Being and Time is the work Martin Heidegger is most well-known for, but it was not what first got people talking. He was famous beforehand merely for his ability to lecture. In fact, the administration at Freiburg university wanted to make Heidegger a full professor but they couldn’t until he published something—so they demanded that he write an original work of philosophy. That’s where Being and Time comes from. But why did they want him to publish?
It was because of the popularity of his lecture courses—especially History of the Concept of Time. This is the lecture course from 1925 that laid the ground for everything to come with Being and Time only two years later.
History of the Concept of Time is said to be a draft of Being and Time, but this misses something crucial. Though the majority of History of the Concept of Time gets reworked into Being and Time, the introduction and first three chapters History of the Concept of Time are not at all in Being and Time. Not only are they missing in Being and Time, but it turns out it would have been quite beneficial indeed if they were included.
The actual introduction to Being and Time does not feel like a real introduction at all—and this is for good reason, because it was written after the fact. The two parts to the introduction take over 40 pages and are significantly harder than the first two chapters of the main work. If you go to this hoping for a clear understanding of phenomenology as a method, much less for a historical account for how it developed, then you’re out of luck. All of that and more, though, can be found in the introduction and first three chapters of History of the Concept of Time.
Chapter one tells the history of phenomenology, focusing largely on Brentano and Husserl; chapter two goes over its method and most important discoveries, while defending Husserl from unfair criticisms; in chapter three Heidegger finally turns away from presenting and defending phenomenology and gives his own immanent critique of his mentor’s project. This is exactly the context one would hope to find in the introduction to Being and Time, which is why I am calling this the missing introduction to Being and Time.
Moreover, the introduction to History of the Concept of Time, which is nine pages in total, gives the fundamental justification and authorial intent of the research project that developed into Being and Time. This introduction focuses on the crises of the sciences and argues that traditional philosophy of science has been floundering in niche corners of various fields as opposed to doing the truly radical act that must be done.
What is the radical act Heidegger thinks philosophy must undertake? Drawing on inspiration from Dilthey and Husserl especially, Heidegger thinks the goal of philosophy should be to get to the root experiences the come before the segmentation of the scientific fields. If the sciences are crises due to an estrangement from their subject matter, if the questions and concepts need to be reworked into a more intimate relation with their subject matter, then the task for philosophy is to step back from the individual sciences, and especially from the “natural vs. historical sciences” split, to instead do the kind of analysis that had only just become possible.
Heidegger believed that Husserl had developed the tools to make a genuinely radical philosophical intervention possible, but he had not gone far enough. Heidegger saw how Husserl and Dilthey alike labored to establish a unique method and concepts fitting to the human sciences on their own grounds, but they both took too much for granted: chief among these being the subject-object divide unique to Cartesian dualism, and the natural vs. historical (or human) science divide itself.
By laboring “on the side of the human sciences” the fundamental crisis of the sciences was only being perpetuated further. Heidegger argued that the time had come to use the tools of phenomenology to work back before the split between natural and human sciences. Philosophy, properly speaking, would not be a handmaiden to the natural or human sciences, but would deal with being itself.
The natural and human sciences are regions of being, but they don’t get the last word on being. In fact, there are serious questions as to whether the tools, discoveries, or insights of specific scientific fields are sufficient for understanding those subject matters. Biology can help us understand life, but is it truly sufficient for understanding life in its vitality, not to mention its historicity?
The wonderful thing about reading the introduction to History of the Concept of Time is you discover the original stated intent of the project that develops into Being and Time: to found the sciences in their being on their shared horizon. What is the shared horizon of the entities that natural and historical sciences both concern themselves? Time itself.
Natural entities have their own durations, and historical beings belong to chronologies. In both cases temporality is the horizon against which these kinds of beings stand out and can be analyzed by their respective sciences.
This lecture course assumes an audience of people who need to be convinced of the importance of such a project, and then argues why phenomenology is important for the proposed task. The opposite is the case with the real introduction to Being and Time, which Heidegger wrote with the project in retrospect.
We are therefore justified in reading the introduction to History of the Concept of Time as the original intent of Being and Time, whereas we should read its real introduction as Heidegger making sense of what was accomplished instead of the original plan.
This is why I have been lecturing on History of the Concept of Time in pre-course lectures to help participants prepare for Being and Time. These have been made freely available at this playlist.
In about an hour and a half I will go live to lecture on chapters 1 and 2 of History of the Concept of Time. Hope to see you there, but you can also watch it after the fact at this link:
Keep on working, great job!