Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time is less a commentary than a topographical and documentary reconstruction of the pathway whose precipices and detours led to Sein und Zeit.
A work written under the constraint that a philosophy which avowedly privileges the temporally unfolding situation of questioning cannot be explained by a static list of theses; instead, it must be approached as a sequence of interrogative positions, each one compelled by a concrete hermeneutic predicament and each one leaving behind conceptual residues that—sometimes incorporated, sometimes bracketed—reappear as the grammar of the next step.
What Kisiel offers, through a decade of archival labour, is an unbroken chain of this compulsion and residue: an account of how the topic of philosophy as Heidegger came to understand it—the pretheoretical, non-objectifiable “something” that worlds and properizes—demanded a method, how that method altered the topic in its very act of approach, and how the result, when it reached textual canon in 1927, was already a midpoint in a path that exceeded it.
In doing so, he dislodges Being and Time from the myth of a freestanding “great book” and relocates it within a conceptually precise, philologically exact itinerary whose inner tensions are as instructive as its celebrated formulations. The result is both factual and philosophical: factual in its minute reconstruction of dates, manuscripts, transcripts, letters, course titles, private typescripts, and editorial practices; philosophical in its insistence that these facts are not ancillary but constitutive of grasping what was thought when and why. The book is thus both a resource and an argument—an argument that the intelligibility of Being and Time depends on the way its own genesis made its claims possible, contestable, and (at crucial junctures) provisional.
Kisiel situates the decisive beginning not in 1927, nor even in the oft-cited winter semester of 1919–20, but in the war-emergency semester of early 1919 at Freiburg, where the young Privatdozent, just returned and appointed as Husserl’s assistant, first identified his lifetime topic and simultaneously collided with the problem that would shape his manner of philosophizing: how to name and access the pretheoretical Es—that which worlds (es weltet) and, in its happening, properizes (es ereignet sich). This is the anchor point for a complete reorientation of the subject matter and method of philosophy away from programmatic world-views and toward an ever provisional immersion in factical life.
Kisiel recovers the classroom drama at the end of that semester—missing from the smoothened “last-hand” edition of the text—where Heidegger sketched, on the board, a four-part schema distinguishing a pretheoretical “primal something” from the theoretical “formal-logical objective something,” and, in that distinction, intimated the need for an approach that would be neither theoretical generalization nor psychological description but a formal indication adequate to a field that borders on ineffability.
The schema names the problem and the strategy in a single gesture; it is a conceptual diagnosis embedded in a minimal method. Kisiel’s reconstruction of this hour is invaluable because it shows that the method and the topic are co-implicated from the start: the formal indication is not an optional instrument but the only way to carry across a domain whose “object” is essentially not an object. Hence the methodological conclusion at which the course arrives—that philosophy is neither theory nor worldview but a plunge into life’s authentic movement—has a determinate logical profile: it is a transformation of the idea of scientific rigor without the forfeiture of rigor; indeed, an excess of it, since the rigor here is the discipline of not mistaking categorial stabilization for the phenomenon in its own temporality.
To name this is already to evoke the recurrent oscillation that Kisiel documents: an aspiration toward Urwissenschaft—philosophy as primal science—coupled with a progressive unwillingness to let “science” be read in the image of invariant theorematic cognition. Throughout the decade 1919–1929, Heidegger’s pronouncements vacillate: is philosophy a primal science or something more originary than science? Kisiel patiently tracks how this vacillation is a symptom of a deeper discovery, namely that what counts as originary access is not given at once but must be sought in and through the very acts by which we try to articulate it—acts that risk “stilling the stream” even as they aim to show it.
Hence the insistence on a counter-movement: a questioning that resists life’s tendency to fall into the anonymity of the “one” (the ruinance of everydayness), and in resisting, discloses a new “object”—no longer the in-itself but the resistive, oppositional context of factical life itself. For Kisiel, the most lucid formulation of this nuclear insight appears in his gloss on the 1919 materials: the immediacy that matters is the polarity between life’s temporal movement and the countermovement of interrogation attuned to that movement; and it is this polarity that will eventually give the systematic program its name. In this sense, Being and Time is the formal consolidation of a dynamic first experienced in precisely dated teaching situations; that is, the title condenses and preserves a polemical structure already functioning in the earliest Freiburg courses.
