1 | Notable for me is that Heidegger was not seeking a new ontology, in the sense of the history of metaphysicalism, when he undertook Being and Time prematurely (for the sake of career advancement).

2 | He wanted to re-conceptualize the notion of so-called “ontology” in existential terms. He wanted ‘ontology’ to be understood relative to an existential conception of flourishing life.

3 | Shortly before submitting Sein und Zeit, he was teaching Aristotle’s Rhetoric, prospecting Aristotle’s practical conceptuality. He was not prospecting Aristotle’s ontology. Or rather, he was understanding ontology as a kind of conceptuality. So, too, for Being and Time: working with the academic conceptuality of the times pragmatically.

4 | That is what ontology is: It’s a kind of pragmatic conceptuality which implies metaphysicalist pretenses, if not overtly metaphysicalist aims.

5 |- Conceptuality can avoid the theo-metaphysicalist pretenses of Catholic license by founding and grounding conceptuality in authentic worldliness. (That may be threatening for a Vatican-oriented sensibility.)

6 | Being and Time inquires into the conceptuality of his academic times for the sake of a conception of flourishing, aiming to facilitate others’ self-actualization “concretely”: “your” ownmost potential for caring for and about your times with others.

7 | Being and Time is not aiming to establish a Heideggerian ontology. The interest in “fundamental ontology” was relative to the prevalence of ontologistic rhetoric, which he sought to re-conceptualize, to antedate in terms of authentic life.

8 | But he abandoned that interest in the ontologistic rhetoric, of course. As he said so carefully near the end of his life, ending a TV interview, he sought to institute new conceptions of key words we already share.

9 | But he realized that re-conceptualizing highly metaphysicalized conceptuality was self-defeating. He wrote to Rudolf Bultmann (1929, I believe) that Being and Time “went too far too soon” (cited by T. Kisiel in his essay “The Demise of Being and Time,” A Companion to Being and Time).

10 | Heidegger sought to re-appropriate traditional conceptuality as teaching (i.e., for educational engagement through conceptual means, not aiming for new doctrine). Being and Time is an event of appropriation, appropriative “poetic thinking” as conception of discursive teaching.

11 | When Sein und Zeit was published, he was teaching The Sophist, which is exemplary of Plato’s Dialogues as educational excursions. Being and Time is teaching as formalized event of appropriation.

12 | Poetic thinking considers conceptions to be appropriations of the writer’s background thinking for the sake of situated teaching.

13 | Being and Time, then, is an hermeneutical paraphrasing of Heidegger’s ongoing path making, in light of the “moment of vision” compelling that intensive milestone.

14 | So, to regard Being and Time as foundational is a mistake.

15 | Though the tome is a “Leap” (too far), he was “Playing Forth” (Contributions to Philosophy, link upcoming) the leading conceptual rhetoric of the 1920s for the sake of enabling others’ thinking (“Grounding” for “Ones to Come”), but too far, too early.

16 | That, as poetic thinking—as appropriative event—is implied by Heidegger writing to Wm. J. Richardson, 1962, that so-called “Heidegger I” was already informed by what is called “Heidegger II.” That letter was soon after indicating in “Recollection” (1957) that the poetry of his youth provided “all that was essential” for his path. That’s amazing.

17 | Therefore, if a scholar obsesses about Being and Time by bringing all manner of categorial armature into treating Being and Time as a foundational treatise, he is concealing Heidegger’s conception of his career, i.e., his interest in having Being and Time understood as a “pathmark,” i.e., understanding Being and Time as an anticipation of what came later, especially inasmuch as the “truth of being” is the freedom of thought which he promoted in “Essence of Truth” repeatedly (as lecture and as course topic) in the early 1930s.

18 | Being and Time was already on a way to advancing freedom of thinking relative to one’s authentic potential for being with others. Heidegger sought to show how authentic life, conscience, and caring for others in our shared world can be beyond theological pretenses, giving care; then, for therapeutic teaching, giving time to care about the misled other, being in the real world fruitfully because that is the potential of our shared humanity: to remake our “belonging together in the Same” world authentically.

19 | Being and Time was a therapeutic. So, the only occasion for making that path the focus of teaching was with psychiatrists!

20 | from “Letter on Humanism”: “And yet thinking never creates the house of being. Thinking conducts historical eksistence, that is, the humanitas of homo humanus into the realm of the upsurgence of healing [des Heilen]” [English. p. 272].

21 | Being and Time is part of an exploratory career seeking a new conception of conceptuality as such for shared understanding in shared world making.

22 | So, a scholar otherwise regarding Heidegger as wanting others’ life orientation to be anchored by “Heideggerian” concepts conceals Heidegger’s interest in evincing others’ actualization of potential, especially as thought emancipated from onto-theology.

23 | Being and Time is Contributions to Philosophy I, from enowning that thinking which preceded the event of appropriation which is Being and Time.

24 | The overall conception of that enowning for Heidegger becomes the model of path making which is articulated as Contributions to Philosophy, c1938. Being and Time was a “Leap” from the historical “Echo” “Playing Forth” discursively for future “Grounding” (through teaching) “Ones to Come,” such that there will someday be no more need of godly orientation. We may become the art of grounding history (“Origin of the Work of Art”).

25 | Heidegger intended his “ways not works” to be understood as a continuous path making—a career long “conversation on a country path”—in which Being and Time was one intensive, career-making Moment.