically to the original genetic motivations in this history having led to the
establishment of such epistemological ideals in philosophy. We need to deter-
mine anew whether these ideals satisfy the fundamental sense of philosophizing,
or whether they do not rather lead a shadowy life that has hardened into a long,
degenerate, and spurious tradition and has never been appropriated in an origi-
nal manner. It is certain that such sharpening of the conscience cannot be taken
care of, or approached in any genuine manner whatsoever, by “creating” a “new”
philosophical program; rather, it must be actualized in a very concrete manner in
the form of a destruction directed precisely to what has been handed down to us
in intellectual history. This task is tantamount to explicating the original moti-
vational situations in which the fundamental experiences of philosophy have
arisen. And these experiences are to be understood as having undergone theoret-
ical development and refinement in the establishment of the aforementioned
epistemological ideals. In this regard, the meaning of the term “theory” is itself
geared precisely to its origin (cf. Plato, Aristotle). The “idea” we have of the
meaning and scope of this task is such that it can scarcely be overestimated. On
the contrary, we will come to see what is concretely “necessary” in philosophy
precisely by restricting ourselves to this task and consciously abandoning aspirations
to “creative” philosophizing that are in fact traditional, even if somewhat histor-
ically open-ended.
If this review emphatically rules out any intention of assessing Jaspers’ work
with fixed, highly refined points of reference that have demonstrably not, however,
been appropriated in any radical sense, it is likewise very suspicious of all indul-
gent “philosophies of life” making claims to free thinking and an apparent pri-
mordiality. “Philosophy of life” will be called into question by analyzing it to show
that the basic philosophical motive coming to expression in it does so in a hidden
74 SUPPLEMENTS
manner, is hardly able to be grasped with the meager inventory of concepts avail-
able to philosophy of life, and in fact manifests itself in a degenerate form.
Refraining from the type of review that brings into play fixed standards to
orient itself means anything but an uncritical approach advocating an ambivalent
syncretism that is blind to differences and subjects everything to mediation. A
definite orientation also is to be found in the basic approach we will be working
out and actualizing in this review, and the essential character of this approach is
expressed precisely in the “how” of our persisting in it. This “how” of a critical
approach always remains subject to a type of appropriation that must constantly
renew itself in the form of a destruction. Our review is phenomenological in the
genuine sense, but it is not “without presuppositions” in the bad sense. Here one
turns what is immediately “on hand” in one’s objective historical, intellectual sit-
uation into the in-itself of the “things themselves.” One fails to see what is char-
acteristic of all intuition, namely, that it actualizes itself in the context of a defi-
nite orientation and an anticipatory foreconception of the respective region of
experience. Thus when one shuns constructivistic points of view foreign to the
subject matter and is concerned with immediacy only in this respect, one’s intu-
ition can all too easily fall prey to a certain blindness regarding the fact that its
own motivational basis is itself in the end not primordial. The meaning of pri-
mordiality does not lie in the idea of something outside of history or beyond it;
rather, it shows itself in the fact that thinking without presuppositions can itself
be achieved only in a self-critique that is historically oriented in a factical man-
ner. An incessant actualizing of a certain worry2 about achieving primordiality is
what constitutes primordiality. (The term “historical”3 is used here in a sense that
will become somewhat more explicit in the course of the following reflections.)
Thinking without presuppositions is here intended to be taken in a philosophi-
cal sense and not in a specifically scientific sense. The path leading to the “things
themselves” treated in philosophy is a long one. Thus the excessive liberties taken
recently by many phenomenologists in their use of essential intuition appear in
a very dubious light and are hardly in line with the “openness” and “devotion” to
the things themselves preached by these phenomenologists. It might just be the
case that even the directions of inquiry in which we could find access to the
things themselves of philosophy lie covered over for us, and that what is thus nec-
essary is a radical deconstruction and reconstruction, i.e., a genuine confronta-
tion with the history we ourselves “are.” And this confrontation would be some-
thing actualized within the very meaning of philosophizing. In the end, it is just
this precisely oriented detour and the type of roundabout understanding actual-
ized in it that make up the path to the things themselves. In connection with the
fundamental question of the sense of the “I am,” we need to ask ourselves if it is
not high time to determine whether we have really so thoroughly come to terms
with that which we ourselves purportedly “have” and “are.” Are we, rather than
taking firm hold of the most important questions in a philosophically rigorous
manner, generating an unspeakable hustle and bustle in our care for the preser-
vation of culture, though we never actually get around to applying ourselves to

this task? Are we today troubling ourselves with peripheral matters that were
transformed into fundamental problems by an earlier form of intellectual indus-
triousness that searched too broadly for all objects of philosophical investigation?
Thinking phenomenologically without presuppositions denotes a certain
approach and orientation, and this is neither mere sport nor prophetic pageantry
promising the salvation of the world. In a review guided by this type of thinking,
it involves exploring the nature of the intuitive experiences lying at the basis of
the author’s initial approach to the respective problems and the conceptual expli-
cation of such an approach (experience is to be understood here in a phenome-
nological sense). This “intuition” grounding the author’s approach is interrogated
in a critical fashion regarding its primordiality, its motivation, its tendencies, and
the extent to which it is genuinely actualized and seen through to the end.
In adopting this kind of basic critical approach to free up the respective
work under investigation, to explore its internal features, and finally to examine
these features with regard to the way their intrinsic meaning actually shows itself,
one constantly runs the risk of missing the mark, i.e., being led down unintended
paths, or singling out and highlighting tendencies of thought that were treated at
random. The more we go wrong in this respect, the less value there is in com-
municating a positive review to others, and the more the value of such commu-
nication is limited to the function of clarifying for oneself what one has ventured
to do. But whatever the plight of this communication may be, its claims must be
restricted to calling something to the attention of others. This is ultimately the
predicament of all philosophizing regarding its intention of having an effect in
the world of others.
The “positive” side of this review consists simply in formulating problems
and understanding what is intended in Jaspers’ work in a more “precise” manner.
And it might just be the case that “more precise” means something other than
simply achieving a progressively clearer conceptual presentation of what is
intended in this work. Though always guided by a fundamental orientation, the
“preliminary work” we need to do is radically destructive, and in our opinion it
involves such great difficulties and perhaps even prolonged tediousness that we
will not be able to venture putting forth any finished results in this review. It will
suffice if we can call attention to and discuss one or another decisive experiential
motivation for Jaspers’ explication of the phenomena with which he deals.
An explication of both aforementioned directions in which Jaspers’ book
moves, namely, the preliminary one (establishing the science of psychology as a
whole) and the real one (providing clarifications and possibilities that can serve
as a means to self-reflection), will allow us to proceed in the direction of those
problems to be highlighted in this review. Psychology of worldviews marks out
the limits of the human soul. The movement of our lives in worldviews is sup-
posed to be understood from the standpoint of “limit-situations” (246). “An
influence on all aspects of our psychical life must occur in the experience of these
76 SUPPLEMENTS
limits, and here everything will in one way or another presumably be a deter-
mining factor for the worldview of a human being” (6). Marking out such lim-
its allows us to gain a “clear horizon” for the whole of our psychical life. Here we
find a preoccupation with providing a regional definition of the whole of our
psychical life, which has never before been accomplished along such paths and
with such breadth, and in fact it has never once been attempted in this manner.
In its initial approach, it works with a certain basic aspect of psychical life,
namely, that it has limits. In psychical life, there are “limit-situations” to which
certain “reactions” are possible, and these reactions to the structural antinomies
of limit-situations take place in the “vital process” of psychical life, which func-
tions as their medium (247). The Dasein of our mental life, i.e., its “being-there,”
arises through antinomies (304).4 In this way of formulating the problem of psy-
chical life in psychology of worldviews, we find a certain understanding of psy-
chical life. Prior to Jaspers’ initial approach to the problem of psychical life, this
psychical life is for its part implicitly seen from the point of view of a certain tra-
ditionally expressed foreconception of it: namely, the soul has limits, i.e., limit-
situations, in the experience of which an “influence” must occur on the play of
mental forces making up our Dasein. From the point of view of the underlying
tendency that actually guides Jaspers’ problem of psychical life, is it at all feasible
for him to adopt this foreconception about what the basic aspect of psychical life
is? In other words, is this foreconception really in keeping with the underlying
tendency of Jaspers’ problem of psychical life? Are not unexamined presupposi-
tions introduced here in an illegitimate manner? Is the task of gaining access to
psychology as a whole promoted in a radical fashion? Can this task be posed at
all in such an isolated manner? Such questions must be confronted and dealt with
by fundamental reflection. To begin with, we need to see but one thing, namely,
a foreconception of psychical life, expressed in a particular manner, is already given
and at work in Jaspers’ initial approach to the problem of psychical life.
Psychology of worldviews is not supposed to work out a doctrine of life
and impose it on others; rather, its goal is “to give clarifications and possibilities
which can serve as means to self-reflection.” This work of clarification means
clarification of “life,” and here “life” is seen in some manner. In Jaspers’ initial
approach to this clarification, in the techniques he uses for it, and in the nature
and scope of his goals here, life itself is forced to appear under a certain aspect for
those who are appropriating such clarifications. If possibilities are disclosed, they
are possibilities under a certain articulated aspect of our life and psychical Dasein
and for the sake of it. A notion of the essential meaning of the “how” of life itself
is expressed in this aspect. However much Jaspers made the attempt to undertake
everything in the nonprejudicial attitude of mere observation, it is nonetheless
the case that when we attempt to understand what he has presented in his obser-
vations and to use it in our own self-reflection, what is demanded of us is that we
adopt and acquiesce in certain basic approaches to the way life and the self are to
be intended. If genuine psychology is supposed to allow us to see “what the
human being is” (5), then the initial manner in which it actually formulates the
problem must from the start harbor within it certain foreconceptions about the
sense of being belonging to this whole of the psychical Dasein of our mental life,
and then again foreconceptions about the possible “how” in accordance with
which this life, having now been clarified, is supposed to be lived, i.e., forecon-
ceptions about the basic sense of that in which such things as “possibilities” can
in any sense be brought to light.
However, in seeing these particular foreconceptions that accompany
Jaspers’ investigations, we should not be tempted to undertake a philosophically
feeble and sterile type of sham critique in which we would now reproach Jaspers
for having contradicted his own intentions, maintaining on the basis of this
charge that his intentions could never be realized in the concrete and arguing that
his whole project is thus “refuted in principle” and “dealt with.” This type of crit-
icism always claims a formal type of superiority in argumentation, but it thereby
fails to take up the productive possibility of returning in a positive fashion to the
thoughts in question and understanding them in a deeper sense. What our review
of Jaspers’ work really needs to do is to highlight his foreconceptions in a still
more precise manner, delve into the motivation, the sense, and the scope of the
direction of inquiry that led to such foreconceptions, and become aware of what
is demanded by the very sense of these foreconceptions, even though the author
himself may not have actually understood these demands in an explicit manner.
In other words, we must ultimately evaluate Jaspers’ foreconceptions with regard
to the philosophical relevance and primordiality of their immanent intentions.
What these problems indicate and lead us to acknowledge is that forecon-
ceptions “are” at work “everywhere” in the factical experience of life (and there-
fore also in the sciences and in philosophizing), and that what we need to do is
simply as it were to join in the experience of these foreconceptions wherever they
operate, as they do, for example, in providing direction for any fundamental type
of knowledge about something. Moreover, we need simply to proceed in light of
how such foreconceptions themselves call for their own clarification. It is by pro-
ceeding in this manner that the concrete context in which we actualize some
form of understanding (e.g., a particular science) can be made genuinely trans-
parent. In other words, our method can be made more appropriate. All problems
of foreconception are ones of “method,” and such problems differ in each case
according to the primordiality, the tendencies, the regional orientation, and the
theoretical level of the foreconceptions in question. We cannot but give ourselves
an initial understanding of method along with our foreconceptions of the subject
matter. Method arises along with these foreconceptions and out of the same
source. A definition of the concept of “method” must work with a formally
indicative meaning (e.g., “path”) and thereby remain open to being shaped con-
cretely in actual research. In obtaining these concrete definitions of method, we
must at the same time also get rid of any prejudices that may have found their
way into them by means of the formally indicative meaning of method we have
78 SUPPLEMENTS
been working with. If method is from the start cut to the measure of specific, iso-
lated problems in the subject matter of a particular science and is nonetheless
taken to be a technique that can be applied anywhere, one loses the possibility of
understanding method in a primordial manner in each particular case of research.
One becomes blind to the fact that one’s own way of proceeding is loaded down
with this particular approach. When objects are approached by way of a specifi-
cally oriented mode of apprehension and this mode of apprehension is, whether
explicitly or not, understood and used as a technique, i.e., basically as a means of
defining these objects that is not, however, restricted to them, it might turn out
that these objects become lost for good by being forced to conform to a particu-
lar type of apprehension alien to them. And, consequently, the copious use of
“methods” and possible variants of these methods would only continue to miss
the very objects one actually intends to gain knowledge of.
Our investigation of the aforementioned problem of foreconception in
Jaspers’ work endeavors to demonstrate that his approach to the problems in ques-
tion requires a more radical type of reflection on method. This is the case not only
because it should be possible for the underlying tendency of these problems to be
realized in a more consistent and genuine manner but also and primarily because
the object apprehended in these foreconceptions is in fact what it is only by virtue
of a primordially immanent “method.” This method is part of the object’s very
makeup and is not something merely foisted on the object from the outside. If one
is not aware of this problem of explication in a “rigorous” enough manner, one
can, to be sure, nonetheless still wind up actually intending the object in some
manner, but a surrogate will, without further explanation, have been inserted into
one’s intuition and concepts. This surrogate will then henceforth constantly make
demands on us to treat it from different sides in order to master it in knowledge
(we are motivated to do this on the basis of real acts of intending the object, but
these intentions do not get involved with the object and grasp it). The surrogate
finally becomes so intrusive that it passes itself off as the genuine phenomenon,
whereas the possibility of a genuine experience of the real phenomenon vanishes
and continues to exist merely in words. “We have no dominant method, but
rather now this one, now that one” (11), and according to Jaspers, this is supposed
to be the case within the basic approach of “mere observation.”
The object actually investigated in Jaspers’ work can be defined in formal
indication as our existence [Existenz]. Having such a formally indicated meaning,
this concept is intended to point to the phenomenon of the “I am,” i.e., to the
sense of being in this “I am” that forms the starting point of an approach to a
context of fundamental phenomena and the problems involved there. In formal
indication (which should be seen to make up the fundamental methodological
sense of all philosophical concepts and their relationships, though this will not be
explained in more detail here), any uncritical lapse into a particular interpreta-
tion of existence—for example, Kierkegaard’s or Nietzsche’s—ought to be
avoided from the start, so that we can free up the possibility of pursuing a gen-
uine sense of the phenomenon of existence and explicate what comes to the fore
in this pursuit. In an exegesis of Kierkegaard’s thought, Jaspers writes: “The con-
sciousness of our existence arises precisely through our consciousness of situa-
tions of antinomy” (217). Limit-situations shed light on our vital Dasein. “It is
in limit-situations that the most intense consciousness of existence flares up, and
this consciousness is a consciousness of something absolute” (245). “Limit-situa-
tions are experienced as something ultimate for human life” (274). With this crit-
ical analysis of limit-situations (202–47), we come to the solid core that sustains
the whole of Jaspers’ work. It should be possible to develop the previously out-
lined problems of foreconception and method to some extent in connection with
this concrete and indeed most powerful section of Jaspers’ investigation.
(Though a student of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Jaspers displays in this section
a very rare talent and energy, giving these free play in his breakdown and treat-
ment of “psychical states” and compiling the respective phenomena in a valuable,
even if only classificatory, manner.)
There are certain crucial situations “bound up with our very humanity and
unavoidably given for our finite Dasein” (202). As soon as human beings attempt
to attain certainty about the totality of the world and life, they find themselves
faced with ultimate forms of incompatibility. “We and our world are split apart
in the form of an antimony” (203). “The structural antinomy of our Dasein [the
world and we ourselves, i.e., the objective and subjective sides of this split] poses
a limit for any objective worldview” (?), and the “subjective” (?) counterpart of
this limit is a type of “suffering bound up with all human life” (204). “Struggle,
death, chance, and guilt” are “particular instances” of this “universal” nature of
limit-situations (ibid.). Certain reactions to these situations of antinomy are pos-
sible, i.e., particular ways human beings attempt to cope with these situations
and find some security in the face of them. “When human beings advance
beyond their finite situations in order to see them within the whole,” they see
“oppositions” and “processes of destruction” everywhere. “Insofar as everything
objective is able to be conceptually expressed, [these oppositions] can be thought
of as contradictions” (203f.). Here destruction means a type of destruction that
lies in the rationality of contradiction. “As antinomies, contradictions remain at
the limit of our knowledge about the infinite. Thus the concepts of infinity, limit,
and antinomy belong together” (205). The concepts of antinomy and limit
derive their meaning from a definite or, we should rather say, an indefinite aspect
of the infinite. It is from our experience of antimony that there arises in us a vital
will to unity (213). “We see experiences of ‘unity’ again and again, and it is pre-
cisely the most intense thinkers of antinomy who in their paradoxical expressions
readily teach us about such mystical and vital unity” (215). The life of the mind
is itself life oriented to unity (213). Human beings “always finds themselves on
paths leading to the infinite or the whole” (204).
It should by now be sufficiently clear that it is from this initial foreconcep-
tion of “the whole” (“unity,” “totality”) that all talk of “destruction,” “division,”
80 SUPPLEMENTS
and “opposition” derives its sense. Human beings stand within antinomies inso-
far as they see themselves in the “whole” and thus have a foreconception of this
aspect of life, seeing themselves essentially to be inserted into this whole as some-
thing ultimate and experiencing their Dasein as something “surrounded” by this
unbroken “medium.” Antinomies destroy and bifurcate, and our experience of
them amounts to standing within limit-situations, only because all of this is ini-
tially viewed from the vantage point of our approach to the flowing stream of life
as a whole. Regarding the genesis of their meaning, even concepts have their ori-
gin in the whole of life. “And if antinomy, infinity, limit, and the Absolute are
concepts which revolve around the same thing” (245), this is likewise the case
with the concept of totality. These concepts not only revolve around the same
thing but also derive their meaning from it, i.e., their conceptual structure or per-
haps lack thereof, as well as their appropriateness or perhaps inappropriateness
for promoting a conceptual understanding of what they are supposed to grasp
and express. We are told nothing definite about what this “seeing within the
whole” and this experience of antinomies within an infinite reflection are sup-
posed to mean. At any rate, this is a type of “thinking” or “seeing” that gets its
motivation from the above-mentioned foreconception of the whole, and its
approach, tendencies, and scope are oriented to this foreconception. It is only on
the basis of this particular foreconception that the notion of “attaining certainty
about the totality” has any meaning.
It might seem as though the point of our exposition of Jaspers’ central,
guiding foreconception is to demonstrate that his position belongs under the
rubric of “philosophy of life.” This kind of approach is indeed possible, and it
could possibly draw upon the particular focus H. Rickert has used in his recently
published critical review of various philosophies of life. This review and others
like it cannot but meet with approval whenever they, in principle, affirm the need
for the rigorous “formation” of concepts, i.e., whenever they approach this from
the vantage point of an ideal of philosophical knowledge that is incontestable in
the formal sense that it stresses the importance of rigorous conceptuality, while
the concrete approach one should take to this ideal is left open for discussion. But
Rickert tells us nothing about the “how” of this concept-formation, about the
way philosophical concepts get their structure, and about the basic intention of
conceptual explication in philosophy. Assuming that all one’s talk about concept-
formation and all of the structural characteristics of concepts one has extracted
from the workings of concept-formation in particular sciences have a validity that
is nonprejudicial in more than a simply formal sense, and this is something that
needs to be investigated, it might turn out to be the case that in rightly stressing
the importance of concept-formation, one nonetheless has failed to give due
attention precisely to the real problem, namely, the one arising from the fact that
the work of “differentiating the meaning of forms” begins with the “material” one
is dealing with. How is the material in question actually there for us, how do we
actually “have” it there before us, and what does gaining access to it really mean?
When our conceptualization of the material takes its motivation from this access
to and having of the material and persists in them, how is it constituted? Here
the positive tendencies of philosophy of life need to be examined to see if a cer-
tain radical tendency toward philosophizing is not indeed ventured in it, even if
this happens in a covert manner and with the help of a means of expression bor-
rowed from tradition rather than fashioned in an original manner. Here we
would have to examine above all the high point of philosophy of life in Dilthey,
to whom all those who came later are indebted for their important insights,
though these inferior offspring actually misunderstood his real intuitions, and he
himself was not even able to achieve real insight into them. In this regard, it is
with an eye to the radical tendency toward philosophizing in philosophy of life
that our review is pursuing its course of analysis. It is important to see that phi-
losophy of life, which developed out of a genuine orientation to intellectual his-
tory, tends—whether explicitly or not—in the direction of the phenomenon of
existence, though the same cannot be said for the type of philosophy of life found
in specialized literati. (Because this point is of importance for a positive evalua-
tion of philosophy of life, it can be formulated and indicated in rough fashion by
defining the “vague” concept of life with reference to two principal tendencies in
its meaning, though these themselves are ambiguous. However, regarding the
need for a radical treatment of the problem of life, we run the risk here of expect-
ing too much from individual philosophies of life when considered separately.
We find in contemporary philosophy of life a widespread, vociferous but nebu-
lous emphasis on orienting our Dasein to the immediate reality of life and the
need for enriching, fostering, and intensifying life. That is, we encounter the now
common and extensively cultivated way of speaking about life, a feeling for life,
lived experience, and experiencing. All of this is a symptom of a certain intellec-
tual situation that involves a tangled interplay of motives deriving from intellec-
tual history and arising from the most varied types of experience. It is this inter-
play of motives that has led to the predominance of the current interest in the
reality of mental life and to the interpretation of life primarily from the point of
view of the human sciences, even though biological concepts of life have not been
completely eradicated here. The characteristic feature of this intellectual situation
is perhaps precisely a muddled interplay of biological, psychological, social-sci-
entific, aesthetic-ethical, and religious concepts of life. It is in this muddled fash-
ion that problems in contemporary philosophy are predominantly centered on
“life” as the “primordial phenomenon” in one of two ways. Either life is
approached as the fundamental reality, and all phenomena are seen to lead back
to it, so that everything and anything is understood as an objectification and
manifestation “of life,” or life is seen as the formation of culture, and this forma-
tion is thought to be carried out with reference to normative principles and val-
ues. The meaning of this watchword “life” should be allowed to remain ambigu-
ous, so it is able to indicate for us all of the different phenomena intended in it.
Here we need to single out two directions in the sense of this term which have
82 SUPPLEMENTS
led the way in shaping its meaning and in which we find expressed a tendency
toward the phenomenon of existence.
(1) Life is understood as objectifying in the widest sense, as an act of cre-
ative formation and achievement, as an act of going out of itself, and thus—
though this is not clearly spelled out—as something like our “be-ing there” 5 in
this life and as this life.
(2) Life is understood as experiencing, as having an experience, under-
standing, appropriating, and thus—though again the connection is left unex-
plained—as something like our “be-ing there” in such experiencing.)
The progress Jaspers’ work makes lies in the fact that his classification of
the phenomena, not previously made available in this manner, has called our
attention to the problem of existence in a much more concentrated fashion and
has in connection with this moved the problems of psychology into more fun-
damental domains. Its philosophical shortcoming with respect to the need for
actually getting down to work and delving into the problems it broaches is
clearly visible in the fact that Jaspers persists in a certain untested opinion. He
thinks that the foreconception of “the whole,” highlighted above, can help him
get a handle on the phenomenon of existence, and that he can understand this
phenomenon precisely by means of those concepts already available to him in
his intellectual milieu.
Keeping in mind the positive tendency of Jaspers’ work directed toward the
phenomenon of existence, we now need to discuss the above-mentioned forecon-
ception of this work with regard to the methodological consequences of its struc-
ture for making the phenomenon of existence visible and conceptually under-
standing it. How does the meaning of this phenomenon get articulated when
such a foreconception forms the starting point of one’s inquiry?
It is only with reference to the infinite whole of life that the particular
framework of such concepts as the “limits of life,” “limit-situations,” “structural
antinomies,” “reactions,” and “vital process” can be understood to have the func-
tion it does in Jaspers’ scheme of classification. The very meaning of this con-
ceptual framework somehow depends on an initial approach to the whole of life,
and the contexts of meaning Jaspers describes are always ultimately related back
to this whole.
The way this foreconception of the whole of life functions in conceptually
articulating the basic meaning of the phenomenon of “existence” can be brought
into relief in the following manner. In its teleological contexts, the biological life
of the body is an intensive infinity, i.e., “things never come . . . to an end” here
(289). This infinity stands in contrast to the limitlessness found in the possible
data able to be gathered about an individual being (e.g., a stone). “The life of the
mind possesses the same kind of infinity that the life of the body does” (ibid.).
Here, too, we never come to an end when we attempt to understand the contexts
in which the human mind lives. “The medium here is the psychical. But in this
psychical realm we find not only the life of the mind but also a mere limitlessness
of phenomena similar to the limitlessness of facts available in the individual

forms of lifeless matter. The infinity of this life of the mind is there for us,
whether we deal with this life in general terms or deal with it in the concrete and
unique form of an individual person. This intensive infinity of the mind, i.e., this
infinity in which it lives, stands in contrast to the limitlessness of the mind in
which it has a chaotic character” (289). When we attempt to understand life, we
find only the finite and the particular. But we can see that behind all of this
something is astir as its driving force, namely, a movement oriented in the direc-
tion of the infinite. Since life is “motion,” the essence of mental life lies in the
fact that it is always “on a path leading to the actualization of its qualities” (290).
Our examination of these claims is not meant to be focused on the ques-
tion of whether the different aspects of the meaning of infinity gleaned from the
reality of bodily life can be so freely applied to the “life of the mind.” For (under-
stood on the level of the distinctions Jaspers himself works with) the limitlessness
of data about an individual being (or limitless progression in knowing and defin-
ing it) and the limitlessness of teleological contexts in the organic world (or never
coming to an end in defining the organic world) do not in any sense differ with
respect to the meaning of infinity. They tell us absolutely nothing about the
meaning of the infinity belonging to life as such. The objective “concept” of
infinity apparently obtained specifically from the unity of biological objects is
claimed for the life of the mind as well, but in such a way that when Jaspers goes
on to define the life of the mind further, a different notion of life intervenes. In
looking at the life of the mind, one notices a movement toward the infinite
“behind it.” Does “infinite” mean here limitless progression in our attempt to
understand actual human lives, i.e., their purposeful contexts, or is a completely
different sense of infinity introduced here? What is meant by “infinite” here is
certainly not the limitlessness of the individual “products and appearances” of the
human mind. In connection with the notion of infinity, the essence of the mind
is characterized as a “path.” Here the direction toward the infinite experienced
“behind” the life of the mind clearly means a type of infinity that lies in the sense
of the actualizing of acts and their relational tendency. This type of infinity is
then somehow equated with the sense of “infinity” obtained from the objective,
external observation of biological unities of life. However, this objective concept
of infinity (i.e., the infinity related to a type of objectifying, theoretical under-
standing concerned with material or organic objects) is not sufficiently explained,
and regarding the new sense of infinity (i.e., an infinity relative to the immanent
sense of tendencies found in the context of the actualizing of acts that have a cer-
tain direction), no attempt is made to obtain it from the “movement of life” itself
and define it conceptually on the basis of this movement. Nor has it been shown
that these two fundamentally different concepts of infinity can be equated with
each other in such a cursory manner, for in establishing this connection between
them, one presumably decides an issue of crucial importance. If the “mere obser-
vation” of Jaspers’ investigations can proceed along these lines, this is only
84 SUPPLEMENTS
because of the foreconception involved here, which initially takes an objectifying

approach to “life” itself as a whole. Both concepts of infinity, each of which is
already vague on its own, are made to reflect each other in a muddled fashion
when the talk comes around to the notions of “infinite whole” and “infinite
process.” Jaspers in fact approaches life as a whole by means of a foreconception
in which life is, with respect to the intentional sense of its relational tendency,
thought of as a thing-like object: i.e., “it is there,” a process in motion (motion
means intentionally directed, and process means “taking place” in the manner of
an occurrence). Life is something given in the objective medium of psychical
being, it occurs there, and it is a process that takes place there before itself. Life
as a whole is the “encompassing” region in which processes of composition and
decomposition run their course. That a certain “direction” is ascribed to the dri-
ving forces, processes, and phenomena of movement generally does not change
the slightest thing in the basic aspect of life described here as an encompassing
realm and as a flowing “stream” that bears all movements within itself. Even if
one professes to reject metaphysics, one still owes it to oneself—if it is indeed
true that “dodging the issues” should have no place in philosophy—to give some
explanation of the objective sense and the mode of being on the basis of which
this whole, or psychical stream, is intended. When one talks about how every
attempt to understand life or a “part” of it is able to grasp only finite aspects, this
is only an expression of the fact that life is initially approached as an undivided
realm which, in conformity with the idea we have of it, can eventually be grasped
in its totality.
Every attempt to understand life is forced to turn the surge and flux of the
aforementioned process into a static concept and thereby destroy the essence of
life, i.e., the restlessness and movement (again understood more as an occurrence
than as a directedness to something) that characterize life’s actualization of its
ownmost qualities. Such argumentation works with the objective concept of
infinity related to theoretical understanding. In putting forth its poorly grounded
demonstration that a stilling of the psychical stream “takes place” objectively in
this manner, it believes itself to have thereby ascertained something of impor-
tance about the possibility of understanding “life” with respect to the precise
sense of the actualizing of its acts. But, in fact, one has here forgotten to begin
one’s investigation by first of all taking a close look at the sense of these contexts
of actualizing. Instead, one at the same time takes a “concept” to be an objective,
thing-like apparatus that inevitably breaks apart the unbroken psychical medium
it is applied to. This characteristically Bergsonian line of argumentation suffers
from a certain paralysis in a twofold sense. Apart from the fact that problems
concerning meaning, concepts, and language are approached only from a very
narrow perspective focusing on objective, reifying concepts, these problems are
allowed to remain on the level of a very crude and vague treatment that con-
tributes nothing to that type of treatment in which one would attempt to define
the fundamental sense of life and lived experience as a whole. And instead of
using this “glut on the market” to provide oneself with an air of profound phi-
losophy (such talk about ineffability easily gives the impression that one has actu-
ally gazed upon ineffable realms), it is high time that we found genuine problems
to deal with. When one has actually succeeded in discovering new contexts of
phenomena, as is the case in Jaspers’ investigation, such a backward theory of
expression is unnecessary. However little Jaspers has defined the concept of life as
a whole with precision, we can nonetheless glean from it what is decisive for the
context of problems under discussion, namely, the function that “life” has. It is
the realm, the fundamental reality, and the one, all-encompassing domain into
which Jaspers inserts all phenomena he examines.
Since the point of this review is to discuss the central, guiding foreconcep-
tion in Jaspers’ work with respect to what is intended in it and how it is intended,
as well as to examine this foreconception more specifically with regard to whether
it is appropriate for conceptually demarcating the phenomenon of existence and
providing us with the fundamental kind of objectivity in which this conceptual
demarcation ought to be carried out, we now need to understand the functional
sense of this foreconception more concretely than we have up until this point.
“Understood from the standpoint of its worldviews, life is played out
within the subject-object split” (248). “The primal phenomenon of experience
lies in the fact that objects stand opposite the subject.” “Where no objects stand
opposite us, so that every content of our experience disappears and cannot be
spoken about, and yet something is still experienced, here we speak of the mys-
tical in the broadest possible sense” (19). Insofar as the life of the mind lies in the
restlessness and movement of taking up different positions and then abandoning
them, “it is also, as something infinite, beyond the subject-object split.” “The
mystical is both alpha and omega” for the human mind (305). Due to all of the
movement involved with it, the mystical is the only thing in which the Absolute
can be grasped without being an object. “From those limits which encompass all
spheres of the subject-object split as the mystical (and here the mind does not flee
into the mystical as a refuge, but rather constantly undergoes it and thereby finds
that its proper sphere lies in movement), there falls an ineffable light on all par-
ticulars within the subject-object split, an indefinable meaning constantly press-
ing forth into form” (305, emphases added). The various types of mental life
include kinds of movements that do not merely take place “between subject and
object” but rather “stand at the same time beyond both of them and form the
basis of the split between them” (307 n.; 388ff.). “Whereas most of the psychi-
cal phenomena we are able to describe are described within a subject-object split
as properties of the subjective side or the objective side of this split, there are
other kinds of psychical experiences in which the subject-object split either has
not yet appeared or has been superseded” (392). What comes to be experienced
in this supersession of the subject-object split is not something objectively
marked off and removed from us; rather, it is characterized by a certain infinity
from which arise driving forces that give direction to life (action, thinking, and
86 SUPPLEMENTS
artistic creation) (393). The subject-object split is itself “the very essence of
human understanding” (426). “It is essentially within the form of this subject-
object split that human beings live, and they never come to rest here, but are
always striving after some kind of goal, purpose, value, or good” (202).
The whole of life is that from which all forms break forth into the light of
day, and it is what “splits” itself asunder in this way. If we are to understand how
the foreconception guiding Jaspers’ work basically gets worked out in concrete
terms, the main thing we need to consider is that he always describes this “split-
ting asunder” precisely as the primal phenomenon of psychical life. It constitutes
the fundamental meaning of the relation between subject and object (and here
the concepts of subject and object each contain a whole multiplicity of phenom-
ena, so that in the former, for example, we find the soul, the ego, lived experi-
ence, personality, the psycho-physical individual [cf. 21]). This splitting asunder
makes sense only insofar as we begin with the notion of that which is not split
asunder and approach it as the underlying reality. To avoid misunderstandings
about the methodological intentions of our examination of the foreconception
guiding Jaspers’ work, it should be clearly noted that the question as to whether
one understands this whole in a metaphysical sense or avoids this kind of inter-
pretation, as Jaspers himself wants to do, is irrelevant in the present context.
Our examination is not focused on the question of whether and in what
way one could prove that this whole really exists in this or that sense of reality, or
on what grounds its reality might possibly be posited as an idea. The really
important thing here is much rather the functional sense of that which is initially
put forth in Jaspers’ foreconception. He intends it to be the realm in which every-
thing takes place or occurs, and it is accordingly an object that ultimately
demands a theoretical, observational “attitude” as the correlative way of under-
standing it and as the basic sense in which it comes to be experienced by us. This
means that the fundamental character of the objective correlate of this theoreti-
cal attitude lies in the fact that it is an objective thing. Everything split asunder,
all movements, and all actions and reactions break forth into the light of day
from out of this whole, pass through it, and return to it. It is from this context
that the subject, one of the two basic components of the primal split, essentially
derives its meaning. The subject is that in which life itself and its “driving forces”
are “anchored” (24), i.e., it is basically characterized as a limited individuation of
life itself, which always comes to expression only imperfectly in such individua-
tions. “Life nowhere produces a concrete individual without remainder” (290).
The central, guiding foreconception supporting everything in Jaspers’
work will now be discussed on a fundamental level as a foreconception. If such
an adjudication of this foreconception is to be what we intend it to be, then it
can only mean that we must pursue and actualize a type of examination that is
demanded by the very sense of this foreconception, and our examination must
accordingly focus on the question of whether the motivation that leads to the
formation of the full sense of this foreconception actually enjoys the level of pri-
mordiality claimed for it. The full sense of any phenomenon includes the fol-
lowing intentional characteristics: the intentional relation, the intentional con-
tent, and the intentional actualizing (here “intentional” must be understood in a
completely formal sense, to avoid any special emphasis on a theoretical sense of
the intentional relation, and it is this specific meaning of “intentional” that is so
easily suggested when one understands intentionality as “thinking about”
[Meinen von] or correlatively as “being-thought”). Our treatment of these inten-
tional characteristics making up the sense of any phenomenon should not con-
sist of arranging them as an aggregate or succession of moments tallied up.
Rather, their sense derives from a structural context of relationships that varies in
each case according to the levels and directions of experience involved. This con-
text of relationships and the shifts of emphasis occurring here should not be
understood as a “result” or as a momentary “addendum” but as the authentic fac-
tor that comes to light in the phenomenological articulation of the above-men-
tioned intentional characteristics. In turn, this authentic factor itself is to be
understood precisely as a kind of “prestruction” of one’s own existence. Such pre-
struction is in each case actualized in the current facticity of one’s life in the form
of a self-appropriation. It discloses and holds open a concrete horizon of expec-
tation that is characterized by worry and is developed and worked out in each
particular context of actualizing it.
Whence and in what way does the foreconception under discussion make
its appearance? Which motives would lead one to make it the starting point of
one’s inquiry and see it through to the end? What is the nature of these motives?
Jaspers does not formulate such questions. Were he to call to mind his own guid-
ing foreconception, he would find these questions about it empty and inconse-
quential. However, an attempt will not be made here to persuade him of their
importance. It is up to him to decide whether he can “go on” without raising
these questions and to what extent these questions might not arise precisely from
the “infinite reflection” that constitutes the “genuine” sense of mental life and
thus also scientific life. As is, Jaspers works more with what he has taken over
from the intellectual history of his own present, doing this in part unconsciously
and in part through reflective appropriation. He has his eye specifically on what
is of importance in this intellectual history for his special project of endeavoring
to establish the science of psychology as a whole. Regarding the approach he ini-
tially takes in his foreconception, Jaspers would be able to say the following: Life
as a whole is a central, guiding idea for me, and I need only look around to see
that this life is somehow or other simply there for me wherever I go. This uni-
form and unbroken whole, this ultimate harmony, which transcends all opposi-
tions, encompasses all life, and is free of all fragmentation and destruction—this
is what guides my experience. I see all particulars in its light, all genuine illumi-
nation comes from it, and it marks out in advance the fundamental domain of
sense on the basis of which everything I encounter comes to be understood as
something that develops and breaks forth out of this life, eventually sinking back
88 SUPPLEMENTS
into it again. This whole provides me with the essential articulation of those
objects I have attempted to observe and classify in my work.
The actual motivational basis from which this foreconception thus arises
is a fundamental experience of the whole of life in which we keep this whole
before our gaze in the form of an idea. In a very formal sense, this experience
can be defined as a “fundamental aesthetic experience.” This means that the
relational sense belonging to the primary type of experience that initially gives
us the object called “life” actually consists of gazing upon something, observing
it, and striving after it. We are not saying here that Jaspers “subscribes” to an
“aesthetic” worldview. I know nothing about this. His worldview could just as
well be an essentially moral one, supposing that such hackneyed philosophical
coinage still means anything. Yet it is possible here that without allowing him-
self to be placed before an antimony, Jaspers does indeed gain access to the
essential thing for him, i.e., the Absolute, within a fundamental aesthetic atti-
tude and sets about classifying it in the same manner. It is likewise possible that
his view of life focusing on the full “vehemence” and “force” of the “vital
process” is an aesthetic one, even if the content of this “process” is understood
to be of an ethical nature. Life “is there” as something we have by means of look-
ing at it, and it is by means of this kind of having that we gain possession of it
in the sense of a whole encompassing everything. Here Jaspers would perhaps,
on principle, make the following reply: For me, it is indeed precisely a matter of
mere observation, and what is observed must then be an object in the basic sense
of being an observed object. There is no other way of proceeding here. In
response, the following needs to be said: This formal type of argumentation
remains from the start empty as long as we have not answered an important
question, namely, does not the formal sense of theoretical understanding allow
itself to be deformalized into very individual and concrete ways of understand-
ing? And this question cannot be answered in a formally deductive manner but
rather only by starting from particular contexts of phenomena and allowing our-
selves to be guided by them. Observation can, in accord with its sense, always
have a theorizing character, but this does not necessarily entail that the sense of
being belonging to what is observed must as such become accessible primarily
within observation. And it is this simple point we have been stressing in our
examination of Jaspers’ foreconception. The relational sense of the initial giving
of the object is not also the relational sense of the explication that has come
across this pregiven object. Accordingly, the mere observation used throughout
Jaspers’ work and extending all the way to the foreconception in which the
actual object of investigation is given has in no way been justified by Jaspers as
the appropriate method of explication. The basic experience in which the actual
object is initially given needs to be examined regarding its full sense, and it must
prescribe for us the genuine structure of explication. “Observation” in Jaspers’
sense might be a fitting approach, but it also might not be. An answer to this
question will be obtained in the following discussion, but for the time being it
will take the form of making visible the problems involved here. To this end,
what Jaspers has taken up in the foreconception of his work must be discussed
in more concrete terms.
The whole of life, i.e., life itself, is something about which we can say noth-
ing directly (288), but it must indeed be intended by us somehow, since the con-
sciousness of our existence arises precisely from the fact that we look to the whole
of life. When human beings “see [their finite situations] within the whole,” when
they “want to attain certainty about the totality of things,” they have the experi-
ence that the objective world and their subjective action are split apart in the form
of an antinomy. “Insofar as the driving forces in worldviews move human beings,”
and insofar as human beings are somehow “concerned about something essential,”
“they always find themselves on paths leading to the infinite or the whole.” It is
“in view of the infinite” that human beings find themselves in antinomies. Antin-
omies are oppositions, but they are oppositions “from the point of view of the
Absolute and value.” Antinomy is “destruction.” When this destruction is experi-
enced, it is experienced along with the “unity” or whole that is breaking apart in
one way or another. The essence of the human mind is “the will to unity.” Insofar
as all processes of destruction are able to be formulated in a rational manner, they
can be thought of as contradictions: for example, death contradicts life, whereas
chance contradicts necessity as well as meaning (203ff.). But struggle, death, and
chance are at the same time described also as limit-situations, i.e., we can experi-
ence struggle and death as limits in our consciousness of that whole that somehow
exceeds life. “Struggle is a fundamental form of all existence” (227). “No existence
is whole” (229), and that is why human beings must struggle if they want to live.
This struggle “never lets a particular individual come to rest in any state of whole-
ness.” “The process of life would cease without struggle” (227). Moreover, transi-
toriness holds for all reality. Every experience and all of our current conditions
fade away into the past. Human beings are constantly changing (229). Experi-
ences, individual human beings, a people, a culture—all of these fall prey to death.
“The relation human beings have to their own deaths is different than their rela-
tions to all other forms of transitoriness. Only the absolute non-being of the world
is a comparable notion.” “Only the perishing of their own being or of the world
in general has a total character for human beings” (230). A “lived relation to death”
is not to be confused with “universal knowledge about death.” This lived relation
is there in one’s life only “when death has appeared as a limit-situation in one’s
experience,” i.e., only when one’s possible “consciousness of limit and infinity”
(231) has not been left undeveloped.
We shall not at this point enter into a critical commentary on the various
limit-situations Jaspers has listed as concrete instances of the universal concept of
a limit-situation. We also can put aside for now the question of whether the con-
cepts of “finite situation,” “limit-situation,” and “situation” have been explained
in such a way that they accomplish something of significance for a real philo-
sophical understanding of them. The following related questions may be left out
90 SUPPLEMENTS
of consideration as well. Do all of the concrete limit-situations mentioned above

