Lee Braver (ed.), <\/b>Division III of Heidegger\u2019s<\/i><\/b> Being and Time: <\/b>The Unanswered Question of Being<\/i><\/b>. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015; 362 pages. ISBN: 978-0262029681.<\/b><\/p>\n
Reviewed by Clinton Debogorski, University of Toronto.<\/i><\/p>\n
Division III of Heidegger\u2019s<\/i> Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being<\/i>, a recent volume of sixteen essays edited, introduced, and contributed to by Lee Braver, offers the reader diverse occasions to think on the philosophical stakes of a glaring absence. The basic question posed and responded to by the contributors to this collection runs roughly as follows: how is one to understand the lack in Being and Time<\/i> of what could well have been the most significant, difficult, problematic, and rewarding of its projected six divisions? As anyone who studies Being and Time<\/i> in its frustrating quasi-entirety must be aware, only the first two divisions of its Part One\u2014a paltry one-third of the projected work\u2014were to see the light of publication. And as Braver points out in his introduction, the steresis<\/i> of Division III, which Heidegger entitled \u201cTime and Being,\u201d appears particularly grave. In an attempt to correct Spiegelberg\u2019s metaphorical description of Being and Time<\/i> as an \u201castonishing torso of a text,\u201d Braver, in his editorial introduction, claims that, without its \u201cheart\u201d (namely, the interpretation of being in general in terms of temporality, which was supposed to have been the content of \u201cTime and Being\u201d), it might be more apt to refer to the text handed down to us as \u201can astonishing pile of limbs.\u201d (4)<\/p>\n
However, for all its obscure transitions and interpretive layers, the truncated pathway through Being and Time<\/i> has an undeniable cohesion: an ever-present sense of direction, an angst-ridden heart, a formidable hermeneutic circulatory system that flows back into itself at least three times before apparently flat-lining: from its point of departure in inauthentic, everyday being-in-the-world, through the strategic interpretation of Angst<\/i> that renders explicit the modally indifferent care-structure of Dasein\u2019s existence, to the conscientious attestation that a resolute, authentic, finite temporality is indeed concretely possible for Dasein to take upon itself\u2014and then, finally\u2026a Sackgasse<\/i>\u2014a dead-end! In its quasi-final pages, Heidegger\u2019s attempted revitalization of ontology appears to choke on the rote repetition of its initial questions: \u201cHow is this [primordial] mode of temporalizing of temporality [which \u201cmakes the ecstatic project of being in general possible\u201d] to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time<\/i> to the meaning of being<\/i>? Does time<\/i> itself reveal itself as the horizon of being<\/i>?\u201d (BT, 415) What Heidegger\u2019s first major contribution presents us with\u2014rather than Spiegelberg\u2019s famous \u201ctorso\u201d or Braver\u2019s even more unsettling image of \u201ca pile of limbs\u201d\u2014is, I think, a weirdly writhing, wriggling foetus, concerning whose viability or unviability its progenitor at no point makes any definitive decision.<\/p>\n
Braver\u2019s preferred metaphor, on the other hand, seems to be an instance of projection in the psychoanalytic, rather than the Heideggerian, sense: it would be more suitable as an image for his own volume than for what we have of Being and Time<\/i>. Division III of Heidegger\u2019s<\/i> Being and Time is rather choppy and uneven in character. (The inclusion of two essays by Alain Badiou, which have nothing to do with the issue at stake, are most conspicuous. Especially given its hauntedness by the absence of any selection from Heidegger\u2019s 200-odd pages of unpublished notes on Division III, the obtrusive inclusion of Badiou\u2019s essays, to my mind, is the greatest shortcoming of the volume.) What we have before us is a pile of essays (alphabetically arranged by writer\u2014or, as Heidegger might put it, enframed) whose functional interrelationships, important similarities, and interpretive differences the reader is left to sort out for themselves; the volume lacks the organic, though developmentally arrested, unity of Heidegger\u2019s magnum non opus<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Metaphorics and Gestell<\/i> suspicions aside, it makes sense to ask: what motivated such a compilation of articles on a non-extant part of a broken off would-be totality like Being and Time<\/i>? Given that Division III, in particular, has been obliterated, what sense could there be in producing secondary literature on it? As Braver playfully observes in his editor\u2019s introduction, citing a number of examples from fictional literature, as well as from Heidegger\u2019s own efforts to delve into the unsaid though allegedly retrievable presuppositions of the writings of the great Western thinkers, \u201cIt turns out that there exists a considerable literature on nonexistent literature.