Kisiel’s story is a three-fold genesis: Being and Time is a topic, a program, and a text. The first genesis is explicit by radicalizing phenomenology through a simultaneous deconstruction of the neo-Kantian vocabulary in which the young Heidegger had been trained and a retrieval of religious phenomena as paradigmatic for a pretheoretical access to meaning. Here the philology matters. Kisiel documents the chain of courses, seminars, and cancelled plans from 1915 to 1921, not just as chronology but as a sequence of conceptual pressures. The habilitation on Duns Scotus is revealed as going beyond Scholastic taxonomy; it becomes the incubator for two motifs that will later conjoin: a sensitivity to haecceitas—thisness, the irreducible singularity of the factical—and a formal acuity regarding categories and their analogy. From these, the need for a non-theoretical yet conceptually disciplined way of speaking is born: the formal indication is retrofitted into a hermeneutic tool for the earliest Freiburg breakthrough. Kisiel’s point is that what later crystallizes as a method had multiple, even divergent, sources that only converged because the topic demanded it.
The second genesis, Being and Time as program, is extracted from the Aristotle years. Here Kisiel’s emphasis falls on a document of particular weight: the October 1922 “Einleitung” to a projected book on Aristotle, written to support candidacies in Marburg and Göttingen, which concentrates, for the first time, the interrelation that will define the 1927 work—namely, the double task of a fundamental ontology grounded in an analysis of the human situation (Dasein). The “Einleitung,” in Kisiel’s reading, is an attempt to solve a problem otherwise unsolved in WS 1921–22: how to fuse the historical with the systematic without sacrificing either. The solution is to approach Aristotle neither as an object of history nor as a quarry of concepts but as an indispensable interlocutor whose logos, physis (especially kinesis), and aletheia allow the pretheoretical situation of Dasein to be articulated in a language that is not already distorted by later metaphysical generalities. The textual story—who asked for what, when the manuscript was typed, how the Overview sat alongside the “Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation,” why this sufficed for an appointment—matters for two reasons: it shows the institutional conditions under which the philosophical program had to present itself, and it reveals, in the very act of presentation, the elements that still needed discovery to become the 1926 draft.
Between these first two geneses, Kisiel inserts a religious axis that proves pivotal for the vocabulary of concern, care, and historicality. The 1920–21 religion courses are not treated as theological excursions but as phenomenological laboratories in which the vocabulary of Bekümmerung (distress, care) is traced to patristic and Pauline sources and tested against the very problem that had haunted the early breakthrough: how to keep the lived counter-movement of questioning from being absorbed by objectified doctrine. To this end, Kisiel reconstructs the dynamic of the “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” and “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” emphasizing both the methodological weight of formal indication (and the institutional friction it generated among less method-minded auditors) and the interpretive strategy that takes Augustine not as a mere “instance” of Hellenization but as a live source of indicative phenomena: inquietum cor nostrum, crede ut intelligas, and the discovery of a self-world that anticipates modern interiority but stands in a different historical relation to transcendence. The point was not to deny the object-historical but to subordinate it to actualization-historical access—the recovery of how a life concerns itself, discloses itself, and finds itself addressed. In this way, religious life becomes a privileged site for the hermeneutics of facticity, a site where the polarity of movement and countermovement is legible without being theoretical; and this yields not a theological thesis but an existential grammar—out of which the lexicon of care, attestation, and resoluteness later emerges.