satisfy the “universal concept” of a limit-situation in the same sense? Do univer-
sal concepts that can be applied to such concrete situations exist in any sense? To
what extent is concrete knowledge of antinomies different from a “lived relation”
to oppositions? How does the one arise from the other? Can these experienced
antinomies—antinomies experienced as limit-situations or antinomies experi-
enced in limit-situations (this distinction has not been clearly worked out)—
really be “rationally formulated” and thought of as “contradictions” without fur-
ther ado? Do they not thereby lose their genuine sense? And, on the other hand,
is it not precisely this theorizing reinterpretation that initially makes it possible
for Jaspers to treat the concrete instances as contradictions that can be, as it were,
lined up in a row for observation? We also will leave undiscussed the question of
whether the concrete limit-situations stand in particular relations to each other
when they are experienced, and to what extent it is precisely these concrete limit-
situations that should properly be spoken of as limit-situations. Even if it is sup-
posed to be “mere observation,” I consider what Jaspers puts forth about concrete
limit-situations (in line with their fundamental significance within the total
sphere of phenomena he intends to deal with, and to have emphasized this is pre-
cisely his main contribution) to be not in the least worked out in a fitting con-
ceptual manner. That is the reason a critical commentary focused on the partic-
ulars of Jaspers’ work would all too easily run the risk of imputing to him views
and meanings he would not be willing to see as his own. In pursuing this type of
critical commentary, we always move around in uncertainties as long as the basic
context from which the phenomena and concepts in question have arisen is not
more clearly visible. That is why critical observations always find themselves
referred back to the problem of foreconception.
Where are the intellectual motives to be found in a factical sense for the
initial approach Jaspers takes in his foreconception? It is not difficult to recognize
the historically “contingent” origin of the concept of the Absolute he uses in his
“observations.” This concept represents a syncretism in which the Kantian doc-
trine of antinomies and its guiding concept of infinity are combined with
Kierkegaard’s concept of the Absolute, which has been “cleansed” of its specifi-
cally Lutheran religious sense and its particular theological meaning in this
regard. Furthermore, these two components, which derive from very different
basic foreconceptions, are transplanted into that vagueness arising from the con-
cept of life we described above. More precisely, they are in fact viewed primarily
on the basis of this vagueness. In the course of his general discussion of limit-sit-
uations, Jaspers at one point suddenly makes the comment about his “observa-
tions” that they amount to “only a presupposition for understanding a psychol-
ogy of types of mental life and are not yet themselves psychology” (204). What,
then, are they? Logic or sociology? (2f.) What is it that we strive after in these
“observations” that are supposed to provide us with the fundamental presuppo-
sitions, and how do we strive after it?
It is possible that Jaspers wants these observations to be understood in a

very formal sense, but then what is really needed is a discussion of the meaning
of this “formal” factor, and here we need to raise the following questions. To what
extent does this formal factor prejudice the observations that deal with concrete
material? To what extent does it not do this? In what way can prejudice be
avoided? In turn, to what extent can we obtain this formal sense only by means
of beginning in a distinctive manner with that which is factically, concretely, and
historically available to us and then explicating this experiential point of depar-
ture in a particular way? To what extent does the conceptual expression found in
actual understanding revoke the formal, and do this in such a manner that here
concept-formation does not mean that we bring to light a theoretical theme for
some merely theoretical purpose, but rather that our experience itself is illumi-
nated through interpretation and that we call attention to this experience in com-
munication with others?
Jaspers’ foreconception has now been described in terms of its functional
sense (its initial objective, factual approach to an intended realm), as well as in
terms of the sense of its basic attitude (its aesthetic point of view) and its origin
(its undiscussed adoption from the intellectual history of Jaspers’ present situa-
tion). At this point, we need to examine Jaspers’ foreconception with regard to
the question of whether it does in fact intend or even can intend that which it
really wants to bring into view and understand, namely, phenomena of our exis-
tence. We need to ask whether it can in any sense simply put us into the situa-
tion of being able to actualize questioning about our existence and the sense of
the phenomena found there. Or does the most proper and full sense of Jaspers’
foreconception actually move us away from this situation? Might it be the case
that if this foreconception dominates our thinking, it will never be possible for us
even to “circle round” the phenomenon of existence?
What kind of explanation is required for our “existence”? From what was
noted in our introductory comments on this problem, it should be obvious that
we are not of the opinion that one can approach the problem of existence
directly. This problem is characterized precisely by the fact that it is lost sight of
when approached in this way (i.e., when one attempts to avoid all detours in a
purportedly superior fashion). Even laying out the very specific problem of our
initial approach, which belongs precisely to the problem of existence, and doing
this in a way that satisfies the most rigorous conceptual requirements, is out of
the question here, given especially the restricted context of our approach in this
review. But we should make the preliminary remark that the meaning of this
problem of our initial approach is such that it cannot be settled through empty,
formalistic reflections. And it is just as pressing to underscore that this problem
should not be considered something “out of the ordinary” and “novel,” which
allows us to raise a new commotion in philosophy and to curry favor with the
hustle and bustle of an avant-garde culture at bottom really hungry for other
things, even if it does display wonderful religious antics.
92 SUPPLEMENTS
In line with the specific aim of this commentary, we wish only to call
the reader’s attention to a few themes and thereby to point to the persistence of
a problem.
Using formal indication (a particular methodological level of phenomeno-
logical explication that will not be dealt with further here, though some under-
standing of it will be gained in what follows), we can make the following remarks
in order to provide an initial approach to this problem (an approach that, accord-
ing to its very meaning, must in turn be deconstructed).
“Existence” is a determination of something. If one wants to characterize
it in a regional fashion, though in the end this characterization actually proves to
be a misinterpretation that leads us away from the real sense of existence, it can
be understood as a certain manner of being and thus as a particular sense of “is,”
that “is,” it has the essential sense of the (I) “am.” And we have this (I) “am” in a
genuine sense not through thinking about it in a theoretical manner, but rather
by actualizing the “am,” which is a way of being belonging to the be-ing of the
“I.” Understood in this way, the be-ing of the self has the formally indicative
meaning of existence. Here we are given a clue about where we must find the
sense of existence as the particular “how” of the self (of the I). What turns out to
be important here is accordingly the fact that I have myself, i.e., the basic experi-
ence in which I encounter myself as a self. Living in this experience and gearing
myself to its very sense, I am able to question after the sense of my “I am.” This
having-myself is ambiguous in many different respects, and this diversity found
in its meaning must be understood specifically with reference to historical con-
texts rather than to contexts of classification that have been elevated to the stature
of regions within an autonomous system. In the archontic sense belonging to the
actualizing of our basic experience of the “I am,” an experience that concerns pre-
cisely me myself in a radical manner, we find that this experience does not expe-
rience the “I” as something located in a region, as an individuation of a “univer-
sal,” or as an instance of something. Rather, this experience is the experience of
the “I” as a self. When we keep purely to this actualizing of our experience, it
becomes clear that the notion of a region or an objective realm is quite foreign to
the “I.” We see that each time we attempt to give a regional definition of the “I”
(a definition that arises from a foreconception about such things as a stream of
consciousness, a context of experience), we thereby “efface” the sense of the “am”
and turn the “I” into an object able to be ascertained and classified by inserting
it into a region. Consequently, there is a need for radical suspicion (and the appro-
priate investigations as well) about all foreconceptions that objectify by means of
regions, about the networks of concepts that arise from such foreconceptions, and
about the various avenues through which these concepts arise.
When it has the sense of “is,” the sense of being has developed from objec-
tively oriented experiences which have been explicated in “theoretical” knowl-
edge, and in which we always somehow or other say of something that it “is some-
thing.” The object here need not be classified expressly within a particular
scientific realm that has been worked out through the special logic of the science
in question. Rather, it usually takes the form of the nontheoretical “objectivity”
that belongs to what is of significance to us 6 in our experience of the environing
world, the with-world of others, and also the self-world. In factical life, I have
dealings of one sort or another with what is of significance to me, and to these
“dealings with” there corresponds a unique sense of objectivity that can be under-
stood phenomenologically. When the sense of existence is investigated in terms
of its origin and our genuine basic experience of it, we see that it is precisely that
sense of being which cannot be obtained from the “is” we use to explicate and
objectify our experience in one way or another when we acquire knowledge about
it. The sense of human existence is to be obtained rather from its own basic expe-
rience of having itself in a certain worried manner. This having is actualized prior
to whatever knowledge about it we might later acquire by objectifying it with the
“is,” and such knowledge is in fact inconsequential for this actualization. If I seek
this objectifying knowledge, the attitude of observation will become central for
me. All of my explications will then have an objectifying nature, but they will put
me at a remove from existence and from a genuine having of it (worry).
The “I” should be understood here as the full, concrete, and historically
factical self that is accessible to itself in its historically concrete experience of
itself. It is not synonymous with the notion of the empirical subject as the possi-
ble subject matter of theoretical observation in psychology. In this kind of objec-
tivity, which is understood more or less as a realm of “physical” processes that
occur, the “soul” has been eclipsed in a fundamental sense. That is, whenever this
kind of psychology has begun with this kind of object, it has never once brought
the “soul” experientially into view, so that it could be given in a preliminary way
as an object for further investigation.
Insofar as the “I am” is something that can be articulated into “he, she, it
is” (or further, “is something”), existence can be spoken of in a formal manner as
a particular sense of being and as a particular “how” of being. Here we also
should take note of the fact that the “is” in “he, she, it is” (each of which must
be understood in the concrete at any particular time) can in turn have different
meanings, and these differences mark out a multiplicity of contexts of life and
realms of objects. For example, “he is” can be taken in the sense of being-present-
to-hand and occurring in nature as it is represented objectively (a multiplicity of
objects and relations). Or, “he is” can have the sense that he plays a certain role
in the environment of the with-world. This sense is expressed, for example, in the
trivial question, “what does X do in Y?” The “was” and the “will,” which belong
to this “is” in connection with the “he,” have their own meanings that are crucial
for the “is.”
But the basic experience of having-myself is not available to one without
further ado, nor is it a kind of experience aimed at the “I” in such general terms.
Rather, if one is to be at all capable of experiencing the specific sense of the “am”
and appropriating it in a genuine manner, the actualizing of one’s experience
94 SUPPLEMENTS
must have its origin in the full concreteness of the “I,” and it must be directed
back to this “I” by way of a particular kind of “how.” Such experience is not a
type of immanent perception that is pursued with a theoretical purpose in mind
and is intent on observing the qualities of present-to-hand “psychical” processes
and acts. On the contrary, the experience of having-myself in fact extends his-
torically into the past of the “I.” This past is not like an appendage that the “I”
drags along with itself; rather, it is experienced as the past of an “I” that experi-
ences it historically within a horizon of expectations placed in advance of itself
and for itself. And here the “I” also has itself in the form of a self. To explicate
phenomenologically the “how” of this actualizing of experience according to its
basic historical sense is the task that is most important for us in the whole com-
plex set of problems we face concerning phenomena of existence. Little is to be
gained by an external view of the psychical in which one emphasizes that past and
future act in conjunction with each other within “consciousness,” if past and future
are understood here as effective states of affairs. In dealing appropriately with this
task, we need to understand that the nature of explication lies in the actualizing
of interpretation. The essential character of the explicata involved here is found
in the fact that they are hermeneutical concepts to which we have access only in
a continual renewal of interpretation that constantly begins anew. It is in this way
that we must bring these explicata to their genuine level of “precision” and main-
tain them in it, though such precision cannot be compared to other kinds of con-
ceptual refinement with a different orientation.
In the above-mentioned basic experience that is relationally directed to the
I, the facticity of this I is decisive. Lived hic et nunc and actualized accordingly in
a situation within intellectual history, one’s own factical experience of life also
actualizes the basic experience of one’s I that arises from it, remains within it, and
ever returns to the factical. But this factical experience of life, in which I can have
myself in different ways, is itself not anything like a region in which I am located,
or a universal that gets individuated in my self. According to the “how” of its own
actualizing, this experience is rather an essentially “historical” phenomenon.
However, it is not primarily an objective historical phenomenon (my life hap-
pening as something that takes place in the present) but rather a phenomenon of
historical actualization that experiences itself in such actualization. When, in
accord with the relational sense of one’s experience, one is directed historically to
one’s self, the context of this experience also has a historical nature in accord with
the sense of its actualizing. The “historical” is here not the correlate of theoreti-
cal and objective historical observation; rather, it is both the content and the
“how” of the self ’s worry about itself, from which the former certainly cannot as
such be detached. Having-oneself arises from such worry, is maintained in it, and
tends toward it. And in this worry, the specific past, present, and future of the
self are not experienced as temporal schemata for objectively classifying facts;
rather, they are experienced within a nonschematic sense of worry having to do
with the actualizing of experience in its “how.” Accordingly, the phenomenon of
existence discloses itself only in a radically historical manner of actualizing our

experience and striving after such actualization. This actualization of experience
is not oriented to the attitude of observation and does not aim at that classifica-
tion which objectifies the phenomenon of existence within a region but rather is
itself essentially characterized by a certain worry about the self. It is itself not
something extraordinary and removed; rather, it is something to be actualized in
our factical experience of life as such and appropriated from out of such factical
experience. And this is supposed to happen not merely once in a momentary, iso-
lated fashion but rather again and again in a constant renewal of worry, which is
necessarily motivated by the self ’s worry about itself and is moreover oriented in
a historical manner. In accord with its fundamental sense, “conscience” is under-
stood here as the actualizing of conscience and not merely in the sense of occa-
sionally having a conscience about something (conscientia). Conscience is a his-
torically defined “how” of experiencing the self (the history of this “concept”
needs to be examined in connection with the problem of existence, and this is
not just an academic problem, even if it is already a pressing problem when
approached in such a way). In indicating this connection between the sense of
historical experience and the sense of the phenomenon of conscience, we are not
giving the concept of the historical a broader meaning; rather, we are under-
standing it in such a way that it is being returned to the authentic source of its
sense. And this also is the factical though concealed source from which historical
experience in the sense of the development of objective historical knowledge (the
historical human sciences) arises. The historical is today almost exclusively some-
thing objective, i.e, an object of knowledge and curiosity, a locus providing the
opportunity to glean instructions for future action, an object for objective cri-
tique and rejection as something antiquated, a fund of materials and examples to
be collected, a conglomeration of “instances” for systematic observations dealing
with the universal. Since we are unable to see phenomena of existence today in
an authentic manner, we no longer experience the meaning of conscience and
responsibility lying in the historical itself (the historical is not merely something
of which we have knowledge and about which we write books; rather, we our-
selves are it and have it as a task). Thus even the motives for returning to the his-
torical via our own history are inactive and hidden from us.
In its relation to what it experiences, our concrete and factical life-experi-
ence has of itself a characteristic tendency to fall away into the “objective” kinds
of significance in the experienceable world around it. This falling away is the rea-
son the sense of being belonging to these objective kinds of significance becomes
predominant for us. Thus it is understandable that regarding its sense of being,
the self quickly becomes experienced as having an objectified kind of significance
(personality, ideal type of humanity) and within this experiential orientation
comes to be understood theoretically and takes on meaning in philosophy. The
more the experienced and known past works its way into our own present situa-
tion in the form of an objective tradition, the more the self is understood in this
96 SUPPLEMENTS
objectified manner. As soon as we see that factical life is characteristically loaded

down with tradition in this way (tradition can be understood here in many dif-
ferent senses), and that the most pernicious effects of this loading down are
mainly to be found precisely in the resulting experiences of having-oneself in the
self-world, we are led to the insight that the concrete possibility of bringing phe-
nomena of existence into view and explicating them in a genuine kind of con-
ceptuality can be opened up for us only when the concrete tradition experienced
as still at work in one form or another has been subjected to a destruction with
an eye to the question of the ways and means of explicating our actual experience
of the self, and when as a result of this destruction, the basic experiences that have
become the effective motives of our thought have been brought into relief and
discussed regarding their primordiality. According to its very sense, this kind of
destruction always remains inseparable from the concrete, fully historical worry
of the self about itself.
The self is what it is in its relations in the self-world, the with-world of oth-
ers, and the environing world. The sense of these directions of experience is ulti-
mately historical and inseparable from the self-world. When phenomenology
first burst onto the scene with its specific aim of appropriating the phenomena
of theoretical experience and knowledge in a new and primordial manner (the
Logical Investigations, i.e., a phenomenology of theoretical logos), the goal of its
research was to win back an unspoiled seeing of both the sense of those objects
experienced in such theoretical experiences and correlatively the sense of “how”
these objects become experienced. But if we are to understand the philosophical
sense of the tendencies of phenomenology in a radical manner and appropriate
them genuinely, we must not merely carry out research in an “analogical” fashion
on the “other” “domains of experience” (the aesthetic, ethical, and religious
domains) which we, following one philosophical tradition or another, have par-
titioned off from one another. Rather, we need to see that experiencing in its
fullest sense is to be found in its authentically factical context of actualization in
the historically existing self, and this self is in one way or another the ultimate
question of philosophy. It will not do to bring in the notion of the person on
occasion and apply to it philosophical results that were arrived at under the guid-
ance of one philosophical tradition or another. On the contrary, the concrete self
should be taken up into the starting point of our approach to philosophical prob-
lems and brought to “givenness” at the genuinely fundamental level of phenom-
enological interpretation, namely, that level of interpretation related to the facti-
cal experience of life as such. From these unavoidably terse remarks, one thing
should have become clear: namely, the authentic phenomenon of existence refers
us to the actualizing of that way of access to it that is appropriate for it. We come
to have the phenomenon of existence only within a certain “how” of experienc-
ing it, and this “how” is something that has to be achieved in a specific manner.
It is precisely this “how” of appropriation and moreover the “how” of our initial
approach to the actualizing of such appropriation that are decisive.
That our factical, historically actualized life is at work right within “how” we
factically approach the problem of “how” the self, in its worry about itself, appropriates
itself—this is something that belongs originally to the very sense of the factical “I am.”
Insofar as the phenomenon of existence and the problem it poses are
intended in this form, the question of how we should actualize our initial
approach and access will constantly stand before us in the starting point of our
approach to this problem of existence whenever we have understood it in a gen-
uine way. Our question about this “how” is the problem of method, though not
the method for a knowledge of objects that defines them with reference to
regions, or for a classification of diverse kinds of objects that are given in advance
for us and can likewise be given in advance throughout our classifying. Rather,
method means here the method belonging to our interpretive, historically actu-
alized explication of concrete and fundamental experiential modes of having-
oneself in a factically worried manner.
We are here able to give only a rough indication of the questions phe-
nomenology urgently needs to address in order to clarify its philosophical sense
and work out its position today. These questions, as listed below, must be
answered not through abstract formal reflections but rather in the course of con-
crete research.
1. In regard to the problem of existence we have touched on, to what
extent does the basic phenomenological attitude—which first burst onto the
scene with Husserl and is a philosophical attitude unable to be learned by rote as
a technique—preserve the most radical origin that can be assigned to the mean-
ing of philosophy? To what extent does it explicitly preserve the decisive direc-
tion of worry that essentially pervades all problems?
2. To what extent does “history” get appropriated here in such a way that
it is seen to be more than just a discipline in philosophy? To what extent do we
gain an understanding of the fact that the historical is, according to its very sense,
originally already there for us right within our philosophical problems and that
accordingly the problem of the relationship between the history of philosophy
and systematic philosophy is at bottom a pseudo problem, even if one believes
oneself to have “solved” it with formalistic ruses?
3. If we have appropriated the basic sense of the phenomenological atti-
tude in a genuine way, to what extent would we sooner have it misused in any
other type of intellectual and literary nonsense than have it misused to supply a
forced orthodox dogmatics with its apologetic principles, a “perversion” for
which a desire has recently begun to stir in phenomenology (and be this dog-
matics in its tenets ever so praiseworthy and today still ever so misunderstood as
the dogmatics of the Middle Ages, which was according to its own sense a gen-
uine type of dogmatics)?
Returning to our central problem of foreconception, it now becomes clear
that insofar as it aims at the phenomenon of existence, Jaspers’ foreconception is
unsuitable for realizing its own underlying intention. Such is the case both in
98 SUPPLEMENTS
regard to the functional sense of this foreconception (it initially posits that on the
basis of which and within which we are to observe our existence as concrete life,
and it posits it as a whole with an essentially regional character) and in regard to
the sense of the basic experience that motivates the foreconception (the attitude
of looking ultimately upon this whole, harmony, and unity of life, inserting phe-
nomena into it in a businesslike fashion and remaining all the while unworried
about the self-world).
However, the full sense of Jaspers’ foreconception is not only unsuitable for
realizing its own underlying intention at work in it; rather, it actually runs counter
to this intention. For regarding the intentional relational sense of its understand-
ing, this orientation toward a region puts us at a remove from the phenomenon
of existence which, according to its sense, cannot be formulated and classified in
regional terms. And regarding the sense of the actualization of its fundamental
(formally) aesthetic attitude, this orientation does not let the self ’s worry about
itself emerge in a crucial sense as that which first gives direction to and charac-
terizes all problems, their objectivity, and their explication.
If we can now show concretely that in Jaspers’ work “method” remains
essentially at the level of a technical managing and classifying which, according
to its relational sense, is characterized by the businesslike insertion of phenom-
ena into a region, and if we also can show here that “method” is thus from the
start not raised as a problem, it will become clear to us from this that Jaspers’
method is indeed in keeping with the structure of his foreconception, only that
it thereby places itself in opposition to its very own intention of penetrating to
phenomena of existence.
Jaspers characterizes the attitude of his method as mere observation. What
is it supposed to accomplish? “The object of all observation is simply that which
exists and is there for us so far in human experience. All observation has the ten-
dency to take this as the whole” (329). Do “that which exists and is there for us so
far,” “being-there,” and “so far” have the same meaning for any and every type of
observing? Jaspers wants to observe “what life is” (250). This is what observation
is supposed to teach us about. Observation stands “in the service of burgeoning
life” (ibid.). The object that observation pursues is that whole initially approached
in Jaspers’ foreconception, as well as the variety of concrete forms belonging to this
whole. As observation, which is in itself not creative, it looks only to what is there
before it. But how exactly is “life” there for us? And how do we obtain that which
exists and is there for us so far? Phenomena of life are after all not like the pieces
on a checkerboard that we now need to rearrange. That which is there for us so
far, i.e., that which exists in life as something available and knowable, always exists
and is “there” in various types of understanding and conceptual expression that
have brought about this “being-there.” After taking up what is given in this inter-
pretive understanding of life and adopting it as that which actually exists and is
really there for us, Jaspers in turn proceeds to organize and classify it in the spe-
cific context of understanding with which he works. This should already be clear
to us from our previous attempts to make Jaspers’ underlying foreconception

explicit. If our pursuit of phenomena of life merely looks at “what is there,” is it
at all capable of taking a single step without treating what is there for us so far in
a specific context of understanding? Even if we expressly relinquish the claim that
our observation is observation per se, or the only possible kind of observation, our
observing of phenomena of life is historical, insofar as it must inevitably be inter-
pretive. It is “historical” not merely in the superficial sense of being valid only for
a particular age; rather, according to the characteristic sense of its ownmost actu-
alization, it has something essentially historical for its object. One needs to
become clear on the nature of this interpretation if one wants to understand
“observation” as a method and recommend it as such.
The fact that today we live in a quite peculiar manner from, in, and with
history is surely at the very least something that also exists and “is there” for us,
if it is not indeed an essential factor of our times. This is the case even if “psy-
chology” has not at all noticed it yet, and if philosophy has taken note of it only
within an objective, external orientation. However, any use of observation that
intends to get at phenomena of existence must regard precisely this fact of our
times as something needing to be “understood.”
It might just be the case that phenomena of life, which are “historical” in
accord with their own basic sense, can themselves become accessible to us only
in a “historical” manner. And here we need to answer the following question:
Does the objectifying kind of understanding in the science of history represent
the most authentic and radical way of formulating our historical experience in
theory? Or is it not the case that when this question is seen in its inseparable con-
nection with the problem of existence, we are confronted by the problem of find-
ing a method of interpreting our existence in a primordially historical manner?
Thus another question arises here. In actualizing and explicating this type of
interpretation that aims at phenomena of our existence, would we in any sense
be calling for anything like the setting up of types? Would this not rather be quite
unsuitable for interpreting our existence? Whenever this approach is brought into
play, does it not result in essentially skewing the real direction in which under-
standing should move, since all work with types and any esteem for them always
remains within a surreptitious, aesthetic attitude? In the present context, it is only
important for us to see here how two things go together: on the one hand, Jaspers’
supposed intention of pursuing observation, one that treats phenomena of life as
a variety of types and forms, or concretions and instances, which have been
stripped of their proper historical provenance; and on the other hand, his previ-
ously described foreconception. What this shows us is that Jaspers does not see that
the historical is a fundamental character of the sense of our existence. Conse-
quently, neither has the problem of method, with respect to its basic meaning
and the nature of its point of departure, been geared to the historical in his work.
The other features exhibited by Jaspers’ method, namely, the treatment of
the question of conceptual expression and the question of “systematics,” also are
100 SUPPLEMENTS
based on his underlying foreconception (i.e., on the initial approach to life as a

region and the observational attitude toward this region). Life is an infinite flow-
ing whole, but since concepts are forms that bring life to a standstill, it is impos-
sible to grasp life and truly understand it.
The inexpressibility of the soul has often and enthusiastically been asserted
in connection with the impossibility of fully grasping the individual. However, it
is of crucial importance here to ask which concept of the individual lies at the
basis of this problem of conceptual expression. Instead of constantly reformulat-
ing the well-worn saying “individuum est ineffabile” [the individual is inexpress-
ible] in new ways, it might be about time to ask the following questions: What
exactly is “fari” [expressing] supposed to mean here? What kind of understand-
ing is supposed to come to expression? Is it not the case that what lies at the basis
of this dictum is a particular way of understanding the individual that is ulti-
mately based on an aesthetic, external observation of the “whole person”? Does
not this kind of observation still remain in effect even when personality is “under-
stood” immanently in psychology, since the objective, pictorial point of view
remains operative here (cf. Dilthey, for example)?
The manner in which Jaspers selects his “method” and interprets it finds
its motivation in the first place in his foreconception, but it goes back in partic-
ular to that influence of Max Weber and Kierkegaard which Jaspers himself
expressly mentions. However, in both cases, this happens via a fundamental mis-
understanding of the real intentions of these thinkers, a misunderstanding that
gets its motivation from Jaspers’ own preconception. What turned out to be
important for Jaspers in Weber’s work was, firstly, his distinction between scien-
tific observation and the promotion of values in worldviews and, secondly, the
connection he made between the most concrete kind of historical research and
systematic thinking (13). I can only understand what Jaspers means here by “sys-
tematic” thinking to be Weber’s attempt to develop a genuine type of rigorous
conceptual expression appropriate to the meaning of his own science. But this
means that for Weber the problem of method was an urgent problem specifically
in the domain of his very own science, and in fact only here. That he himself ben-
efited in an essential way from subscribing to the particular theory of science and
conceptuality that he did reveals only how clearly he saw the importance of the
following two things: on the one hand, the fact that his science is a historical
human science of culture (“sociology” is “an empirical science of human action”)
and, on the other hand, the fact that Rickert’s investigations provide the theoret-
ical and scientific foundations particularly for the historical sciences of culture.
This is why Weber had a certain right simply to adopt Rickert’s investigations.
He essentially never went any further here. He needed to be guided by this
approach in his own historical science, even though it contained a specific prob-
lem of method within it. However, one misunderstands the true scientific vehe-
mence of Weber’s thought when one simply carries this approach over into psy-
chology and moreover into one’s attempts to get at the whole of psychology, i.e.,
into one’s “observations” about basic principles that at bottom have a completely
different structure than the type of observations Weber pursued. To emulate
Weber truly would rather be to strive just as radically and incessantly as he did to
achieve a genuine “systematic” mastery in one’s own field of psychology and,
more particularly, with reference to the problem of working out the whole of psy-
chology as a science. Objective economic processes and human actions as seen in
the context of the development of intellectual history are surely from the start
something other than worldviews and “ultimate positions of psychical life,” i.e.,
phenomena of existence. At the very least, one really needs to ask whether the
attitude, method, and conceptual structures of sociology can be transferred from
this science (taken moreover in the sense of Weber’s very specific conception of
it) to the problem of the nature of psychology, something that Jaspers broaches,
moreover, for the sake of pursuing specifically philosophical intentions.
Furthermore, we need to examine that distinction between scientific obser-
vation and value, which likewise has a very specific sense in Weber’s thought and
again derives from his own concrete science. Can one demand it also in the
sphere of philosophical knowing without any further discussion? If the meaning
of objectivity in philosophical knowledge has not been clarified beforehand, we
can decide nothing about the role of this distinction in philosophy.
Concerning Kierkegaard, we should point out that such a heightened con-
sciousness of methodological rigor as his has rarely been achieved in philosophy
or theology (the question of where he achieved this rigor is not important here).
One loses sight of nothing less than the most important aspect of Kierkegaard’s
thought when one overlooks this consciousness of method, or when one’s treat-
ment of it takes it to be of secondary importance.
Jaspers falls under the spell of a deception when he thinks that it is precisely
in mere observation that he would achieve the highest degree of noninterference
in the personal decisions of his readers and would thus free these individuals for
their own self-reflection. On the contrary, by presenting his investigations as mere
observations he indeed appears to avoid imposing on his readers particular world-
views, i.e., the ones he has described, but he pushes his readers into believing that
his unexamined preconception (life as a whole) and the essential modes of articu-
lation corresponding to it are something obvious and noncommittal, whereas it is
rather precisely in the meaning of these concepts and the “how” of their inter-
preting that everything is really decided. Mere observation does not give us what
it wants to, namely, the possibility of radical reexamination, decision and, what is
synonymous with these, an intense consciousness of the methodological necessity
of questioning. We can set genuine self-reflection free in a meaningful way only
when it is there to be set free, and it is there for us only when it has been rigor-
ously awoken. Moreover, it can be genuinely awoken only if the Other is in a cer-
tain way relentlessly compelled to engage in reflection and thereby sees that one’s
appropriation of the objects treated in philosophy is inseparably bound up with a
certain rigor in the actualization of method. All sciences fall short of this rigor,
102 SUPPLEMENTS
since in the sciences it is only the demand for objectivity that is important,
whereas in philosophy what belongs together with the matters treated is the phi-
losophizing individual and (his) notorious poverty. One can call something to the
attention of another and compel him to engage in reflection only by traveling a
stretch of the path oneself.
Jaspers might be able to justify his having allowed the problem of method
to recede into the background by pointing out that he did not endeavor to pro-
vide a “general psychology” in his investigations. Certainly all problems cannot
be dealt with in one fell swoop, but in fundamental investigations dealing with
principles, the successive treatment of problems is no mere juxtaposition of them.
Any individual problem in philosophy bears within itself directives for us to fol-
low forward and backward into contexts of principles. It is a sign precisely of
Jaspers’ misunderstanding and undervaluation of the real problem of method
that he approaches problems in psychology of worldviews under the assumption
that this psychology is a separate science. He fails to see that “general psychology”
and “psychology of worldviews” cannot be separated from each other in this way,
and that both of these together cannot be separated from fundamental problems
in philosophy.
Though Jaspers has only gathered up and depicted what “is there,” he has
nonetheless gone beyond mere classification by bringing together in a new way
what has already been available to us, and this must be evaluated positively as a
real advance. However, if it is to be capable of effectively stimulating and chal-
lenging contemporary philosophy, his method of mere observation must evolve
into an “infinite process” of radical questioning that always includes itself in its
questions and preserves itself in them.
APPENDIX
Familiarity with Jaspers’ book is assumed. A detailed report has been avoided
because this book does not, in a good sense, allow itself to be reported on with-
out simply paraphrasing its different parts. Otherwise the clarity Jaspers has
striven for and fully attained in many parts would be missing from the reader’s
representation and understanding of his book. This also is why certain changes
in the various parts of the book that have turned out to be rather sprawling would
be welcome in a new edition. These parts could remain as they are, if only Jaspers
would show us in his subsequent investigations that a clear, preliminary presen-
tation of the phenomena in question is really already a head start for the philo-
sophical explication that follows.
But one change or another may very well be apropos in the following areas.
1. The Introduction (pp. 1–31) can be left out altogether without this
impairing the reader’s understanding of the body of the book, or else it must be
rewritten and limited to §1, §2, and the section from p. 31 to p. 37. The latter
belongs among the best parts of the book, and it makes possible a more funda-
mental understanding and analysis of principles. It is only in a fundamental

investigation of principles that §3 (pp. 14–31) could be developed in a way that
is appropriate to the sense of the phenomena in question.
2. It would be more germane to the subject matter of the book if chapter 3
(Types of Mental Life) were placed at the beginning, and if chapter 1 (Attitudes)
and chapter 2 (Worldviews) also were allowed to emerge as it were from out of the
“vital forces” that are presented in chapter 3. Jaspers characterizes these attitudes
and worldviews as “emanations” (189) of vital forces. It would be even more effec-
tive to organize chapter 3 and “divide it up” into parts in such a way that chapter
1 and chapter 2 were taken up and contained right in the middle of it.
3. It would be more in accordance with the way Jaspers actually proceeds in
his book if the methodological expression “psychology of understanding” were
specified as a “constructive psychology of understanding” (“constructive” is meant
here in a positive sense as a formation of types that draws these types out of intu-
itive understanding and is actualized and developed in a manner always appropri-
ate to such understanding). The problem of understanding has been left undis-
cussed in our critical observations, because such questions remain unripe for
discussion as long as the problem of the historical, roughly indicated in our “com-
ments,” has not been laid hold of at its roots and lifted up into the center of philo-
sophical problems. The same goes for the notion of “ideas as driving forces.”
This page intentionally left blank.
Chapter Eight
The Problem of Sin in Luther (1924)
Prof. Heidegger proceeded roughly as follows.