\u201d (2) Quite uncannily true! Braver\u2019s concept here, to my mind, is quite ingenious. It is difficult to imagine anything more consistent with Heidegger\u2019s own approach to ontology than to linger on the hulking absences, conspicuous lacunae, major withdrawals and reservations at work in, before, after, and beyond what would otherwise stagnate as a mere present-at-hand lettre du texte<\/i>, idly passed along as unphenomenological hearsay. If the broken hammer, qua<\/i> broken, can help us uncover as much as Heidegger establishes that it can concerning its own manner of being\u2014as ready-to-hand in the nexus of its in-order-to references\u2014then careful investigation of the breaking-off of Being and Time<\/i> might well harbour the potential to render the turn from the projected Treatise on Being to the receptive, meandering modes of thrownness expressed in his later Holzwege<\/i> more explicit than it was before.<\/p>\n
Let us turn to the biographical dimension of Division III\u2019s abandonment. Fran\u00e7ois Raffoul\u2019s, Theodore Kisiel\u2019s, and others\u2019 pieces in the volume relate it for us: sometime near the end of 1926, following a series of \u201cfriendly and intense discussions\u201d with Karl Jaspers, Heidegger would commit Division III of Being and Time<\/i> to the flames. (240) He took this drastic and (even by one of his own retrospective assessments) unfortunate measure, he later said, because \u201cthe elaboration that I had managed up to this point of this most important section would necessarily be unintelligible.\u201d (84) A strange explanation indeed, coming from a thinker who would go on to say that \u201cTo make itself understandable is suicide for philosophy!\u201d (Heidegger, 2012, 344)<\/p>\n
In their bundle of limbs, the contributors do a fine job demonstrating that Heidegger\u2019s published lectures, books, notes, and correspondences give us plenty to contemplate concerning what blocked the coming to fruition of Division III, and perhaps inspired its incineration. \u00a769c of Being and Time<\/i>, \u201cThe Temporal Problem of the Transcendence of the World,\u201d along with the more traditionally, historically oriented reuptake of its indications in the final two sections (\u00a7\u00a720\u201321) of the Basic Problems of Phenomenology <\/i>lectures of the same year, appear throughout Braver\u2019s collection as crucial hermeneutical hints into what the strategy for Division III may have been\u2014and why it had to fail. In particular, the account of ecstatic-horizonal temporality, initiated in the former text and developed further in the latter, appears to be the primary locus of the Daseinsanalytik<\/i> strategy\u2019s dramatic self-implosion. In his intricate historical survey of Heidegger\u2019s many abandoned attempts to elaborate Division III, \u201cThe Drafts of \u2018Time and Being\u2019: Division III of Part One of Being and Time<\/i> and Beyond,\u201d Theodore Kisiel shows how these attempts lent themselves\u2014even explicitly, in Heidegger\u2019s own words\u2014to an untenable objectification of being. By late 1930, Heidegger saw how such an ecstatic-horizon-based \u201cschematic-phenomenological construction<\/i> of the concept of being by way of time\u201d blocked the possibility of saying the truth of being from out of its genuine source. (163) This origin, as simple as it is elusive in its abyssal refusal throughout the history of Western metaphysics, Heidegger would come to call the event (Ereignis<\/i>). As Fran\u00e7ois Raffoul points out in his piece, \u201cThe Incompletion of Being and Time<\/i> and the Question of Subjectivity,\u201d we are confronted in Heidegger\u2019s later works with an emphasis on the truth<\/i> of being (or beyng, Seyn<\/i>), rather than its meaningfulness, intelligibility, and so on. (250) On account of its ineluctable historicity and elusive uniqueness, the event of beyng primordially resists explication in terms of meaning, if by this we mean any sort of representation or determination of the being of beings by way of ontological concepts.<\/p>\n
