I just finished reading the amazing Davos disputation (called, euphemistically as it can only appear now, an "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" or "workgroup" while the event was being held--I should just mention now that anyone interested in it should consult Peter Eli Gordon's fascinating account of the conflict in Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 [2004], pp. 219–248) between Heidegger and Cassirer that took place in the little Alpine city in early March 1929 (pictured, as it probably looked in March). Heidegger in his rebellious ski-clothes (I've tried to evoke how strange Heidegger looked at the time by including this picture from 1921 of him, on the right, with Gadamer chopping wood) walked in, pissed off at what he thought were Cassirer's misreadings of Being and Time, which still was extremely new on the philosophical scene (has anyone yet digested Badiou's sequel to Being and Event, Logiques des mondes? This philosophical atmosphere probably has the same relationship to 1929's and its familiarity, especially with Kantians like Cassirer, with Being and Time--in fact I think we can appreciate how penetrating Cassirer's reading is, especially with regard to truth, given this atmosphere), and proceeded to bulldoze him with a series of amazingly penetrating responses.
By "bulldozed," I mean mostly that in general Heidegger just rudely talked over him: I don't think Heidegger made himself look any better by doing this, except to the hoarde of his spiritual followers in the audience. Nor is it clear that he presented a better case about Kant than Cassirer, in the end. But something (and you can see from the vehemence that this something is very much tied into his Nazism) impelled him to be impolite and indirect to one of the most amazing minds of the early twentieth century. If we can rationalize it, I think he was angry that people were not able to see and appreciate what he had been developing through his teaching and writing at Freiburg for more than a decade--the ideas that made up and were condensed into Being and Time. But obviously there is more to it than that, and this "more" precisely what becomes and what always was ugly, barbaric, romantic, naively Wagnerian and in the end unbelievably stupid in Heidegger. Regardless, any scholar of Heidegger gets some very direct statements out of this "bulldozing," this disturbing performance there in front of Cassirer, regarding what Being and Time was frankly trying to get at, not to mention some more direct statements on Heidegger's interpretation of Kant. From Cassirer, we also get an elucidation of the importance he accords to the symbol and its relationship to freedom, which Heidegger to a certain extent sees (inanely) as unimportant in pushing Cassirer into a definition of what freedom is and how it relates to time. In the end, what I'm saying is that Heidegger brings it to this debate. That said, the quotes we see below should really help anyone reading Being and Time:On Time:
Every page in this book was written solely with a view to the fact that since antiquity the problem of being was interpreted on the basis of time in a wholly incomprehensible sense and that time always announced the subject (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 198). Notice "every page:" this means Division I, too (Heidegger somewhere says this of Division I explicitly in the discussion, but I can't find it).
What, then, does the eternal actually mean here? From where, then, do we know of this eternity? Is this eternity not just permanence in the sense of the aei [the "always," the "forever," the "everlasting"] of time? Is this eternality not just that which is possible on the grounds of an inner transcendence [my emphasis, mj] of time? ...that [is,] time is not just what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has in itself a horizonal character; that in a futural process of having been as a comportment [my interpretation of what the transcribers of the debate probably misconstrued, mj] I always have at the same time a horizon with respect to the present, futurity, and having-been [or what the transcribers misconstrue as "pastness", mj] in general; that a transcendental, ontological determination of time is found here, within which something like the permanence of the substance [the phenomenon of the aei] is constituted for the first time (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 198).
On "Anxiety:"
This whole problematic in Being and Time, which treats Dasein in man, is no philosophical anthropology... the task is: to bring out the temporality of Dasein with reference to the possibility of the understanding of Being... The analysis of death has the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, but not of producing an altogether final and metaphysical thesis concering the essence of death (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 199). This quote (and the next) seems absolutely indispensible for anyone who is reading Heidegger on anxiety and death, or indeed any one of the "ontical possibilities of Dasein" that Heidegger looks at throughout the work, because it shows a bit clearer than in Being and Time what the role of this ontical possibility is playing in the work. It also shows you that Dasein in general is not a being or entity which man always is, but rather is "in man." In other words, it is a kind or way of manifestation of being, like Vorhanden or Zuhanden. If one thinks the relationship of man to Dasein in this way, you reading Being and Time becomes a lot easier (even though, as Derrida constantly reminds us, this relationship is confused and constantly re-thought in Heidegger, and, in fact, never sufficiently resolved). In the end, what I'm getting at is that you can see the genius of the simplicity in the way Hubert Dreyfus presents his account of what Dasein is (that it is just one of these kinds of being that man can, in a sense, enter into and step out of--even though man never can properly or "own-mostly" be something other than Dasein), and that it gets its justification in the most forthright passages of Heidegger like these.
On the grounds of which metaphysical sense of Dasein itself is it possible that the human being in general can have been placed before something like the Nothing? In answer to this question, the analysis of anxiety was provided so that the possibility of theNothing is thought of only as an idea which has also been grounded in this determination of the disposition of anxiety. It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand the Nothing or anxiety. Being is incomprehensible if the Nothing is incomprehensible (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 199).
Etc.
I would misunderstand myself if I said that I gave a philosophy free of points of view. And here a problem is expressed: that of the relationship between philosophy and world-view. Philosophy does not have the task of giving world-view, although, again, world-view is the presupposition of philosophizing. And the world-view which the philosopher gives is not a direct one in the sense of a doctrine or in the sense of an influencing. Rather, the world-view which the philosopher gives rests in the fact that in the philosophizing, it succeeds in making the inner possibility of this finite creature comport itself with respect to beings as a whole (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 200). Here Heidegger resignifies the role of "world-view" in his work in opposition to Cassirer (or really any humanist philosopher--Cassirer really has just become a straw-man for Heidegger at this point): world-view is a "setting free of the Dasein in man," not an opening out of philosophy into "cultural philsophy," which Heidegger, rashly, characterizes Cassirer's work as.
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