The problem of sin will be treated not insofar as it is an object of religious
reflection but rather as a theological problem, and it is from the point of view of
this question that Luther’s theology will then be examined.
The object of theology is God. The theme of theology is man in the how
of his being-placed before God. But the being of man is at the same time also a
being in the world, and there exists for him also the whole problem of the world.
Now Luther followed a particular fundamental direction of theological ques-
tioning, one proceeding directly from sin. Thus our question reads like this:
What does the word “sin” mean when the relation of man to God is being dis-
cussed as a theological problem? This problem is closely connected with the ques-
tion of man’s original state (iustitia originalis [original righteousness]). What is
asked about here is the being of man at the moment he emerged from the hand
of God.
Man must, on the one hand, be regarded as the summum bonum [highest
good] of creation. On the other hand, he must be so created that the Fall and the
being of sin are possible and are not a burden falling on God. And the idea of
See pp. 8, 31 for bibliographic and other background information on this transcript
of Heidegger’s two-part lecture from the start of his Marburg Period, which was presented
in Rudolf Bultmann’s theology seminar “The Ethics of St. Paul.”
105
106 SUPPLEMENTS
redemption is indeed dependent on the way original sin and the Fall are viewed.
The sense and essence of any theology are to be read off in light of iustitia orig-
inalis. The more one fails to recognize the radicalness of sin, the more redemp-
tion is made little of, and the more God’s becoming man in the Incarnation loses
its necessity. The fundamental tendency in Luther is found in this manner: the
corruptio [corruption] of the being of man can never be grasped radically
enough—and he said this precisely in opposition to Scholasticism, which in
speaking of corruptio always minimized it.
It was now necessary to show:
1. that the tendency toward this problem was already alive in Luther’s early period,
2. that the later Luther also displays the same tendency.
1. “Quaestio de viribus [et voluntate hominis sine gratia]” [The Question of

Man’s Capacity and Will without Grace] from the year 1516.1
Here Luther does not see sin as the accumulation of errors but rather
draws attention to affectus [affect], that is, to the mode of man’s being-placed in
relation to things, to the being-displaced and being-horrified [Entsetztsein] by
them that arises from his clinging to them. Man is seized by a horror [horror]
that is based in quaerere iustitiam suam [seeking his righteousness]. There thus
arises desperatio spiritualis [spiritual despair], despair before God not because of
a mass of sins but because of the affectus horrens peccatum [affect of being horri-
fied at sin]—and sin is something defined by a very particular kind of being-
placed in relation to the world. The fundamental requirement for all theology is
thus to interpret man’s being in the world in such a way that he can get out of
this being and come to God. Thus this being may not be presented as something
good, for here he does not learn to love God; rather, man must be brought to
the point where he grasps his being as a persisting in the world that affords not
glories but adversities. God has in His mercy shattered man’s quaerere suam
iustitiam [seeking his righteousness], so that he now knows “I have nothing to
expect from the world.” Thus Luther puts the emphasis on the affectus subtilis-
sime carnalis [simplest affect of the flesh] and arrives at a proposition quite the
reverse of Scholasticism: corruptio amplificanda est [corruption is something to
be amplified].2
2. “Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam” [”Disputation against Scholastic

Theology”] of 1517.3
a. Thesis 17: Man cannot of himself want God to be God; rather, man
wants to be God. And this is precisely the essence of sin: velle se esse deum et deum
non esse deum [to want himself to be God and God not to be God].4
THE PROBLEM OF SIN IN LUTHER (1924) 107
b. Thesis 25: Hope comes not from works but from suffering.5
c. Thesis 30: On the part of man nothing precedes grace except rebellion
against grace. The possibility of the existence of grace does not lie in him.6
d. Thesis 37: All human action is presumptuous and sinful.7 These asser-
tions distinguish Luther from Aristotle and the whole of Greek ontology, so that
he can say in Thesis 50: Totus Aristoteles ad theologiam est tenebrae ad lucem [The
whole of Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light].8
3. The Heidelberg Disputation of 1518.9

Here Luther very clearly characterizes the task of theology by contrasting
two theological points of view: The first is theologia gloriae, quae invisibilia Dei
ex operibus intellecta conspicit (th. 22)10 et dicti malum bonum et bonum malum
(th. 21)11 [the theology of glory, which sees the invisible things of God in works
as perceived by man and calls evil good and good evil]. Opposite this stands the
theologia crucis [theology of the cross], which takes its point of departure only
from the actual matter (dicit id quod res est [says what the matter actually is]).12
The Scholastic takes cognizance of Christ only subsequently, after having
defined the being of God and the world. This Greek point of view of the Scholas-
tic makes man proud; he must first go to the cross before he can say id quod res
est [what the matter actually is].13
In the Heidelberg Disputation, we surely find the most pointed formula-
tion of Luther’s position in his early period. The demonstration that the same
tendency is maintained in Luther’s theology even in his later period will come in
the next meeting.
(Continuation of Prof. Heidegger’s paper [on Feb. 21, 1924]).
II
1. What is useful for assessing the related problems of sin and iustitia originalis
in Luther is an examination of these problems in Scholasticism. Here the
response to the question of iustitia originalis is dependent on the basic view that
the Church is the authority in matters of faith. But it can be this only insofar as
it is a divine institution—something that needs to be demonstrated rationaliter
[rationally]. What is necessary for this is the proof of (1) the existence of God and
(2) the possibility of a historical Revelation that is attested in inspired Scripture
and carried forward in the Church that is based on it. In order to be able to carry
out these demonstrations, it is presupposed that man of himself, outwardly, pos-
sesses the possibility of knowledge of God. This can be assumed only if the
natura hominis [nature of man] is integra [unspoilt], even after the Fall.
If this state is the natural one, then man must have possessed another knowl-
edge of God, a higher one, before the Fall on account of a donum superadditum
108 SUPPLEMENTS
[superadded gift] which, as is well known, consists of the three theological virtues.14
Man loses this “more” through sin but not—and this is the decisive thing—his nat-
ural being-placed before God.
Luther rebels against this and here appeals to experientia [experience]. The
natura hominis is corrupta [corrupt]. The being of man as such is itself sin. Sin is
nothing other than the antithesis to faith, where faith means: standing (being
placed) before God. Thus sin is not an affixing of moral attributes to man but
rather his real core. In Luther, sin is a concept of existence, something that his
emphasis on affectus already points to.
Besides this fundamental definition of man, Luther turns his attention to
the movement that sin as a mode of the being of man bears in itself: One sin
begets another and drags man down ever deeper. The real sin is incredulitas, i.e.,
unbelief, aversio dei [turning away from God]. What is included in it, insofar as
man is in this being-turned-away from God placed into the world, is a pavor
[fear]. And with this in further succession: fuga [flight], odium [hatred], despera-
tio [despair], impoenitentia [impenitence].
2. What was stated above can be elucidated with Luther’s lectures on Genesis
from 1544 (Erlangen edition app. exeg. lat. tom. I).15
a. The difference of opinion comes to expression clearly on p. 208: Scholas-
tici disputant, quod justitia originalis non fuerit connaturalis, sed ceu ornatus
quidam additus homini tanquam donum. . . . [The Scholastics argue that original
righteousness was not a part of man’s nature but, like some adornment, was
added to man as a gift. . . .] Luther against this: . . . justitiam . . . fuisse vere nat-
uralem, ita ut natura Adae esset diligere Deum, credere Deo, agnoscere Deum . . .
[righteousness . . . was truly part of his nature, so that it was Adam’s nature to
love God, to believe God, to know God. . . .]16
The conclusion coming from this Scholastic definition of iustitia originalis
would be that if it does not belong to the real essence of man, then neither does
sin.17 However: fugiamus deliria ista . . . et sequamur potius experientiam [let us
shun those ravings . . . and rather follow experience].18 Experientia . . . docet nos
de his calamitatibus . . . [experience teaches us about this calamity],19 i.e., defectus
[loss] which arose from sin. But we recognize its entire magnitude only when
from a correlative point of view we see God as God. For only then do we under-
stand what aversio Dei, turning away [from God], means.
b. The Fall through sin: . . . inveniemus summam et acerrimam omnium ten-
tationum hanc fuisse, quia serpens invadit ipsam voluntatem Dei bonam, et nititur
probare, Dei voluntatem erga hominem non esse bonam. Ipsam igitur imaginem
Dei . . . petit. [. . . we shall find that this was the greatest and severest of all temp-
tations; for the serpent directs its attack at God’s good will and dares to prove that
God’s will toward man is not good. Therefore it launches its attack against the
very image of God. . . .]20 Thus Adam and Eve are not tempted by a particular,
THE PROBLEM OF SIN IN LUTHER (1924) 109
specific sin but are stirred up against God himself and his Word. And their sin
consists in the fact that they lend an ear to a Word that is not God’s Word, that
they let themselves get involved in any way in a disputatio [dispute]. Through
this, they lose their original being before God.
c. The movement of sin: Primum enim cadit homo ex fide in incredulitatem
et inoboedientiam: incredulitatem autem sequitur pavor, odium et fuga Dei, quae
desperationem et impoenitentiam secum adducunt. [First man falls from faith into
unbelief and disobedience. Then fear, hatred, and flight from God, and these
bring with them despair and impenitence.]21 God is unbearable to man; man is
frightened by Him even in the quiet rustling of leaves, since he is shaken and
unsettled in his own proper being.22 He flees from God and thereby demonstrates
his intellectum depravatum [depraved intellect]. An non enim extrema stultitia
est . . . Deum fugere, quem non possunt fugere? [Or is it not the height of folly . . .
to flee from God, from whom they are unable to flee?]23 And he flees because he
does not see that sin itself means the vera discessio a Deo, nec oportuit majorem
fugam addere [actual withdrawal from God, and it would not have been neces-
sary to add any further flight].24
Et tamen haec (stultitia and pavor) sunt quasi praeludia. [And yet these (folly
and fear) are, as it were, preludes.]25 The real meaning of sin is this: He who flees
once flees in such a way that he constantly wishes to distance himself further, he
fugit in aeternum [keeps on fleeing forever].26 And Adam flees excusando men-
daciter peccatum, peccatum peccato addit. . . . Sic peccatum pondere suo semper
secum trahit aliud peccatum, et facit aeternam ruinam [by excusing his sin with
lies, heaping sin upon sin. . . . Thus sin by its own gravitation always draws with
it another sin and brings on eternal ruin].27
Adam has the presumption to make an excusatio [excuse], he perstat in
excusatione [persists in his excuse].28 He has the presumption to make an accusa-
tio et culpam a se in Creatorem transfert [accusation and transfers his guilt from
himself to the Creator].29 Non enim possunt (peccatores) aliter, quam Deum
accusare et se excusare. [They (sinners) cannot do otherwise than accuse God and
excuse themselves.]30 That is the real despair.
And it goes still further: in her excuse, Eve aims her accusation at God as
creator of the serpent and thereby characterizes him as auctor peccati [the origi-
nator of sin]. Ita ex peccato humano ficit peccatum plane diabolicum, et increduli-
tas vertitur in blasphemiam, inoboedientia in contumeliam Creatoris. [Thus out of
a human sin comes a sin that is clearly demonic; unbelief turns into blasphemy,
disobedience into contempt of the Creator.]31 Hic ultimus gradus peccati est. [This
is the last step of sin.]32
d. And nonetheless the situation of man in which he distances himself
from God is a relation to God that shows itself in a certain looking back on man’s
part in the sense that God is rejected as auctor peccati, in the sense that man says:
“God is not God.”
110 SUPPLEMENTS
And this situation of man is effected by God, insofar as it is the summa gra-
tia [highest grace]33 that he did not remain silent after the Fall but loquitur
[speaks]. What also needs to be taken into account is how the being of God is
always conceived of as verbum [word], and the fundamental relation of man to
him as audire [hearing].
e. What is evident from these remarks is how Luther’s orientation regarding
sin is totally different vis-à-vis Scholasticism, and how he understands Scholasti-
cism as a fundamental antithesis to faith. In theological terms, this means: “One
can understand faith only when one understands sin, and one can understand sin
only when one has a correct understanding of the being of man itself.”
Contemporary Protestant theology does not generally exhibit the above-
sketched understanding of sin and of the relation of God and man involved here,
and when it is once again explained in the latest theological movement, one
underestimates it and fights against it out of a fear of what this understanding
amounts to, betraying thereby the principle of Protestantism.
f. A remark about Catholicism and Protestantism in Kierkegaard’s journal
of 1852 (II, p. 284ff.) can be useful in clarifying what was meant above. Its sense
is briefly the following:
Protestantism is only a corrective to Catholicism and cannot stand alone as
normative, just as Luther is Luther only on the spiritual basis of Catholicism. If
Catholicism degenerates, then “surface sanctity” arises—if Protestantism degen-
erates, then “spiritless worldliness” arises. In the process, what would appear in
Protestantism is a refinement that cannot develop in Catholicism. For in the lat-
ter, when a representative of its principle degenerates into worldliness, then he
brings upon himself the odium [disgrace] of worldliness—when a representative
of Protestantism degenerates into worldliness, then he is praised for his godliness
and frankness. And this is the case, because in Catholicism the universal presup-
position exists “that we human beings are really scoundrels”; “the principle of
Protestantism has a special presupposition: a human being who sits there in mor-
tal anxiety—in fear and trembling and great spiritual trial.”34
Chapter Nine
Phenomenological Interpretations
in Connection with Aristotle
An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation (1922)
The following investigations serve the purpose of a history of ontology and logic.
As interpretations, they stand under certain conditions of interpreting and
understanding. The subject matter making up the content of an interpretation,
i.e., the thematic object in the “how” of its being-interpreted, is able to speak for
itself in a manner fitting for it only when the particular hermeneutical situation
at the time, and every interpretation is relative to such a hermeneutical situation,
has been made available by being sketched out in a sufficiently clear manner. All
See pp. 8, 29 for bibliographic and other background information on this draft intro-
duction to a planned book on Aristotle from the last years of Heidegger’s Early Freiburg
Period. Insertions by the translator have been placed in brackets, those by the German edi-
tor in the symbols “{ },” and those by Heidegger within quotations in the symbols “< >.”
References to Aristotle’s works have been filled out, missing references added, and mis-
takes in the German edition regarding the spelling of Greek words corrected. For the con-
venience of the reader, standard English translations of terms and passages from Aristotle
also have been added, though often in modified form, from The Basic Works of Aristotle,
ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
111
112 SUPPLEMENTS
interpretations have, in each case in accord with the particular domain of their
subject matter and their knowledge-claims about it: (1) an initial position of look-
ing they have more or less explicitly assumed and secured; (2) motivated by this,
a direction of looking in which is defined the “as-what” (in terms of which the
object is to be conceptually grasped in advance) and the “toward-which” [das
“woraufhin”] (with respect to which [auf das] the object is to be interpretively laid
out);1 and (3) demarcated by the position and direction of looking, the scope of
looking within which their particular claims about the objectivity of their inter-
pretation move at any particular time.
The possible actualization of interpretation and understanding and the
appropriation of the object emerging from this actualization will be transparent
to the degree that the hermeneutical situation, in which and for the sake of which
the interpretation temporalizes and unfolds itself,2 is elucidated from the above
points of view. A hermeneutics of the situation has to work out the transparency
of its situation at the particular time and bring this hermeneutical transparency
right into the starting point of interpretation.
The situation of interpretation, i.e., of the appropriation and under-
standing of the past, is always the living situation of the present. As a past that
is appropriated in understanding, history itself grows in comprehensibility the
more primordial one’s resolute choice and working out of the hermeneutical sit-
uation is. The past opens itself up only in accord with the degree of resoluteness
and power of the capacity to disclose it that the present has available to it. The
primordiality of a philosophical interpretation is determined by the particular
competence and sureness in which the philosophical research in question main-
tains itself and its questions. The conception this research has of itself and of the
concreteness of its problems also already decides its basic orientation to the his-
tory of philosophy. What for these philosophical problems constitutes the
proper domain of objects that should be interrogated—this determines the
direction of looking into which one inevitably places the past. This reading into
the past is not only not contrary to the sense of historical knowing, but it is in
fact the basic condition for getting the past to speak to us at all. All of those
interpretations in the field of the history of philosophy and likewise in other
fields which, in contrasting themselves with “constructions” employed in the
history of problems, consider it crucial that one not read anything into the texts
will inevitably also themselves be caught in the act of reading something into
these texts, only they will be doing so without being informed about it and by
using conceptual resources taken from utterly disparate sources over which they
have no control. One mistakes this absence of worry3 about what one is “actu-
ally doing” and this ignorance about the conceptual resources one employs for
a suspension of all subjectivity.
The elucidation of the hermeneutical situation of the following interpreta-
tions, and through this the demarcation of their thematic domain, is developed
from the following fundamental conviction. In accord with the basic character of
PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS 113
its being, philosophical research is something a “time,” as long as it is not merely

concerned with it as a matter of education, can never borrow from another time.
Such research also is something that—and this is how it needs to understand
itself and the nature of what it can possibly achieve in human Dasein—will never
want to step forward with the claim that it be allowed to and is able to relieve
future times of the burden of having to worry about radical questioning. The
possibility that now past philosophical research will have an effect on the future
of research can never consist in its results as such, but rather is rooted in the pri-
mordiality of questioning which is attained and concretely worked out in each
particular case, through which past research can become a present in ever-new
ways as a model that evokes problems.
[THE INITIAL POSITION OF LOOKING]
The object of philosophical research is human Dasein insofar as it is interrogated

with respect to the character of its being. This basic direction of philosophical
questioning is not externally added and attached to the interrogated object, facti-
cal life. Rather, it needs to be understood as an explicit taking up of a basic move-
ment of factical life. In this movement, life is in such a way that in the concrete
temporalizing of its being, it is anxiously concerned about its being, even when it
goes out of its way to avoid itself. A characteristic of the being of factical life is that
it finds itself hard to bear. The most unmistakable manifestation of this is the fact
that factical life has the tendency to make itself easy for itself. In finding itself hard
to bear, life is difficult in accord with the basic sense of its being, not in the sense
of a contingent feature. If it is the case that factical life authentically is what it is
in this being-hard and being-difficult, then the genuinely fitting way of gaining
access to it and truly safekeeping it can only consist in making itself hard for itself.
This is the only duty philosophical research can be required to fulfill, unless of
course it wants to miss its object completely. All making it easy, all the seductive
compromising of needs, all the metaphysical tranquilizers prescribed for problems
having been for the most part derived from mere book learning—the basic inten-
tion of all of this is from the start to give up with regard to the task that must in
each case be carried out, namely, bringing the object of philosophy into view,
grasping it, and indeed preserving it. Accordingly, the history of philosophical
research will be there as object in a relevant sense for present research on it when
and only when the latter aims to provide not diverse historical curiosities but
rather radically simple monuments that evoke thinking, i.e., only when it does not
divert understanding within the present into the goal of merely enlarging knowl-
edge about the past but rather forces the present back upon itself in order to inten-
sify its questionability. However, and especially for a present in whose character of
being historical consciousness has become constitutive, worrying about history
and appropriating it in the above manner means: understanding radically what a
particular kind of past philosophical research put forward at a particular time in
114 SUPPLEMENTS
and for its situation in worrying itself with the basic things it did. Understanding
consists not merely in taking up the past for the sake of a knowledge that merely
takes note of it but rather in repeating in an original manner what is understood
in the past in terms of and for the sake of one’s very own situation. This under-
standing happens least when one takes over from the past certain theorems,
propositions, basic concepts, and principles and updates them in one way or
another. When it uses models from the past, and what is at issue here is itself, it
subjects these models from the ground up to the sharpest critique and develops
them for the sake of a potentially fruitful opposition. Factical Dasein always is
what it is only as one’s own Dasein and never as the Dasein in general of some
universal humanity. Expending care on the latter could only ever be an illusory
task. Critique of history is always only critique of the present. Such critique
should not naively be of the opinion that it is able to calculate for history how it
would have happened, if only. . . . Rather, it needs to keep its eye on the present
and see to it that it raises questions in accord with the kind of originality it is able
to attain. History gets negated not because it is “false,” but because it still remains
effective in the present without, however, being able to be an authentically appro-
priated present.
Establishing the basic historical orientation of interpretation develops from
an explication of the sense of philosophical research. We already have defined the
object of this research in an indicative manner as factical human Dasein as such.
It is from this its object that a concrete sketch of the philosophical problematic
needs to be drawn. Thus what becomes necessary here is that we bring into relief
in a preliminary fashion the specific characteristics of the object, factical life. And
we need to do this not only because factical life is the object of philosophical
research, but also because this research itself constitutes a particular how of facti-
cal life. As such, it co-temporalizes and helps unfold the concrete and historically
particular being of life itself, and it does this in its very actualization and not first
through some subsequent “application” to life. The possibility of this co-tempo-
ralizing is based on the fact that philosophical research is the explicit actualizing
of a basic movement of factical life and constantly maintains itself within it.
In our indication of the hermeneutical situation, the structures of the
object “factical life” will not be sketched out concretely and presented in their
constitutive interrelation. Rather, by enumerating only the most constitutive ele-
ments of facticity, what we mean by this term will be brought into view and made
available as a forehaving for such concrete investigation.
The confusing plurivocity of the word “life” and its usages should not be a
reason for simply casting it aside. One would thereby forfeit the possibility of
pursuing the various directions in the meaning of this word that are proper to it
and alone make it possible to reach the respective object meant in each. In this
regard, we must basically keep in view the fact that the term zwhv, vita [life],
points to a basic phenomenon that the interpretations of human Dasein in Greek
thought, the Old Testament, New Testament Christianity, and Graeco-Christian
thought made central. The plurivocity of this term’s meaning is rooted in the
meant object itself. In philosophy, the uncertainty of a term’s meaning can only
be either an occasion for eliminating it or, if it turns out to be based in the object
as necessary, an occasion for making it into an explicitly appropriated and trans-
parent uncertainty. Such a focus on plurivocity (pollacw`~ legovmenon) [that
which is said in many ways (cf. Met. 1003a33ff.)] is not a mere poking around
in the meanings of isolated words but rather an expression of a radical tendency
to gain access to the meant objects themselves and to make available the motiva-
tional source of the different ways they are meant.
The basic sense of the movement of factical life is caring (curare). Life’s
“being out for something” in which it is directed toward and cares about it is such
that the toward-which of this care, namely, its historically particular world, also
is there. The movement of caring is characterized by the fact that factical life goes
about its dealings with the world. The toward-which of care is the with-which of
these dealings. The sense of the being-real and being-there [Dasein] of the world
is based in and defined by its character of being the with-which of dealings
marked by caring. The world is there as always already having been taken up in
care in one way or another. In accord with the possible directions of care, the
world is articulated into the environing world, the with-world, and the self-world.
Accordingly, caring is the care for one’s livelihood, occupation, pleasures, remain-
ing undisturbed, not dying, being familiar with . . . , knowing about . . . , and
arranging one’s life with respect to its ultimate goals.
The movement of concern displays many different modes of actualizing
itself and of being-related to the with-which of its dealings: for example, tinker-
ing with . . . , preparing for . . . , production of . . . , guaranteeing by . . . , mak-
ing use of . . . , utilizing for . . . , taking possession of . . . , safekeeping of . . . ,
and loss of. . . . The with-which corresponding to each of these modes, that is,
the with-which of dealings directed to a routine task and performing it, stands at
any particular time within a definite kind of acquaintance and familiarity. These
dealings characterized by caring always have their with-which within a definite
kind of seeing of it. Circumspection is at work in these dealings, guiding them, co-
temporalizing them, and playing its part in unfolding them. Caring takes the
form of a looking around and seeing, and as this circumspective caring it is at the
same time anxiously concerned about developing its circumspection, that is,
about securing and expanding its familiarity with the objects of its dealings. In
circumspection, the with-which of dealings is in advance grasped as . . . , oriented
to . . . , interpreted and laid out as. . . . Objects are there as objects having been
signified in this or that way and as such pointed in this or that direction. Here
the world is being encountered4 in this character of significance. Dealings char-
acterized by caring not only have the possibility of giving up this care for gearing
objects in the world in certain directions but rather, on account of a primordial
tendency in the movement of factical life, they have an inclination to do so. In
this blockage of the tendency to pursue dealings characterized by concern, these
116 SUPPLEMENTS
dealings are transformed into a mere looking around without any view to direct-
ing oneself to routine tasks and gearing things in certain directions. Such look-
ing around takes on the character of merely looking at. . . . In the care of this look-
ing, i.e., in curiosity (cura [care], curiositas [curiosity]), the world is there for one
not as the with-which of dealings directed to routine tasks but solely from the
point of view of its look, its appearance. The looking becomes more fully actual-
ized when one proceeds to define the world looked at and as such can organize
itself into the form of science. Thus science is a mode of dealings with the world
temporalized and unfolded by factical life itself and concerned with looking at
the world. As the movement of going about these dealings, science is a mode of
the being of factical life and plays a part in shaping its Dasein. The inventory of
ways of looking at the world, i.e., points of view, obtained at any particular time
(i.e., the definition of contexts of objects in the world with regard to how they
look) is something that has accrued to the circumspection out of which it has
grown. Here looking around actualizes itself in the mode of addressing and dis-
cussing the objects it deals with. The world is always being encountered in a par-
ticular manner of having-been-addressed, i.e., of an address that has made cer-
tain claims about it (lovgo~).
In releasing itself from its tendencies to direct itself to its routine tasks and
perform them, going about dealings takes a break and makes a sojourn. Looking at
the world becomes an autonomous form of dealings with it. As such, this looking
becomes, in holding itself back from its work, a sojourning among objects for the
sake of defining them. Objects are originally there for one as objects having sig-
nificance, whereas objects in the sense of mere things and facts first emerge from
the world as it is factically encountered (i.e., out of what has significance) within
a multistage process of theorizing directed to the world in a particular manner.
Factical life moves at any time within a certain state of having-been-inter-
preted that has been handed down to it, and it has reworked or worked out anew.
Circumspection makes the world available to life as having been interpreted on
the basis of those points of view within which it is encountered and awaited as
an object of anxious concern, arranged in the forms of tasks, and sought as a
refuge to which one can flee. These points of view, which are for the most part
available in an inexplicit manner and which factical life has more often than not
simply slipped into through habit as opposed to having explicitly appropriated
them, sketch out in advance the paths on which the movement of caring can
actualize itself. The interpretation of the world is factically also the interpretation
that life itself stands in. In it is also laid down the directions in which life takes
itself up into its care. In other words, what is also established in it is the particu-
lar sense the Dasein of life has, i.e., the “as-what” and the “how” in which human
beings maintain themselves within their own forehaving.
The movement of care is not a process running its course on its own over
and against the world that is there for it. The world is there in life and for life.
However, it is not there in the sense of a mere being-thought-about and being-
observed. This mode of the being-there of the world is temporalized and

unfolded only when, in the movement of its going about those dealings charac-
terized by concern, factical life takes a break and sojourns. This being-there of the
world—which as actuality and reality, or indeed conceived of in terms of the
objectivity of nature that has been stripped of all significance, usually is thought
to provide the necessary point of departure for epistemological and ontological
problems—is what it is only as having developed from a certain taking a break
and sojourning. This sojourning is as such a sojourning in and for the basic move-
ment of those dealings characterized by concern.
And as for this concern, there is more to it than that it is related to its
world generally and in an original intentionality. The movement of concern is
not an indifferent actualizing, one that is of such a kind that by means of it things
simply happen in life and as if life itself were a process. What lives within the
movement of caring is its inclination toward the world, and it takes the form of
a propensity toward becoming absorbed in the world and letting itself be taken
along by the world. This propensity of the anxious concern of life is the expres-
sion of a basic factical tendency in life toward falling away from itself and, as
included in this, falling into the world and itself falling into ruin. Terminologi-
cally, we can describe this basic characteristic of the movement of caring as “the
inclination of factical life toward falling” (or in abbreviated form, simply as
“falling into . . .” ), and we have thereby at the same time provided an indication
of the directional sense and the intentional toward-which of the tendency of car-
ing. Falling should not be understood as an objective happening or as simply
“occurring” in life but rather as an intentional how. This propensity [Hang] is the
most profound fate [Verhängnis] that life factically has to endure within itself.
The how of having to endure itself in this manner, i.e., the way this fate “is,”
must be approached along with this fate itself as a constitutive factor of facticity.
This characteristic of movement is not an evil feature of life appearing
from time to time and able to be eradicated in more progressive, happier times
of human culture. This is so little the case that such approaches to human Dasein
in terms of an attainable perfection and a paradisiacal naturality are themselves
only extensions of this very inclination toward falling into the world. Here one
closes one’s eyes to the ownmost character of movement belonging to life and
views life in a worldly manner as an object of dealings able to be produced in
some ideal form. That is, one views it as the toward-which of simple concern.
That factical life in its inclination toward falling arrives at this worldly
interpretation of itself gives expression to a basic characteristic of such move-
ment: namely, it tempts life insofar as it spreads out before it and puts in its way
possibilities (drawn from the world) of making things easy for itself in an ideal-
istic manner and thereby missing itself. As tempting, the inclination toward
falling is at the same time tranquilizing, i.e., it holds factical life fast in the cir-
cumstances of its fallenness, so that life speaks of these circumstances and con-
cernfully refines them as though they were situations of unworried security and
118 SUPPLEMENTS
the most ideal possibilities of human activity. (In contrast to circumstances, the
situation of factical life means the stand taken by life in which it has made itself
transparent to itself in its falling and has, in worrying about itself in a concrete
manner at the particular time, seized upon itself and stirred itself in its possibility
of a motion running counter to the falling of its care.) As tranquilizing, the ten-
dency toward falling that manifests itself in the manner of temptation is alienat-
ing. That is, in being absorbed in the world it concerns itself with, factical life
becomes more and more alienated from itself, and the movement of caring that
has been left to its own devices and comes before itself as the occurrence of life
increasingly takes away the factical possibility that life can, in worrying about
itself,5 bring itself into view and take itself up as the goal to return to and appro-
priate. In the three characteristics of its motion, namely, being tempting, tran-
quilizing, and alienating, the tendency toward falling is the basic movement not
only of going about those dealings that gear things in certain directions and pro-
duce but also of circumspection itself and its possible autonomy, i.e., of looking
at and the addressing and interpreting that define and provide knowledge. Facti-
cal life not only takes itself up and cares for itself as a significant occurrence
standing before it and as worldly importance but also speaks the language of the
world whenever speaking about itself.
What lies in the inclination toward falling is the fact that factical life,
which is in each case properly the factical life of the individual, is for the most
part not lived as such. Rather, it moves within a certain averageness that belongs
to its caring, its going about its dealings, its circumspection, and its understand-
ing of the world. This averageness is that of the reigning publicness 6 at any par-
ticular time, of the social environs, the dominant trends, the “just like the oth-
ers.” It is this “everyone”7 that factically lives the life of the individual: everyone
is concerned about such and such, everyone sees it, judges it to be so, everyone
enjoys it, everyone does it, asks about it. Factical life is lived by the “no one,” to
which all life devotes its concern and apprehensions. Life is always mired in inau-
thentic traditions and customs of one sort or another. Out of them develop cer-
tain yearnings, and in them the paths along which such yearnings are to be sat-
isfied have been mapped out for one’s concern. Life conceals itself from itself in
the world in which it is absorbed and in the averageness in which it goes about
its dealings. In the tendency toward falling, life goes out of its way to avoid itself.
Factical life itself gives the clearest attestation to this basic movement in the way
it approaches death.
If in accord with the basic character of its being factical life is not a process,
so death is not a cessation in the sense of the termination of this process that will
turn up at one time or another. Death is imminent for factical life, standing before
it as an inevitability. Life is in such a way that its death is always in one way or
another there for it, i.e., there as seen in one way or another, even if this takes the
form of pushing away and suppressing “the thought of death.” Death is given as
an object of care precisely in the fact that in the obstinacy of its imminence, it is
encountered as a how of life. The forced absence of worry about death in the car-
ing of life actualizes itself in a flight into worldly concerns and apprehensions.
However, this looking away from death is so little a seizing upon life that it rather
turns out to be an evasion of the life standing before it and of the authentic char-
acter of its being. Whether in the form of one’s worldly concerns and apprehen-
sions fleeing death, or in that of worrying oneself about it and laying hold of it,
having death imminently before one is a basic constitutive characteristic of fac-
ticity. When one has death before one as certain and lays hold of it as such, one’s
life becomes visible in itself. When death is in this manner, it gives to life a cer-
tain way of seeing itself and constantly leads it before its ownmost present and
past, a past that, burgeoning within life itself, comes toward it from behind it.
When time and again the attempt is made to define the basic characteris-
tics of the object, factical life, and of its being without having also taken death
and “having death imminently before one” as a fundamental starting point to
guide one’s approach to this problem, such an omission cannot be rectified merely
by a subsequent addition of these themes. The above-sketched problem of the
basic characteristics of the being of death, a problem absolutely constitutive for
ontology, has nothing to do with a metaphysics of immortality and its treatment
of the question of “what comes after death.” Since death as imminently before one
characteristically makes the present and past of one’s life visible, it is as such a
constituent moment of facticity at the same time the key phenomenon in which
the specific kind of “temporality” belonging to human Dasein is to be brought
into relief and explicated. It is on the basis of the sense of this temporality and not
at all through a formal analysis of concept-formation in historiography that the
basic sense of the historical needs to be defined.
The constitutive characteristics of facticity indicated above, namely, caring,
the tendency toward falling, and the how of having death imminently before one,
seem to contradict what we previously brought into relief as a basic characteris-
tic of factical life, namely, that it is a being for which what is at issue, what it
comes to, in its manner of temporalizing is its own being. But this only seems to
be the case. Whenever it goes out of its way to avoid itself, life is factically there
for itself. It is precisely in this “away from itself ” that life presents itself and pur-
sues its absorption in its worldly concerns and apprehensions. Like all other kinds
of movement of factical temporality, this “absorption in” has in itself a more or
less explicit, though unacknowledged view back to that before which it is in flight.
The before-which of its fleeing is life itself as the factical possibility of being
explicitly seized upon and stirred as an object one worries oneself about. All going
about dealings has its circumspection, and what such circumspection provides for
these dealings is a certain guiding foresight into their with-which and the kind of
authenticity it is possible to achieve at the particular time regarding it. The being
of life accessible in facticity is in itself such that it can be made visible and reached
only on the path of a detour through a motion running counter to the falling of
care. As the worry of life about not becoming lost, this countermotion is the way
120 SUPPLEMENTS
the possibility of seizing upon the being of life, stirring it, and authenticating it
is temporalized and unfolded. This be-ing itself, which is possible in and for fac-
tical life, can be described as its “existence.” Whenever factical life worries about
its existence, it finds itself on the path of a detour. The possibility of seizing upon
and stirring the being of life in its worry about itself is simultaneously the possi-
bility of failing to exist. Insofar as existence is possible for factical life at any par-
ticular time, but also in itself something life can fail at, it is in principle some-
thing that warrants questioning. The possibility of existence is always the
possibility of concrete facticity as a how of the temporalizing and unfolding of
this facticity in its temporality. The question of what will show up in such exis-
tence cannot in any sense be asked in direct and universal terms. Insight into exis-
tence itself can be gained only through that kind of actualizing in which factic-
ity is rendered questionable, i.e., through a concrete destruction of facticity at
some particular time with respect to the motives of its movement, its directions,
and what is available to it on a volitional level.
The motion running counter to the tendency toward falling should not be
interpreted as an escapist flight from the world. What is typical of all such flight
from the world is that it does not intend life in terms of its existential8 character.
That is, it does not seize upon and stir it up in its fundamental questionability
but rather imaginatively inserts it into a new world of tranquility. Worrying one-
self about existence changes nothing in the factical circumstances of one’s life at
the particular time. What is changed is the how of the movement of one’s life,
and this how can as such never become a matter of publicness and the “every-
one.” Here the concern and apprehension involved in going about one’s dealings
are such that in them one is worried about one’s self. And when in factical life
one worries about existence in this way, this is not a matter of brooding over one-
self in egocentric reflection. Rather, such worry is what it is only as a motion run-
ning counter to the tendency of life toward falling, i.e., it is what it is precisely
in the concrete movement of going about one’s dealings and of the concern
involved. Here the “counter to” as a “not” attests to a primordial achievement that
is constitutive on the level of being. In view of its constitutive sense, negation has
an original primacy over any position-taking. And this is because the character of
the being of human beings is factically defined by its falling, i.e., by its worldly
propensities. The sense of this primal fact itself and the sense of this factuality as
such can, if at all, only be interpreted within and relative to facticity insofar as it
has been seized upon and stirred. The actualization of having insight into life and
addressing it with respect to its existential possibility has the character of a worry
about life in which life is interpreted with respect to the sense of its being. “Fac-
ticity” and “existence” do not mean the same thing, and the factical character of
the being of life is not determined by existence. The latter is only one possibility
that temporalizes itself and unfolds itself in the being of life we have described as
“factical,” and this means that it is in facticity that the possibility of radically for-
mulating the problem of the being of life is centered.
If in the first place philosophy is not an artificial occupation that merely

accompanies life and deals with “universals” of one sort or another and arbitrar-
ily posited principles but rather is as a knowing that questions, that is, as research,
simply the explicit and genuine actualizing of the tendency toward interpretation
that belongs to the basic movements of life in which what is at issue is this life
itself and its being; and if secondly philosophy is set on bringing into view and
conceptually grasping factical life in terms of the decisive possibilities of its being,
i.e., if relying upon its own resources and not looking to the hustle and bustle of
worldviews, it has radically and clearly resolved to throw factical life back on itself
as this is possible in this factical life itself and to let it fend for itself in terms of
its own factical possibilities, i.e., if philosophy is in principle atheistic 9 and under-
stands such about itself—then it has resolutely chosen factical life with a view to
its facticity and, in acquiring it as an object for itself, it has preserved it in its fac-
ticity. The how of its research is the interpretation of the sense of this being
[Seinssinn] with respect to its basic categorial structures, i.e., the modes in which
factical life temporalizes itself, unfolds itself, and speaks with itself (kathgorei`n
[predicating in terms of categories]) in such temporalizing. As long as philo-
sophical research has understood, simply on the basis of the object it has seized
upon, that what this object entrusts it with as its topic of inquiry consists of those
primordial ontological conditions of the possibility of any worldview that can be
made visible only in the rigor of its research, it will have no need for the finery
of worldviews and the zealous care about not arriving too late for the turmoil of
some present times in which one wants to go along for the ride. These conditions
are not “logical forms.” Rather, understood as categories, they are possibilities of
the factical temporalizing and unfolding of existence that have been grasped in
their genuine availability.
The basic problem of philosophy concerns the being of factical life. In this
respect, philosophy is a fundamental ontology that deals with principles, so that this
ontology of facticity provides the particular specialized regional ontologies of the
world with a foundation for their problems and a clarification of the sense of
these problems. The basic problem of philosophy has to do with the being of fac-
tical life in the how of its being-addressed and being-interpreted at particular
times. In other words, as the ontology of facticity, philosophy is at the same time
the interpretation [Interpretation] of the categories of this addressing and inter-
preting [Auslegen], i.e., it is logic.
Ontology and logic need to be brought back to their original unity in the
problem of facticity and understood as offshoots of fundamental research into
principles that can be described as “the phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity.”
The interpretations of factical life found in the circumspection of caring
and the insight of worry are in each case concrete, and it is with a view to their
forehaving (the basic sense of being into which life places itself ) and with refer-
ence to their foreconception (the modes of addressing and discussing in which fac-
tical life converses with itself and speaks about itself ) that philosophical research
122 SUPPLEMENTS
needs to render these interpretations categorially transparent in the factical unity

of their temporalizing and unfolding of life. This hermeneutics is a phenomeno-
logical hermeneutics, i.e., the object making up its domain of research, namely,
factical life with respect to the how of its being and speaking, is thematically and
methodologically brought into view as a phenomenon. The structure of an object
that characterizes it as a phenomenon, i.e., intentionality in toto (being related
to . . . , the toward-which as such of the relation, the actualization of the relating
itself to . . . , the temporalizing and unfolding of the actualization, and the true
safekeeping of this temporalizing and unfolding), is none other than the struc-
ture of that object which has the character of being of factical life. Taken simply
as being related to . . . , intentionality is the first phenomenal characteristic of the
basic movement of life, i.e., of caring, that one can directly bring into relief. Phe-
nomenology itself is radical philosophical research, as it was when it first burst
onto the scene with Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Phenomenology has not been
seized upon and understood in its most central motives if, as happens in some
areas of phenomenological research itself, one sees in it only a philosophical
propaedeutic whose purpose is supplying clear concepts and with whose assis-
tance one is then supposed to set to work for the first time in actual philosophy—
as if one could clarify basic philosophical concepts on a descriptive level without
that fundamental orientation to objects that is central in philosophical problems
and needs to be constantly appropriated anew.
[THE DIRECTION OF LOOKING]
We have now given an indication of the initial position of looking to be adopted

by the following interpretations, insofar as they are phenomenological interpre-
tations and are for the sake of a history of ontology and logic. The idea of a phe-
nomenological hermeneutics of facticity includes within it the tasks of a formal
and material theory of objects and logic, a theory of science, a “logic of philoso-
phy,” a “logic of the heart,” and a logic of “pretheoretical and practical” thought.
And such is the case not because this “hermeneutics” is a collective term that
combines the above tasks but rather in consequence of its effective force as the
fundamental approach to all philosophical problems.
But we still have not yet gained an understanding of what historical inves-
tigations are supposed to accomplish for such a hermeneutics, why we are focus-
ing especially on Aristotle as a theme of investigation, and furthermore how this
investigation is to be carried out. The motivations for the particular directions of
looking we will be taking result from the concrete understanding gained in our
above-sketched initial position. What lies in the idea of facticity is that the gen-
uine object of research is in each case always authentic facticity (“authentic” is
being understood literally here as “one’s own” ), i.e., the facticity of one’s own
times and generation. Due to its tendency toward falling, factical life lives for the
most part in what is inauthentic, in what has been handed down to it, in what
has been transmitted and reported to it from the past, in what it has appropri-
ated and learned in an average way. Even what has been worked out in an origi-
nal manner as an authentic possession falls into averageness and publicness. It
loses the specific sense of its provenance out of its original situation and in this
free-floating manner enters into the common practices of the “everyone.” This
falling touches all of the dealings of factical life, all of its circumspection, and not
least of all its own actualization of its interpretation with respect to the forehav-
ing and foreconception of this interpretation. In the ways it formulates questions
and finds answers to them, philosophy too is situated in this movement of fac-
ticity, since it is only the explicit interpretation of factical life.
Accordingly, it is necessary for the philosophical hermeneutics of facticity
to begin within its factical situation by inserting itself into the particular state of
the having-been-interpreted of factical life given in advance for hermeneutics.
This having-been-interpreted initially supports hermeneutics and can never be
completely eradicated. According to what was said above about the tendency
toward falling effecting all interpretation, it is precisely “what is self-evident” in
this pregiven interpretation, i.e., what is not discussed in it, what is thought to
require no further explanation, which will turn out to be what inauthentically,
i.e., without being explicitly appropriated from out of its origins, sustains the
reigning effective force of pregiven problems and directions of questioning.
The addressing and interpreting of factical life actualized by factical life
itself allow the ways of seeing and speaking here to be given to them in advance
from objects in the world. Whenever human life, Dasein, the human being
becomes an object of inquiry and is defined in interpretation, this objectivity
stands within forehaving as a worldly occurrence, as “nature” (the psychical is
understood as nature, as are spirit and life in the analogous categorial articulation
involved here). That today we still speak of the “nature” of man, the “nature” of
the soul, and more generally the “nature of things,” and that we also discuss the
categories of this kind of objectivity in the same way, i.e., employing categories
developed from a particular kind of explication, namely, a particular way of look-
ing at “nature”—this has its motives in intellectual history. Even when the objects
in question are in principle no longer crudely spoken of as “substances” (a way of
speaking Aristotle was, one should add, far more removed from than is generally
taught) and interrogated in terms of their occult qualities, the interpretations of
life move nonetheless within basic concepts, starting points for questions, and
tendencies of explication that have sprung from experiences of objects we today
have for a long time no longer had available to us.
In its contemporary situation, philosophy moves inauthentically within
Greek conceptuality and, indeed, this conceptuality has been permeated by a
chain of diverse interpretations of it. The basic concepts of Greek philosophy
have lost their original expressive functions that were tailored to particular
regions of objects that were experienced in a particular manner. But in spite of all
of the analogizing and formalizing these basic concepts have undergone, a certain
124 SUPPLEMENTS
aspect of their provenance still survives. They still bear within themselves some-
thing of the genuine tradition of their original sense, insofar as one can point out
in them the way their sense is directed back to their source in certain objects.
When in its contemporary situation philosophy takes as its starting point the idea
of man, ideals of life, and notions of the being of human life, it moves within
points of departure in certain founding experiences temporalized and unfolded
in Greek ethics and, above all, in the Christian idea of man and human Dasein.
Even the views found in contemporary anti-Greek and anti-Christian trends
maintain themselves at bottom within these same directions and modes of inter-
pretation. Accordingly, insofar as the phenomenological hermeneutics of factic-
ity endeavors, in its interpretation, to play its part in helping the contemporary
situation with the possibility of its being appropriated in a radical manner, doing
this by calling attention to concrete categories and allowing them to be given in
advance, it sees itself directed to the task of loosening up the reigning state of tra-
ditional interpretation today with respect to its hidden motives and its unex-
pressed tendencies and modes of interpreting so that it can, by way of a decon-
structive regress, penetrate into the original motivational sources of these
explications. Hermeneutics carries out its tasks only on the path of destruction. If
philosophical research has really understood the kind of objectivity and being
belonging to its thematic toward-which (namely, the facticity of life), it takes the
form of “historical” knowing in the radical sense of the term. In philosophical
research, this destructive confrontation with its own history is not merely a sup-
plement for illustrating how things stood in earlier times, an occasional overview
of what others before us “came up with,” or an opportunity for depicting enter-
taining perspectives in world-history. Rather, destruction is the authentic path
upon which the present needs to encounter itself in its own basic movements,
doing this in such a way that what springs forth for it from its history is the per-
manent question of the extent to which it itself is worried about appropriating
radical possibilities of founding experiences and of their interpretation. It is by
means of this question that contemporary tendencies toward a radical logic of
origins and toward formulating the starting points of ontologies can gain a fun-
damental, critical clarification. Here the sort of critique already arising precisely
through the concrete actualization of destruction is thereby centered not on the
fact that we always stand within a tradition but rather on the how of our stand-
ing within a tradition. What we have not interpreted and brought to expression
in an original manner amounts to something we do not truly have in an authen-
tic safekeeping10 of it. And it is factical life itself (i.e., also the possibility of exis-
tence found in it) that needs to be taken up into, temporalized by, and unfolded
in this true safekeeping. Thus if this life relinquishes the originality of interpre-
tation, it relinquishes the possibility of ever coming into possession of itself in a
radical sense, i.e., the possibility of radically be-ing [zu sein] itself.
The tangled complexity of central, constitutive effective forces at play in the
being of our contemporary situation will, with respect to the problem of facticity,
be referred to in brief as the Graeco-Christian interpretation of life. This also will

