In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 459
already sensed, will not alter your Existenzfreudigkeit. "74 If the affirmation
of existence, in the environment of the big city, can no longer limit
itself to affirmation of the authentic, it still can prevail as an affirmation
of life in general. [see Authenticity = Artificiality (Life)]
Why Time?
Whereas the first part of Sein und Zeit ("Preparatory Fundamental
Analysis of Dasein") offers an ontological analysis of Dasein, the second
part ("Dasein and Temporality") explores the meaning of human existence.
"Meaning" (Sinn) is defined as "that wherein the understandability
... of something is maintained-even of something which is not visible
explicitly and thematically. "75 Heidegger's treatment of this question has
become so famous that today it is difficult not to assume automatically
that Dasein means "time." But why, for example, doesn't he point to
being-in-truth instead of time? Why wouldn't it be convincing to define
Dasein by referring to the privilege of having its Being uncovered? Again,
Heidegger does not discuss (or eliminate) alternative answers to a key
question of his book; and again this lack of alternatives leads us to
speculate about the unconscious effect that contemporary culture may
have had on his thought.
We know that, as early as the fall of 1922, Heidegger conceived the
idea of a book on Aristotle which would discuss the viability of an
ontology under the epistemological conditions of his own historical
moment.76 [see Uncertainty vs. Reality] His interest in time as a philosophical
issue arose later and, probably not by coincidence, in connection
with two public lectures and a publication project for a recently
founded and particularly successful academic journal, the Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte.77
Time was a ubiquitous philosophical topic, both in the academic world
and among the intellectually interested public, because it had only recently
surfaced in the history of Western thought as a condition of
human life which, instead of being a given, had to be constituted. The
discussion of time had bifurcated: one branch was concerned with individual
time-perception and its morphology, and the other-in which a
new relationship between present, past, and future was at stake-with