The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time" (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 181 Theodore Kisiel. The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time." Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 6o8. Cloth, $6o.oo. In Germany as well as in the United States Theodore Kisiel is considered to be the most prominent and important critic of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. In what can be seen as a positive counterpart to his scathing criticism, Kisiel has spent more than a decade investigating Heidegger's early development. Having extended his research over a period of time comparable to the period covered, he has finally brought out its results in a voluminous book, which claims to tell a "full and reliable story of Heidegger's development from t915 to 1927, on the basis of the most complete documentation that can be mustered" (2). The results of Kisiel's painstaking investigations, collecting and interpreting notes, letters, manuscripts and student's transcripts, are impressive. With them it is possible for the first time to understand Heidegger's Being and Time genealogically, to trace all the conceptual innovations of this book back to their roots. Kisiel's opus magnum is a major step forward for both the philological and philosophical reconstruction of Heidegger's thought. It contains three useful appendices : a complete list of Heidegger's teaching activities from x915-3o, a chronology of the publication history of Being and Time, and a glossary of the early Heidegger's basic terms. In order to structure the extensive material he has discovered, Kisiel uses a threefold schema for Heidegger's development: the first phase, from its beginning in the War Emergency Semester of 1919 through the courses of 1921, is put under the heading "radicalized phenomenology.... understood as a pretheoretical science of origins," and concerning the "already meaningful 'stream of life'" (8). The second phase, from October 1922 through July 1924, is dominated by Heidegger's Aristotlereception and his attempt to elaborate the correlative task of fundamental ontology and historical deconstruction. With Heidegger's talk in Marburg of July 1924, entitled "The Concept of Time," the third and last phase begins, namely, the writing of the three drafts of Being and Time: the hermeneutic one, inspired by Dihhey, the phenomenological-ontological one, inspired by Husserl, and the final draft with strong references to Kant and a systematic interest in time (cf. 9 and part III). The thoroughness of Kisiel's preoccupation with the early Heidegger is grounded in his conviction that "the juvenilia'.., perhaps contain the key to all of Heidegger" 0o), a conviction for which he draws strong support from the material he has explored. Thus Kisiel shows that in his course of the summer semester of 19x9, Heidegger had already developed what could be called a "formally indicating hermeneutics" (5o). "The climactic last hour" (5~) of this course, in which all these developments take place, is not completely contained in the corresponding volume of the Gesamtausgabe, and therefore Kisiel relies on student transcripts, which he uses extensively throughout his work, in order to compensate for the shortcomings of Heidegger's official edition. Kisiel is in no way sparing with his criticism concerning this edition (cf. 2, 6, 544, 545 and passim) and goes so far as to talk about "paramilitary assaults on scholarship by Heidegger's literary executors" (544, n. 2). His entire book is driven by his claim to make the editor's nongenetic point of view obsolete and to replace it with a philologically secured interpretation of Heidegger's work in progress. Nevertheless, Kisiel does 182 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:1 JANUARY I995 not always seem to be able to play by his own rules. In his account of Heidegger's early lecture courses, he gives his content by means of a paraphrase, which leaves the reader no chance to verify the soundness of his reconstruction. The fact that Heidegger's publication rights are being held by the editors of the Gesamtausgabe urges Kisiel to keep his sources hidden. As large divisions of part I of his book consist of more or less complete paraphrases of Heidegger's early lectures, these portions become impossible to check and the reader is unable to distinguish between Heidegger's own words, the...