include those contemporary anti-Greek and anti-Christian trends of interpretation
that are determined by and relative to the Graeco-Christian interpretation of life.
The idea of man and of human Dasein taken as the starting point in this Graeco-
Christian interpretation determined the philosophical anthropology of Kant and
that of German Idealism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel came out of theology and
received from it the basic impulses of their speculative thought. This theology is
rooted in the theology of the Reformation, which succeeded, only in very small
measure, in providing a genuine explication of Luther’s new fundamental religious
position and its immanent possibilities. As for this new position, it itself grew out
of those interpretations of Paul and Augustine that Luther had taken up in an orig-
inal manner, as well as out of his confrontation at the same time with the theology
of late Scholasticism (Duns Scotus, Ockham, Gabriel Biel, Gregory of Rimini).
The doctrines of late Scholasticism concerning God, the Trinity, the origi-
nal state of man, sin, and grace worked with the conceptual resources that Thomas
Aquinas and Bonaventure provided for theology. But this means that the idea of
man and of the Dasein of life initially taken as the starting point in all of the above
domains of theological problems was based on an Aristotelian “physics,” “psy-
chology,” “ethics,” and “ontology,” in which Aristotle’s basic teachings were treated
in a particularly selective manner and worked with on the basis of a particular
interpretation of them. Augustine also was decisively influential and through him
Neoplatonism and, through it and to a greater degree than is commonly supposed,
again Aristotle. These connections are more or less well known to us on the crude
level of the historical textual filiations involved, but what is still completely lack-
ing is an authentic interpretation of these connections that has its central basis in
the fundamental philosophical problem of facticity outlined above. The prospect
of pursuing comprehensive research on the Middle Ages is in its guiding points of
view entangled at present in the schematism of a neo-Scholastic theology and in
the framework of an Aristotelianism having taken shape in this neo-Scholasticism.
What is first necessary is that we understand the exegeses and commentaries of
medieval theology (i.e., its scientific structure) as interpretations of life conveyed
in a particular form. Theological anthropology needs to be traced back to its
founding philosophical experiences and motives, so that with reference to them
we can make sense of the force of influence and kind of transformation that issued
from the particular basic religious and dogmatic position at the time.11 Not only
has the hermeneutical structure of commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
(something supporting the actual development of theology up to Luther) not as
such been uncovered, but the very possibility of questioning and approaching it is
utterly wanting. What was taken up in the Sentences in the spirit of and through
selections from Augustine, Jerome, and John Damascene is by itself already of
importance for the development of medieval anthropology. If one is to have any
sort of standard for assessing these transformations, an adequate interpretation of
Augustinian anthropology needs to be available for this purpose, one that does
126 SUPPLEMENTS
not, for example, simply attempt to extract propositions on psychology from his
works on the model of a textbook in psychology or moral theology. An adequate
interpretation of Augustine with respect to the fundamental ontological and logi-
cal constructions in his teachings about life needs to take its central focus from his
writings on the Pelagian controversy and his teachings on the Church. The idea of
man and of Dasein at work here points back to Greek philosophy, to the patristic
theology based on Greek philosophy, to Pauline anthropology, and to the anthro-
pology of the Gospel of John.
In connection with the task of the above phenomenological destruction,
the important thing is not merely to paint a picture of various intellectual cur-
rents and their relations of dependency but rather to bring into relief the central
ontological and logical structures at each of the decisive turning points in the his-
tory of Western anthropology by making a primordial regress to the relevant
sources. One can bring off this task only if a concrete interpretation of Aristotle’s
philosophy taking its orientation from the problem of facticity, i.e, from a radi-
cal phenomenological anthropology, has been made available.
Looking at Aristotle in light of the problem of facticity we have taken as
our starting point, we can see that he was simply the completion and concrete
refinement of the philosophy preceding him. But it also is true that his “physics”
succeeded in working out a new fundamental approach to principles, and what
grew out of this was his ontology and logic, which in turn permeated the history
of philosophical anthropology that we schematically and retrospectively sketched
out above. Beings in the how of their being-moved became the central phenom-
enon for Aristotle, and the explication of this phenomenon was the main topic
of his physics.
The only appropriate basis for the particular methodological aims of the
following investigations is the actual textual corpus in which Aristotle’s research
has been handed down to us (namely, discussions in the style of thematic out-
lines and investigations). It is only by working back from Aristotle that we can
properly define Parmenides’ doctrine of being and understand it as the crucial
step that decided the sense and fate of Western ontology and logic.
These investigations seeking to carry out the task of a phenomenological
destruction set their sights ultimately on late Scholasticism and Luther’s early
theological period. Accordingly, their range encompasses tasks whose difficulty
should not be underestimated. Moreover, it is our initial position (i.e., our hav-
ing taken the problem of facticity as our starting point and our exposition of it)
that determines our basic approach to history and the way in which the particu-
lar direction of looking at it focuses on Aristotle.
[THE SCOPE]
In accord with its initial position and direction of looking, each and every inter-
pretation necessarily elucidates its thematic object in overprecise terms. One is
able to define the object in a fitting manner only when one first sees it in over-
precise terms (not arbitrarily but on the basis of access to the content in it one
defines) and then manages, by a retraction of this overprecise elucidation, to
arrive at a demarcation of the object that is as fitting as possible to it. An object
that is always seen only in semi-darkness can be correctly understood in its semi-
dark givenness only by a detour passing through an overly clear elucidation of it.
However, insofar as it does elucidate in overprecise terms, interpretation should
not question too broadly and claim for itself an utterly fantastic kind of objec-
tivity in historical knowledge, as if it could eventually meet up with an “in-itself.”
Merely inquiring into such a thing in any sense whatsoever means that one has
misunderstood the basic character of the object of history. Inferring relativism
and skeptical historicism from the fact that an “in-itself ” cannot be found is only
the flip side of the same misunderstanding. The translation of interpreted texts
and above all the translation of their decisive basic concepts is something that has
grown out of the concrete interpretation of them and contains it, so to speak, in
nuce [in a nutshell]. Coinages employed in translations do not spring from an
obsession with innovation but rather from the content of the translated texts.
We now need to clarify the basic approach we will be taking in our inter-
pretation of Aristotle, an approach determined by our above-sketched initial
position. We will at the same time provide a summary sketch of the first part of
our investigations.
The question that must guide our interpretation of Aristotle is: As what
kind of object, with what kind of characteristics of being, was human being, i.e.,
“being in life,” experienced and interpreted? What is the sense of Dasein in terms
of which Aristotle’s interpretation of life initially approached human being as an
object? In short, in what kind of forehaving of being did this object stand? Fur-
ther, how was this being of the human being explicated in concepts, out of what
soil did this explication arise as a phenomenon, and which categories of being
grew out of what was viewed in this manner as its explicata?
Was the sense of being Aristotle employed to define the being of human life
drawn in a genuine manner from a simple, founding experience of this object only
and its being, or was human life understood as only one being within a more com-
prehensive domain of being, i.e., did Aristotle apply to it a sense of being that he
took to be archontic for investigating it? What did being in any sense whatsoever
really mean for Aristotle? How was it able to be accessed, grasped, and defined? The
domain of objects supplying the primordial sense of being was the domain of those
objects produced and put into use in dealings. Thus the toward-which this primor-
dial experience of being aimed at was not the domain of being consisting of things
in the sense of objects understood in a theoretical manner as facts but rather the
world encountered in going about dealings that produce, direct themselves to rou-
tine tasks, and use. What is amounts to what has been finished and made ready in
the movement of going about the dealings of production (poivhsi~), i.e., what has
come into a being-on-hand and is now available for certain tendencies to use it.
128 SUPPLEMENTS
Being means being-produced and, as having been produced, being of significance

relative to certain tendencies to have dealings with it, i.e., being-available for them.
Insofar as they are objects of circumspection or indeed of that kind of understand-
ing that in its autonomy simply looks at them, beings are addressed with respect to
the way they look (ei\do~ [idea, form]). The understanding that simply looks at
beings explicates itself by addressing and discussing (levgein) these beings. The
“what” of these objects that is addressed (lovgo~ [discourse]) and their look (ei\do~)
are in a sense the same. And this means that what is addressed in lovgo~ makes up
as such these beings in the authentic sense. With the objects it addresses, levgein
takes beings in the beingness (oujs iva [substance]) of their look into true safekeep-
ing. But in Aristotle and also after him, oujs iva still retains its original meaning of
the household, property, what is at one’s disposal for use in one’s environing world.
Oujsiva means possessions, what one has [die Habe]. What it is in beings which, as
their being, comes into the true safekeeping that deals with them, i.e., what allows
them to be characterized as possessions, is their being-produced. It is in production
that the objects of dealings first appear and come to look the way they do.
The domain of being consisting of objects of dealings (poiouvmenon [what
has been produced], pra`gma [a thing done], e[rlon [a work], kinhvsew~ [what
has been set in motion]) and the mode of addressing these objects in such deal-
ings, namely, a particular “logos” or more precisely the objects of such dealings
in the how of their being-addressed, mark out the forehaving from which Aris-
totle drew the basic ontological structures and also the modes of addressing and
defining for approaching the object “human life.”
How did these ontological structures arise? As the explicata of a defining
that looks at [hinsehend] . . . and addresses . . . , that is, insofar as they grew out
of Aristotle’s having moved along a certain path of research in which, adopting
particular points of view [Hinsichten], he took up and articulated the domain of
being that had been brought into forehaving through a founding experience of
it. In other words, those researches in which objects were experienced and
thought in their basic character of being-moved and something like motion also
was initially seen to be given in these objects must provide the possibility of gain-
ing access to the authentic motivational source of Aristotle’s ontology. It is in
Aristotle’s Physics that we find this sort of research. In the method of interpreting
it, this research needs to be treated as a phenomenon in toto and interpreted with
respect to its object in the how of the investigative dealings with it, the founding
experience in which this object was initially given as the starting point of
research, the constitutive movements that actualize this research, and the con-
crete modes of thinking the object and conceptually articulating it. What
becomes visible in this way are beings in motion with regard to the basic charac-
ter of their being, movement with regard to its categorial structure, and thereby
the ontological constitution of the archontic sense of being. For a phenomeno-
logical interpretation of this research, we also need to gain an understanding of
the sense in which Aristotle generally understood research and the way it is pur-
sued and actualized. Research is a mode of dealings in which one looks at some-
thing (ejpisthvmh [scientific understanding]). It has its particular genesis out of
dealings characterized by concern and directed to routine tasks. And it is only
with reference to this genesis that we can understand its mode of circumspection,
i.e., of interrogating something from the point of view of its “in what way”
(ai[tion [cause]) and its “from-out-of-which” (ajrchv [origin, first principle]).12
Insights into the genesis of research will be provided in our preliminary interpre-
tation of {Met. A 1–2}. But the kind of understanding in which one looks at and
defines (ejpisthvmh) is only one way that beings are brought into true safekeep-
ing. It has to do with those beings that necessarily and for the most part are what
they are. Another kind of dealings in the sense of those that gear beings in cer-
tain directions and deliberate about them in a concerned manner exists for those
beings that also can be other than they are at present and first need to be brought
about in the dealings themselves, either by handling them or producing them.
This mode of the true safekeeping of being is {tevcnh [art]}. Within a primordial
context of problems, Aristotle interprets the modes of the illumination of deal-
ings, namely, circumspection, insight, and looking at . . . (each of which is dif-
ferent in accord with the particular region of being it corresponds to), as modes
of the actualization of that pure and simple perceiving that gives sight in any sense
and with respect to the possibility of their basic achievement of appropriating
being and truly safekeeping it (Eth. Nic. Z). By providing an interpretation of
this text, we will at the outset be able to gain access to the phenomenal horizon
within which research and theoretical knowing need to be located as modes oi|~
ajlhϑeuvei hJ yuchv [in which the soul is true] (Z 3, 1139b15). Accordingly, the
first part of our investigation will include interpretations of the following texts:
1. Eth. Nic. Z;
2. Met. A 1–2; and
3. Phys. A, B, and G 1–3.
Eth. Nic. VI
Temporarily leaving aside the specific problem of ethics in these discussions, our
interpretation of them explains the “dianoetic virtues” as different modes of hav-
ing available the possibility of actualizing a genuine true safekeeping of being.
Soϕiva [wisdom], i.e., authentic understanding that consists in looking at . . . ,
and ϕrovnhsi~ [prudence], i.e., circumspection in the care for human well-being,
are interpreted as the authentic modes of actualizing nou`~ [intellect], i.e., of pure
and simple perceiving as such. What becomes accessible in them and comes to be
appropriated and taken into true safekeeping are the kinds of beings corre-
sponding to each of these characteristic ways of perceiving. And this means that
what is given, along with this interpretation of these phenomena, is the possibil-
ity that the beings taken into true safekeeping in soϕiva and ϕrovnhsi~ can now
130 SUPPLEMENTS
be defined and demarcated in the how of their being-perceived and thereby also
with respect to the genuine characteristics of their being. Thus we can clearly see
the way this interpretation of the “virtues” is connected with the problem of
ontology broached above. The principle of the phenomenal difference between
the structures of the two basic ways of perceiving allows the two corresponding
and quite different regions of being to become visible. [Estw dh; oi|~ ajlhϑeuvei
hJ yuch; tw`/ kataϕavnai kai; ajpoϕavnai pevnte to;n ajriϑmovn: tau`ta d jejsti;
tevcnh, ejpisthvmh, ϕrovnhsi~, soϕiva, nou`~: uJpolhvyei ga;r kai; dovxh/ ejndevcetai
diayeuvdesϑai. “Thus let us begin by assuming that the modes in which the
soul brings and takes beings into true safekeeping as unveiled—actualizing this
by means of explication in speech which either affirms or denies—are five in
number: procedures in which one is directed to certain tasks and produces
[tevcnh (art)]; defining by way of looking at, discussing, and identifying
[ejpisthvmh (scientific understanding)]; the kind of seeing around one which has
to do with care for human well-being (circumspection) [ϕrovnhsi~ (prudence)];
the kind of understanding which sees in an authentic manner [soϕiva (wisdom)];
and pure and simple perceiving [nou`~ (intelligence)]. <Only these ones come
into consideration> since it lies in the very sense of supposition and having a
viewpoint [dovxa (opinion)] that they do not necessarily give us beings as
unveiled, but rather such that what is meant by them only looks as if it were . . .
and this puts itself in front of the beings in question and deceives us” (Eth. Nic.
Z 3, 1139b15–18, cf. ibid., Z 6, 1141a3).13 These modes kaϑ ja}~ mavlista . . .
ajlhϑeuvsei hJ yuchv [in accord with which . . . the soul is most of all true] (ibid.,
Z 2, 1139b12), i.e., in accord with whose pure and simple characteristic actual-
ization the soul “most of all” brings to givenness beings (and these are given in
advance for each of the above modes) as unconcealed in a primordial true safe-
keeping of them, constitute the “virtues” under discussion in Aristotle’s text. A
correct interpretation of the meaning of the terms ajlhϑev~ [true] and ajlhvϑeia
[truth] is of fundamental importance in understanding Aristotle’s analysis of the
above-mentioned phenomena, how they differ from each other as phenomena
and, as part of this, how they constitutively achieve different things in actualiz-
ing the true safekeeping of being, and finally how they are characterized by the
fact that they are in each case concrete ways of actualizing the underlying vitality
of perceiving as such (nou`~, noei`n). Likewise, it is only by gaining a phenome-
nological understanding of nou`~ that we can explain the structural context of the
phenomena falling under it.
When defining what “truth” means, one usually appeals to Aristotle as the
source of its original meaning. We are told that for Aristotle “truth” “occurs in
judgment” and is more precisely the “agreement” of thought with its object.
Moreover, one then takes this concept of truth as a basis for putting forward the
so-called “representationalist theory” of knowledge. No trace of the concept of
truth as “agreement,” the common conception of lovgo~ as valid judgment or,
above all, a “representationalist theory” can be found in Aristotle. When the mis-
begotten epistemology of so-called “critical realism”14 indeed uses Aristotle as the

main authority in its apologetics against “idealism,” which it misunderstands, it
also misunderstands from the ground up the original situation of Aristotle’s
thought from which the phenomena in question arose and which is still available
to us through a study of the relevant sources.
The meaning of ajlhϑev~, namely, being-there as unconcealed, i.e., being-
meant in itself, is in no way drawn from and explicated on the basis of judgment
and thus does not originally reside in it or refer to it. jAlhϑeuvein [being-true]
does not mean “possessing the truth” but rather taking the beings meant in each
case and as such into true safekeeping as unveiled.
Ai[sϑhsi~ [sense perception], i.e., perceiving in the how of the sensory, is
not “also” called true merely because the “concept of truth” has been transferred
from lovgo~ to it. Rather, in accord with its own intentional character, it in itself
primordially brings to givenness its intentional toward-which “in the original.” It
means “bringing an object to givenness as unveiled.” Hence, hJ me;n ga;r ai[sϑhsi~
tw`n ijdivwn ajei; ajlhϑhv~ [sense perception of the proper objects of each of the indi-
vidual senses is always true] (De an. G 3, 427b12).15 We can see that with respect
to the phenomenal situation intended here, the expressions “truth” and “true” do
not really tell us anything. In contrast, “falsehood” (yeu`do~, yeudev~) can be
found only where there is “synthesis”: to; ga;r yeu`do~ ejn sunϑevsei ajeiv [false-
hood always involves a synthesis] (ibid., G 6, 430b). Falsehood presupposes as the
condition of its possibility a different intentional structure of meaning something
as an object, an approach to beings from the “point of view” of another kind of
being-meant. When a being is intended in itself not in a plain and simple manner
but rather as this or that, i.e., in its character of being “as” something, perceiving
takes place in the how of a taking-together and taking-with. When, as sense per-
ception, perceiving actualizes itself in the mode of addressing and discussing its
object “as” this or that (i.e., in levgein), it can happen that in the course of this the
object winds up giving itself out as something that it is not. And this tendency
toward meaning the object in its “as” is utterly foundational for the possibility of
yeu`do~: o{ti me;n ga;r leukovn, ouj yeuvdetai, eij de; tou`to to; leuko;n h] a{llo ti,
yeuvdetai [while the perception that white is there before one cannot be false, the
perception that what is white is this or that may be false] (ibid., G 3, 428b20);
dianoei`sqai d ej nj devcetai kai; yeudw`~ kai; oujdeni; uJpavrcei w|/ mh; kai; lovgo~ [it
also is possible to think falsely, and thought is found only where there is discourse
as well as sense perception] (ibid., 427b13). That is, only what is perceived in the
mode of being-addressed with respect to an “as” can give itself to such addressing
“as deceptively like.” In accord with its meaning, the “being-true” of the lovgo~ of
addressing is constituted only circuitously through a reference to yeu`do~. Lovgo~
itself needs to be understood in terms of its own basic intentional characteristic,
namely, that it is ajpovϕansi~ [assertion], i.e., an addressing and discussing which
means its object in such a way that what it says is said on the basis of this object
and is drawn from (ajpov) it. Accordingly, ajpoϕaivnesϑai [asserting] is to be
132 SUPPLEMENTS
understood as: letting the object “appear” for itself (middle voice) from out of
itself and as it is in itself. This is of importance for our interpretation of ϕanta-
siva [imagination].
What levgein brings to givenness is beings themselves, and we now know
that this means that it brings them to givenness in their unveiled “as-what” inas-
much as a deceiving “what,” which merely passes off the being in question as
such and such, does not put itself in front of this being. Insofar as it is a decep-
tive self-veiling, yeu`do~ has this sense only on the basis of that meaning of ajl-
hϑev~ that does not originally refer to lovgo~: dovxa yeudhv~ ejgevneto, o{te lavϑoi
metapeso;n to; pra`gma [opinion becomes false when, upon changing, its object
becomes concealed and escapes notice] (ibid., 428b8). Here, remaining-concealed,
being-veiled, is explicitly specified as what determines the meaning of yeu`do~
and thus also that of “truth.” Aristotle sees being-concealed as in itself positive,
and it is no accident that the sense “truth” had for the Greeks was defined priva-
tively on the level of its meaning and not just on a grammatical level. Beings in
the how of their possible “as-what-definitions” are not simply there for one, but
rather they are a “task.” And beings in the how of their being-unveiled, i.e., o[n
wJ~ ajlhϑev~ [being as being true], need to be taken into true safekeeping and pro-
tected against possible loss. This is the meaning of e{xei~, ai|~ ajlhϑeuvei hJ yuchv
[states of having in which the soul is true]. The highest and authentic of these
states of having are soϕiva and ϕrovnhsi~, since they each within their own
domain of being hold the ajrcaiv [first principles] in true safekeeping. [On wJ~ ajl-
hϑev~ is not the authentic being of true judgments and their domain of being or
validity but rather beings themselves in the how (wJ~) of their unveiled being-
meant. Beings are ejn dianoiva/ [in thought] as nohtovn [what is thought], i.e., they
are in the “intellect” as the toward-which of its perceiving. The above interpreta-
tion of ajlhϑev~ and ajlhϑeuvein, which eliminates a series of mere pseudo-prob-
lems in interpreting their meaning, will be concretely demonstrated in detailed
phenomenological analyses of Met. E 4, De an. G 5ff., De interp., Met. D 29, and
above all Met. Q 10.
Lovgo~ i.e., levgein, is the way noei`n [perceiving] actualizes itself, and as
such it is dianoei`sϑai [discursive thought], a perceiving in which what is meant
is taken apart. That is, it is diaivresi~ [division]: ejndevcetai de; kai diaivresin
ϕavnai pavnta [it is possible to call all of these cases division as well as synthesis
(De an. G 6, 430b3). Addressing and discussing, when it takes the form of syn-
thetically defining, also can be described as a taking-apart and making ex-plicit.
The basic character of noei`n is perceiving. Nou`~ is the perceiving as such,
i.e., is what generally makes possible and initially gives a toward-which for deal-
ings to be directed toward and to do something with. It is tw`/ pavnta poiei`n, wJ~
e{xi~ ti~, oi|on to; ϕw`~ [what produces all things, a state of having like light]
(ibid., G 5, 430a15). That is, perceiving produces everything in that it is able to
have everything available to it, doing so like light. Nou~ gives sight, a something,
a “there” in any sense whatsoever. As the i[dion tou` ajnϑrwvpou [what is proper
to human being], nou`~ is—in its concrete actualization as ejnevrgeia [actuality]

(i.e., literally as “being at work,” namely, its own work [Eth. Nic. Z 2,
1139a18ff.], which is that of giving sight)—always nou`~ in the mode of concrete
dealings with beings, i.e., gearing these beings in certain directions, producing
them, handling them, and determining something about them. Insofar as nou`~
gives to dealings their sight, it also can be characterized as the illumination of
these dealings, and such illumination has the sense of a true safekeeping of being.
The genuine objects of nou`~ are what it perceives a[neu lovgou [without dis-
course], i.e., without the mode of addressing something with respect to its “as-
what-definitions” (ouj ti; katav tino~ [it is not the assertion of something about
something]) (De an. G 6, 430b28). In other words, they are the ajdiaivreta [indi-
visible objects], what in itself cannot be taken apart, what is not able to be expli-
cated any further. As such, nou`~ brings to givenness objects purely as such in
their unveiled “what,” and as such it “can only be true”: hJ me;n ou\n tw`n ajdi-
airevtwn novhsi~ ejn touvtoi~, peri; a{ ou[k e[sti to; yeu`do~ [the perceiving of
indivisible objects is found in those cases where falsehood is impossible] (ibid.,
430a26). Here, “only” means “not yet at all” having the possibility of being-false
and not “no longer” having this possibility. Nou`~ gives to all concrete discussing
its possible about-which, and this about-which is itself not something the dis-
cussing as such would in the end be able to gain initial access to on its own.
Rather, it is initially accessible only in ejpagwghv (“induction”), but this word
needs to be understood purely in its literal sense, i.e., not in the sense of empir-
ically gathering things together and understanding them collectively, but rather
as a simple and direct leading to . . . , a letting be seen of. . . . Nou`~ is ai[sϑhsiv~
ti~ [perception of something], a perceiving which at any particular time initially
gives the look of objects in a simple manner: oJ nou`~ ei\do~ eijdw`n kai; hJ
ai[sϑhsi~ ei`do~ aijsϑhtw`n [intellect is the form of forms and sense perception
the form of sensible things] (ibid., G 8, 432a2). Just as the hand o[rganovn ejstin
ojrgavnwn [is the tool of tools] (ibid.), i.e., just as it is the case that a tool used in
some work first comes to its authentic being, namely, doing work, when it is taken
in hand, so the look [Aussehen] of objects is seen only by means of nou`~ and “in”
nou`~ as its toward-which. The look of objects as it were looks out [es sieht aus] at
one by means of nou`~. Insofar as a domain of objects itself poses the problem of
gaining access to it in an explicit manner, and this not exclusively in the sense of
defining it in theory, the “from-out-of-which” and “from-the-point-of-view-of-
which” (ajrchv) of one’s levgein must be available in advance as having been
unveiled. Insofar as its view is directed toward this ajrchv, one’s levgein makes it
its point of departure, and indeed it keeps this point of departure “before its eyes”
as its constant and fundamental orientation. As unveiled, such ajrcaiv are explic-
itly taken into true safekeeping in ejpagwghv (tw`n ajrcw`n ejpagwghv [induction of
the first principle]) (Eth. Nic. Z 3, 1139b31). Leivpetai nou`n ei\nai tw`n ajrcw`n
[the remaining alternative is that it is intelligence that grasps the first principle]
(ibid., Z 6,1141a7), i.e., the highest and authentic achievement of nou`~ consists
134 SUPPLEMENTS
in this bringing to givenness and true safekeeping of the ajrcaiv corresponding to

each region of being (mavlista ajlhϑeuvei [it is most of all true]). The concrete
modes of the actualizing of this authentic true safekeeping of being are soϕiva
and ϕrovnhsi~.
The kind of understanding consisting in a pure and simple looking at . . .
brings into true safekeeping those beings whose “from-out-of-which” is, as they
themselves are, in such a way that it necessarily always is what it is. In contrast,
circumspection with regard to the care for and discussion of human well-being
brings into true safekeeping those beings which, along with their “from-out-of-
which,” can in themselves be otherwise.
Both modes of true safekeeping temporalize and unfold themselves meta;
lovgou [within discourse] [ibid., Z 4, 1140a4ff.] , i.e., in the discussing and expli-
cating within which they are actualized. This explication is constitutive for them,
insofar as they bring the ajrcaiv into view not as isolated things existing on their
own but rather such as they in fact are, i.e., in their ownmost sense as ajrcaiv
for. . . . As the for-which of the ajrcaiv and as needing to be defined, the for-
which comes into true safekeeping along with the ajrcaiv. Lovgo~ is here an
ojrϑo~ lovgo~ [correct discourse that hits its mark].16 The discussing is a kind of
discussing that moves in a certain direction and keeps to this direction in a pri-
mordial manner, i.e., it has in each case an “end” it has fixed upon, and it is this
end that is, in accord with the sense of the particular mode of true safekeeping in
question, what is at issue for the illuminative explication of this true safekeeping
and what it endeavors to arrive at. What ϕrovnhsi~ brings into true safekeeping
is the toward-which of going about those dealings that human life has with itself
and the how of these dealings in their own being. These dealings are pra`xi~
[action]: i.e., how one handles oneself in dealings that are not productive but
rather in each case simply perform actions in the precise sense of this term.
Frovnhsi~ is the illumination of dealings that co-temporalizes and unfolds life in
its being.
Our concrete interpretation of ϕrovnhsi~ shows how these kinds of beings
(actions) are constituted in it, namely, in terms of the kairov~ [timeliness, the
moment]. Handling oneself, i.e., performing actions in which one’s care is
directed toward human well-being, is always a handling oneself in the concrete
how of concerned dealings with the world. Frovnhsi~ makes the circumstances of
the actor accessible by keeping a firm hold on the ou| e{neka (“for the sake of
which”) [ibid., Z 2, 1139a32ff.] of an action, by making available its more pre-
cisely defined “what-for,” by grasping the “now” it is to be performed at, and by
mapping out its how. Frovnhsi~ moves toward the e[scaton, “the ultimate par-
ticular fact” [ibid., Z 8, 1142a25ff.], in which the concrete situation seen in these
definite terms culminates at the particular time in question. What makes it possi-
ble for ϕrovnhsi~ to discuss and deliberate about what it does in its care for human
well-being is the fact that it is primarily an ai[sϑhsi~ [ibid., 1142a28ff.], i.e., ulti-
mately an immediate, overall view of the moment from the point of view of the
end of action in question. As beings becoming unveiled and available through the
ajlhϑeuvein of ϕrovnhsi~, praktav [actions] are as a “not yet being such and such.”
As “not yet such and such” and, indeed, as the toward-which of concern, they are
at the same time already such and such, i.e., insofar as they are a toward-which that
belongs to a concrete readiness for dealings, the constitutive illumination of which
is provided by ϕrovnhsi~. This “not-yet” and this “already” need to be understood
in their “unity,” i.e., on the basis of an original givenness, with reference to which
they are particular explicata. We say “particular” because here the objects in ques-
tion are placed under determinate aspects of movement. The concept of stevrhsi~
[privation] is the category of the above-mentioned explicata. It is in this category
that Hegelian dialectic is rooted within intellectual history.
jAlhvϑeia praktikhv [practical truth] is nothing other than the whole
unveiled moment (at the particular time) of factical life in the how of its decisive
readiness for dealings with itself, and this how is within life’s factical relation of
concern to the world it is presently encountering. Frovnhsi~ is epitactical [ibid.,
Z 10, 1143a8]: it brings beings to givenness in their basic character that they are
something one should be concerned with in this or that way, and within this
point of view it provides and maintains each definite aspect of the moment (the
particular how, what-for, to-what-extent, and why at the particular time). As epi-
tactical illumination, it brings one’s dealings into their basic orientation of a
readiness for . . . , breaking out toward. . . . The kinds of toward-which one
intends here, i.e., the beings within the moment, stand within the point of view
of their significance for . . . , their being a concern one is able to attend to, their
being something one needs to do right now. Frovnhsi~ is a looking kata; to;
sumϕevron pro;~ to; tevlo~ [from the point of view of what is conducive to the
end] (ibid., Z 9, 1142b32). Because it is the true safekeeping of the moment as
a whole, circumspection in the authentic sense is what genuinely maintains the
“for the sake of which” of action (i.e., its ajrcaiv) in true safekeeping. The ajrchv
always is what it is only in its concrete reference to the moment. In being seen
and being seized upon, it is there for one in the moment and for it.
Our interpretation of ϕrovnhsi~ also provides a concrete description of the
method Aristotle uses to explicate this phenomenon, namely, descriptive com-
parison and elimination, which is done in accord with the different phenomenal
points of view of being-related to . . . , the toward-which of the relation, and the
how of the actualization of the relation. His description is always actualized by
simultaneously holding the different e{xei~ [states of having] up against one
another. Especially instructive in this regard is his analysis of eujbouliva [deliber-
ating well] (ibid., Z 9), which is the concrete way of actualizing the levgein
immanent in ϕrovnhsi~. From out of the moment itself it brings into view for
circumspection the how of the fitting way to set to work and authentically
achieve the end in question.
However, not only does Aristotle’s interpretation bring into relief the kinds
of beings and the basic characteristics of their being that ϕrovnhsi~ takes into
136 SUPPLEMENTS
true safekeeping, but it also provides an initial understanding of the basic char-
acteristics of being that ϕrovnhsi~ itself has. Frovnhsi~ is a e{xi~, i.e., a how of
having available the true safekeeping of being. And as a e{xi~, it is a ginovmenon
[a having-become of the soul], which temporalizes and unfolds itself in life itself
as its own possibility, brings life into a particular state, and in a certain sense actu-
ally brings it about. Thus what shows itself in ϕrovnhsi~ is a doubling of the
point of view into which Aristotle placed the human being and the being of life
and which became decisive within intellectual history for the fate of the catego-
rial explication of the sense of the being of facticity. In circumspection, life is
there for itself in the concrete how of the with-which of going about its dealings.
However, and this is decisive, in Aristotle it is not on the basis of this phenome-
non and not in a positive manner that the being of the with-which of dealings is
ontologically defined. Rather, it is defined simply in a formal manner as capable
of being otherwise than it is and thus not necessarily and always what it is. This
ontological definition gets actualized through a negative comparison with
another kind of being that is considered to be being in the authentic sense. In
accord with its basic characteristics, this kind of being is for its part not arrived
at through an explication of the being of human life as such. Rather, in its cate-
gorial structure, it springs from an ontological radicalization of the idea of beings
that are moved, and this is carried out and actualized in a particular manner. It is
the motion of production that is taken into forehaving as exemplary for these
kinds of beings and for the possibility of bringing into relief their structural sense.
Being is being-finished-and-ready, i.e., a kind of being in which motion has
arrived at its end. The being of life is seen as movement running its course in this
life, and indeed human life is in this movement when it has arrived at its end with
regard to its ownmost possibility of motion, namely, that of pure and simple per-
ceiving. This movement is in the e{xi~ of soϕiva. In accord with its intentional
characteristics, pure understanding does not take into true safekeeping human
life in the how of its factical being. Rather, soϕiva does not in any sense have
human life as its intentional toward-which. Human life is actually a being that is
precisely insofar as it can in each case be otherwise. For Aristotle, the being of life
must be looked at simply in terms of the pure temporalizing and unfolding of
soϕiva as such, and this is due to the authentic kind of movement available in
soϕiva. First, as pure and simple perceiving, nou`~ is in its genuine movement
when it has given up all concern for gearing beings in certain directions and only
perceives. Second, as this perceiving, it is a movement that, in having arrived at
its end insofar as what it is able to perceive in a pure and simple manner now
stands before its gaze, not only does not cease, but rather now—precisely as hav-
ing arrived at its end—really is motion for the first time.
As a bavdisi~ eij~ [going toward], i.e., a being on the way to . . . [Unter-
wegssein zu], motion [Bewegung] is in accord with its sense motion that has not
reached its toward-which. As a presently going toward . . . , it is, for example,
learning, walking, or building a house. In accord with the basic character of hav-
ing-gone, the going is fundamentally different from this having-gone: e{teron

kai; kinei` kai; kekivnhken [what is moving is different from what has moved]
(Met. Q 6, 1048b32). In contrast, having-seen is at the same time as and along
with the seeing. He has seen—in sight—only insofar as he is seeing just now. He
has perceived just now precisely in his act of perceiving (noei` kai; nenovhken [is
perceiving and has perceived]) (ibid.). Such movement is a kind of being that
consists in both a temporalizing and unfolding of itself that takes itself in true
safekeeping and a taking itself into true safekeeping that temporalizes and
unfolds itself (a{ma to; aujtov [the same thing at the same time] (ibid., 1048b33).
It is only novhsi~ as pure ϑewrei`n [contemplation] that satisfies the highest idea
of pure movement. The authentic being of human beings temporalizes and
unfolds itself in the pure actualization of sofiva as a tarrying alongside and pure
perceiving of the ajrcaiv of those beings that always are, a tarrying that is unwor-
ried and always has time to spare (scolhv [leisure]). The basic character of the
being of e{xi~ and thus also of ajrethv, i.e., the ontological structure of human
being, is understood on the basis of an ontology of beings in the how of a par-
ticular kind of movement and on the basis of an ontological radicalization of the
idea of this kind of movement.
Met. A 1–2
Our interpretation of these two chapters brings to light three things regarding our
guiding problem of facticity:
1. The phenomenal structure of the intentional toward-which and relation
found in going about those dealings (ejpisthvmh) that simply look at . . . and
define contexts having to do with the question of “why,” as well as the phenom-
enal structure of the highest possible kind of temporalizing and unfolding of
these dealings, namely, authentic understanding (soϕiva), which looks at the ajr-
caiv and brings them into true safekeeping. It is on the basis of this that concrete
ajrchv-research, which “physics” is understood to be, will be clarified in advance
with regard to the demarcation of its objects that is drawn from the idea of pure
understanding in its starting point (its specifically critical basis) and with regard
to its method of categorial explication.
2. The path on which Aristotle gains all access to the phenomenon of pure
understanding and the kind of interpretation he employs for this phenomenon.
Both of these are characteristics of the fundamental meaning of “philosophy.”
3. The basic character of the being of soϕiva as such and its constitutive
achievement for the being of human life.
These three points of view of our examination are intrinsically related, so
that the structure of pure understanding will become intelligible simply on the
basis of the fact that with regard to its being it is rooted in factical life and has a
particular mode of genesis in it. This is why the real emphasis of our interpreta-
tion consists in bringing to light what was mentioned in point two above.
138 SUPPLEMENTS
The question we ask is: How is that which Aristotle defines as research
there for him in its point of departure? Where is it found and as what? How does
Aristotle approach it, and how does he deal with it? From factical life and its own
way of speaking in its dealings, Aristotle takes up a certain talk about soϕwvteron
[being wiser], i.e., having more understanding than. . . . In other words, he
focuses on the factical ways of supposing-something-to-be-something in which life
interprets its own modes of dealings (i.e., ejmpeiriva [experience], tevcnh [art]):
oijovmeϑa [we consider], uJpolambavnomen [we assume], nomivzomen [we usually
think], hJgouvmeϑa [we hold] [Met. A 1, 981a13ff.]. He begins with a compara-
tive expression. What becomes visible in it is what is at issue in life when it
addresses something as soϕwvteron, namely, a ma`llon eijdevnai [knowing more]
[ibid., 981a31], i.e., a looking and seeing more. Factical life is anxiously con-
cerned about developing its dealings, indeed, those original ones directed to rou-
tine tasks and producing, into a kind of dealings that always has available to it a
looking and seeing more in the sense of that which has been proposed at any par-
ticular time in its dealings. It is in this looking and seeing more that the “look”
of the with-which of dealings becomes visible and indeed not as an object to be
defined in theory but rather as the toward-which of that concern which gears
beings in certain directions. The “look” (of an illness, for example) is character-
ized by a “why” (ai[tion) for the concern of those dealings directed to certain rou-
tine tasks (ijatreuvein, “doctoring” [ibid., 981a18ff.]). The why originally has a
“practical” sense.
In its tendency toward this looking and seeing more, factical life eventually
gives up the care of directing itself to routine tasks. The with-which of those deal-
ings directed to routine tasks changes into the toward-which of a mere looking
at. . . . The look of an object comes to be viewed and explicated with respect to
those relations in its why that characterize the what of this object itself. Here the
tendency of caring has displaced itself into a looking at . . . for its own sake. This
looking at . . . becomes an autonomous kind of dealings and as such the toward-
which of a unique kind of concern.
In Aristotle’s interpretation of the meaning of looking and seeing [Hinse-
hen] more, a meaning first put forward by life itself, is also found the ultimate
direction he takes toward what is mavlista eidevnai [the knowledge that sees
most] [ibid., A 2, 982a30ff.]. He accompanies factical life in its own direction of
interpretation and adopts from it the ways of supposing-something-to-be-some-
thing in which it addresses a human being as soϕovn [wise], i.e., as someone who
has authentic understanding. His interpretation of these modes of addressing
yields that meaning of soϕiva all can agree with: someone who has authentic
understanding is concerned with the ultimate viewpoints [Hinsichten] in which
beings can in themselves be defined. These viewpoints have as their toward-
which the first “from-out-of-whiches” and “from-the-points-of-view-of-which”
with respect to which beings need to be initially unveiled, if they are indeed to
be taken into true safekeeping in a fitting manner in the concrete addressing, dis-
cussing, and defining undertaken in research. Thus Aristotle arrives at an under-

