It has been a dozen or more years since I read Being and Time. There are books I have read more than once. Heidegger's will not be one of them. The ether is thin. He was either a brilliant thinker or one of the most flagrant charlatans of our time. Yours truly can truly not decide. His Nazism does not bother me---many great thinkers have made questionable choices when it came to other aspects of ideology. But I could find no clarity in his presentation. Some may say, well, there are the problems that attach to translation. Friends and associates have said the same of Frege's work on math-based logic. In any case, I leave MH to those who 'get it'. I can't. Exotic smoke & mirrors is still smoke & mirrors.

With regards to Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis, it should be noted that no influence by him on the regime has been discovered and his efforts to associate himself with fascism as a movement in the years 1933-34 had no success in helping to determine it. Its main motive ground apparently amounted to a need for human beings to meet the historical challenge presented by technology (cf. "Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten," Der Spiegel, 31 May 1976, pp. 193-219); but no ostensive relation can be drawn between his philosophy and his politics, even if many can be suggested by speculation. A much clearer relation between the same can be found however in Heisenberg's work, who not only worked closely with Nazi leadership but played a considerable role in the war effort, enthusiastically advocating for the construction of nuclear weapons, even if the project in Germany never got off the ground. It's an interesting question for the history of ideas about why Heisenberg seems to get a pass for his involvement and Heidegger typically doesn't. Is it because of the nature of the concepts involved, i.e. that one kind can be clearly delineated from political matters and the other can't?

The answer is "no" in my view of the subject, but not because the two classes of concepts can't be separated from politics the way they're separated from one another, but because they must be. Even a political theorist can behave without contradiction differently in her/his political life than might be expected from a given theory. One's practice can differ from one's theory without it being on that account a bad theory. But on what is this distinction between theory and practice based? Is it a practical or theoretical one? It's just this type of question, I assert, which is dealt with by the early Heidegger. If the world can be divided into two kinds of things, determined as things which just sit there and things which one can do something with, then there must be a third kind of entity: that in which the distinction is grounded, what Heidegger calls "being there", or "Dasein". This consists in a network of practical involvement already set up by a given structure of social relations, so that the theoretical is based on the practical, which in turn has its ground in Dasein. All epistemic authority therefore derives from social authority, as determined by preexisting interrelations of practices and their response-expectations. In order then to secure an epistemic claim no reference to a thinking subject is required, only the social structure found together with any discovery of theoretical individuality. So what really exists under such an arrangement? Might someone who has some acquaintance with the early work assist?

The reason for this question is that although Heidegger's thought changes on this matter as too anthropological, it provides in my view the foundations of understanding his later work, which is in addition much more lay-reader accessible. For one thing, he comes to want to separate the "da" from the "sein" as more fundamental, since Being (the "is" in the "what is") has up to that point only been conceivable in thought as a kind of being (a "what" which is). To get around that he suggests that any being one can think must appear in a space cleared of any beings. A lit candle, for example, only illuminates something insofar as it stands in an open space. "Da" therefore = "Clearing" as the possibility of phenomena, light in the candle example. A question therefore arises: Because the Being of Being is thought only as a being being Being, Being being a being remains within the realm of beings being. The history of beings being Being, or conversely, of Being being a being, is the history of Being's beings, when one asks the question of "what is?" rather than "what is doing the is-ing?" What apart from beings, then, can be Being being Being unconstrained by beings of Being being a being being Being?

So how does one get from "Dasein" (= something) to "Da" (= Nothing)? How is the analysis of Dasein, which determines quantifiable reality to derive from use-indifferent restatement of the context of its proximate discovery, supplemented by the retreat to an examination of the systematic conditions of this discovery? In the discovery of Being how does one arrive at Time as the Horizon of Being? Clearly Death has something to do with it, as death causes the present to spring out of the future in surprise. Because time is limited, one is freed from insignificant considerations at the same time as one never seems to have enough of the significant ones. Any Heideggerian volunteers for this question? For in the absence of further assistance to finding an answer, in the context of shared space for ideational interchange afforded by the present program page to the point of availability corresponding to readiness resulting in a non-unused public utility, my meager resources in the area and feeble capacities must carry the obligation of providing one, if nevertheless conceded indubitably as pre-provisional.

As the risk of absurdity is for practical considerations endemic to sustained philosophical inquiry, and because an associated accommodation to the potential appearance of soliloquistic discourse in an empty hall darkened enough to exclude optical confirmation of possible discussants (were any in fact present) is no reason for dismissing it merely on the basis of its unlikelihood or expectation-history, in solicitation of informed contribution to a more thorough analysis it is judged appropriate that responses to the following question be cordially and enthusiastically invited: If the traditional notion of truth is constituted by an assertion about what something is, and what is asserted is how it must be, (which makes assertion-contents falsifiable), then how can this be called a genuine correspondence between two separate things, when it's the thing itself which is grasped and defined by what can be asserted of it, rather than its myriad appearances which do not contradict each other?