Does the persistence of objectification\u2014understood in this context as the persistence of a conceptual style that tempts thinkers to reify being, to betray the intimation that it is not a being\u2014suggest a lingering subjectivism in Being and Time<\/i>, a subjectivism fatal enough to render Division III a dead end? This question, to my mind, is one of the main hermeneutic battlegrounds in Braver\u2019s compilation. As Richard Polt argues in his essay \u201cFrom the Understanding of Being to the Happening of Being,\u201d Heidegger\u2019s failure to express the turn (die Kehre<\/i>) from Dasein\u2019s temporal understanding of being to the temporality of being as such may not be so much a matter of persistent subjectivism as it is one of residual<\/i> transcendentalist ahistoricism<\/i>. Dasein\u2019s understanding of the being of beings, as Polt points out, is not interpreted there as an achievement of subjectivity in the traditional manner. (232) The traditional, Descartes-inspired, idealist brand of constitutive subjectivity, as Heidegger claims in both The Essence of Truth<\/i> lectures of 1930 and his Letter on Humanism<\/i> (1947), has already been dismantled and left behind in Being and Time<\/i>, where the Daseinsanalytik<\/i> exposes the so-called subject\u2019s mode of being as a way of always already being open to, in, and for the sake of a factical region of significance. The openness in question is nothing like an activity emanating from Dasein\u2019s understanding, but rather characterizes Dasein itself in its way of being\u2014always already<\/i>. In each case Dasein finds itself thrown into a veritable web of significance that overwhelmingly shapes their more or less authentically pursued projections in advance. Such an interpretation of the subject, qua<\/i> ontological, gives the lie to any subjectivist interpretation according to which pure forms of receptivity or determinative activity would characterize our experiential apparatus a priori<\/i> as present-at-hand, pre-worldly, inner capacities for rendering the world into an intelligible system of appearances. Through a transcendental investigation into the conditions of possibility of Dasein\u2019s ontological understanding, Heidegger comes to see that the continuance of such an investigation would necessarily<\/i> be unintelligible, for the universality<\/i> implied by the je<\/i> (\u201cin each case\u201d) and the necessity<\/i> implied by the immer<\/i> (\u201calways\u201d) of je schon<\/i> (\u201cin each case already\u201d) and immer schon<\/i> (\u201calways already\u201d), respectively, must<\/i> revolt against the embrace of radical historicality and bottomless contingency implied by Dasein\u2019s thrownness. (235\u20136)<\/p>\n
As Charles Guignon stresses in \u201cThe Place of Division III in Heidegger\u2019s Plan for Being and Time<\/i>,\u201d Heidegger came to see that the inquiry into the meaning of being (to be concluded with Division III of Part One) and the inquiry into the history of Western metaphysics (planned for Part Two, as a concretization of the temporal interpretation of being) were more deeply entwined than he had projected in Being and Time<\/i>. Heidegger\u2019s insight into the inseparability of systematicity and historicity in the question of being may have played the central role in preventing the completion of the crucial turn from the Daseinsanalytik<\/i> to the destruction of the history of ontology that was to be performed in the joint between the first and second halves of Being and Time<\/i>: Part One, Division III. And the consensus of many of the contributors is that Heidegger\u2019s most radical, decisive, and protracted abandonment of the still-too-thematizing language of ecstatic temporal horizons, for the sake of an unrelenting meditation on the baseless basis of the radical historicity of being (by now intimated as beyng<\/i>) comes in the 1936\u201338 text Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)<\/i>. The playing out of the conjunction of Being and<\/i> Time proved to be, if not too subjectivistic (see the essays by Braver, Guignon, Harries, Nelson, Polt, Raffoul, Thompson, and Sheehan on this dispute), then in any case still insufficiently historical in its presentation. Vis-\u00e0-vis <\/i>the Western-philosophical penchant for unified, architectonic, all-encompassing transcendental\/metaphysical systems, one might think that the incompletion of Being and Time<\/i> is a symptom of its already resolutely pushing against<\/i> the metaphysical language of \u201ca priori<\/i> conditions of possibility,\u201d \u201cconstitutive structures,\u201d \u201cfundamentally ontological schemata,\u201d and so on. What the turn amounts to, at least in part, is Heidegger\u2019s hard-won realization that the temporal interpretation of the meaning of being in general could not be laid out as a ground independent from Part Two\u2019s projected destruction of the history of ontology. As early as the 1927 lecture course on the Basic Problems of Phenomenology<\/i>, Heidegger set out, as Kisiel and others quote him, \u201con a more historical path\u201d than that of the first two Divisions of Being and Time<\/i>. (149) Still dissatisfied with the ecstatic-horizonal schematization pursued in the aforementioned lectures (as well as the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic<\/i> lectures of 1928), Heidegger finally abandoned the project of Division III to tread what he regarded as an utterly<\/i> historical path\u2014a path he referred to as \u201cbeing-historical thinking\u201d\u2014in the Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)<\/i>. In \u201cThe Antinomy of Being and the End of Philosophy,\u201d Karsten Harries explains: The Contributions<\/i>, \u201cwhich is said to make the turn from a Dasein-centred explication of the problem of time as horizon of the question of Being to a restatement of this question in terms of the history of Being\u2026can thus be understood as the most worked out, certainly the most ambitious attempt to meet the promise made for Division III of Part One of Being and Time<\/i>.\u201d (140)<\/p>\n
With the help of the converging limbs of Division III of Heidegger\u2019s<\/i> Being and Time, it becomes clearer to the reader why Heidegger should have considered the dead-ended character of the path of Being and Time<\/i> to be an important contribution, precisely qua<\/i> dead-ended, to the later course of his thought. In and through experiencing his magnum non opus<\/i>\u2019 failure to arrive at a fundamental sense of what it means to be, we are able to watch the metaphysical aspiration for an ahistorical system of transcendental conditions devour itself with the help of its own ineluctably situated, temporally specific categories. Rather than attempting to gain access to the meaning of being by way of an analysis of Dasein\u2019s structural totality<\/i>, Heidegger comes to see that the very gesture of identifying constitutive ontological structures is a manifestation of an objectifying, ultimately technological representation of being\u2014including that of Dasein itself\u2014over which Dasein, as Braver points out, has little to no \u201cinitiative and control.\u201d (72) In the transcendental phenomenological language of Being and Time<\/i>, \u201cthrownness [has swallowed] up projection.\u201d (67)<\/p>\n
What the contributors to this experimental collection of essays show, I think, is that by lingering on the oblivion of Division III of Being and Time<\/i>, the oblivion of \u201cTime and Being,\u201d interpreters might let otherwise taken-for-granted contours of Heidegger\u2019s anti-transcendental, radically situated early lectures, and otherwise unnoticed turnings of his later being-historical wanderings, light up in potentially decisive ways.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Additional Works Cited<\/b><\/p>\n
Heidegger, Martin (2010). Being and Time<\/i>, tr. J. Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press. Referred to parenthetically in the text as BT.<\/p>\n
Heidegger, Martin (2012). Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)<\/i>, tr. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.<\/p>\n
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Lee Braver (ed.), Division III of Heidegger\u2019s Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015; 362 pages. ISBN: 978-0262029681. Reviewed by Clinton Debogorski, University of Toronto. Division III of Heidegger\u2019s Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being, a recent volume of sixteen essays edited, introduced, and contributed to by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10,35,38],"class_list":["post-5182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-heidegger","tag-ontology","tag-phenomenology","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 16:25:23","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5182"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6949,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182\/revisions\/6949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}