standing of the meaning of philosophy through an interpretation of a factical
movement of care with respect to its ultimate tendency. However, these dealings con-
sisting in a pure and simple looking at . . . prove to be such that they cannot any
longer really see in their toward-which that very life in which they are. Insofar as
these dealings, as pure understanding, still temporalize and unfold life, they do
this only through their kind of movement.
The concrete possibility of actualizing this pure understanding lies in free-
ing oneself from the concerns and apprehensions of going about those dealings
directed to routine tasks. This is the how in which life, with a view to one of its
basic tendencies, makes a sojourn. Qewrei`n is the purest kind of movement life
has available to it. It is due to it that life is something “divine.” But in Aristotle
the idea of the divine did not grow out of an explication of an object to which
access was first gained in a founding religious experience. Rather, ϑei`on [divine]
is a term for the highest character of being coming to light in an ontological rad-
icalization of the idea of beings that are moved. The ϑei`on is novhsi~ nohvsew~
[thinking of thinking] [ibid., L 9, 1074b35] only because of the fact that with
regard to the basic character of its being, i.e., of its movement, such perception
satisfies most purely the idea of being-moved as such. This divine being must be
pure perceiving, i.e., it must be free of any emotional relation to its toward-
which. The “divine” is incapable of jealousy, not because it is absolute goodness
and love but rather because in its being as pure movement it can neither hate
nor love at all.
But this means that the forehaving of being that is decisive here, namely,
beings in their motion, and the particular ontological explication of these beings
are the motivational sources of the basic ontological structures that later deci-
sively influenced the notion of divine being in the specifically Christian sense
(actus purus [pure act]), the inner life of the divine (the Trinity), and thereby also
the being of God’s relation to man, as well as consequently the sense of man’s own
being itself. Christian theology, the philosophical “speculation” standing under
its influence, and the anthropology always also growing out of these contexts all
speak in borrowed categories that are foreign to their own domains of being.
That nonetheless precisely Aristotle’s ontology of the soul provided sup-
port for the temporalizing and unfolding of a rich, far-reaching interpretation of
the being of life within the Christian life-world is due to the fact that it was
within his concept of motion and precisely by means of it that the decisive phe-
nomenal character of intentionality came into view and consolidated a particular
direction of looking.
Phys. A, B, G 1–3
The phenomenon of motion is ontologically explicated according to its cate-
gories in that kind of research having been handed down to us under the title of
140 SUPPLEMENTS
Aristotle’s Physics. Our interpretation needs to bring to light the following things
right within the phenomenal movement of this research: the founding experience
at work in it, i.e., the way its object has initially been given (kinouvmenon [what
is moving]); the points of view into which the object has been placed; and the
explicata having grown out of the analysis that looks at the object from these
points of view.
The above research is characterized as ajrchv-research, i.e., it has to bring
into true safekeeping the “from-out-of-whiches” and “from-the-points-of-view-
of-which” (ajrcaiv) on the basis of which the kinouvmenon comes to be seen. But
if these ajrcaiv are to be capable of achieving what they are supposed to in accord
with their sense, they themselves must be drawn from the phenomenal content
of the objects in question. The ajrcaiv of beings are not there for those concerned
dealings and their circumspection in which one goes about gearing beings in cer-
tain directions. This concern and apprehension lives within other points of view,
namely, within those directed to the immediately encountered world of its deal-
ings. Within the scope of going about dealings in the concern of factical life, the
“from-out-of-whiches” of beings are as such concealed. The primordial sense of
the “concept of truth” proves to be at work in Phys. A 1 and indeed in Aristotle’s
initial approach to the problem of research in physics.
jArchv-research is research into the question of access. As such, (1) it has to
secure its forehaving, i.e., its thematic domain of objects in the how of the basic
phenomenal character of their content, and (2) it has to work out its foreconcep-
tion, i.e., supply the points of view in which the actualization of its explication of
its domain of being is supposed to maintain itself. The initial approach of this
research is critique and more precisely fundamental critique concerned with prin-
ciples. Aristotle’s interpretation makes clear why such research into the question
of access must necessarily take a critical approach: namely, because all research
moves within a particular level of some pregiven interpretation of life and within
certain pregiven ways of discussing the world. What is still there and at work in
the facticity of Aristotle’s own research is the how in which the “ancient physi-
cists” had already seen, addressed, and discussed “nature.”
Accordingly, the critical question Aristotle’s ajrchv-research poses to former
times runs as follows: Were those beings that were thought of as ϕuvs i~ [nature]
brought into the forehaving of research in such a way that their decisive phe-
nomenal character, namely, motion (a character previous research always also had
in mind in one way or another when it addressed beings in the ways it did), was
taken into true safekeeping and explicated in a primordial manner? Or was the
way traditional research sought to gain access to the domain of being in question
such that this research moved from the outset within “theories” and thematic
principles that not only were not drawn this domain of being itself but blocked
almost all access to it?
The sense of Aristotle’s critical stance consists in posing this question. His
critique is positive in a distinctive sense, and it is based explicitly on a decisive
founding experience: namely, “we assume from the outset <hJmi`n uJpokeivsϑw>
that there are beings in motion” [Phys. A 2, 185a13]. These beings in this how
are accessible in a plain and simple manner in ejpagwghv. The first book of the
Physics exhibits a very tight structure, and the first stage of its critique, namely,
that of the Eleatics, makes sense only on the basis of its concrete task of research
into the question of access and the necessity of a critical approach here.
According to Aristotle’s explicit comments, the Eleatics in fact do not
“really” belong in any sense within the thematic compass of his critique [ibid.,
184b27]. Their foreconception, i.e., their theory of being, was such that it, in
principle, blocked access to beings as beings which are moved, and thus access to
ϕuvs i~. The Eleatics were thereby not in a position to catch sight of the basic phe-
nomenon in the subject matter taken up as the theme of research in physics
(namely, motion) and to allow this motion itself to provide the decisive points of
view for concrete inquiry into it and for concretely defining it.
Aristotle draws the Eleatics into the discussion in spite of their “not belong-
ing there” not, as Bonitz thinks, to have an easy target for refutation but rather so
that in this critique of them he can secure the horizon that is decisive for looking at all
subsequent problems in physics: namely, that of lovgo~, i.e., the kinouvmenon as
legovmenon. Here Aristotle points out the following things. What has been taken
up as a theme of research, i.e., the kinouvmenon, is as an object of ejpisthvmh one
that is addressed and discussed: ejpisthvmh and soϕiva (as nou`~ kai; ejpisthvmh
[intelligence and scientific understanding] (Eth. Nic. Z 6, 1141a5) are meta; lov-
gou. These beings must be approached initially within their ontological structure
that is constituted in advance in such a way that they are in principle always the
“toward-which” of an addressing and discussing, i.e., they are meant in the how of
their “as-characteristics.” Beings are always categorially something as such and
such, and this means that their sense of being is in principle manifold (having
more than one sense). What is prescribed in an a priori manner in the sense of lev-
gein is that everything addressed is addressed as something. The idea of the ajrchv,
of the from-“out-of-which” for something, i.e., the “point-of-view as in regard to
and for . . . ,” becomes categorially impossible if being is not articulated as having
more than one sense, i.e., if the science of physics approaches its domain of objects
with the Eleatic thesis, e{n ta; pavnta [all things are one] [Phys. A 2, 185a23].
In an intermediary set of reflections in which we provide an interpretation
of the decisive ontological contexts in the doctrinal poem of Parmenides, it is
shown that Parmenides was the first to have brought the being of beings into
view, though in ontological terms things remained at this first “impression of
being.” With this first, though decisive view, ontological seeing was already at its
end. The idea that everything experienced is in the how of being-an-object
became of such importance for the domain of objects in question that this being-
an-object was itself in fact thought of as being that “really” is, and from this point
of view its sense was decided in a negative manner by exciding all other possible
definitions of being. Noei`n as a pure and simple meaning something and ϕavnai
142 SUPPLEMENTS
[speaking], i.e., addressing, were at first viewed in the same way and indeed in
their unity with being. The ajlhvϑeia operative here was not, however, brought
into relief with regard to the basic phenomenal structures that are primary and
decisive for it.
The first stage of Aristotle’s critique endeavors to show that if ajrchv-
research wants to gain access to the domain of objects that initially should be
given for it and to the proper points of view for this domain, it must work out
the ontological constitution of this domain by taking a look at the basic phe-
nomenon of motion. It is simply an internal consequence of the formulation of
this problem that in the context of his critique of the Eleatics, Aristotle comes
across the problem of oJrismov~ [definition], i.e., the simple explicative definition
of an object in the what of its beingness. The object in question here is that phe-
nomenon of motion which Aristotle wishes to explicate.
Proceeding from this first stage of Aristotle’s critique, which secures the
general horizon of research, our interpretation shows how he interrogates the
opinions and explications found in the “ancient natural philosophers” with
respect to how far they got in allowing the phenomenon of motion to speak for
itself, and how they were always in principle impeded in their explication of this
phenomenon because of their preconceived theories about the sense of being.
Through this interpretation, it will become clear that behind the seemingly for-
malistic question, how many ajrcaiv should be posited with respect to ϕuvsei
o[nta [natural beings], and what are they, there is concealed a question that Aris-
totle always considers, namely, to what extent is motion itself being seen and gen-
uinely explicated on the basis of itself ? If it is seen and explicated on the basis of
itself, then there is necessarily more than one “from-out-of-which” and “from-the-
point-of-view-of-which” in its categorial structure and just as necessarily not more
than three. It is in Chapter [7]17 that Aristotle offers a positive explication of the
phenomenon of motion, doing this at first solely in the context of the problem
of lovgoı that has been introduced, and in fact we need to look back from this
chapter to the preceding ones. The “fundamental category” of stevrhsi~ pervad-
ing Aristotle’s ontology grows out of the explications that he pursues in Chapter
7, i.e., out of his explication of a particular kind of addressing of movement
which is viewed in a definite manner. Characteristically, the “coming to be of a
statue from bronze” [ibid., A 7, 190a25] (i.e., in the movement of going about
the dealings of production) plays the role of an example in problems directed to
the kivnhsi~ [movement] of ϕuvsei o[nta.
The problem of the ajrchv is approached from another direction of looking
when we come to Book Two of the Physics. The question raised here is, what are
the possibilities of being-interrogated (ai[tion, “why”) in theory that are motivated
by the content of ϕuvsei o[nta and their fundamental categorial structure? Our
interpretation shows how the notion of the “four causes” springs from the prob-
lem of ontology that has already been sketched out. But at the same time this
book (Chapters 4–6) is of decisive importance with respect to the problem of fac-
ticity as such. It is shown that under the headings of tuvch [chance], aujtovmaton
[spontaneity] (terms utterly untranslatable when it comes to their authentic
meaning), Aristotle ontologically explicates the “historical” movement of factical
life, i.e., the movement of “what happens and can happen in such and such a way
to someone everyday” [ibid., B 8, 198b36]. These ontological analyses have to
this day not only remained unsurpassed but have not even been understood and
utilized for what they are. They have been treated as an awkward and no longer
usable supplement to the definition of the “real causes,” though these causes
themselves clearly bear witness to the fact that they are conditioned by a particu-
lar approach to the problems in question.
In Book Three, Aristotle initiates his properly thematic analysis of the phe-
nomenon of motion. Our interpretation (of Chapters 1–3 above all), which must
contend with almost insurmountable textual difficulties (Simplicius [395, 20]18
complained about this early on), can really only be laid out when we work
through the concrete contexts of this book. What is decisive for Aristotle is to
show that the phenomenon of motion cannot be understood in a fundamental,
categorial manner by using the traditional categories of “being” and “non-being”
(“being-different,” “being-unequal”) [ibid., G 2, 201b21] that had until that time
been made available in ontology. The phenomenon of motion provides of itself
the structures that are primordial and ultimate in it: namely, duvnami~ [potential-
ity], i.e., the in each case particular availability of . . . ; ejnevrgeia [actuality], i.e.,
the putting to work of this availability; and ejntelevceia [the fulfillment in which
something has reached its end], i.e., the maintaining (in true safekeeping) of this
availability that has been put to work.
The second part of our investigations is focused on an interpretation of

Met. Z, H and Q. What is shown here is how Aristotle develops the fundamen-
tal problem of beingness through a specifically executed explication of what is
addressed in a particular manner in lovgo~ as such (and in terms of the forehav-
ing at work here, this lovgo~ is at the same time the look of something being
moved in some way, i.e., of something having arisen from motion [kivnhsi~—
poivhsi~—pra`xi~]), as well as how, on the basis of this, he arrives at an ontolog-
ical formulation of the “categories” of duvnami~ and ejnevrgeia, which are, along
with his categories in the narrower sense, constitutive for the being “of beings.”
Aristotle’s “ethics” is then to be placed into this ontological horizon, so that
this “ethics” is seen as the explication of beings in the sense of human beings, i.e.,
human life and its movement. This is done in such a way that we first provide an
interpretation of De anima with respect to its ontological and logical structure,
and indeed this itself is carried out on the broader basis of an explication of the
domain of the being of life as a particular kind of movement (i.e., on the basis of
an interpretation of De motu animalium). What is shown here is how “inten-
tionality” comes into view for Aristotle and indeed as “objective,” i.e., as a how
of the movement of life that is somehow “noetically” illuminated when it goes
144 SUPPLEMENTS
about its dealings. Beings in their basic aspect of being-moved, i.e., their “being
out for” and “going toward,” constitute the forehaving and condition that makes
it possible for us to bring intentionality into relief in accord with how it becomes
explicit in Aristotle and for its part makes visible the basic characteristic of lovgo~.
We will then for the first time have at our disposal the concrete motivational basis
allowing us to understand the final stage that Aristotle reached in the problems
of ontology and logic. What this final stage is rooted in will be exhibited in an
interpretation of Met. G, E, B, and I and in an interpretation of De interp., the
Prior Analytics, and the Posterior Analytics. What becomes clear on the basis of
these interpretations is the extent to which a particular ontology of a particular
domain of being and the logic of a particular kind of addressing came to be
regarded, in consequence of the inclination toward falling found in interpreting,
as the one and true ontology and the one and true logic, and as such came to dom-
inate in a decisive manner not only the history of ontology and logic but also that
of spirit itself, i.e., the history of human existence.
The origin of the “categories” does not lie in lovgo~ as such. Nor are these
“categories” read off from “things.” Rather, they are the basic modes of a particu-
lar kind of addressing of a particular domain of objects that are maintained in
forehaving in terms of their “look” and consist of those objects of dealings one can
be concerned with and directed to in terms of routine tasks. As such, they are the
“phyla” of the sense of the as-what-characteristics in terms of which these objects
are able to be addressed [for this and the following, see Met. Q 10, E 2–4, D 7].
They are found together with dunavmei and ejnergeiva/ o[n [being possible and
being actual], since, in growing out of the what of objects and being for it, they
are constitutive for the being of objects in the sense of states of “affairs” [“Tuns”-
Gegenstände] (o[n wJ~ pra`gma [being in the sense of things]). In contrast, o[n wJ~ ajl-
hϑev~ [being in the sense of being true], i.e., truth as a characteristic of beings, as
the how of their unveiled being-there as they are in themselves, is not constitutive
for the pra`gma [thing], and yet it is the kuriwvtaton [being in the strictest sense]
(Met. Q 10, 1051b1), i.e., what is decisive, what leads the way, with respect to
gaining access to beings in the mode of a simple perceiving of them and an
explicative defining of them. O [ n kata; sumbebhkov~ [being in the sense of acci-
dental attributes], i.e., being in the how of being-found-along-with, is as little con-
stitutive for beings as o[n wJ~ ajlhϑev~. For the primordial sense of being is being-
produced [Hergestelltsein]. Such beings are originally there, as what they are, only
for a productive kind of dealings, only that these dealings now no longer make use
of them, in that they are able to take up the now finished and ready objects within
different and no longer original points of view for caring about them.
The being of a house is being as being-built [Erstelltsein] (oujs iva ginomevnh,
poihϑei`sa [being that is coming into being, is being produced].19 Thus the sense
of being is for Aristotle a very particular sense of being, not the vague, indifferent
sense of reality in general. Here being is relative to production, i.e., to the cir-
cumspection (procedures) illuminating these dealings. As a consequence of this
sense of authentic being having been taken as the fundamental starting point, the
modes of the look and the encountering of the objects of dealings in which these
objects are given in terms of their full significance in the environing world (e.g.,
the being-comfortable of the house, its being-pleasant, being-conveniently-
located, and being-well-lit [ibid., E 2, 1026b8–9]) must appear as a mere being-
found-along-with and as ejgguv~ ti mh; o[n—w{sper ojnovmati movnon [something
closely akin to non-being—as if it were a mere name] (ibid., 1026b22,
1026b14). But the fact that Aristotle was able to bring this being-found-along
with into relief as a separate sense of being is at the same time the strongest
expression of the fact that he did take up the environing world as it is fully expe-
rienced, that he did see the sorts of things here that are found along with . . . ,
only that—and this happened already with the term he used for it—all of this
was ontologically interpreted on the basis of the guiding theme of a particular
sense of being that had been worked out and refined as the decisive one. For its
part, this sense of being had its provenance in the environing world as it is orig-
inally given in experience, but then, and this is found even in Aristotle himself,
it lost the sense of this provenance due to the pressure exerted by the kind of
ontology worked out and refined. In the course of the subsequent development
of ontological research, it fell into the averageness of having its vague traditional
meaning of “reality” or “actuality” and as such then provided the starting point
for the problems of epistemology. The “objectivity” of the theoretical definition
of objects in the sense of “nature,” an “objectivity” that in turn first grew out of
this starting point for epistemology, then took the lead regarding the problem of
the sense of being.
Chapter Ten
Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the

Struggle for a Historical Worldview (1925)
CHARLES BAMBACH, TRANSLATOR
CONTENTS
I. Introduction. The theme, method of treatment, and structure of the

following discussions.
II. Dilthey’s life and works.
III. The formulation of Dilthey’s basic problem: The question of the sense
of history.
IV. Dilthey’s influence on contemporary philosophy. The limits of his
formulation of the above question. The possibility of taking up this
question once again in phenomenology.
V. The essence and goals of phenomenology.
VI. The phenomenological question of the sense of history as the ques-
tion of the being of human beings.
VII–VIII. Time as the fundamental character of human being.
IX. Time as the fundamental character of history.
X. The essence of historical being. Return to Dilthey.
See pp. 8–9, 32 for bibliographic and other background information on

this ten-part series of lectures from Heidegger’s Marburg Period, delivered in Kas-
sel the year before the composition of Being and Time.
147
148 SUPPLEMENTS
The theme of these lectures will appear somewhat remote and unfamiliar per-
haps, but it involves a fundamental problem pervading the whole of Western phi-
losophy: the problem of the sense of human life. What kind of reality is life? In
terms of the question of what reality is, immediate reality is taken to be the world
or nature. Yet always already included in such a question is the question of the
being of human being itself. The discovery of the authentic sense of the being
and reality of human life has a muddled history. Only in recent times has it
arrived at a basis so that it can be investigated in a scientific, philosophical man-
ner. In the history of this question, the work of Dilthey has a central place. At
the same time, in conjunction with this question, there has been an upheaval in
the way philosophical questions have been formulated, a crisis of philosophy as
science. And philosophy is not the only science in crisis. All sciences and groups
of sciences are undergoing a great revolution of a productive kind that has
opened up new modes of questioning, new possibilities, and new horizons. In
physics, there is the appearance of the theory of relativity; in mathematics, where
the foundations have become questionable, one speaks of a crisis of foundations.
In biology, attempts are being made to overcome mechanism; in the historical
[historischen] sciences, questions are raised concerning our understanding of his-
torical [geschichtlichen] reality and the possibilities of interpreting the past.1 Even
in theology (i.e., Protestant theology) a rejection of mere history of religion is
taking place, and theologians are beginning to reflect on their theme and method
in a new way. Philosophy also stands within this general crisis, a crisis whose roots
go back before the war. It develops out of the continuity of science itself, and this
is the guarantee for the earnestness and reliability of its upheavals.
First we have to make clear what kind of question is being raised in the
theme of these lectures. What does “historical [historische] worldview” mean?
What is a “struggle for” a historical worldview? Who is Dilthey, and what does
he have to do with all of this?
To begin, we address the theme, method of treatment, and structure of the
following discussions.
Historical Worldview:
What is the meaning of this expression, and how did it arise as a problem? World-
view: the expression is first used in the eighteenth century. In itself, the term is
ambiguous, not really reflecting what it literally means: having a view of the
world, of nature. At the same time, it also means knowledge about life and one’s
own being in the world. From this knowledge are formed certain posited goals
that regulate one’s actions. In a worldview, a certain attitude thus manifests itself.
A worldview is not merely a theoretical form of knowledge but a practical atti-
tude about the world and one’s own existence that is not momentary but endur-
ing. It is formed and appropriated by human beings themselves. This possibility
THE STRUGGLE FOR A HISTORICAL WORLDVIEW (1925) 149
has only come to light since the Renaissance, with the freedom from religious
ties. In another sense, one also can speak of a natural worldview that all human
beings as such already also bring with them through milieu, aptitude, education,
etc. This is a prescientific worldview in contrast to a scientific one, i.e., a position
formed on the basis of theoretical-scientific knowledge.
A historical worldview is one in which knowledge of history determines
one’s understanding of the world and Dasein. It is grounded in the historical char-
acter of the development of the world and of human Dasein. Here struggle means
a struggle for the attainment of such a position from out of one’s knowledge of the
historical character of the world and Dasein. Its concern is to make these decisive
historical forces primary for the shaping of beliefs and the consciousness of
Dasein. That is only possible where history as our own reality has entered human
consciousness. This is not something self-evident. Primitive peoples have lived a
long time without history [Geschichte], as we ourselves have. The Greeks no doubt
already had a certain experience of the historical. However, knowledge of change
is hardly the same thing as historical [historisches] consciousness. The latter is tied
to certain presuppositions. In humanism and the Reformation, there arose a cer-
tain historical critique and debate with Catholicism. One sought to return to the
pure forms of Christian life, something that led one back into history. On the
other hand, there developed a national consciousness among individual peoples
that led to a push for knowing one’s own origins. But all of this still cannot be
called “historical consciousness.” Only when history is so viewed that one’s own
reality also is seen within a historical context can it be said that life knows about
the history in which it stands, that a historical consciousness is found there. One’s
own epoch is experienced as a situation in which the present itself stands, and this
not merely in the sense of standing over against the past but rather simultaneously
in the sense of a situation in which the future will be decided or has been decided.
Thus the awakening and vigilance of historical consciousness is not something
self-evident or pregiven in life. It is much more a task to be developed.
In a historical [historische] worldview, historical [geschichtliche] knowing
becomes the principle for viewing all human things. History becomes universal
history. Here the main question is: What is the sense of history, and what exis-
tential goals can be derived from it for the future? The derivation of life-goals
from history has developed since the eighteenth century in Kant, Herder, Hum-
boldt, and Hegel. The fundamental view here was ultimately that of a historical
development whereby humanity overcomes its dependency and arrives at free-
dom (for Hegel, the humanity of European culture is embodied in the state). In
this way the path was cleared for actual historical research, i.e., for the sciences
that open up history theoretically and scientifically on the basis of sources
secured in critical work (as in Wolff, Niebuhr, Savigny, Bopp, Bauer, Schleier-
macher, Ranke, Jacob Grimm).
During the period 1780–1840, creative forces were unleashed that today
we can no longer imagine. Then, with the collapse of Hegelian philosophy,
150 SUPPLEMENTS
reflection on historical reality subsided. What remained was positive, systematic

work on history, and yet the question of the sense of historical being died out.
Now it was the natural sciences that again took the actual lead in the formation
of a worldview. When philosophy once again took stock of itself in the 1860s,
this had the form of a historical return to Kant as the author of the three critiques
and especially as the author of The Critique of Pure Reason, which offered a the-
ory of the mathematical natural sciences. Philosophy was now understood as
epistemology, a move carried out by the Marburg school of neo-Kantians. Phi-
losophy no longer attempted to master the individual sciences, or to go beyond
their results, but limited itself to a single domain of its own: theory of science. In
his first critique, Kant had provided only a theory of the mathematical natural
sciences. In the meantime, the historical sciences had developed. Thus the task at
hand was to extend Kant’s critique, i.e., to place a theory of the historical sciences
alongside it. With the retreat from this way of formulating the question at the
end of the nineteenth century and with the growth of concrete historical
research, the need to raise the question of the sense of historical being became
even more pressing. The question of formal foundations was superseded by that
of material foundations (Troeltsch following upon Windelband and Rickert, who
received their impulses from Dilthey; Spengler also derives from this position).
Modern philosophy of history owes its impulses and initiatives to Dilthey.
Yet modern theory has not really understood the authentic tendencies of
Dilthey’s thought; in fact, it has seen to it that these tendencies have remained
buried to this day.
We now will attempt to grasp the sense of the historical worldview in a
more precise manner, i.e., we need to characterize this knowledge of the histori-
cal being of the world. The development of such knowledge is the task of phi-
losophy and the historical sciences themselves. The possibility of a historical
worldview is based on the attainment of clarity and transparency concerning the
human condition. We need to make this presupposition very clear to ourselves.
The struggle for a historical worldview is not played out in debates about the his-
torical conception of the world but rather in those about the sense of historical
being itself. And here we are speaking of the labors of Dilthey’s research. We need
to examine how philosophical questioning gains the transparency necessary for
developing a historical worldview. We are raising the question: Which reality is
historical in the authentic sense? And what does historical mean?
We will at first follow Dilthey on his paths of inquiry. It was Dilthey who,
from the 1860s (along with Count Yorck), had a truly radical awareness of this
problem. To gain an intimate understanding of Dilthey’s work means that we
ourselves question, that we ourselves formulate the questions that moved Dilthey.
We need to ask whether he solved the problem and whether he at all possessed
the philosophical resources necessary to do so. Thus we will be questioning
beyond him, and indeed we will do this on the basis of phenomenology (Dilthey
characterized the Logical Investigations as an epochal work).2 We will see that the
authentic historical reality is human Dasein itself, and we also will see what kinds
of structures human Dasein possesses. The fundamental character of Dasein is
nothing other than time. On the basis of this character of time, we will make
clear that human being is historical. As we pursue this question of time, we will
encounter another problem of time in the theory of relativity and will attempt to
make clear its philosophical meaning. From the historicity of Dasein, we will
return to Dilthey in order to inquire, in a critical way, into the whole of his work.
What we should achieve in all of this is a certain relation to the things
themselves, in which we see that these things are things that concern human
beings. Our aim is to awaken the consciousness that truly productive work exists
in the modern sciences, and that there is no cause for resignation. Such work is
done without window dressing or any racket, and because of this science is exem-
plary for the existence of our entire nation.
II
Outwardly, Dilthey’s life was uneventful. What was present was his inner life and
that which was alive in each of this philosopher’s questions. That was able to
express itself in his works and writings which, according to their aim, promoted
the thematic treatment of specific problems. We will first present an external
sketch of his life, then his “intellectual world,” then the determining forces in his
intellectual life, and lastly his works.
Born in 1833 as the son of a pastor, Dilthey first studied theology and later
philosophy and the historical sciences (1850s and early 1860s). He was
appointed to Basel in 1867, to Breslau in 1871, and to Berlin in 1882. Member
of the Academy [of the Sciences] in 1887. Died on October 1, 1911 in the Tyrol.
Sketches of his life in his student years in the diaries, Ethica (1854–1864), deal
mostly with scholarly issues.3 In his years as a university lecturer, involvement in
the “Suicide Club” (Scherer, Grimm, Erdmannsdörffer, Usener). Correspon-
dence with Yorck during the period 1877–1897, marked by a rare philosophical
friendship.4 Dilthey often wished for a quieter existence than the Berliners had.
He was not one who easily finished his work. Rather, through the pressure of the
Academy, he was forced to publish things he otherwise never would have.
Intellectual life was the only real existence for Dilthey. We will consider
first his inner growth and impulses, then the determining forces stemming
from history and the present. Dilthey was a theologian in the beginning and
was thus provided with specific horizons and an openness for Dasein that
remained effective later on. For him, theology had a relation to philosophy and
to history, namely, the history of Christianity and its fundamental fact, the life
of Jesus. Dilthey planned a history of Western Christianity, but this plan and
his whole program of theological studies fell apart during his study of the Mid-
dle Ages. In the struggle between faith and knowledge, Dilthey sided with
knowledge and this-worldliness. He renounced all closure and finality and was
152 SUPPLEMENTS
everywhere satisfied only with being able to explore, only with researching and
“dying on the journey.”5 However, he took with him from theology essential
impulses for understanding human life and its history. His passion remained
open for the scientific investigation of human life.
This helps us understand his reaction to the contemporary forces of his
time: positivism, the Historical School, the philosophy of Kant (as seen essen-
tially through the eyes of Schleiermacher).
French positivism offered a critique of metaphysics; it sought a purely sci-
entific form of knowledge and coincided with what we today call “sociology.”
What Dilthey took up in a positive way from this movement was its critique of
metaphysics and its stress on things here below. But positivism misunderstood
the life of the mind and its history. It sought to define mind as nature, and so it
seemed to Dilthey that his task was to preserve the unique character of the world
of the mind. He adopted a certain tendency from positivism, namely, that “one
would not want to be hoodwinked by anything,”6 but he rejected its desire to
conceive of the mind as a product of nature. He took up positivism only as a
principle of knowledge for defining things from out of themselves.
The Historical School: here Dilthey learned to think historically and expe-
rienced the living, effective force of the history of the mind, an impression that
remained fresh for him during his whole life (see his “Seventieth Birthday
Speech”).7 The world of history and his vital experience of historical research were
the foundation for Dilthey’s formulation of the question of history.
Dilthey approached Kant’s philosophy basically in terms of the view that it
formulated the question of the essence of knowledge. But, because of the influ-
ence of Schleiermacher, Dilthey saw knowledge within the context of the whole
of life. The period of the 1860s was decisive, not in the sense of a neo-Kantian-
ism but rather precisely because of Dilthey’s tendency to understand the human
condition on the basis of a full comprehension of human being. Thus Dilthey
never shared the extreme attitude against Hegel that was prevalent among his
contemporaries. He knew how to esteem Hegel’s positive contribution long
before neo-Hegelianism.
Dilthey remained open for everything of substance and closed his mind to
all empty and groundless thinking that turns on its own axis and never engages
the things themselves. This enabled him to formulate and foster in a new way a
fundamental problem in philosophy. The effect of his work on others was at first
slight. Only a few gifted people availed themselves of Dilthey’s initiatives. One of
them was Windelband, whose “Rectorial Address” of 18948 rendered Dilthey’s
inner aims superficial and turned them on their head. Following in Windelband’s
footsteps, Rickert attempted to delimit the natural sciences and the historical sci-
ences over against each other in a wholly empty and formal way. This reception
was tied just as much to the way his works were published. Only two major
works were published in his lifetime, and they both stopped at volume one: The
Life of Schleiermacher 9 and Introduction to the Human Sciences.10 Besides this, he
wrote essays, “Contributions To . . . ,” “Ideas Concerning . . . ,” “Attempts

At. . . .” Everything preliminary, incomplete, and on the way. As a result, his
work was ignored for a long time, and yet positive discoveries such as his cannot
be repressed for long. Today we have the possibility of grasping the positive
effects of his work—not merely repeating what he said but questioning beyond
his work in a new way.
III
What sort of basic question did Dilthey formulate? What resources did he pos-
sess for answering it? We will attempt to understand Dilthey’s formulation of his
question by looking at the context of his own works and by contrasting it with
the approaches of his contemporaries. We saw that all of his works are incom-
plete. So we must understand that any characterization of the contents of those
works is impossible without recognizing the basic question raised by Dilthey.
Thus at first it is only with an eye to this question that we will provide the his-
torical sequence of his works.
Dissertation: “On Schleiermacher’s Ethics.”11 We can already see that
Dilthey’s theme is not a theoretical one but rather a problem concerning the prac-
tical situation of human being. In the same period, he wrote the essay for a prize
competition: “On Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics,” i.e., on the scientific theory of
historical understanding and interpretation of texts. It was Schleiermacher who first
worked out this theory as a universal theory of understanding. Hermeneutics is a
discipline that will acquire fundamental significance at the present time and in the
future.12 Dilthey never published this work, although he later used a portion of it
in a Festschrift for Sigwart: “The Rise of Hermeneutics.”13 The connection here with
history is clear, for history as a science is an interpretation of sources that have been
secured for it in advance by the critical-historical work of philology. In 1864, he
wrote the habilitation thesis: “Attempt at an Analysis of Moral Consciousness.”14
Here again Dilthey chose a theme that forced him to grapple with the problem of
the being of human beings. He also wrote essays on Novalis, Hölderlin, and
Goethe (Poetry and Experience).15 These writings, which appear to depart from
Dilthey’s other works, have their own special place in his corpus. In them an
attempt is made to understand concrete historical individuals from their intellec-
tual core (“from their center,” as one says in the George circle). During this period,
Dilthey also wrote about empirical psychology, and in 1870 he published his biog-
raphy of Schleiermacher. In 1875, he wrote essays that contain the central thoughts
of his Introduction to the Human Sciences: “Concerning the Study of the History of
the Sciences of Man, Society, and the State.”16 The Introduction to the Human Sci-
ences has the subtitle Attempt at Laying a Foundation for the Sciences of Society and
History. Book One gives an overview of the individual human sciences and poses
the problem of the foundation for this group of sciences. Book Two deals with the
topic of metaphysics as the foundation of these sciences, its dominance as well as
154 SUPPLEMENTS
its decline. Human beings cannot be understood as historical beings if they are clas-
sified within the structures of the world as a part of nature. Volume Two of this
book was never written, hence the book ends with a discussion of the medieval
era.17 In a series of essays, Dilthey made further ventures in this direction toward an
anthropology: “Conception and Analysis of Human Being . . . ,”18 “The Natural
System of the Human Sciences.”19 Anthropology is for Dilthey a kind of historical
research whose goal is to understand how the human being was viewed in the past.
“Contributions to the Solution of the Question of Our Belief in the External
World,” written in 1890,20 raised the question: How is one to characterize the fun-
damental relation of the human being to the world? “Ideas Concerning a Descrip-
tive and Analytic Psychology” written in 1894 (will concern us more closely later).21
Following this, Dilthey wrote “Contributions to the Definition of Human Indi-
viduality.”22 At the same time, he continued work on the biography of Schleierma-
cher, on the “History of German Idealism,” and on “The History of the Young
Hegel.”23 “Studies on the Foundations of the Human Sciences” in 1905 revealed a
new current in Dilthey’s thinking.24 Perhaps this can be traced back to the effect of
Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which Dilthey read at that time and called an
epochal work, holding seminars on it for years with his students. In his founda-
tional work of 1907, “The Essence of Philosophy,” Dilthey reflected on his own
activity as a philosopher.25 “The Structure of the Historical World in the Human
Sciences” was written in 1910.26
What was the inner connection in this diversified productivity? Not a con-
ceptual system but rather a vital questioning after the sense of history and human
being. Questioning is a kind of searching in the realm of knowledge that has as its
goal the discovery and defining of reality. In every question something is interro-
gated [befragt], and it is interrogated from a determinate point of view, i.e., what
is interrogated is questioned about [abgefragt] something. Thus to formulate a
question requires that one have an originary intuition of the object that one is
interrogating. Now where does one find the object “history,” so that one might
read off it the sense of its being, i.e., read off its historical being? It is the above
sense of questions that also constitutes the sense of a scientific crisis. Every crisis
is defined by the fact that previous concepts begin to totter, that phenomena are
revealed that lead to a revision of these concepts.
On which paths of inquiry did Dilthey open up for himself access to his-
tory so that he could read off the sense of its being? On the following three:
1. a path of inquiry focusing on the history of the sciences;

2. an epistemological path of inquiry;
3. a psychological path of inquiry.
The first two paths are grounded in the third and presuppose it. We will see later
how they point to it. But for Dilthey psychology means something very specific,
and the first requirement for understanding it is to ask just what Dilthey himself
meant by it.
Dilthey’s formulation of the question of history in terms of the history of the

sciences began with his essays on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and those dealing
with the study of the history of the sciences, etc. These essays are not simply his-
torical research on the history of the sciences but rather attempts to understand
how in earlier times human life was interpreted. Their ultimate theme is a ques-
tion about the concept of life. The history of the historical sciences has a different
sense than that of the natural sciences. When the history of the historical sciences
is investigated, life itself is investigated with respect to its knowledge. As knowing,
life investigates itself in its history. The knower is the known. That is the sense that
belongs to the history of the sciences of human being and to its structure.
Dilthey’s epistemological formulation of the question of history had the same
motive. Here too we need to emphasize his question about the concept of life. This
tendency of his thought has been misunderstood to this day. Dilthey’s question
appeared in the form of the traditional demarcation of the natural and human sci-
ences that already had been attempted by J. S. Mill, who sought to understand his-
tory with the help of concept-formation in the natural sciences. Dilthey sought to
assert a unique status for the human sciences. But his interest was not a doctrine of
method and system; he was not concerned with the question of how to classify par-
ticular sciences within different domains. Such matters later became the interest of
Rickert. Dilthey’s central problem was how to see historical reality in its own real-
ity. He sought to salvage the unique character not of a science but of reality. He
sought to make comprehensible the process of human self-knowledge. To the sense
of human being belongs not only consciousness of the world but also, as included
in this consciousness, a knowing of oneself. Historical knowledge is a distinct form
of self-knowledge. Dilthey’s real interest lay here; he was not seeking an isolated
theory of the sciences. On this point, his intentions have been so widely misun-
derstood that his own followers have not understood the real sense of his theory of
science. Rather, they have emphasized that Dilthey, in contrast to Windelband and
Rickert, drew his theory from a real knowledge of historical knowing. That is
indeed correct, but it is self-evident and inessential. What mattered to Dilthey was
to discover a concept of life, even on this epistemological path of inquiry. Charac-
teristically, Dilthey was open to all stimuli. Hence, even Windelband’s and Rick-
ert’s philosophy of history, which was influenced by Dilthey, was able to exert a
reverse effect on him, so that in the end he misinterpreted the tendencies of his own
work. Thus his real intentions remained unrealized.
The goal of both the above-mentioned directions of Dilthey’s research shows
itself clearly to be the apprehension and illumination of the phenomenon of life.
This also is what Dilthey attempted to tackle in his psychology and indeed in sharp
contrast to traditional psychology, where the unique being of life is relinquished.
IV
Dilthey’s basic question concerns the concept of life. This question about the
concept of life is one about the conceptualizing of life. Thus it is necessary to first
156 SUPPLEMENTS
gain an originary access to life in order then to grasp it conceptually. Dilthey

understood this task under the traditional heading of psychology. Psychology
is the science of the soul or, in its modern conception, the science of experi-
ence. Insofar as these two conceptions appear in a certain continuity, one
speaks of the stream of experience (James). Experiences are a reality that does
not exist in the world but rather is accessible only in the inner observation of
reflection, in the consciousness of oneself. Thus this entire region of experi-
ences also is described as consciousness. (Descartes—res cogitans). As a science,
psychology is the science of the contexts of experience, the science of con-
sciousness. Dilthey had still another description of this science, which shows
more clearly what was at issue for him: anthropology. He was not seeking to
observe psychological processes side by side with physiological ones; rather,
his theme was the human being as a spiritual being, and it was the structures
of this being that he wanted to research. This also is the meaning of the defi-
nition: empirical psychology. Dilthey thereby disassociated himself from the
specific conception of psychology as a natural science. With these intentions,
he drew on earlier attempts in psychology, and yet this does not detract from
an interpretation of his approach as constituting something fundamentally
new. In 1874 there appeared Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Stand-
point, a book written in the spirit of positivism, which stressed the necessity
of taking stock of the psychical states of affairs before proceeding to inquire
into the laws governing the course of psychical events. In order to read off the
constitution of such laws, one must first know the primary structures. Origi-
nally, Brentano was a Catholic theologian, a student of Trendelenburg, leav-
ing theology in 1870 and moving to the study of philosophy. However, the
historical tradition, with which he came into contact in his theological stud-
ies, remained vital for him (the Middle Ages and Aristotle). Greek psychology
was something wholly different from experimental psychology. Psychology
was here a doctrine of life and of human being itself. (Brentano’s psychology,
which did not seek to explain psychical sequences of events but sought to
describe fundamental constitutive states of mind, decisively influenced not
only Dilthey but also Husserl.) Dilthey sought to research the structures of the
psychical, and what is essential here is that he saw in them not mere empty
forms of psychical being [Dasein] in terms of which they are classified; rather,
he saw them as belonging to the reality of psychical life itself. This signifies
the most extreme position to which Dilthey advanced in his concept of life:
structures as the primary vital unity of life itself and not as the mere classifi-
catory schemata for understanding life.
In his “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology” (1894),
Dilthey undertook the demarcation of his own psychology from the positivist
conception of psychology as a natural science. His psychology is descriptive and
not explanatory, analytic and not constructive. The conception of psychology as a
natural science transfers the methods of physics to psychology and seeks to grasp
laws in its measurement of regularities. Because it does this without first interro-
gating the psychical with respect to its being, this kind of psychology has to trans-
plant certain hypotheses and prejudgments that are not and cannot be demon-
strated. A hypothesis is justified on the basis of its results. Now, insofar as the
hypothesis is not, however, grounded by a prior intuition of the thing inquired
into, everything constructed upon it is only of hypothetical certainty. This psy-
chology can never be the fundamental science of the human sciences. This is the
kind of psychology that Wundt attempted in his Physiological Psychology,27 where
the psychical is treated in connection with the physical, and both are supposed
to be made accessible through the same method.
Dilthey called his psychology “analytic” in contrast to construction, which
is the basic approach of psychology as a natural science. The latter attempts,
much like physics, a reduction to ultimate elements. As physics constructs nature
on the basis of elements, so one tries to do the same thing with the psyche. One
sees the ultimate element in the sensible impression. From complexes of impres-
sions, one seeks to assemble phenomena such as “will,” “hate,” etc. It is no acci-
dent that this psychology saw sense data as the primal elements, for here the
methods of comprehension through measurement in the natural sciences are
most likely possible. Psychology as a natural science is therefore essentially a psy-
chology of the senses. (Today even this kind of psychology—influenced in part
by phenomenology—has arrived at new ways of formulating questions and has a
wholly different look than it had in Dilthey’s era). So for it, too, construction was
the way to explain psychical contexts of experience.
Against these tendencies, what was important for Dilthey was that one
begin by looking at the psychical context. Context was for him what is primary;
it was the whole of life itself. It is always already there and is not first constructed
out of elements. It is to be grasped first, and its component parts are to be loos-
ened free from it. This breaking loose is no breaking loose of elements but a loos-
ening up of primary structures. Psychical life is originally always given in its
wholeness and, indeed, according to three fundamental characteristics:
1. It develops itself.
2. It is free, and
3. it is defined by an acquired context, i.e., it is historical.
For the sake of contrast, we can describe the way one usually attempts to under-
stand “seeing.” One believes that one is able to understand it in terms of amass-
ing sense impressions. One does not see that it is seeing itself that is primary and
first determines the assimilation and interpretation of sensory data. The same can
be said for memory and recollection, which one usually tries to explain through
association. On the contrary, the related comprehension of two states of affairs at
different times is already recollection, and association is only a particular occur-
rence of recollection.
158 SUPPLEMENTS
The fundamental character of psychical context is the self, the self-same-

ness of the person, of the ego, which is conditioned by the external world. It
influences the self, and the self in turn influences it. There exists a certain effec-
tive correlation between the self and the external world (“On the Origin of Our
Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification”). This whole con-
text of self and world is there [ist da] at every moment. Yet this being-there
[Dasein] does not necessarily mean that life knows this fundamental structure.
The context is a continuous one; something is always present for consciousness.
For states of consciousness, taken at a cross-section, so to speak, there emerges at
every moment a comportment that is equally noetic, emotive, and volitional. The
intimate relationship between these moments constitutes the real structure of
consciousness. This structure is something that is experienced by life itself. It is
experience, i.e., the self-experience of psychical life itself, i.e., nothing other than
the self-experience of the human being, insofar as the latter is determined by a
world. This determination is not, however, causal; the context is much more tied
to motive and motivation. Psychical life is defined by a context of purposes, a
characteristic that is at first in motion (?) in individual life. Insofar as life is life
with others, the structures of this life with one another need to be established.
How is the life of the other originally given? In epistemological terms, the ques-
tion presents itself as one concerned with the knowledge of an alien conscious-
ness. But this way of formulating the question is mistaken, because it overlooks
the fact that life is primarily always already life with others, a knowledge of one’s
fellow human beings. Yet Dilthey never pressed this question any further. The
essential thing for him was that the structural context of life is acquired, i.e., it is
defined by its history.
We now ask, how was Dilthey’s fundamental research received? The Mar-
burg school of neo-Kantians, whose main interests focused on epistemology, did
not concern itself with Dilthey at all. But the Southwest German school of neo-
Kantians, which was influenced by Kant as well as by Fichte, took up Dilthey’s
impulses. Windelband, “Rectorial Address.” Rickert, The Limits of Concept-For-
mation in Natural Science.28 Here Dilthey’s basic problem was misunderstood
beyond the point of recognition. Dilthey’s ultimate interest was historical being,
but Rickert never really concerned himself with knowledge of history, only with
its manner of presentation. The upshot of Rickert’s inquiry was to show that the
historian presented unique individuality, whereas the natural scientist presented
the universal; the one sought individuation, the other generalization. This is
merely a formal taxonomy which, though so obviously true that it cannot be
challenged, is so empty that nothing can be gleaned from it either. For both
Windelband and Rickert, psychology is a generalizing science and hence a nat-
ural science. It cannot, therefore, serve as the basis of the human sciences, for a
science of the universal cannot provide the basis for a science of the particular.
This analogical inference—taken from the relationship of mathematics and
physics—wholly overlooks the fact that even in this relationship universality is a
purely formal, empty designation. The universality of mathematics is wholly dif-

ferent from that of physics; in mathematics, universality is merely a formaliza-
tion, while in physics it is to be understood as a generalization. What is really
essential here, however, is that the neo-Kantians of the Southwest German school
did away with the positive tendency of Dilthey’s thought with one stroke. They
didn’t concern themselves with the fact that Dilthey wanted to develop a psy-
chology that neither wanted to be nor could be a natural science. They simply
said: for us psychology is a natural science. The inner consequence was that Rick-
ert launched superficial attacks against philosophy of life that did not carry
research any farther, but that—and this was typical!—were true in principle. He
maintained that the important factor for philosophy was to form a concept of the
thing it researches. And here Rickert was right. Yet obviously philosophy of life
also seeks to develop a concept of life and to work out its conceptuality. The
demand for concept-formation is, however, an empty one; the real substance of
science is its relation to the thing it researches. A change in this relation is also the
primary factor in every transformation of a science.
If we now view Dilthey’s life work as one of research, then we need to for-
mulate a critical question and ask, how far did Dilthey get in his research, and
where and in what way did he fail? We need to repeat his questioning and to do
this on the basis of a type of research—namely, phenomenology—that provides us
with the suitable resources for advancing further than Dilthey’s own position.
The formation of a historical worldview is grounded in historical research.

(Yorck: “Our common interest is to understand historicity”).29 What is important
is to work out the being of the historical, i.e., historicity rather than the histori-
cal, being rather than beings, reality rather than the real. What is of concern is
thus not the question of empirical research on history; even in universal history,
one still would not have historicity. Dilthey penetrated into that reality, namely,
human Dasein which, in the authentic sense, is in the sense of historical being.
He succeeded in bringing this reality to givenness, defining it as living, free, and
historical. But he did not pose the question of historicity itself, the question of
the sense of being, i.e., concerning the being of beings. It is only since the devel-
opment of phenomenology that we are in a position to pose this question clearly.
Thus we need to look at this type of research that prepares the ground for our
question.
The expression “phenomenology” is at first complicated and strange, but its
meaning is simple. We will clarify the sense of this thing called “phenomenology”
in terms of the following five themes, to be able then to understand the name:
1. The fundamental attitude of phenomenology as a new direction of philo-

sophical research and its relation to traditional philosophy today.
160 SUPPLEMENTS
2. The first breakthrough to it in Husserl’s Logical Investigations.

3. The characterization of its decisive discoveries: intentionality and categorial
intuition.
4. The name “phenomenology.”
5. The limits of previous phenomenological research.
The fundamental attitude of phenomenological research is defined by a principle

that appears self-evident: to the things themselves. Accordingly, in the question of
historicity, it is a matter of bringing historical reality to givenness so that the sense
of its being can be read off it. To derive concepts from things, and to philoso-
phize from out of the things themselves, seems to be something self-evident. But
this really only seems to be the case. Research and life have the strange tendency
to leap over what is simple, originary, and genuine and to get hung up on what
is complicated, derivative, and non-genuine. That is true not only today but for
the whole history of philosophy. Contemporary philosophy is traditional; its
newness lies in its renewal of previous philosophy, not in any new way of for-
mulating questions about things. Traditional philosophy begins with opinions
about things, i.e., with concepts that are not examined regarding their original
appropriateness in the past. In contrast, phenomenology postulates an advance
into the things themselves.
This obviously is not done with a postulate. At first, phenomenology was
not a program but an undertaking. It treated apparently quite primitive and ele-
mental things. But returning to self-evident things concealed from the con-
sciousness of everyday life is always the genuine path to great discoveries. Every
great discoverer poses an elementary question. With its new principle, which was
concealed since the classical era and discovered again from it, phenomenology
aimed not so much to place itself outside of history as to remain unaffected by
it. But that is not possible, since every discovery stands in a historical continuity
and is codetermined by history. Historical motives are alive in phenomenology
and, in part, have determined its traditional way of formulating questions and
starting points, concealing from it a genuine access to things. Phenomenology
needs, first of all, to enter more and more into the possibility of extricating itself
from the tradition in order to free up past philosophy for a genuine appropria-
tion. The result of this kind of phenomenological research is necessarily a variety
of directions, i.e., directions of inquiry. But there is no phenomenological school.
There are different directions of work that subject themselves to reciprocal cri-
tique. Every proposition is valid only insofar as it can be demonstrated. One is of
course never able to suspend personal opinions entirely, but they have no weight.
The first breakthrough in this kind of research was in 1900–1901 with the
publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. The Logical Investigations in fact
constitute the fundamental book of phenomenology, but here we cannot really
discuss the content of this work. That would even contradict the phenomeno-
logical principle since, according to it, one cannot demonstrate what is merely
reported in a lecture; and it is precisely this pursuit of the things themselves that
is essential. That requires a certain schooling which is neither sorcery nor a clever
trick but a scientific method for which, as for every method, a certain aptitude is
of course required. This aptitude can, however, only be developed by working
with the things themselves over many years.
We will attempt in a roundabout way to make clear the two decisive dis-
coveries that will allow us to formulate Dilthey’s question in a new phenomeno-
logical way: intentionality and categorial intuition. Intentio is an aiming at some-
thing. In the Middle Ages, this expression was used to designate a characteristic
of psychical comportment. All thinking is a thinking about something, all will-
ing is a willing of something, all experience is an experience of something. This
self-evident proposition is of fundamental significance. When we bring to mind
this directedness toward something, the toward-which of this directedness is
simultaneously given just as it is intended in the act in question. We experience
what is intended in the determinations of its being-intended. That is, we have the
possibility of interrogating the experienced world with respect to its being-there
[Dasein]. Here we can learn to see beings in their being. Thus a scientific basis is
acquired for the question of the being of beings. Phenomenological research does
not simply observe one region of being; what matters to it, rather, is to investi-
gate all regions with regard to the structure of their being. In this way, philoso-
phy once again has the possibility of being in advance of the sciences. It no longer
needs to say in an inadequate and a more general way what the individual sci-
ences have already said with more precision and in a better way. As Plato once
opened the way for geometry, so now philosophy again has the possibility of
opening up the respective regions of the sciences and providing the main themes
of their research through fundamental definitions. Thus phenomenology has its
place in research at the universities. It seeks to make of students not philosophers
but rather scholars with a consciousness of their own science. And this is precisely
the effect that Plato and Aristotle had in the Academy and Lyceum.
The second discovery, categorial intuition, can be touched upon only
briefly. Earlier we differentiated being from beings by observing that being,
unlike beings, is not accessible through sensory intuition. Nonetheless, the sense
of being that is meant when I say the word “is” must somehow be capable of
demonstration. I must be able to show what the meaning of being is when I use
the expression “is.” The act that opens up access to this demonstration is catego-
rial intuition.
According to the demands of phenomenology, philosophy should be con-
cerned not with polishing concepts, making use of them in a superficial manner,
but rather with making accessible that which is intended in them so that it can
show itself from itself: ϕainovmenon [phenomenon]—lovgo~ [discourse]. Phe-
nomenology is therefore an addressing and defining of that which shows itself
from itself. Thus in its Greek name one can already see an allusion to its basic
162 SUPPLEMENTS
principle: to the things themselves. In its earliest breakthrough, phenomenolog-

ical research confined itself essentially to theoretical experiences, i.e., to thinking.
It then later brought in emotional experiences as well. Yet one can see without
much effort that there is nothing really new here except a more radical formula-
tion of traditional psychology. Phenomenology was still working to a great extent
within the framework of the older psychological tradition when the discovery of
intentionality was made, a discovery that shifted its research to another plane,
however. Husserl himself misunderstood his own work when he wrote the fore-
word to Logical Investigations.30 Here he put forward the completely mistaken
interpretation of phenomenology as a better kind of psychology.
VI
For Dilthey, authentic historical being is human Dasein. Dilthey managed to

draw attention to certain structures in life, but he never formulated the question
of the reality of life itself, namely, what is the sense of the being of our own
Dasein? Because he doesn’t pose this question, he never offers an answer to the
question of historical being, a question also neglected by previous phenomeno-
logical research. Phenomenology presupposed life. When it asked the question,
what is man?, it offered the traditional answer: animal rationale. Sensibility,
understanding, and reason as more exact definitions (in Kant). What holds these
realms together? What is the character of being that belongs to the whole being?
Phenomenology defined the human being as a context of experiences held
together through the unity of the ego as a center of acts. But it did not inquire
into the character of being that belongs to this center.
What we would like to attempt now is a preliminary definition of the
being of human being that will serve as a basis for the more authentic definition
in which the sense of the being of human being will be shown to be time. We
will attempt, phenomenologically, to set forth characteristics of the being of
human being and to see human Dasein just as it shows itself in its everyday exis-
tence [Dasein]. This is a fundamental task that appears to move in the realm of
what is most self-evident and closest to us, but this realm of what is closest to us
is in fact what is least uncovered for us. This reality has been forgotten due to the
sediment of traditional modes of questioning. That is why we will begin with cer-
tain faulty interpretations in order to arrive at a genuine interpretation.
One fundamental interpretation has the human being as an ego. It derives
from Descartes who, in his Meditations, sought a secure foundation of certitude
and found it in his understanding of the ego as res cogitans. Starting from this
Cartesian foundation and proceeding via Kant’s mode of questioning, modern
epistemology has tried to understand how the subject comes out of itself to the
object, i.e., how it can know the object. By moving along this path of inquiry,
modern epistemology believes itself to be eminently critical. What was at issue in
Descartes’ orientation to geometry was the acquisition of certain principles from
which inferences could be made; what mattered was not a presentation of the
total being of human beings but an axiom for deduction. This interpretation,
namely, that at first only the ego is given, is uncritical. It is based on the presup-
position that consciousness is similar to a box, where the ego is inside and reality
is outside. But natural consciousness knows nothing of all this; rather, the primal
givenness of Dasein is that it is in a world. Life is that kind of reality which is in
a world and indeed in such a way that it has a world. Every living creature has its
environing world not as something extant next to it but as something that is there
[da ist] for it as disclosed, uncovered. For a primitive animal, the world can be
very simple. But life and its world are never two things side by side; rather, life
“has” its world. Even in biology this kind of knowledge is slowly beginning to
make headway. People are now reflecting on the fundamental structure of the
animal. But we miss the essential thing here if we don’t see that the animal has a
world. In the same way, we too are always in a world in such a way that it is dis-
closed for us. An object such as a chair, for example, is merely extant; all life, on
the other hand, is there [ist da] in such a way that a world also is there for it.
Now it is important to see the fundamental structures in which this being
in the world is played out. How is the world originally given? Not as an object of
theoretical knowledge but as an environing world in which I look around and
act, set up something, care for it. These objects are not in the first place objects
of theoretical knowledge but are things with which I am involved and which
carry within themselves references to what they are used for and directives for
their use, their usability. What is given at first is not material things in the sense
of physics. The extraction of nature from the world as it is given immediately to
us is originally a complicated process. The world that is closest to us is one of
practical concern. The environing world [Umwelt] and its objects are in space,
but the space of this world is not the space of geometry. It is essentially defined
by moments of nearness and distance as we go about our everyday dealings
[Umgang], i.e., by possibilities of turning to something and the like. It doesn’t
have the homogeneous structure of geometric space; rather, it has definite and
distinct places. The distances between pieces of furniture, for example, are not
given as measurements but rather in dimensions that are disclosed in going about
dealings with them (they can be reached by a touch of the hand, one can walk
between them, etc.). It is to the task of uncovering the space in the environing
world that the painter is dedicated. It is on the basis of this space that geometric
space is first worked out through a specific process.
The being-there [Dasein] of life is further defined by the being-there-with-
us of other realities that have the same character of being that I myself have: other
human beings. We enjoy a peculiar kind of being-with-one-another. We all share
the same environing world; we are in the same space. Space is there for us as we
are with one another, and we are there for one another. But the chairs in this
space are, on the contrary, merely present, they are not there for one another, and
though they are of course all in the same space, this space is not there for them.
164 SUPPLEMENTS
Being-in-the-world is thus being-with-one-another. The former is characterized

by this being-with-one-another even when there is in fact no other person there.
In my natural way of living, I myself am not given to myself in such a way that
I observe my experiences. I am initially given to myself in that with which I am
involved, in that with which I tarry from day to day. There is a certain character
of familiarity to the world (room, house, city, etc.). It is in this world, having
faded into it as it were, that I see myself as something real. I encounter myself in
my environing world. The environing world [Umwelt] is initially given in prac-
tical circumspection [Umsicht]. The possibility of theoretical research arises here
only through a certain reorientation. I can reorient myself by detaching my cir-
cumspection from my own concerns and allowing it to become merely a kind of
looking around, i.e., ϑewriva [theory]. This move toward the autonomy of sight
is the real source of any science. Science is the development of this way of merely
looking at a thing.
But who is this Dasein? Initially and for the most part, we are not our-
selves. We live in terms of what everyone says, what everyone judges to be the case,
how everyone sees things, what everyone wants. It is this indeterminate “everyone”
that rules over Dasein. Initially and for the most part, this everyone enjoys a thor-
ough dominance over Dasein. Even science lives in terms of it. In tradition, we
are shown how everyone asks questions and how everyone takes up research. This
publicness of Dasein that rules over our being-with-one-another makes it clear
that we are, for the most part, not ourselves but the Others: our lives are lived in
terms of the Others and are lived as it were by them. Who is this everyone? It is
imperceptible, indefinable, no one—however, it is not nothing but rather the
most real reality of our everyday Dasein. This everyone-Dasein has the tendency
to lose itself in its concerns with the world and to fall away from its own self. The
human being is inauthentic in its everyday world, and it is precisely this fact that
defines the primary reality of human Dasein. This becomes most evident in a
structure of human being that the Greeks saw and used in their definition of
human being. The human being is a zw`/on lovgon e[con [a living creature that has
discourse]. For the Greeks, who liked to talk a lot, the human being is defined as
speaking. Discourse is not understood here as the fundamental structure of our
being. (Here one should, however, not understand discourse to be mere sound
after the fashion of psychology as a natural science.) Discourse is always discourse
about something and expressing oneself about something, and it is always with
and to someone. Through discussion, what is discussed is uncovered and made
accessible to others. Lovgo~ [discourse] is dhlou`n [making visible]. The possibil-
ity of mere talk means for human beings precisely a tendency toward fallenness.
This is the possibility that the everyone seizes upon. Typically, discourse does not,
for the most part, arise from any original knowledge of things, for it is in fact
impossible to have seen and documented everything for oneself. A considerable
amount of discourse originates from hearsay. What characterizes this rote saying
is that in being circulated the validity of what has been said becomes calcified and
simultaneously gets disengaged from the very thing about which it was said. The
more rote saying dominates, the more the world is covered over. It is in this way
that Dasein has the tendency to cover over the world and, along with this, itself.
This tendency to cover over is nothing other than Dasein’s flight from itself into
publicness, a flight that has important consequences for understanding the phe-
nomenon of time.
Here we are not discussing acts or experiences of consciousness but cer-
tain ways of being-in-the-world. We are defining this Dasein in the first place in
terms of its dealings and concern with the world. This concern also is always a
concern with myself. Care is the authentic kind of being which characterizes
Dasein. The concept and experience of care are ancient, but this phenomenon
has long since been covered over, and it has never been taken up primordially as
a point of departure.
Here we need to formulate a critical question: Can one, by following this
path of description, arrive at any concepts that will help define human Dasein as
a whole, as a unified reality? I can only define human Dasein as a living being
that always has before it a not-yet being. When I am no longer alive, however, I
will no longer be in a position to experience this whole [Ganzheit]. When life is
finished, completed [ganz], then it is no longer. One cannot evade this difficulty.
How can human Dasein be given as a whole? For only in this way can one form
a concept of life. The particulars of another life lived to its end provide only poor
information. For, first, this life is of course no longer there and, second, one can
never substitute another life for one’s own. Dasein is in each case one’s own
Dasein, my Dasein, which is given at a particular time; this characteristic is insep-
arable from Dasein. We must hold fast to this point if we are to discover the ulti-
mate meaning of Dasein, i.e., its authentic existence. How can we grasp human
Dasein, which is always one’s own, as a whole?
VII
Dasein’s circumspection is guided by a type of interpretation that reigns within

publicness. Defined by this interpretation, the world is accessible to everyone in
an average way. The public character of the ways in which Dasein has been inter-
preted also defines life in the public arena. Moreover, individual life has the ten-
dency to sink away into this publicness and to become lost in it. When Dasein
speaks about itself, it sees itself as a thing in the world, like other things. Thus
life is in the first place reflected upon in terms of concepts of the world and not
in terms of concepts that originally belong to it. One finds oneself at first in one’s
concerns, in what one does, in one’s career, and so on. The world of concerns
yields the initial concept of what Dasein is. Thus the human being is first defined
as an animal, while its peculiar kind of being is described only as rationality—a
definition that is wholly characterized by the world. Kant understands this defi-
nition of the human being as a unity of the sensory world with understanding
166 SUPPLEMENTS
and reason. Thus these characteristics are no doubt viewed together as being uni-
fied in a single reality, but the question of the sense of the being of this unity is
never raised. It remains merely a sum in which the parts precede the whole; the
whole is merely supplementary. In contrast, a whole is something through which
the parts are first determined. For example, a machine cannot be understood as
the sum of gears and the like, which are somehow combined; rather, the mean-
ing of the whole determines the type and arrangement of the individual parts.
The main point here is to see life as a whole. We must ask about the structural
moment that defines life as a whole and about the sense of this whole, i.e.,
whether perhaps it is this whole that marks our being at every moment. We saw
earlier that life is essentially still incomplete; there is always part of it that still lies
ahead. A whole requires, however, a sense of being finished. Yet when life comes
to be finished in death, then it is no longer. We usually are accustomed to think-
ing that something really “is” only when it is finished. Yet life doesn’t fit this case;
when all of its possibilities have been exhausted, it “is” no longer. The dead per-
son has departed from the world. The question of immortality or non-
immortality does not play a role here. Earlier we saw that we could not find a way
out of this predicament by living the life of another, whose death we experience,
since their death is not my death—and there is no such thing as “death itself.”
Death is always in each case my death at the particular time. When one overlooks
this, one has lost the very theme under discussion.
Just as every Dasein discovers the world for itself, so too every life is given
to itself as its own. Earlier we spoke of death as a limit. In so doing, we tacitly
understood life as a process that ceased somewhere or other. Here life is under-
stood as a context of experiences coming to an end somewhere. In so doing, how-
ever, we once again have relinquished our earlier theme. Dasein is not a process,
nor is death something that comes afterward at the end some time. Death is
something that stands imminently before human beings; it is something that life
itself knows. Having said this, however, we still have not provided a definition of
death. Many things are imminent for me, but here there is a difference! When an
event is imminent for me, it is something that concerns me and that I encounter
in the world. But death is not something that comes to me from somewhere; it
is rather what I myself am. I myself am the possibility of my own death. Death
is the utmost end of what is possible in my Dasein; it is the most extreme possi-
bility of my Dasein. There lies in Dasein a possibility which is imminent for it
and in which human Dasein itself stands imminently before itself in its most
extreme possibility. Here we are not concerned with moods or dispositions but
rather with seeing the movements which Dasein makes in the consciousness that
death is the most extreme possibility of itself that stands imminently before it. I
myself am my death precisely when I live. Here it is less important to describe
types of death than to understand death as a possibility of life. Our aim here is
not to offer a metaphysics of death but to understand the ontological structures
of death within life. For the difficult thing is not to die but to deal with death in
the present. We will need to keep this idea of death in mind for the following dis-
cussion. If death is such a thing, namely, the most extreme possibility that Dasein
itself is, then Dasein must have different possible ways of standing before its
death. First we need to see how the everyday life of the individual caught up in
the everyone stands before its death, as well as how death shows itself in this
standing-before-death, i.e., how it is encountered in everyday life. We saw that
what defines everydayness is the fact that here Dasein loses itself in its world.
Death is encountered daily in everyday life. We see it and know, in a rather indif-
ferent way, that dying is a departure from this world that can perhaps someday
affect even us. In this indifference lies the moment of our thrusting death aside.
Here Dasein evades death and pushes it aside as a possibility. This fleeing from
death goes so far that in everyday life one tries to persuade the dying person that
he or she will not die and thus to talk the person out of his own death. One
believes that by doing this one has rendered a service to the dying person. Dasein
not only tranquilizes itself before the prospect of death but also seeks to thrust it
aside through a certain interpretation of it. Thinking about death is considered a
kind of cowardice or a form of escapism. Life tranquilizes itself regarding death
and by interpreting it in a certain way as something alien pushes it away from the
horizon of life. In its concerns, Dasein cares for itself; to the structure of care
belongs the fact that Dasein also is simultaneously concerned with itself and with
others. Dasein cares for itself by making sure that the possibility of its death stays
away. It is continually taking care that it omits the possibility of taking hold of
death in a more radical fashion. It is precisely in this flight from death that the
being-there [Da-sein] of death shows itself. Death shows itself in the from-which
of our fleeing. How is death there for us in our constant flight from it? What are
the characteristics of its peculiar form of being present? Its indefiniteness: this
possibility of Dasein is indefinite. When death will come is wholly indefinite for
Dasein. But at the same time this possibility stands imminently before us as a cer-
tainty that surpasses all other certainties we might think of. It is for Dasein a cer-
tainty that it will die its death. This certainty neither does away with the indefi-
niteness nor diminishes it. On the contrary, it increases it. Everydayness attempts
to thrust aside this indefinite certainty. It reckons with all that still remains for
Dasein. It pushes away the indefiniteness of death into the realm of postpone-
ment and suppresses its certainty in an attitude of “not thinking about it.”
Thus death shows itself as the most extreme, indefinite, and yet certain
possibility of Dasein in which Dasein stands before itself.
This definition of the structure of death is not an arbitrary one but rather
must be grasped in a priori fashion as a definition that is fundamental to any inter-
pretation of death, even those in which faith must be taken into account. This
holds for Christianity as well. It was through Christian theology that the problem
of death first appeared in connection with the question of the sense of life.
We have defined Dasein in its publicness as inauthenticity. This inauthen-
tic way of standing-before-death is a kind of evasion. But what constitutes the
168 SUPPLEMENTS
kind of standing-before-death that belongs to authenticity, and what meaning

does this have for gaining a fundamental understanding [of the constitution?]31
of human Dasein?
VIII
Should the task of defining the being of Dasein be successful, then this task
becomes a matter of grasping Dasein as a whole. A whole is defined by limits.
Death is just such a limit that is there for Dasein itself. Standing before this limit
as an indefinite and yet certain possibility is what characterizes the kind of being
that is characteristic of human life. In its everydayness, Dasein evades this possi-
bility, a phenomenon that we have characterized as an inauthentic stance toward
death. Is there an authentic way of approaching death that is not defined by pub-
licness but rather is a way in which Dasein always stands before itself as in each
case something individual, ownmost, and “my own”? What is implied here is
grasping the actuality of this possibility and holding fast to it. To stand before a
possibility means to grasp it as a possibility. To endure the possibility of death
means to have it there for oneself in such a way that it stands before one purely
as what it is—indefinite regarding its “when” and certain regarding its “that.” To
let this possibility exist as a possibility and to not turn it into an actuality, as is
done in suicide, for example, means to run forward toward it in an anticipatory
manner. Here the world withdraws, collapsing into nothingness. The possibility
of death means that I will, at some time, depart from this world, that the world
will have nothing more to say to me, that everything to which I cling, with which
I busy myself, and about which I am concerned will have no more to say to me
and will no longer be of help to me. The world, as something on the basis of
which I am able to live, will then no longer be there. I have to deal with this pos-
sibility purely on my own. Here we see that the possibility of choice is given in
advance for Dasein. At every moment Dasein can comport itself in such a way
that it chooses between itself and the world; it can make each decision on the
basis of what it encounters in the world, or it can rely on itself. Dasein’s possi-
bility of choosing offers the possibility of fetching itself back from its having
become lost in the world, that is, from its publicness. When Dasein has chosen
itself, it has thereby chosen both itself and choice. To have chosen to choose
means, however, to be resolved. Thus running forward anticipatorily means
choosing; to have chosen means to be resolved—not to die but to live. This
choosing and this being resolved is the choice of responsibility for itself that Dasein
takes on and that consists in the fact that in each instance of my acting I make
myself responsible through my action. Choosing responsibility for oneself means
to choose one’s conscience as a possibility that the human being authentically is.
It is an error on the part of phenomenology (Scheler) that it has misunderstood
the genuinely anthropological structure of Kantian ethics. Kant saw that the fun-
damental sense of Dasein is possibility, i.e., to be possibility itself and to be able
to grasp it. To choose one’s conscience means at the same time, however, to
become guilty. As Goethe once said, “He who acts is always without conscience,
irresponsible.” Every action is at the same time something marked by guilt. For
the possibilities of action are limited in comparison with the demands of con-
science, so that every action that is successfully carried out produces conflicts. To
choose self-responsibility, then, is to become guilty in an absolute sense. Insofar
as I am at all, I become guilty whenever I act in any sense.
What do these connections mean? This anticipatory running forward into
the most extreme possibility of myself, which I am not yet, but will be, means to
be futural. I myself am my future by virtue of this anticipatory running forward.
I am not in the future but rather am myself futural. Being guilty is nothing other
than carrying the past around with oneself, for being guilty is a kind of being past.
In this state of being guilty, we can see how one holds onto the past and how
along with this human Dasein, through its actions, comes authentically into the
present. In being resolved, Dasein is its future, in being guilty it is its past, and in
acting it comes into the present. The being-there of Dasein is nothing other than
being-time. Time is not something that I encounter out there in the world, but is
what I myself am. In running forward anticipatorily, being guilty, and acting,
time itself is there for us. Time characterizes the whole of Dasein. At any partic-
ular time, Dasein is not only in the moment but rather is itself within the entire
span of its possibilities and its past. It is remarkable how, in acting in the direc-
tion of the future, the past comes alive and the present vanishes. Those who act
authentically live from out of the future and also can live from out of the past;
the present takes care of itself. Time constitutes the whole of my Dasein and also
defines my own being at every moment. Human life does not happen in time but
rather is time itself. This will become clearer if we can show that even in its every-
day manner of being, Dasein is characterized by time.
How is time there for us in everyday life? It is obviously there for me when
I decide or determine something about it, when I look at the clock and say “now.”
What is going on in this now? What is that time which is ascertained when
Dasein is arranged in terms of timetables, days, weeks, and years? In these means
of orienting oneself, one can already see that all life is defined in a peculiar man-
ner by time. These ways of arranging time are characterized by concern. Concern
means to bring that which has been placed under one’s care into the present; by a
certain way of managing it, one makes available that which is not yet available.
In care there lies a certain anticipation or awaiting, that is, a certain relation to
the future. I await something from the future that affects me; it is not something
that I am but rather something I have to deal with. To concern oneself in this way
with the future is at the same time to forget. What is of concern loses its charac-
ter of having-become what it is; it is simply there for us. Its history is covered
over. It becomes an everyday matter. The counter-phenomenon to this awaiting
is thus not memory but forgetting. Everyday life always lives in the present,
which provides the measure with which the future is calculated and the past is
170 SUPPLEMENTS
forgotten. This tendency to stay within the present is what has brought about the
use of clocks. Why are there clocks? Because everyday life wants to have the
course of the world available in the “now.” Now and then, and then, and
then. . . . Nothing but more nows that one wants to make available in the realm
of the everyone. To make these nows universally accessible requires a clock.
What is the genesis of the clock? What are the genuine motives of calculat-
ing time? Plato, Timaeus: time is the heavens. This definition grows out of a pri-
mordial experience, but Plato could not grasp its meaning conceptually. Everyday
life orients its concern to the now. The circumspection of concern is characterized
in its possibilities by its being-day-to-day. For primitive humanity, night is the time
of rest. The day and the course of the day determine daily tasks. Morning, after-
noon, and evening are not astronomical facts but rather points of orientation for
going about one’s dealings, now-points for certain kinds of concern. Insofar as
humanity defines this now with reference to the heavens, its assertions about time
appeal to the heavens. Time is the heavens. For the Greeks, further determinations
of time established themselves as the time of the market and the time of political
assembly, which again were oriented around concern. As this sense of shared con-
cern grew, it became more urgent to have agreed-upon determinations of time and
the now. The Greeks invented the tree clock (?) for this. Shadows measured in
terms of footsteps served as the measure of time. The more that everyday Dasein
becomes absorbed in shared concerns, the less time it has and the more precise the
clock becomes. In determining time, it also is important that no time be lost
(pocket watch). Authentic temporal being does not amount to acting in time and
calculating with time, for using a clock means to turn all time into the present. This
is clearly shown by the fact that we use the clock to objectively define processes of
nature. Dasein attempts to define the world with the help of the clock. Why does
Dasein define the world in terms of clock-time? And what kind of time is it that is
measured in the natural sciences? What does the use of the clock, i.e., this kind of
periodical system of calculation, signify? It means that one makes a possibility avail-
able within the framework of the now. But life thereby loses its sense for the time
that it itself authentically is. To look at the clock means: to say “now.” This now is
not, however, my now, but the “now” of the clock that we can speak about together,
the public now of being-with-one-another. This time is the time of the everyone
that belongs to publicness. This time of the everyone, because of which we are agi-
tated and rushed by existence [Dasein], shows in an extreme sense the dominance
of publicness in our Dasein. This kind of time is nothing other than our being-
with-one-another itself, i.e., the time that we are with one another.
IX
The being of Dasein as being-there in the world is characterized by circumspec-

tive concern. Here Dasein has the possibility of looking away from its concern
and making its circumspection autonomous. This is how philosophy and science
can emerge at all. Philosophy is observation of the world, disclosing it in terms

of its being. Here the real being of the world is nature as that which always is; a
science of the world is in the first place therefore an unlocking of nature. Nature
has to be made present and accessible in its perpetual being and regularity in such
a way that all of those moments are excluded which, though conditioning our
access to the observation of nature, interfere with it. This tendency first devel-
oped in such a way that rather than erecting a nexus of particular laws, it secured
fundamental concepts. This happened in Greek philosophy.
Modern physics led to the discovery of laws of motion, defining them in a
way that was free of any reference to the contingencies of its access, measurement,
and defining of them. The theory of relativity took seriously this idea of an absolute
knowledge of nature. It is not a theory about the relative validity of physical laws;
rather, it inquires into those conditions of definition and measurement that make
it possible for nature to be grasped purely in terms of itself and for its laws of
motion to be understood. What is the philosophical significance of this theory
spawned by one of the individual sciences? This question is legitimate since every
genuine science is only a kind of concrete philosophy and is genuine only to the
extent that it is philosophically grounded. To date, the theory of relativity has been
little proven by the facts. Nonetheless, it has provided confirmation of two impor-
tant insights: (1) the curving of light rays by gravity; (2) the deviation of the orbit
of Mercury. Mathematically, the theory of relativity depends upon achieving a
radical conception of geometry. Not every spatial property of a figure is geometri-
cal. For Euclidean geometry, above, below, right, and left are unimportant. Its
results are independent of displacement, rotation, and reflection. In contrast to
these transformations, its theorems are invariant. On the basis of these facts, the
mathematician Klein worked out a geometry that was a theory of invariants for a
certain class of transformations. This way of formulating the question was occa-
sioned by the controversy over the axiom of parallel lines, which could not be
proved. As a result, the methodical hypothesis was asserted that this axiom could
not be valid, and two new geometries were established that were in themselves free
of contradiction within their own spheres: (1) elliptical geometry, which was based
on the hypothesis that a parallel line cannot be drawn through a point at any
degree (here the sum of the angles in a triangle < 180°); (2) hyperbolic geometry,
which was based on the hypothesis that one can draw several parallel lines through
a point at any degree (here the sum of the angles in a triangle > 180°). In the prob-
lem of defining the laws of motion, one proceeds from a system of coordinates
with time as the fourth coordinate and formulates the question of whether a sta-
tic system is preferable or whether the equations of a dynamic system should be
preserved. The Newtonian laws were transformed by an accelerated motion in the
system of measurement. The tendency to preserve the laws of motion led to mod-
ifying space and time (as conditions of measurement) in such a way that the laws
of motion are preserved with respect to all motions in the system of measurement.
How must the system of coordinates be defined for this? The necessary condition
172 SUPPLEMENTS
here is that the time that I measure alters with the movement, as do the very stan-
dards for measuring it. Space and time vary; they are dependent on matter. Hence,
it becomes necessary to redefine the concepts of matter and field of force.
What is to be found in these definitions regarding time? Here the Kantian
concept of time is no longer adequate. The new discovery in the theory of rela-
tivity is that time is always local time; it always depends upon the site where it is
measured. Measuring means to consult a standard of measurement in such a way
that the quantity of the thing measured becomes visible; the latter is made acces-
sible through number and brought into the present. Measuring is a way of mak-
ing something present. The idea that time is really local time becomes more com-
prehensible if we see that the self is authentic time. Time is not something that
happens outside of us, a kind of receptacle of being; we ourselves are time. The
processes of the world are encountered in time. They are encountered within a
kind of understanding that is capable of saying “now.”
Thus time, even thought of as the time of nature, does not have to be con-
ceived of in an absolute metaphysical fashion. This is one of the basic discoveries
of the theory of relativity. Physical time is a one-dimensional, irreversible multi-
plicity of earlier and later moments. Each “now” is unrepeatable and has its own
distinct position. The ultimate character of these nows is their openness, which
is without beginning and end. Minkowski attempted to reform geometry on the
basis of these aspects of time. With the help of time as the fourth coordinate, he
developed geometry into a theory of relativity.
It is this world-time that everyone can agree upon. Though this measured
time is not authentic time, Bergson is wrong in thinking that here time is spa-
tialized. Time is rather transferred from the future into the now. It is not an acci-
dent that the first scientific definition of time deals with the time of nature. Aris-
totle fully understood what he was really measuring in the measurement of time.
The sundial displays a moving shadow that constantly changes place—it is now
here, now here, now here. Time, says Aristotle, is what is counted in motion with
respect to before and after. This definition has remained essentially unchanged
up to modern times. Kant, too, defines time by starting from an understanding
of nature. But it is essential that we understand time as the reality of our own
selves. The inauthentic being of time is the customary one—each of us is this
inauthentic time. Yet a difficulty arises here: if in each case Dasein itself is time,
how is it that there can be such a thing as measured time? This is a question about
how the specific character of individual Dasein is to be understood in terms of
the phenomenon of being-with-one-another in time. In any case, what we have
ascertained so far should suffice for our question about the sense of historicity.
X
Dilthey’s real question concerns the sense of history. It is bound up with his ten-
dency to understand life in terms of itself and not in terms of a reality alien to it.
This implies that the way in which life itself is constituted must be made visible.
Dilthey emphasized that the fundamental character of life is historical being. But
he merely left it at that and neglected to ask what historical being is. Nor did he
show in what way life is historical. We have attempted to formulate this question
on the basis of phenomenology, and we have prepared ourselves for it by provid-
ing an analysis of Dasein and its authentic reality, namely, time. In this way, we
have provided a sufficient basis for raising the question of historicity, which we
will discuss in three stages:
1. history and historicity;

2. historicity and historical science;
3. an example of historical [historischer] knowledge as a possibility of historical
[geschichtliche] being: namely, research on the history of philosophy.
In preparation, let us first define the meaning of two terms: history

[Geschichte] and historical science [Historie]. Each word has a very different ori-
gin, and yet both are used interchangeably. However, this is not merely by
chance. History signifies a happening [Geschehen] which we ourselves are and in
which we are involved. There is a difference between history and motion (e.g.,
the motion of the heavenly bodies). Only when the term is taken in a very broad
sense can it be said that there also is a “history” of the world. History is, formally
speaking, a particular kind of motion. It is a happening which, as something past,
is still there and which we know about in a particular manner, carry with us, and
endure. In the word “past,” the moment of time manifests itself.
Historical science (iJstorei`n: ascertaining, making known that which has
happened) means knowledge of certain happenings. This mode and method of
knowledge that enables something past to be made known is called historical
[historisch]. It is accomplished in the discovery, critical testing, and interpretation
of sources as well as in the presentation of what is found in these sources. But
why is the expression “knowledge of a happening” used of this happening itself?
Because it is a happening with us ourselves. This happening is preserved in our
knowledge of it.
In order to define history in a scientific manner, we first would need to dis-
tinguish it from movement. But here we must be satisfied with a few short com-
ments. Earlier we distinguished merely being-extant from being-in-the-world.
Motion is the broader concept; it means the phenomenon of change and of alter-
ation from one thing to another. Motions transpire in the world. History happens
to me; I am this happening. Anticipatory running forward is a motion that Dasein
carries out in its own future. This going-forth-in-advance-of-oneself is the funda-
mental motion from which history arises, for it is through this going-forth that
the past is uncovered. This happening is not mere change or a sequence of events;
rather, insofar as we go forth in advance of ourselves, we are this very happening.
That we know about ourselves in it belongs to the structure of the happening. The
174 SUPPLEMENTS
happening is originally discovered there. We need to understand this structure of

historicity along the same lines as we did time. We are history, i.e., our own past.
Our future is lived from out of the past. We carry the past with us. That clearly
can be seen in being-with-one-another within a generation. Dilthey discovered
that this concept of generation was important for the phenomenon of historicity.
Each of us is not only his own self but also belongs to a generation. The genera-
tion precedes the individual, is there before the individual, and defines the
Dasein of the individual. The individual lives in terms of that which has been in
the past, drags himself or herself through the present, and finally is overtaken by
a new generation.
The past can be seized upon and understood in an explicit manner. That
is, this context of being, in terms of which life is lived, can be opened up as a
theme for research. The past is immediately there for one as a present that has
passed away. Understanding the past is always caught up in certain limits. This
possibility is determined by how we ourselves understand and define our own
Dasein. For example, Spengler’s notion of the universal observation of history is
determined by an interpretation of cultures that basically characterizes them as
symbols, i.e., as expressions of the souls of the respective cultures. This way of
interpreting the phenomena in question no longer allows for a genuine charac-
terization of them. Here the soul of a culture is understood in purely biological
terms. Spengler’s notion of historical observation is an aesthetic kind of observa-
tion that does not investigate dynamic contexts of history but rather amounts to
a type of botany masquerading as history. One’s own present is only one among
others. These theses in Spengler’s interpretation of history are certainly con-
testable; here we only want to show that from the outset whatever is researched
stands within a certain interpretation. If the past is to be disclosed authentically
in terms of what it is, we will have to avoid bringing in questions that ignore the
present historical situation. This implies that fundamental reflection on histori-
cal research also includes reflection on the possibility of developing a concept of
Dasein for the possibility of interpreting its history. Developing a basis for this
possibility is a fundamental part of historical method. For the most part, objec-
tive historical research proceeds from the naive assumption that the concepts it
adopts and uses are self-evident. This is precisely what the Marburg school did in
its history of philosophy when it tried to understand this history in terms of
Kantian concepts. In Catholic philosophy, Aristotle has been interpreted from a
Thomistic standpoint. And in the rivalry between these schools, the one played
up Plato as an idealist, and the other played up Aristotle as a realist. Within the
historical present of one’s research there lies the danger of obstructing history, of
not uncovering it but rather rendering it inaccessible. We are faced with the crit-
ical task of freeing ourselves from preconceptions and reflecting instead on those
conditions that enable us to understand the past. What is required of philosoph-
ical research is that it be a critique of the present. In disclosing the past in a pri-
mordial manner, the past is no longer seen to be merely a present that preceded
our own present. Rather, it is possible to emancipate the past so that we can find
in it the authentic roots of our existence and bring it into our own present as a
vital force. Historical consciousness liberates the past for the future, and it is then
that the past gains force and becomes productive. And only because Dasein is in
itself historical [geschichtlich] and can have its own past are unhistorical [unhis-
torische] epochs at all possible. Here one does not see the past as such; rather, the
past is absorbed in the present, something that is only a particular kind of tem-
poral being and historical being.
To bring home the meaning of historical research and its possibilities we
choose as our example the history of philosophy. We do not choose this example
arbitrarily but rather because phenomenology, one of the most genuine and rad-
ical tendencies in philosophy, is characterized by a lack of history, even an ani-
mosity toward history, for it believes itself to be capable of discarding what has
been as irrelevant and coming to the things themselves on its own. But here phe-
nomenology remains entangled in traditional ways of formulating questions.
And yet it belongs to the very sense of phenomenological research that it must
constantly reflect upon itself and throw off all spurious tradition in order to acti-
vate the genuine sense of the past.
We focus our treatment of the history of philosophy on a fundamental
problem, one that we already constantly have had in view but have not expressly
formulated, namely, the question of the being of beings. A question concerning
the being of a particular realm of beings is, however, not yet radical, since I still
do not know what I really want to know with the term “being.” Plato was the
first to formulate this central question in The Sophist. With the decline of philo-
sophical research, this question also falls into decline. Today one simply says:
Being is the most universal concept and hence is indefinable. But what is deci-
sive for a concept is not definition but its demonstration in terms of how things
stand with the subject matter. This critical, foundational question is the central
question of philosophy. It is at the same time a question about the way in which
the sense of being can be experienced. By formulating the question in this way,
the otherwise chaotic appearance of the history of philosophy becomes very sim-
ple. What is striking here is how the Greeks interpreted being in terms of time:
oujs iva [being] means presence, the present. If this is what being signifies, then
authentic being is that which is never not there, i.e., what is always there (ajei; o[n
[perpetual being]). Within the tradition, this concept of being was employed to
understand historical reality, a reality that, however, is not always there. It is clear
that if the Greek doctrine of being is uncritically accepted as absolute, then it
becomes impossible for research to understand a reality such as historical Dasein.
Descartes offers proof of how the Greek doctrine of being can be kept alive in the
present. He made use of the Thomistic doctrine of being, whose fundamental
concepts are entirely Greek. Descartes neglected to ask about the sense of the
being of the “I am” that he discovered. Here he simply employed the concept of
being that meant being-extant in the world. This omission and confusion was
176 SUPPLEMENTS
transmitted through subsequent philosophy to phenomenology. Husserl, too,

fails to formulate the question of the being of consciousness. So it can be shown
that a certain interpretation of being pervades the history of philosophy and
determines its whole conceptuality.
Thus the question of historical inquiry in philosophy is referred back to
the fundamental question of being itself. We need to formulate this question in
such a way that we can preserve its continuity with the first scientific formula-
tion of the question of being in the Greeks, investigating the legitimacy of this
formulation and its fundamental limits. If we succeed in returning scientific phi-
losophy to its real themes, then this kind of research certainly will be fruitful for
the sciences once again. Logic will then no longer be a supplementary formula-
tion of methods in the sciences but something that runs ahead of the sciences,
guides them, and discloses their fundamental concepts. For this, we need the his-
tory of philosophy, i.e., we need to understand the ancients anew. We must push
on until we are once again a match for the questioning of the Greeks. Yorck von
Wartenburg had perhaps an even better idea than Dilthey of this urgent need for
historical reflection. He writes on August 21, 1889: “It appears to me that the
oscillations brought about by the principle of eccentricity, which led to a new era
more than four hundred years ago, have become extremely broad and flat.
Knowledge has progressed to the point where it annuls itself, and human beings
are so removed from themselves that they can no longer see themselves. ‘Modern
man,’ i.e., man since the Renaissance, is ready for burial.”32 And on February 11,
1884: “Since to philosophize is to live, there is in my opinion—do not be
alarmed!—a philosophy of history: but who would be able to write it? . . . That
is also why there can be no real philosophizing which is not historical. The dis-
tinction between systematic philosophy and historical presentation is essentially
false. . . . I am alarmed at the monastic cell of modern man in these times where
life’s waves surge so high and where, if at all, knowledge would be power. But if
science has a ground, it is to be found in the world of the past, in antiquity.”33
Notes
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
1. This term was subsequently expanded into a central philosophical theme in my
interpretation of Heidegger’s early writings in YH 14ff.
2. On Heidegger’s early philosophy of translation, which has provided the main
principles of translation in the present volume, see my “Translator’s Epilogue” in OHF
91–99.
3. For elaboration on this sense of “supplements,” see YH 14ff.
4. GA1 55; translated as “A Recollection,’” in Sheehan 1981, p. 21.
5. Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976), pp. 81ff.; translated as
On Time and Being, tr. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 74ff.
6. For elaboration on the following overview of Heidegger’s Student Period, see YH
chs. 3–6; Steven Galt Crowell, “Making Logic Philosophical Again,” in RHFS ch. 3; and
Sheehan 1988, pp. 77–137.
7. GA2 553 n. 4/BTMR 471 n. v/BTS 384 n. 5.
8. For the influence of Braig, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, see Heidegger’s 1957
chronology of his early development in GA1 55–57; translated as “A Recollection,” in
Sheehan 1981, pp. 21–22.
9. For elaboration on the following overview of Heidegger’s Early Freiburg and
Marburg periods, see YH chs. 7–15 and RHFS chs. 4ff.
10. See YH ch. 2 for elaboration on this terminological schema of “content,” “rela-
tion,” “actualizing,” and “temporalizing” which, though used in his student writings, Hei-
degger first introduces as precise technical terms around 1920 (see chapter 7 of this vol-
ume, p. 87), adding “temporalizing” around 1922 (see chapter 9 of this volume, p. 112),
and continuing to use all of them in Being and Time and in later texts such as Contribu-
tions to Philosophy, even if in a less technical sense.
11. For an overview of Heidegger’s turn to Kant in 1925–1926, see YH 363–67, as well
as Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Kant-Courses at Marburg, in RHFS ch. 16 and Frank
Schalow, “The Kantian Schema of Heidegger’s Late Marburg Period, in RHFS ch. 17.
177
178 SUPPLEMENTS
12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Martin Heidegger’s One Path,” tr. P. Christopher Smith,
in RHFS 26.
13. GA56/57 11–12; GA61 35. For an overview of Heidegger’s first postwar courses
of 1919, see George Kovacs, “Philosophy As Primordial Science in Heidegger’s Courses of
1919,” in RHFS ch. 5.
14. For an overview of Heidegger’s destruction of traditonal ontology in the twen-
ties, see YH ch. 7; Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Heidegger’s Ontological ‘Destruction’ of West-
ern Intellectual Traditions,” in RHFS ch. 6; Robert Bernasconi, “Repetition and Tradi-
tion: Heidegger’s Destructuring of the Distinction between Essence and Existence in Basic
Problems of Phenomenology,” in RHFS ch. 7; and Otto Pöggeler, “Destruction and
Moment,” tr. Daniel Magurshak, in RHFS ch. 8.
15. Heidegger had known his friend and colleague, Father Engelbert Krebs, since the
early teens, co-teaching a seminar with him in SS1916. A year later, Krebs married Hei-
degger and his fiancée Elfride Petri on March 21, 1917 in a quiet, wartime wedding in the
university chapel. Before the wedding, Heidegger’s fiancée had expressed to Krebs her wish
to convert from Lutheran Protestantism to Catholicism, but she was told that she should
wait to make such a difficult decision. Then, during the Christmas of 1918, she again vis-
ited Krebs, this time with the news that “my husband no longer has his faith in the
Church, and I did not find it,” and that “both of us now think in a Protestant manner
(i.e., without a fixed, dogmatic tie), believe in the personal God, pray to him in the spirit
of Christ, but without Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy.” Reminding Krebs of this recent
stormy visit from his wife, and referring to the last two troubled years in which he per-
formed military service and did not teach but engaged in soul-searching reflection, Hei-
degger’s letter of January 9, 1919—preceded two days earlier by Husserl’s request to the
Ministry of Education that Heidegger be appointed his salaried assistant—explains his
profound confessional and philosophical turn from Catholicism to free Protestantism and
from the phenomenological neo-Scholasticism of his postdoctoral dissertation to a funda-
mentally historical phenomenological philosophy and phenomenology of religion. See
Ott 1988/1993, pp. 99–108/99–109.
16. Heidegger had originally intended to publish this essay in the journal Göttingis-
chen Gelehrten Anzeigen, but it never appeared there and was published only decades later
in 1973 in an anthology on Jaspers’ philosophy (see the entry on this essay in chapter 1).
The bibliographic note to its reprinting in GA9 reads: “A critical review from the years
1919–21 the author sent to Karl Jaspers in June of 1921.” Indeed, the published corre-
spondence shows that it was a lively topic of conversation between them in the early twen-
ties. See Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1920–1963, ed. Walter Biemel
and Hans Saner (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), pp. 15ff. The bibliographic note in GA9
also highlights that “the foreword to the third edition (1925) of Jaspers’ Psychology of
Worldviews . . . provides, without naming names, a response to Heidegger’s review.”
This new edition is an unaltered reprint of the second edition. Allow me to make a
few purely personal comments about why a revised edition would be difficult.
The result would be a new book. In representing worldviews as moments or dimen-
sions of the one true worldview, which comprehends the whole only vaguely and never
explicitly, I attempted at that time to formulate all of this on the basis of intuition and to
communicate it to my readers without any second thoughts. The particulars of what was
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 179
presented in this manner still seem to me today to be true. I would be unable to do it bet-
ter today. I could only do it differently. Following this first endeavor, which used an imme-
diate, intuitive approach, I have for quite some time been concerned with the method-
ological issue of venturing the second step of providing a logically precise elucidation of
our modern consciousness of existence. Therefore, allowing my youthful undertaking to
remain in its original form would seem to be the more natural thing to do. Without my
being aware of it or wishing it at the time, my whole approach in the book and my
method of analysis expressed a hidden ideal. I fully acknowledge this, now that I have
become aware of it. However, the limits found in the nature of this kind of presentation
demand that the same content should appear in different form. I am presently endeavor-
ing to come up with a new form, and the wrong way to do this would be to revise what
has already been published. In my subsequent work, I have become a different person not
in my cast of mind but rather in the realm of knowledge and logical form. And I would
rather leave my earlier work untouched in the hope that, after this first attempt to provide
a psychological explanation and foundation for philosophical existence, I also will be able
to present a logically systematic clarification and foundation.
Another possible result of a revised edition would be damage to the book. Since the
book has certain flaws (in its arrangement, methodological comments, and historical
digressions, i.e., in matters that should be considered unessential with respect to the pur-
pose of the book), I would want to correct these in a revised edition, taking advantage of
my present insights into the book. Pages and sentences that are weak could be deleted, a
lot of the terminology could be altered, and above all lacunae could be filled and the sys-
tematics of the whole book could be rearranged without effecting the particulars, but the
result would be a hybrid form, and the book would suffer because of this. In return, it
would gain only a certain correctness in its outward appearance and in peripheral matters.
Years later, Jaspers again responded to the review in his autobiography with the rec-
ollection that he found much of it incomprehensible. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophische
Autobiographie, 2d ed. (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1977), p. 95, translated by Dale
Ponikvar as “On Heidegger” in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 7 (1978): 110.
17. For an overview of the development of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion,
see YH chs. 7–8, as well as Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger (1920–21) on Becoming a Chris-
tian: A Conceptual Picture Show,” in RHFS ch. 10 and John D. Caputo, “Sorge and Kar-
dia: The Hermeneutics of Factical Life and the Categories of the Heart,” in RHFS ch. 18.
18. For an overview of Heidegger’s transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology in
the early twenties, see YH ch. 9; István M. Fehér, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Leben-
sphilosophie: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Husserl, Dilthey, and Jaspers” in RHFS ch.
4; Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl” in RHFS ch. 13; Rudolf Ber-
net, “Phenomenological Reduction and the Double Life of the Subject,” tr. François
Renaud, in RHFS ch. 14; and Jacques Taminiaux, “The Husserlian Heritage in Heideg-
ger’s Notion of the Self,” tr. François Renaud, in RHFS ch. 15.
19. For an overview of Heidegger’s reading of philosophy of life in the early twenties,
see David Farrell Krell, “The ‘Factical Life’ of Dasein: From the Early Freiburg Courses to
Being and Time,” in RHFS ch. 20.
20. For an overview of Heidegger’s early concept of formal indication, see YH ch. 14,
as well as Th.C.W. Oudemans, “Heidegger: Reading against the Grain,” in RHFS ch. 2
180 SUPPLEMENTS
and Jean Grondin, “The Ethical and Young Hegelian Motives in Heidegger’s Hermeneu-
tics of Facticity” in RHFS ch. 19.
21. For background material on Heidegger’s preoccupation with Luther in the early
twenties, see my “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther” in RHFS 159–74.
22. This text, which Heidegger himself cited as his “Aristotle-introduction” and was
known to Heidegger scholars as the famous lost “Natorp-Report,” has a curious history.
See the epilogue of the German editor, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, in Dilthey Jahrbuch 6:
270–74. In 1922, Paul Natorp at the University of Marburg and Georg Misch at the Uni-
versity of Göttingen wrote to Husserl asking for information about the teaching activities
and publication plans of his assistant Martin Heidegger, who was being considered as a
candidate for positions at the two universities, even though he had not published anything
since the printing of his revised postdoctoral dissertation on Duns Scotus in 1916. The
result was that over the course of three weeks, between September and October of that
year, Heidegger hurriedly wrote an introductory outline of the large book titled “Phe-
nomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle,” which he was planning to
publish the following year in vol. 7 of Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenol-
ogische Forschung and was to have been composed by drawing on the manuscripts of his
lecture courses on Aristotle in WS1921–22 (GA61) and SS1922 (GA62) and his seminars
at the time. The original typescript, which Heidegger relayed to Natorp at the University
of Marburg through Husserl and so was largely responsible for his receiving his position
as associate professor there in WS1923–24, was passed on to Natorp’s student, the young
Hans-Georg Gadamer, but then later lost during World War II in a bombing raid on
Leipzig. The other copy sent to Misch in Göttingen was passed on to Misch’s student Josef
König in 1964, and having been filed away among his papers and forgotten, it finally was
discovered there in the late eighties. As for the planned book on Aristotle, for which Hei-
degger wrote this introduction, it never appeared, though he worked on it until as late as
1925. But it, too, has become available to us in certain versions, namely, the lecture
courses of WS1921–22 (GA61), SS1922 (GA62), and SS1924 (GA18), as well as the first
part of the lecture course of WS1924–25 on Plato’s Sophist (GA19 21–188; translated by
Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as Plato’s Sophist [Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1997]. It also is cited and elaborated on in the course of SS1923 (see my expla-
nation in OHF 1 n. 1, 37 n. 41).
23. For an overview of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the early twenties, see YH
ch. 10; Franco Volpi, “Being and Time: A ‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics?,” tr.
John Protevi, in RHFS ch. 11; and Walter Brogan, “The Place of Aristotle in the Devel-
opment of Heidegger’s Phenomenology,” in RHFS ch. 12.
24. See also the translations of the WS1924–25 course Plato’s Sophist and the SS1925
course History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), as well as the 1924 talk The Concept of Time, tr. Will
McNeill (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1992) and the following courses currently being
translated: Toward a Definition of Philosophy, tr. E. H. Sadler (Athlone Press), containing
lecture courses from KNS1919 and SS1919; Phenomenology of Religious Life, tr. Jennifer
Gossetti (Indiana University Press), containing lecture courses from WS1919–20,
WS1920–21, and SS1921; and Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, tr. E. H. Sadler
(Athlone Press), containing the lecture course from SS1920.
25. GA2 97 n. 1/BTMR 102 n. i/BTS 67 n. i.
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 181
26. GA2 399 n. 7/BTMR 301 n. xv/BTS 277 n. 17.

27. GA2 331 n. 2/BTMR 293 n. vi/BTS 231 n. 6.
28. GA2 313 n. 6, 447 n. 2/BTMR 278 n. vi, 388 n. iii/BTS 217 n. 6, 311 n. 3.
29. GA2 252 n. 3/BTMR 235 n. iv/BTS 178 n. 4.
30. GA2 264 n. 3/BTMR 243 n. vii/BTS 185 n. 7.
31. GA2 185 n. 3/BTMR 178 n. v/BTS 131 n. 6.
32. GA2 252 n. 3, 59 n. 1/BTMR 235 n. iv, 69 n. i/BTS 178 n. 4, 41 n. 1.
33. GA2 331 n. 2/BTMR 293 n. vi/BTS 231 n. 6.
34. GA2 252 n. 3, 406 n. 1/BTMR 235 n. iv, 354 n. ii/BTS 178 n. 4, 283 n. 2.
35. GA2 264 n. 3/BTMR 243 vii/BTS 185 n. 7.
36. GA2 227 n. 1/BTMR 215 n. xi/BTS 160 n. 12.
37. GA2 553 n. 4/BTMR 471 n. v/BTS 384 n. 5.
38. GA2 52 n. 2, 63 n. 1, 67 n. 9, 103 n. 1, 220 n. 1, 289 n. 15, 324 n. 1, 480 n.
10/BTMR 63 n. v, 73 n. ii, 75 n. x, 108 n. ii, 209 n. x, 261 n. xxxiv, 288 n. iii, 414 n.
xxiii/BTS 34 n. 5, 44 n. 2, 47 n. 10, 72, n. 3, 155 n. 11, 201 n. 34, 227 n. 3, 332 n. 22.
39. See Richardson 1963, pp. viii–xxiii.
40. For Heidegger’s suggestions that “Heidegger II” was a return to a Heidegger
before “Heidegger I,” see also GA1 55–57, translated in part as “A Recollection,” in Shee-
han 1981, pp. 21–22; GA12 81–146, translated as On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D.
Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 1–54; GA13 87–90, translated by Thomas
F. O’Meara and Thomas J. Sheehan as “The Pathway,” Listening 8 (1973): 32–39; Zur
Sache des Denkens, pp. 81–90, translated as On Time and Being, pp. 74–82.
41. For elaboration, see YH chs. 2 and 16, and “Translator’s Epilogue” in OHF.
42. Cf. GA65 §§62–69, 105, 153–54, 179, 212.
43. GA26 219; translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. Michael Heim
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 171.
44. GA12 81–146; translated as On the Way to Language, pp. 1–54.
45. On hermeneutics in Heidegger’s early and later thought, see Will McNeill, “The
First Principle of Hermeneutics,” in RHFS ch. 22.
46. Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 81–90, translated as On Time and Being, pp. 74–82.
The untranslated work Seminare returns to the appropriation of Husserl in the early twen-
ties (GA15 334–39, 372–400). For Heidegger’s early notion of truth, see John Sallis, “The
Truth that is not of Knowledge,” in RHFS ch. 21.
47. GA9; translated as Pathmarks, ed. Will McNeill (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998). See also the untranslated anthologies Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens
(GA13), which opens with texts from 1910, and Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines
Lebenswege 1910–1976 (GA16), which also opens with texts from the Student Period.
48. See, for example, GA65 §§32, 42, 134–35, 218, 242; translated by Parvis Emad
and Kenneth Maly as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1999).
49. The Question Concerning Technology, tr. William Lovitt (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977).
182 SUPPLEMENTS
50. Poetry Language Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,
1971).
51. GA1 55–57, translated as “A Recollection,’” in Sheehan 1981, pp. 21–22; Shee-
han 1988, pp. 86–88.
52. Quoted in Sheehan 1988, p. 88.
53. See chapter 1 in this volume, pp. 18–19, 21–26.
54. GA56/57 46, 70–76, 132–34, 207; GA58 32, 58, 65, 69, 76, 85, 111, 205;
GA60 301–37.
55. GA20 375–76, translated by Theodore Kisiel as History of the Concept of Time:
Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 272; GA2 22, 216/BTMR
37, 205/BTS 14, 152.
56. See my elaborations in OHF 5 n. 9, 90–93.
57. GA1 57, translated as “A Recollection,” in Sheehan 1981, p. 22.
58. See note 24 above.
59. See chapter 1, which also functions as a primary bibliography.
60. For elaboration on the rediscovery of Heidegger’s early texts and the issue of eval-
uating their philosophical importance, see YH ch. 1 and the editor’s following articles: “Is
It an Objective or Subjective Genitive?,” International Philosophical Quarterly XXXV
(1995): 483–89; “What Does It All Come To? Response to Reviews of The Young Hei-
degger,” Philosophy Today 41 (1997): 325–33.
61. In addition to the editor’s works (YH, RHFS), see Sheehan, 1981, 1988; Shee-
han and Palmer 1997; Caputo 1982, 1992; Krell 1986, 1992; Taminiaux 1991; Schalow
1992; Kisiel 1993; Dahlstrom 1994; Bambach 1995; McNeill 1999; and Crowell 2001.
62. For this concept taken from Jacques Derrida, see YH 14–16.
CHAPTER ONE
1. All four sections are revised versions of Appendices I–IV in John van Buren, “The
Young Heidegger,” Ph.D. dissertation, McMaster University, 1989, p. 564ff. The first sec-
tion is based on Bernhard Casper, “Martin Heidegger und die Theologische Fakultät
Freiburg, 1909–1923,” Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 100 (1980): 534–41; Sheehan 1988,
77–137; Hugo Ott, “Der junge Martin Heidegger: Gymnasial-Konviktszeit und
Studium” and “Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger und das von Schaezler’sche
Stipendium” in Freiburger Diözesanarchiv 104 (1984): 315–25, and 108 (1986): 141–60;
Ott 1988/1993. Sections 2–4 are based on Heidegger’s “List of Lecture Courses” in
Richardson 1963, pp. 663–65; the publisher’s prospectus of March 2000 for Heidegger’s
Gesamtausgabe; corrections to these documents in Kisiel 1993, 461–69; and “Appendix I:
Heidegger’s Writings, Lectures, Courses, and Seminars” in Denker 2000, pp. 247–53.
2. For biographical sketches on Heidegger’s teachers at the University of Freiburg,
see Sheehan 1988, p. 90ff.
3. The curriculum vitae Heidegger submitted with his postdoctoral dissertation of
1915 refers to his health problem in 1911 as “severe exhaustion” and “my heart-trouble,”
which “broke out so severely that any later employment in the service of the Church was
taken to be extremely questionable” (see Sheehan 1988, p. 79). Physically and mentally
NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 183
exhausted after three semesters of intense studies and a prolific publication output for a
freshman and sophomore (see section 2 of this chapter), the twenty-one-year-old Heidegger
saw at the end of WS1910–11 a renewed outbreak of the “heart-trouble” that had earlier led
to his being dismissed from the Jesuit Novitiate at Tisis in the fall of 1909. The director and
doctor at the Theological Seminary where Heidegger lived described the problem as a psy-
chosomatic “nervous heart condition” of an “asthmatic nature,” a condition that would con-
tinue to plague him later in the wake of the denazification hearings after the collapse of Nazi
Germany, when Heidegger went into therapy. After following the doctor’s recommendation
to spend time at home in Messkirch “to have complete rest,” he returned in April to resume
his studies in SS1911, but his condition worsened, and he apparently spent most of the sum-
mer semester at home convalescing, though still finding time to read Husserl’s writings. The
poems “Dying Splendor,” “Hours on the Mount of Olives,” and “We Shall Wait” that were
published by Heidegger between October 29, 1910 and April 8, 1911, as well as the great
interest his published book review of March 1910 shows in Johannes Jörgensen’s autobio-
graphical depiction of his intellectual turmoil and despair (see chapter 2 of this volume), give
an important indication of Heidegger’s own Angst-ridden state of mind and intellectual cri-
sis. For example, “My life’s hours on the Mount of Olives: often you have looked at me with
the dark apparition of dejected apprehension” (GA13 6). Faced also with severe financial
worries, and to the great disappointment of his parents, who had even dreamt that their
gifted son might one day become a bishop, the twenty-one-year-old Heidegger took the
advice of his superiors to abandon the idea of becoming a priest and withdrew from the sem-
inary and the Department of Theology. For the details of this first intellectual “turn” in Hei-
degger’s development, see Ott 1988/1993, pp. 67ff./64ff. and Sheehan 1988, pp. 95–96.
4. In his curriculum vitae of 1915, Heidegger states that beginning in WS1911–12
he attended “a great quantity of lecture courses in philosophy” (see Sheehan 1988, p. 79f.).
5. Heidegger later recalled that “I did attend one lecture course in theology even in
the years after 1911, the course on dogmatic theology by Carl Braig.” See Zur Sache des
Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976), p. 82; translated by Joan Stambaugh as On
Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 75.
6. For this and the following course, see the curriculum vitae Heidegger sent to
Georg Misch in 1922 (GA16 41–42).
7. In a later recollection of his student years, Heidegger mentioned attending at
least one lecture course given by Vöge, who asserted a “decisive . . . influence” on him. See
GA1 57; translated as “A Recollection,’” in Sheehan 1981, p. 21.
8. The curriculum vitae Heidegger submitted with his doctoral dissertation of 1913
mentioned attending “lecture courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and botany.”
See Sheehan 1988, p. 106.
9. This curriculum vitae can be found in German and English translation in Shee-
han 1988, pp. 106, 115 and in Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert: Briefwechsel 1912 bis
1933, ed. Alfred Denker (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002), p. 92.
10. The German text of Schneider’s evaluation of the doctoral dissertation can be
found in Sheehan 1988, p. 115, as well as in Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert: Briefwech-
sel 1912 bis 1933.
11. For Heidegger’s letters of application for Von Schaezler grants, see Ott, “Der
Habilitand Martin Heidegger und das von Schaezler’sche Stipendium,” pp. 315–25.
184 SUPPLEMENTS
12. See Sheehan 1988, p. 111.

13. Heidegger’s seminar paper can be found in Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert:
Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933, pp. 77–79.
14. See Sheehan 1988, p. 113.
15. Published in Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert: Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933, pp.
81–90; also in GA80 (forthcoming).
16. This curriculum vitae can be found in German and English translation in Shee-
han 1988, pp. 78–80, 116f., as well as in GA16 37–39.
17. The German text of Rickert’s evaluation of the postdoctoral dissertation can be
found in Sheehan 1988, p. 117f., as well as in Martin Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert:
Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933.
18. For the history of the composition of Being and Time, see Kisiel 1993, p. 489.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Lebenslüge und Lebenswahrheit (Kirchheim, 2d ed., 1903).

2. Parabeln (Kirchheim, 2d ed., 1905, p. 78f.).
3. Reisebuch (Kirchheim, 1898).
CHAPTER THREE
1. Sur les chemins de la croyance: I ère étape (l’utilisation du positivisme) (Paris, 8th ed.,
1910), p. 25 note. [Tr.’s n.: When Heidegger in this and the following chapters provides
only the place and the date of publication, separating them with a comma, this format has
been retained.]
2. Prolegomena (Leipzig), p. 34 [Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis
White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950)].
3. Tr.’s n.: Defending Oswald Külpe’s “critical realism” in the present essay, Hei-
degger in 1916 argues for the need to critically supplement it with the viewpoint of “tran-
scendental idealism” (see chapter 5 in this volume, p. 64, n. 5), but then in 1922 he dis-
misses it completely as a “misbegotten epistemology” (see chapter 9, p. 131, n. 14). For a
sketch of this little-known thinker, see The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (New York:
Macmillan, 1967), pp. 367–68.
4. Cf. Fr. Klimke, Der Monismus und seine philosophischen Grundlage (Freiburg,
1911), p. 382ff. This work, the title of which is not even remotely indicative of the wealth
of thought through which it works, deals in Book IV (pp. 371–533) with the movements
of conscientialism [Konszientialismus] and phenomenalism that will be examined in what
follows, although Klimke’s treatment is admittedly carried out from the standpoint of
epistemological monism.
5. “. . . the chief question is always simply this: what and how much can under-
standing and reason know apart from all experience?” Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig,
2d ed.), “Preface to the First Edition,” p. xvii [Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 12]. For the three parts of the main tran-
scendental problem, see Kant’s Prolegomena, p. 57ff. [Prolegomena to Any Future Meta-
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 185
physics, p. 28ff.]. Külpe correctly observes that Kant, who so vehemently warned against
overstepping limits, was untrue to himself and allowed a theory of formal science to
become a theory of science in general.
6. Cf. E. Walz, “David Hume und der Positivismus und Nominalismus,”
Philosophisches Jahrbuch XXIII (1910): 161–82.
7. Tr.’s n.: Though Wirklichkeit is customarily translated as “reality,” it is here ren-
dered as “actuality,” since Heidegger, following Oswald Külpe’s terminology in his Ein-
leitung in die Philosophie (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1907), pp. 147–65 [Introduction to Philosophy:
A Handbook for Students of Psychology, Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics, and General Philosophy, tr.
W. B. Pillsbury and E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897), p. 172], uses it
in this essay to refer specifically to the “actuality” of consciousness and its contents, con-
trasting it to Realität, that is, “reality” in the sense of that which exists independently of
consciousness. Accordingly, “reality” has been reserved for Realität.
8. Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland (Leipzig, 5th ed., 1911), p. 136.
[The Philosophy of the Present in Germany, tr. M. L. Patrick and G. T. W. Patrick (London:
George Allen, 1913), p. 251.]
9. A. Ruge, “Unter den beiden Türmen.” On the philosophical congress in
Bologna, see Der Tag, no. 99 (1911).
10. Hereafter we shall use the following abbreviations of Külpe’s works in references:
K = I. Kant (Leipzig, 2d ed., 1908); E = Einleitung in die Philosophie (Leipzig, 5th ed.,
1910); EN = Erkenntnistheorie und Naturwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1910); Ph = Die Philoso-
phie der Gegenwart in Deutschland (Leipzig, 5th ed., 1911).
11. Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (Bonn, 1878).
12. Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses
(Berlin, 2d ed., 1903); Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Leipzig, 2d ed., 1907); Der menschliche
Weltbegriff (Leipzig, 2d ed., 1905).
13. A thorough critique of Mach can be found in Ph 23ff. [The Philosophy of the Pre-
sent in Germany, p. 35ff.] and in Klimke, ibid., p. 416ff.
14. Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindung (1906), p. 17f.
15. See E 149ff. [Introduction to Philosophy, p. 194ff.] A summary account can be
found in Klimke, ibid., pp. 431–51.
16. Külpe distinguishes between logical, empirical, formal, teleological, and genetic
arguments.
17. Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre (Münster, 1909), p. 62.
18. Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre, p. 275. For the general prob-
lem touched upon here, cf. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1 (1900), sect. 17ff.
[Logical Investigations, vol. 1, tr. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)],
and A. Messer, Empfindung und Denken (Leipzig, 1908), p. 163ff.
19. Cf. W. Wundt, Grundriß der Psychologie (Leipzig, 10th ed., 1911), p. 34f.
20. Ph 27. [The Philosophy of the Present in Germany, p. 49 (modified).]
21. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 17ff. (A edition), 31ff. (B edition) [Critique of Pure
Reason, p. 65ff.].
22. Ibid., pp. 66 (A edition), 91 (B edition) [Critique of Pure Reason, p. 103].
186 SUPPLEMENTS
23. A. Messer’s Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie, in Philosophische Bibliothek, vol.

118, chap. 2, sect. 4, p. 14ff., provides a good orientation regarding the “objective nature
of thought.” In the same book, the author treats naive and critical realism (pp. 41–61).
The reservations expressed about naive realism are especially lucid; however, the first
objection “from the viewpoint of religious doubt” does not seem especially convincing.
24. Grundlegung der empirischen Psychologie (Bonn, 1902), p. 89.
25. In the area of psychology, the work of the Würzburg school of psychology con-
cerning higher intelligent life has led to a vigorous attempt to escape from the sensation-
alistic psychology that considers sensations and their reproductions the only elements of
consciousness. Cf. Geyser, Einführung in die Psychologie der Denkvorgänge (Paderborn,
1909), as well as N. Kostyleff, “Les traveaux de l’école de Wurzbourg. L’étude objective de
la Pensée,” Rév. philos. XXXV 12 (1910): 553–80.
26. The influence of Ed. von Hartmann and his “transcendental realism” has done
the most in philosophy to pave the way for a realist type of thought.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Medieval thinking really was never quite as removed from empirical method as
is oftentimes believed. It certainly knew how to appreciate the processing of experience,
or at least the registering of facts. There was, even if it was not explained on a theoretical
level, a consciousness of the value of mathematics for research into nature, and there was
a familiarity with experiments. However, in all of this the proper way to formulate prob-
lems in the natural sciences was still missing.
2. Acht Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1910), p. 8. [Eight Lec-
tures on Theoretical Physics, trans. A. P. Willis (New York: Columbia University Press,
1915), p. 8 (modified).]
3. Ibid., p. 9. [Eight Lectures on Theoretical Physics, p. 9 (modified).]
4. Unterredungen und mathematische Demonstrationen über zwei neue Wissenszweige,
die Mechanik und die Fallgesetze betreffend. 3. und 4. Tag (1638), translated and edited by
A. von Öttingen, in Ostwalds Klassiker der exakten Wissenschaften, no. 24 (Leipzig: Engel-
mann, 1891), p. 7. [Galileo, Two New Sciences, tr. S. Drake (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1974), p. 154.]
5. A. Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,” Annalen der Physik 17
(1905); rep. in Fortschritte der mathematischen Wissenschaften in Monographien, edited by
O. Blumenthal, vol. 2: Das Relativitätsprinzip (Berlin and Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), p. 28.
[H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, and H. Minkowski, The Principle of Relativity, tr. W. Perrett
and G. B. Jeffery (New York: Dover, 1952), pp. 38–39.]
6. Planck, Acht Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik, p. 117. [Eight Lectures on Theo-
retical Physics, p. 120 (modified).]
7. Wissenschaft und Wirklichkeit (Berlin and Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), p. 168.
8. Kleine Schriften (Halle: Niemeyer, 1910), p. 42.
9. Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1607), chap. 7, “De temporis uni-
versi ratione,” p. 431. [Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, tr. B. Reynolds (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 303 (modified).]
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 187
10. Grundriß der Historik, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Viet, 1875), p. 79f. [Outline of the Prin-
ciples of History, tr. E. B. Andrews (New York: Fertig, 1967), p. 111 (modified).]
11. O. Redlich, Urkundenlehre (Berlin and Munich: Oldenbourg, 1907), part I, p.
21f.
12. E. Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, 5th and 6th eds. (Leipzig:
Duncker & Humblot, 1908), p. 393.
13. Augustin. Die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter in Anschluß an die Schrift “de
civitate Dei” (Berlin and Munich: Oldenbourg, 1915).
14. Ibid., p. 6f.
15. Ibid., p. 172.
16. Tr.’s n.: The German term is bedeutsam, which derives from bedeuten (“to mean,”
“to signify”). When Heidegger has in mind the meaning of terms and concepts, bedeuten
is translated as “to mean” and the noun Bedeutung as “meaning,” but when he is discussing
the more practically oriented meaningfulness of the world and experience, bedeuten is
rather translated as “to signify,” the adjective bedeutsam as “significant” or “of signifi-
cance,” and the noun Bedeutsamkeit as “significance.” These renderings are used consis-
tently throughout this volume.
17. Rühl, Chronologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard,
1897), p. 24.
18. Regarding this fundamental concept of concept-formation in history, cf. H.
Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung: Eine logische Einleitung in
die historischen Wissenschaften, 2d ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913), p. 333ff. [The Limits of
Concept-Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences
(abridged edition), tr. Guy Oakes (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 99ff.]
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Tr.’s n.: See chapter 4, p. 59, n. 16 on the term Bedeutung.
2. Novalis, Fragmente, Vol. II (Minor), p. 111. [Novalis: Philosophical Writings, tr.
Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York, 1997), p. 23 (modi-
fied).]
3. Even O. Külpe emphasizes “difference in the domain of the validity of the cate-
gories.” See “Zur Kategorienlehre” in Sitzungsberichte der Kgl. Bayr. Akad. d. Wissensch.
philos.-hist. Klasse (1915), p. 46ff. This very valuable work, which was Külpe’s last,
appeared only after the present investigation was completed. The significance of Külpe’s
essay and of the general philosophical position that this scholar who died too young won
for himself calls for comment, but this will be done only to the extent that the following
train of thought requires it. We may emphatically note, just in case this is needed, that
respect for the author will thereby not in the least be infringed upon.
4. I hope to be able to show on another occasion how Eckhartian mysticism is given
its proper philosophical interpretation and assessment only from this point of view and in
connection with the metaphysics of the problem of truth we shall touch on below.
5. The lack of attention paid to the fundamental importance of the problem of judg-
ment for the grounding of objectivity [Objektivität] also is the reason Külpe succeeded as lit-
188 SUPPLEMENTS
tle in his book Realisierung (1912), as in his previously mentioned essay, “Zur Kategorien-
lehre,” in refuting transcendental idealism and could not succeed. Right at the crucial point
where Külpe rejects the term “picture theory” as an unsuitable description of critical real-
ism and emphasizes that “the objects of the real world to be represented and defined [!] in
knowledge are not components of perception already discoverable in it, i.e., are not simply
given in consciousness, but rather can be grasped only through a process of knowing and espe-
cially through scientific research” [emphasis added] (“Zur Kategorienlehre,” p. 42), he here
bases his position on an argument that transcendental idealism has consciously made the
focal point of the problem. If critical realism could be brought to the point where it takes
judgment into account in a fundamental manner in its treatment of the problem of knowl-
edge and if, on the other hand, transcendental idealism could manage to incorporate organ-
ically into its basic position the principle of the material determination of form, then we
would succeed in lifting up into a higher unity these two “directions” of epistemology that
are the most significant and fruitful ones in our present times.
6. See Külpe, “Zur Kategorienlehre,” p. 52. In the present times, it is especially H.
Rickert in his Gegenstand der Erkenntnis who has made us aware of the necessity of includ-
ing the logical judging subject. We shall have to refrain from making any definitive com-
ment on the problem of “judging consciousness in general” and of “unquestionable affir-
mation” (ibid., pp. 318ff. and 334ff.) until the general foundations necessary for all of this
have been made available in the theory of value Rickert is presently working out. Roughly
the same holds for Husserl’s valuable theses about “pure consciousness” (Ideen, p. 141ff.),
which offer a penetrating, decisive look into the riches of “consciousness” and destroy the
often expressed view that consciousness in general is something empty of content.
7. Tr.’s n.: In the present essay, Geist has been rendered as “spirit,” Geistesgeschichte
as “intellectual history of spirit,” and geistig and the associated term seelish as “spiritual” to
reflect Heidegger’s attempted grounding of epistemology in the metaphysical relation of
“the soul” to God and the influence of Hegel, who is explicitly cited later on. Though in
preceding and following texts in this volume, Geist usually has been rendered simply as
“mind,” geistig as “mental” or “psychical,” Geistesgeschichte as intellectual history, and seel-
ish as “psychical,” the reader should keep in mind the above connotations of these terms.
8. The author hopes shortly to be able to contribute some fundamental theses on
this problem in a more detailed investigation about being, value, and negation.
9. Unfortunately, even Külpe—as is clear from his constant preference for “objec-
tive logic”—was not able to deal with precisely this problem, just as he never paid any
attention to Lask’s Lehre Vom Urteil (1912), an investigation to which I would have to
attribute a more far-reaching importance for the theory of categories than that of his Logik
der Philosophie. This book on judgment is unusually rich in fruitful perspectives, for which
reason it is all the more regrettable that Külpe, with his distinguished and exemplary style
of critical analysis, was no longer allowed the chance to present to the experts his position
on Lask regarding what is, in my opinion, the all-decisive problem of judgment. Indeed,
what Külpe in his last work wrote of Lask holds true today for himself: “Surely the highly
talented researcher would not have been able to avoid this consequence of his deeply pen-
etrating train of thought [about the problem of the differentiation of forms] in the course
of his later development if he had not been torn from us all too early by a harsh fate” (“Zur
Kategorienlehre,” p. 26, n. 2).
10. See Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1: Frühe Schriften, p. 255ff.
NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT 189
11. It is from this point of view that we can also, for the very first time, analyze and
define the concept of “philosophia perennis” in theory of science, something that to this
day has not even been done in a roughly adequate fashion. Just as little to this day has the
problem of providing a study of Catholic theology within theory of science—something
closely connected with what was discussed above—been seen as a problem, to say noth-
ing, then, of a solution having been ventured. The reason for this is in part the all too tra-
ditional manner in which logic has until now treated its subject matter and its blindness
to problems. The first fundamental reorientation in the area of logic has been undertaken
by Geyser, whose Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre (1909) already has been sin-
gled out in an earlier writing. See my review “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” Liter-
arische Rundschau für das katholische Deutschland, ed. J. Sauer, vol. XXXVIII, no. 11
(1912): 522ff.; repr. in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1: Frühe Schriften, p. 35ff.
CHAPTER SEVEN
All notes are by the translator.
1. See chapter 5, p. 65, n. 7 on the terms “psychical,” “mental,” “mind,” and “spirit”
used in the present chapter.
2. See Heidegger’s helpful explanation of this early terminus technicus Beküm-
merung (later replaced by Angst [anxiety] in Being and Time) in chapter 9 of this volume,
p. 118, n. 5. See also my elaboration in OHF 13 n. 17.
3. Heidegger uses two German words interchangeably for history in this 1920 essay
and in the 1922 essay in chapter 9, namely, Historie and Geschichte. He does not clearly
distinguish between them, as he does later in his 1925 lectures on Dilthey’s philosophy of
history in chapter 10 (see p. 148, n. 1). There, Historie usually is reserved for the “science
of history” and Geschichte for the actual “happening” of history. In the present chapter and
in chapter 9, I have translated both terms and their variants in the same way without indi-
cating which German term is being employed at the time, since Heidegger allows the con-
text of their usage to define which sense of history is meant.
4. Anticipating the terminology in Being and Time, this essay and the one from
1922 in chapter 9 already use Dasein as a central term, playing on its literal meaning as
“being-there” and that of the verb dasein as “to be there,” though these German terms nor-
mally mean simply “existence” and “to exist,” respectively. Thus following existing trans-
lation practice, in both essays I have either used the German term Dasein without italics
or rendered it as “being-there.” The verb dasein usually has been translated as “to be there
(for us, one).” The English term existence has been reserved for Existenz. See my elabora-
tion in OHF 2 n. 7.
5. The German neologism that Heidegger employs is Da sein. When he places spe-
cial emphasis on the dynamic, verbal sense of Sein, it is rendered with “be-ing.” See my
elaboration in OHF 2 notes 5 and 7.
6. See chapter 4, p. 59, n. 16 on the term bedeutsam.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. M. Luther, “Quaestio de viribus et voluntate hominis sine gratia disputata”
(1516) in D. Martin Luthers Werke, vol. 1 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883), pp.
190 SUPPLEMENTS
142–51. [Tr.’s n. : The above-cited volume of the Weimar edition of Luther’s works will
be abbreviated “WA1.”]
2. The Latin words cannot be found as quotations in Luther’s text in WA1, p. 145ff.
3. M. Luther, “Disputatio contra scholasticam theolgiam” (1517) in WA1, pp.
221–28. [“Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” trans. Harold J. Grimm in Luther’s
Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 31: Career of the Reformer
(Philadelphia: Concordia, 1957), pp. 9–16.]
4. WA1, p. 225, l. 1f. [“Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” p. 10: “17. Man
is by nature unable to want God to be God. Indeed, he himself wants to be God and does
not want God to be God.”]
5. WA1, p. 225, l. 15f. [“Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” p. 10: “25.
Hope does not grow out of merits, but out of suffering which destroys merits (merita
destruentibus).”]
6. WA1, p. 225, l. 29f. [“Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” p. 11.]
7. Tr.’s n.: WA1, p. 226, l. 3f. [“Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” p. 11:
“37. Nature, moreover, inwardly and necessarily glories and takes pride in every work
which is apparently and outwardly good.”]
8. WA1, p. 226, l. 26. [“Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” p. 50.]
9. M. Luther, “Disputatio Heidelbergae habita” (1518) in WA1, pp. 350–74.
[“Heidelberg Disputation,” tr. Harold J. Grimm, in Career of the Reformer, pp. 39–70.]
10. WA1, p. 362, l. 35.
11. WA1, p. 362, l. 21.
12. WA1, p. 362, l. 22. [“Heidelberg Disputation,” p. 53 (modified): “21. A theolo-
gian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross says what the matter
actually is . . . 22. That wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as per-
ceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened.”]
13. Ibid. [“Heidelberg Disputation,” p. 53.]
14. Faith, hope, and charity (see 1 Cor. 13:13).
15. M. Luther, In primum librum Mose enarrationes = Enarrationes in Genesin, cap.
I–IV, 7 in M. Luther, Exegetica opera latina, curavit Christoph Steph. Theoph. Elsperger,
tom. I (Erlangen, 1829) (= EA1); cf. WA42–44. [Lectures on Genesis, tr. George V. Schick,
in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, vols. 1–8 (Saint Louis:
Concordia, 1958).]
16. EA1, p. 209. [Lectures on Genesis, vol. 1, pp. 164–65.]
17. Tr.’s n.: see EA1, p. 210 and Lectures on Genesis, p. 166: “But see what follows if you
maintain that original righteousness was not a part of nature but a sort of superfluous or
superadded gift (donum superadditum). When you declare that righteousness was not a part
of the essence of man, does it not also follow that sin, which took its place, is not part of the
essence of man either? Then there was no purpose in sending Christ, the Redeemer, if the
original righteousness, like something foreign to our nature, has been taken away and the nat-
ural endowments remain perfect. What can be said that is more unworthy of a theologian?”
18. EA1, p. 210. [Lectures on Genesis, vol. 1, p. 166 (modified): “Therefore let us shun
those ravings like real pests and a perversion of the Holy Scriptures, and let us rather fol-
NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT 191
low experience, which shows that we are born from unclean seed and that from the very
nature of the seed we acquire ignorance of God, smug carefreeness, unbelief, hatred against
God, disobedience, impatience, and similar grave faults. These are so deeply implanted in
our flesh, and this poison has been so widely spread through flesh, body, mind, muscles,
and blood, through the bones and the very marrow, in the will, in the intellect, and in rea-
son, that they not only cannot be fully removed but are not even recognized as sins.”]
19. EA1, p. 178. [Lectures on Genesis, pp. 141–42 (modified): “But these words show
how horrifying the ruinous fall (horribilis ruina) of Adam and Eve was; for through it we
have lost a most beautifully enlightened reason and a will in agreement with the Word and
will of God. . . . The most serious loss consists in this, that not only were those benefits
lost, but man’s will turned away from (aversio) God. As a result, man wants and does none
of the things God wants and commands. Likewise, we have no knowledge about what
God is, what grace is, what righteousness is, and finally what sin itself is. These are most
horrible losses (defectus), and those who not realize and see them are blinder than moles.
Experience, of course, teaches us about this calamity. . . . Therefore it is a cause for great
errors when some men minimize this evil and speak of our depraved nature in the man-
ner of the philosophers, as if it were not depraved. Thus they state that the natural endow-
ments have remained unimpaired not only in the nature of man, but also in the devil.”]
20. EA1, p. 184. [Lectures on Genesis, p. 147 (modified).]
22. Tr.’s n.: see Lectures on Genesis, pp. 169–71 (modified): “And when they had heard
the voice of the Lord, who was walking in Paradise at the breeze of the day, Adam and his wife
hid among the trees of Paradise from the face of the Lord. . . . After their conscience had been
convicted by the Law, Adam and Eve were terrified by the rustling of a leaf (Lev. 26:36).
We see it to be just so in the case of frightened human beings. When they hear the creak-
ing of a beam, they are afraid that the entire house may collapse; when they hear a mouse,
they are afraid that Satan is there and wants to kill them. By nature we have become so
thoroughly frightened that we fear even the things that are safe. . . . When the conscience
is truly and thoroughly frightened, man is so overcome that he not only cannot act but is
unable even to do any thinking. They say that such a thing happens in battle when sol-
diers who are overcome by fear cannot move a hand but permit themselves to be slain by
the enemy. . . . Oh, what a grievous downfall, to plunge from the utmost carefreeness . . .
into such horrifying fear (horribilem pavorem) that man flees from the sight of God more
than from the sight and presence of the devil!”
23. EA1, p. 217f. [Lectures on Genesis, p. 172 (modified): “Nor can we have any
doubt that their intellect was depraved when we look at the stratagem by which Adam and
Eve think they are safe. Or is it not the height of folly, in the first place, to attempt the
impossible, to try to flee from God, from whom they are unable to flee?”]
24. EA1, p. 218. [Lectures on Genesis, pp. 172–73 (modified): “9. And the Lord God
called Adam and said to him: Where are you? . . . After Adam had become terrified through
the awareness of his sin, he flees from the sight of God and realizes that not only Paradise
but the entire world is too narrow to be a safe hiding place. And now, in that anxiety [anx-
ietate] of soul, he reveals his folly by seeking relief from sin through flight from God. But
he had already fled too far from God. Sin itself is the actual withdrawal from God, and it
would not have been necessary to add any further flight.”]
192 SUPPLEMENTS
25. Ibid. [Lectures on Genesis, p. 172 (modified).]

26. Ibid. [Lectures on Genesis, p. 173.]
28. EA1, p. 223. [Lectures on Genesis, p. 177.]
33. EA1, p. 229. [Lectures on Genesis, p. 181 (modified): “He does not drive Adam
away from Himself because of his sin, but He calls him and calls him back from his
sin. . . . It is the highest grace that after Adam’s sin God does not remain silent but speaks
(locquitur), and in many words (verbis) indeed. . . .”]
34. Tr.’s n.: See Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3, ed. and tr. Howard V.
Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 669–72.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Tr.’s n.: Itself confirming what Heidegger says below about the inevitable
“plurivocity” of words, his neologism das woraufhin has both the directional or intentional
meaning of “the toward-which” of interpreting and the horizonal meaning of “that on the
basis of which” or “that with respect to which” something is interpreted. The single occur-
rence of this term here and the frequent occurrences below of its abbreviated form das
Worauf have been rendered as “the toward-which,” though the reader also should keep in
mind its above horizonal meaning. When the preposition auf, from which these neolo-
gisms are formed, is used in conjunction with them, it has been translated as “with respect
to,” which has the advantage of expressing its double meaning of “toward” and “on the
basis of.” See my elaboration in OHF 1 n. 3, 21 n. 29. Regarding my neologistic transla-
tions here and below of Heidegger’s own neologisms, which are themselves sometimes
translations of Aristotle’s own neologisms, see Heidegger’s comments on p. 127 about the
hermeneutical value of employing such apparently unnatural modes of expression when
they are demanded by the content of the text being translated.
2. Tr.’s n.: The verb zeitigen, rendered here as “to temporalize and unfold,” is related
to the nouns Zeit (time) and Zeitlichkeit (temporality) and more closely to the adjective
zeitig, which means timely, seasonable, ripe, or mature. Heidegger accordingly intends it
both in its meaning of “to temporalize” and in its more common vegetative sense, namely,
to unfold, ripen, mature, or bear (fruit) in season, at the right time (e.g., the ripening of
grapes or blooming of flowers in season). It is bound up with Heidegger’s terms jeweilig
and jeweils, which have respectively been rendered in most occurrences as “at the particu-
lar time” and “at any particular time”; with his use of the phrase es kommt auf . . . an,
which is connected with the sense of temporalizing as a “not yet” or a Zukunft (a “future,”
but literally “a coming toward us”), and which accordingly has been rendered simultane-
ously as “what is at issue” and “what it comes to”; and even more intimately with a num-
ber of vegetative terms that he employs in connection with temporality, namely, erwach-
sen (aus), which has been rendered as “to grow (out of )”; anwachsen (“to bourgeon”);
entspringen (“to spring from”); Verwurzelung (“being rooted in”); and Boden (“soil” or
NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE 193
“basis”). This concomitant vegetative sense of zeitigen again comes to the fore when Hei-
degger puts it to work to interpret and translate the basic concepts of Aristotle’s treatment
of bivo~ [life] and more specifically of human life in his “natural philosophy” (Physics, De
anima, and De motu animalium), as well as the basic concepts of his “metaphysics,”
“logic,” and “ethics” (as Heidegger states, his view is that the latter disciplines “grew out
of ” Aristotle’s natural philosophy). The most notable of these concepts in Aristotle’s nat-
ural philosophy are ϕuvs i~ (nature, but more literally, that which grows or springs forth),
ginovmenon (becoming), ajrchv (origin, first principle, though Heidegger himself translates
it with the neologism Vonwoaus [the “from-out-of-which”]), kivnhsi~ (motion, namely,
that of life from duvnami~ [potentiality] to ejnevrgeia [actuality], the latter term being
translated by Heidegger as Vollzug [“actualization” or “actualizing”]), and kairov~ (the
right season, the moment, timeliness). Thus it is in order to express something of its rich
double meaning of “to temporalize” and “to unfold (in season, at the right time)” that zeit-
igen has for the most part been rendered into English with the hendiadys “to temporalize
and unfold.”
3. Tr.’s n.: The somewhat clumsy technicus terminus (sich) bekümmern (to worry
oneself, to be worried), which Heidegger had been using at least since his 1920 essay on
Jaspers (see this volume, p. 74ff.), is defined in note 5 as the anxious and resolute “care of
[human] existence” for itself. In subsequent writings, including Being and Time, it was
replaced with the perhaps more natural term Angst (“anxiety” or “anxiousness” about exis-
tence). Though sich bekümmern has been rendered as “to worry,” other possible transla-
tions include “to trouble oneself ” as well as “to be troubled,” “to concern oneself,” and “to
be in distress about” or “anxious about.” However, “anxious” has been reserved for trans-
lating the term Besorgnis, which is an intensive form of Besorgen and accordingly some-
times has been rendered not simply as “concern” (about the world) but more strongly as
“anxious concern” or “concern and apprehension” (about the world). Note that the ety-
mological connection between these two German terms, on the one hand, and Sorgen and
Sorge, on the other hand, is lost in my respective translations of the latter terms as “car-
ing” and “care” (about the world or about human existence).
4. Tr.’s n.: On the term begegnen (to encounter), see my comments in OHF 65 n. 53.
5. “Worry” refers not to a mood in which one wears a woebegone expression but
rather to a factical being-resolved, that is, seizing upon one’s existence (cf. pp. 119–20) as
something that one is and will be concerned about. If we take “care” to be vox media [in
the middle voice] (which in itself, as a category of meaning, has its origin in the speech of
facticity), then worry is the care of existence (gen. ob. [objective genitive]).
6. Tr.’s n.: The German term is Öffentlichkeit, which has the literal spatial meaning
of “openness,” on which Heidegger oftens plays in connection with the similarly spatial
term Dasein (“being-there”). See my elaboration in OHF 25 n. 34, 78 n. 75.
7. Tr.’s n.: For an explanation of the term das Man (“the everyone”), see my com-
ments in OHF 26 n. 36.
8. Tr.’s n.: The German term is existenziell. See my explanation of this term in OHF
13 n. 21.
9. “Atheistic” not in the sense of a theory such as materialism or the like. Any phi-
losophy that understands itself in terms of what it is, that is, as the factical how of the
interpretation of life, must know—and know it precisely if it also has an “intimation” of
194 SUPPLEMENTS
God—that this throwing of life back upon itself which gets actualized in philosophy is
something that in religious terms amounts to raising one’s hand against God. But philos-
ophy is thereby only being honest with itself and standing firm on this, that is, it is com-
porting itself in a manner that is fitting to the only possibility of standing before God that
is available to it as such. And here, “atheistic” means: keeping itself free from the tempta-
tions of that kind of concern and apprehension that only talks glibly about religiosity.
Could it be that the very idea of a philosophy of religion, and especially if it does not take
into account the facticity of human being, is pure nonsense?
10. Tr.’s n.: Though the term that Heidegger is employing here, namely, Verwahrung,
means simply “safekeeping” or “preservation” in everyday German, he also plays on its lit-
eral meaning of “true-ing” or, in archaic terms, “betrothing.” This is especially the case
when he uses it frequently below in his discussion of “truth” in Book VI of Aristotle’s Nico-
machean Ethics. Thus from this point onward it has been rendered as “true safekeeping”
in the expectation that this somewhat clumsy translation will nonetheless put across what
Heidegger is struggling to express in this early essay. See my elaboration in OHF 56 n. 48.
11. The hymnology and music of the Middle Ages, as well as its architecture and
plastic arts, can be properly approached in intellectual history only on the basis of a pri-
mordial phenomenological interpretation of the philosophical and theological anthropol-
ogy of this era, which was communicated within the environing world and the social with-
world through sermons and schooling. “Gothic man” will remain a mere cliche as long as
this anthropology has not been appropriated.
12. Tr.’s n.: The neologism Heidegger employs here, Vonwoaus, has a double mean-
ing expressing the well-known double meaning of the Aristotelian term it translates,
namely, Aristotle’s term ajrchv (origin and logical first principle). Like the neologism das
woraufhin (see n. 1 above), it has, as Heidegger makes clear below (see especially pp.
133–34, 141), a directional meaning and a horizonal meaning, that is: (1) the directional
meaning of “the from-out-of-which” or “point of departure” (Ausgang) both for the being
of things and for our discourse about it (and in the latter sense it seems to be the Aris-
totelian equivalent of Heidegger’s notion of one’s “initial position of looking” that moti-
vates one’s “direction of looking” [see p. 112 above]); and (2) the horizonal meaning of
“the from-the-point-of-view-of-which” on the basis of which beings are interpreted and
understood in their being. It is therefore often translated below with the hendiadys “the
from-out-of-which and point-of-view-of-which,” though “point of view” also is used for
Hinsicht.
13. Tr.’s n.: Cf. The Basic Works of Aristotle, p. 1024 (modified): “Let it be assumed
that the states by virtue of which the soul is true by way of affirmation and denial are five
in number, i.e., art, scientific understanding, prudence, wisdom, and intelligence; we do
not include supposition and opinion because these can be false.”
14. Tr.’s n.: See chapter 3 in this volume, p. 40, n. 3, regarding Heidegger’s now
explicit renunciation of his earlier adoption of Oswald Külpe’s “critical realism.”
15. Tr.’s n.: In the German text, this reference to Aristotle’s De anima is followed by
“see chap. 3,” which apparently is an error on either the editor’s or Heidegger’s own part,
since the reference already cites “chap. 3.”
16. Tr.’s n.: Heidegger has in mind the fact that orthotes means not only “correct” but
also “in a straight line toward . . . “ and “hitting the mark.” See the opening passage of
NOTES TO CHAPTER TEN 195
Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics: “In all the states of having we have mentioned, as well
as in all other matters, there is a mark the one who possesses discourse aims at, heighten-
ing or relaxing his activity accordingly, and there is a measure determining the mean states
we say are intermediate between excess and deficiency, one which is in accord with correct
discourse which hits its mark” (The Basic Works of Aristotle, p. 1022 [modified]).
17. Tr.’s n.: The published German text reads “chap. 3,” but the context indicates
that “chap. 7” is really meant.
18. Tr.’s n.: See Simplicii in Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quattuor Priores Commen-
taria (Berlin, 1882), p. 395, l. 20.
19. Tr.’s n.: The passage Heidegger seems to be referring to, namely, Met. E 2,
1026b8–9, actually speaks of “the house [oijkiva] which has come into being” and “has
been produced.” In apparently substituting “being” (oujs iva) for “house,” Heidegger also
may have in mind his above interpretation of Aristotle’s term oujs iva as a neologism whose
original meaning is “the household.”
CHAPTER TEN
1. Tr.’s n.: In this essay, Heidegger almost always distinguishes between the two Ger-
man words for history, namely, Geschichte and Historie, and the two corresponding adjec-
tives geschichtlich and historisch. For Heidegger, Geschichte means historical existence itself,
i.e., the fact that human Dasein is marked by temporality, historicity, and the factical cat-
egories of life rather than by the lifeless, rigid categories of Aristotelian or neo-Kantian
logic. To be historical (geschichtlich) is to be constituted by the various structures of sense
(Sinn) that make up our temporal existence. In GA59 43–49, we find the young Heideg-
ger speaking of six senses of history, and in GA60 34–45, and GA9 32–34 (see chapter 7
of this volume) we find him offering his own views on history. In these earlier
texts, he has not yet begun to clearly distinguish between the terms geschichtlich and his-
torisch (see chapter 7, p. 74, n. 3), nor has he done so in his very early essay “The Con-
cept of Time in the Science of History” in chapter 4 of this volume. By the time of the
Kassel lectures in 1925, Historie means the historiographical inquiry into the past, whereas
Geschichte signifies something that, as he already put it in his 1920 essay on Jaspers, “we
ourselves are” (GA9 34; see this volume, p. 95). See also the 1924 lecture “The Concept
of Time”: “Dasein, however, is in itself historical [geschichtlich] insofar as it is its possibil-
ity.” Der Begriff der Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), p. 25; translated by Will
McNeill as The Concept of Time (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1992), p. 19. In order to
avoid the sometimes infelicitous lexicon of Heideggeriana, I have in this translation aban-
doned the neologism “historiology” (used by Macquarrie and Robinson in their transla-
tion of Being and Time) to render Historie. Instead, I have translated Historie as “histori-
cal science” and Geschichte as “history.” Likewise, I have departed from their use of the
neologism “historiological” as an English equivalent of the German adjective historisch,
and I have simply translated both it and the adjective geschichtlich as “historical.” When
the context does not make clear which of these two German adjectives is being used, or
what Heidegger’s meaning is, I have inserted the German term in brackets. The noun
Geschehen has been translated as “happening” or “happenings.”
2. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Halle: Niemeyer, 1900,
1901), now available in Gesammelte Werke, vols. XVIII, XIX/1, and XIX/2 (Hague: Mar-
196 SUPPLEMENTS
tinus Nijhoff, 1975, 1984); translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols.

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
3. Ethica: Aus den Tagebüchern Wilhelm Diltheys (Berlin: Literaturarchiv-
Gesellschaft, 1915), now available in Der junge Dilthey: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und
Tagebüchern, 1852–1870, ed. Clara Misch neé Dilthey (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner,
1933).
4. Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg,
1877–1897, ed. Sigrid von Schulenburg (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923).
5. Der junge Dilthey, p. 87.
6. “Vorrede” (1911) in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957), p.
3. [Tr.’s note: All volumes of Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften will hereafter be referred to as
“GS” with the appropriate volume number immediately following.]
7. “Rede zum 70. Geburtstag” (1903) in GS V, pp. 7–9.
8. Wilhelm Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” (Strasbourg Rector-
ial Address of 1894) in Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte,
vol. 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1924), pp. 136–60; translated by Guy Oakes as “History
and Natural Science” in History and Theory XIX (1980): 165–85.
9. Leben Schleiermachers, vol. 1 (Berlin: Reimer, 1870), now available in GS XIII.
10. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium
der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1883), now avail-
able in GS I; translated by R. Betanzos as Introduction to the Human Sciences (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1988).
11. “De principiis ethices Schleiermacheri,” Ph.D. dissertation (Berlin, 1864). The
first part of the German translation is unpublished. The second part has been published
under the title “Kritik der ethischen Prinzipien Schleiermachers” in GS XIV, pp. 339–57.
12. “Das hermeneutische System Schleiermachers in der Auseinandersetzung mit der
älteren protestantischen Hermeneutik” (1860), now available in GS XIV, pp. 597–787;
translated as “Schleiermachers Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant
Hermeneutics” in Selected Works, ed. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi, vol. 4, Hermeneutics and
the Study of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 33–227.
Selected Works will hereafter be abbreviated as “SW” with the volume number immediately
following.
13. “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik” in Philosophische Abhandlungen: Christoph
Sigwart zu seinem 70. Geburtstag 28, März 1900 Gewidmet (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr,
1900), now available in GS V, pp. 317–31; translated as “The Rise of Hermeneutics” in
SW IV, pp. 235–58.
14. “Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewußtseins” (1864), now available in
GS VI, pp. 1–55.
15. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (Leipzig: Teub-
ner, 1906).
16. “Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der
Gesellschaft und dem Staat” (1875), now available in GS V, pp. 31–73. See also “Vorar-
beiten zur Abhandlung von 1875” and “Fortsetzungen der Abhandlungen von 1875” in
GS XVIII, pp. 17–37, 57–111.
NOTES TO CHAPTER TEN 197
17. Tr.’s n.: GS XIX and XX contain the drafts of the uncompleted sections of vols.
1 and 2 of the Introduction to the Human Sciences. For a discussion, see SW I, pp. 3–7.
18. “Auffassung und Analyse des Menschen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert” (1890–91),
now available in GS II, pp. 1–89.
19. “Das natürliche System der Geisteswissenschaften im 17. Jahrhundert”
(1892–93), now available in GS II, pp. 90–245.
20. “Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität
der Aussenwelt und seinem Recht” (1890), now available in GS V, pp. 90–138.
21. “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (1894), now
available in GS V, pp. 139–240; translated by R. Zaner as “Ideas Concerning a Descrip-
tive and Analytic Psychology” in Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).
22. “Beiträge zum Studium der Individualität (Über vergleichende Psychologie)”
(1895–96), now available in GS V, pp. 241–316.
23. See Leben Schleiermachers, vol. 2 in GS XIV, and Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels und
andere Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des deutschen Idealismus in GS IV.
24. “Studien zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften” (1905), now available in
GS VII, pp. 3–75.
25. “Das Wesen der Philosophie” (1907), now available in GS V, pp. 339–416; trans-
lated by S. Emery and W.T. Emery as The Essence of Philosophy (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1961).
26. “Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften” (1910),
now available in GS VII, pp. 79–188.
27. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: Engelmann,
1874).
28. Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Tübin-
gen and Leipzig: J.C.B. Mohr, 1902); translated by G. Oakes as The Limits of Concept For-
mation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
29. Briefwechsel Dilthey-Yorck, p. 185.
30. Introduction to vol. 2 of Logical Investigations.
31. Tr.’s n.: The German edition reads: “. . . die Grund[v?]erfassung des men-
schlichen Daseins. . . .”
32. Briefwechsel Dilthey-Yorck, p. 83.
33. Ibid., p. 251. This and the above quotation from Yorck were put into modern
German by Walter Bröcker, who made the transcript of Heidegger’s lectures.
Glossary
This glossary lists only central or problematic German terms and only the most
frequent English renderings.
Abbau deconstruction
Anzeige indication
Aussein auf being out for something (and moving toward it)
bedeuten to mean, to signify
bedeutsam significant, of significance
Bedeutsamkeit significance
Bedeutung meaning
begegnen to encounter, is being encountered
Bekümmerung worry
Besorgnis concern, anxious concern, concern and apprehension(s)
bestimmen define, characterize, determine
Bezug relation
Blickrichtung direction of looking
Blickstand the initial position of looking
Blickweite scope
Dasein Dasein, being-there
Existenz existence
existenziell existential
Gehalt content
Geist spirit, mind, intellect
geistlich spiritual, mental, intellectual
Geltung validity
Gerede mere talk
Geschehen happening, happenings
Geschichte history
199
200 SUPPLEMENTS
Geschichtlichkeit historicity
Historie historical science
historisch historical
jeweilig at the particular time, particular
(das) Man the everyone
Mensch human being(s), man
Mitwelt with-world
Öffentlichkeit publicness
Seiendes beings
Sein being, be-ing
Selbstwelt self-world
Sinn sense, meaning
Umgang (going about) dealings
Umsicht circumspection
Umwelt environing world
Verwahrung (true) safekeeping
Vollzug actualizing, actualization
(das) Vonwoaus the from-out-of-which, the from-the-point-of-view-of-which
Vorgriff foreconception
Vorhabe forehaving
Vorlaufen running forward
(das) Worauf(hin) (the) toward-which
zeitigen temporalize (and unfold)
Zusammenhang context, relation, nexus
Secondary Bibliography
This bibliography lists comprehensive studies of either Heidegger’s early thought

as a whole, his student years, his Early Freiburg Period, or his Marburg Period.
Citations of these studies are made in short form in the body of the volume,
which also contains references to more specialized secondary literature. Internet
sites providing philological resources such as a chronology of Heidegger’s life, a
listing in German and English of the volumes of his Gesamtausgabe, bibliogra-
phies on selected topics, and a link to the Heidegger Archives at the Deutsches
Literatur Archiv in Marbach, Germany, have been given at the end.
Bambach, Charles. 1995. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism: History and Met-
physics in Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Neo-Kantians. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press.
Caputo, John D. 1992. Demythologizing Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
——— . 1982. Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics. New York:
Fordham University Press.
——— . 1978. The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought. New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press.
——— . 1974. “Phenomenology, Mysticism and the Grammatica Speculativa,” Journal of
the British Society for Phenomenology 5: 101–17.
Crowell, Steven. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Tran-
scendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Dahlstrom, Daniel O. 1994. Das logische Vorurteil: Untersuchungen zur Wahrheitstheorie
des frühren Heidegger. Vienna: Passagen-Verlag.
Denker, Alfred. 2000. Historical Dictionary of Heidegger’s Philosophy. Lanham, Md.: Scare-
crow Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1990. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and
Time, Part I. MIT Press.
201
202 SUPPLEMENTS
Farías, Victor. 1989. Heidegger and Nazism. Edited by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rock-
more and translated by Paul Burrell and Bariel R. Ricci. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1994. Heideggers Wege. Tübingen: Mohr, 1983. Translated by
John W. Stanley as Heidegger’s Ways. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg et al. 1986–1987. “Vorträge, gehalten auf den Symposien ‘Faktiz-
ität und Geschichtlichkeit’.” Dilthey-Jahrbuch 4: 1–180.
Gudopp, Wolf-Dieter. 1983. Der junge Heidegger: Realität und Wahrheit in der
Vorgeschichte von Sein und Zeit. Berlin: Akademie.
King, Magda, and John Llewelyn. 2001. A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Krell, David Farrell. 1992. Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
——— . 1986. Intimations of Mortality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press.
Löwith, Karl. 1960. Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht.
McNeill, William. 1999. The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of The-
ory. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Ott, Hugo. 1993. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. Frankfurt: Campus,
1988. Translated by Allan Blunden as Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. New York:
Basic Books.
Petkovs=ek, Robert. 1998. Heidegger-Index (1919–1927). Slovenia: Theology Department
of the University of Ljubljani.
Pöggeler, Otto. 1997. Neue Wege mit Heidegger. Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1992.
Translated by John Baliff as The Paths of Heidegger’s Life and Thought. New York:
Prometheus Books.
——— . 1987. Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers. Pfullingen: Neske, 1963; 3rd ed., 1990.
Translated by Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber as Martin Heidegger’s Path of
Thinking. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
Richardson, William J. 1963. Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff.
Schaeffler, Richard. 1970. Frömmigkeit des Denkens? Martin Heidegger und die Katholische
Theologie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Schalow, Frank. 1992. The Renewal of the Heidegger–Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and
Responsibility. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sheehan, Thomas (ed.). 1988. “Heidegger’s Lehrjahre.” Pp. 77–137 in J. C. Sallis et al.,
eds., The Collegium Phaenomenologicum. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
——— . 1981. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Chicago: Precedent.
Sheehan, Thomas, and Richard Palmer, eds. 1997. Psychological and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 203
Taminiaux, Jacques. 1991. Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology. Translated
by Michael Gendre. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Van Buren, John. 1994. The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Van Buren, John, and Theodore Kisiel, eds. 1994. Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays
in His Earliest Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Zimmerman, Michael E. 1981. Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept
of Authenticity. Athens: Ohio State University Press.
INTERNET SITES
Ereignis: Heidegger Links. http://webcom.com/~paf/ereignis.html.

Heidegger, Burghard. Heidegger-WWW-Server-Projekt. http://www.heidegger.org.
About the Contributors
CHARLES BAMBACH is associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

He is the author of essays on hermeneutics, Continental philosophy, and the his-
tory of philosophy. His book Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism was
recently published by Cornell University Press.
PHILIP J. BOSSERT was formerly professor of philosophy at the University of

Hawaii and is presently president of Strategic Information Solutions, Inc.
JOHN PROTEVI is assistant professor of French studies at Louisiana State Uni-

versity. He is the author of Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida
(Bucknell University Press, 1994) and Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the
Body Politic (Athlone Press, 2001), as well as the coeditor of Between Deleuze and
Derrida (Athlone, forthcoming).
RODERICK M. STEWART is associate professor of philosophy at Austin College

in Sherman, Texas. His research interests are in contemporary Continental phi-
losophy (especially Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Gadamer) and more recently in the
debates over multiculturalism and intellectual canons.
HARRY S. TAYLOR is professor of philosophy at Blue River Community College,

Missouri.
HANS W. UFFELMANN is professor of philosophy and medicine at the Univer-

sity of Missouri.
JOHN VAN BUREN is associate professor of philosophy and director of envi-

ronmental studies at Fordham University, the author of The Young Heidegger:
Rumor of the Hidden King, editor of Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in
205
206 SUPPLEMENTS
His Earliest Thought, translator of and commentator on Heidegger’s 1923 lec-

ture course Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, and editor (with Baird Cal-
licott) of the State University of New York Press series Environmental Philosophy
and Ethics.

Fil Cont-Heidegger - Supplements. From The Earliest Essays To Being and Time and Beyond 2002 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fil Cont-Heidegger - Supplements. From The Earliest Essays To Being and Time and Beyond 2002 PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fil Cont-Heidegger - Supplements. From The Earliest Essays To Being and Time and Beyond 2002 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Martin Heidegger

From the Earliest Essays to

Being and Time and Beyond

Chapter 1: Chronological Overview

Chapters 2–5: Student Period

exhibit predominantly theological, moral, aesthetic, and cultural interests. Rep-

a conceptual nexus of timeless ideal being by means of which intentional “judg-

Chapters 6–10: Early Freiburg and Marburg Periods

lecturer now attempted to fulfill the above three “requirements,” he eventually,

Christianity (Augustine, medieval mysticism, Luther, Kierkegaard), Aristotle’s

composition of Being and Time, in which Heidegger turns to a systematic engage-

Supplementing BEING AND TIME

Supplementing Heidegger’s Later Writings

included in chapter 7 of this volume. The supplements (Nachträge) in this volume

Supplementing the Rediscovery of Heidegger’s Earliest Thought

corpus of earlier published and unpublished texts comprising course manu-

Education, Teaching, Research, and Publication

JOHN VAN BUREN

STUDENT PERIOD: EDUCATION

1889. Martin Heidegger, born September 26 in Messkirch, Germany

University of Freiburg, Department of Theology

Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

and Metaphysics, two hours (Prof. Heinrich Rickert, Department of

7/26/1913. Department of Philosophy recommends Heidegger for the doc-

Dissertation submitted with a curriculum vitae16 on 7/2/1915: “The

STUDENT PERIOD: RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION

Previously unpublished poems. “Fernes Land” (Distant Land), “Hast die

August 27, 1910. Newspaper article. “Abraham a Sankta Clara. Zur

64–71, reprinted with extensive revisions by the original translator and

August 20, 1913. Letter of application to the Freiburg Archdiocesan Chan-

EARLY FREIBURG PERIOD

Lecturer, University of Freiburg

WS1915–16. Lecture course. “Die Grundlinien der antiken und scholastis-

WS1915–16. Seminar. “Über Kant, Prolegomena” (On Kant’s Prolegomena).

Assistant to Edmund Husserl

SS1919. Seminar. “Einführung in die Phänomenologie im Anschluß an

SS1921. Lecture course. “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus” (Augustine

are valuable translation suggestions by Michael Baur in his earlier trans-

Associate Professor, University of Marburg

WS1923–24. Seminar. “Phänomenologische Übung für Anfänger: Husserl,

Ingeborg Schüßler (1992). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and

WS1925–26. Lecture course. “Logik” (Logic), four hours. Published as

PER MORTEM AD VITAM

Thoughts on Johannes Jörgensen’s

JOHN PROTEVI AND JOHN VAN BUREN, TRANSLATORS

The Problem of Reality

PHILIP J. BOSSERT AND JOHN VAN BUREN, TRANSLATORS

problem. The necessary precondition for developing a deeper understanding of a

dominant epistemological trends are characterized by conscientialism (immanen-

1. Is positing the real justifiable?

In order to proceed in a methodical manner, we will begin with a consid-

However, a being that is thought is in no way identical with being in thought.

The Concept of Time in the

HARRY S. TAYLOR, HANS W. UFFELMANN,

Motto: Time is what changes and diversifies itself, eternity

Bringing into relief the logical foundations of methods of research in the

The historical object is, as historical, always past—strictly speaking, it no longer

authenticity of a document is to be demonstrated. This might happen by seeking

Historical chronology, an auxiliary discipline in the science of history, is of