The third genesis, Being and Time as text, is narrated as the sequence of drafts through which a planned article on Dilthey and Yorck, a Marburg lecture to theologians, and a 1925 summer course on the history of the concept of time grew, congealed, and were finally eclipsed by a last-minute Kantian and “existential” re-composition. Kisiel’s most arresting claim here is that the very first passages written for the famous book were not a brilliant opening on the question of being but a five-page review of the Dilthey–Yorck correspondence and a sentence acknowledging Husserl’s incisive guidance—passages which would later surface almost verbatim in §77 and a programmatic footnote. This is not anecdote for its own sake; it shows the fact that the axial question that started the 1924 article was historicality, not being in the abstract. The essay’s middle sections already anticipate the division of labour that will structure the 1927 publication; the outer sections configure the destruction of the history of ontology. The reason the piece never appeared as such is as revealing as its content: its length doubled and its language turned out tortured and ponderous by the standards of a generalist journal. Transferred to the Jahrbuch, it metamorphosed into a book whose title and internal architecture kept the pressure of historicality while shifting the explicit thematic to the question of being. Kisiel emphasizes that this shift was not mere retitling but a development compelled by the hermeneutic situation of 1925–26, in which the analysis of intentionality (via Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation) and the interrogation of Dasein as the being that questions being are joined to the discovery of the ecstatic-horizonal structure of temporality—thus preparing a last-minute turn to Kant and to the etymology that legitimates the talk of ex-sistence.
Philologically, the weight of Kisiel’s enterprise is felt in the notes where he corrects course titles, documents unpublished seminars, and reconstructs the documentary chronology from 1924 to 1927. These are not merely repertorial; they reframe the inner story. The “Aristoteles-Einleitung,” for instance, is not a single text but a family of drafts and references scattered across letters to Löwith, reports to mentors, and changing teaching plans. The very title “Einleitung”—an “indication of the hermeneutic situation”—is itself an act of method: an attempt to write an introduction that is not prefatory but foundational, that is, an introduction that is the content because it situates the reader within the very polarity of movement and countermovement that defines the phenomenon. When Kisiel shows that the 1922 version was sufficient to secure a chair, then underwent expansion and doubt, then receded as Die Zeit came to occupy the center, he is measuring the demands of a questioning that refuses to let the historical become a museum of positions even as it refuses to let the systematic lose its anchorage in discovered sources.
Across these three geneses, Kisiel insists on a double correction: against the legend of Being and Time as an isolated achievement, and against the opposite temptation to dissolve it into a seamless self-identity of “Heidegger’s thought” from beginning to end. The documentary story supports a more difficult reading. On the one hand, the book is a massive step forward, not only in scope but in innovation; on the other hand, it contains the seeds of its own self-critique—something Heidegger later acknowledged when he judged that he ventured “too far too soon,” that the project was, in its own terms, a failure, and that the so-called “turn” is less a change of subject than a return to earlier abandons, pursued with a different lexicon. Kisiel identifies, in this light, a rhythm of recurrence: the impersonal “it worlds” of 1919, silenced in the intervening decade by the press of the Dasein-analysis, returns in 1928–29; the “it properizes,” only sporadically voiced early on, reappears with increasing insistence from the 1930s onward, now carrying the etymological and experiential freight of Ereignis. The point is neither to erase the difference between the 1927 book and later thought nor to make the early years prophetic; it is to argue that, without the first breakthrough, the later idiom would be unmotivated or empty, and without the later insistence, the early discovery would remain eclipsed by the very scientific discipline it had borrowed to articulate itself.
One of the strengths of Kisiel’s narrative is his refusal to treat biography as gossip or as causality while equally refusing to divorce conceptual genesis from the institutional and personal matrix in which it took place. The letters, the unpublished reviews, the seminar exercises, the fragments of manuscripts marked by later interpolations—all these are sources that alter our sense of what the text is. Hence the critical attention to the editorial principle of the Ausgabe letzter Hand, which, by not distinguishing what was presented in the moment from what was added years later, can distort the public chronological record of the development. What is at stake is not the purity of a mythic “original” rather than the possibility of grasping how questioning itself moved—what was seen when, what was still obscure, what had to be sought in the next semester, and what “firsts” belong to contexts different from the ones in which we often place them. In the case of the 1919 course, Kisiel’s use of student transcripts recovers the final hour’s schema and closing remarks that sharply distinguish philosophy from worldview—an indispensable clarification for understanding why the hermeneutics of facticity could claim rigor while disavowing doctrine. In the case of the religion courses, the absence of an autograph and the existence of multiple transcripts make it possible to reconstruct the stretch in which the formal indication was treated with unique explicitness and then abruptly abandoned under classroom and faculty pressure—an event whose philosophical import is real, since it marks the moment when a decisive piece of method recedes from explicit discussion even as it continues to operate tacitly.
Kisiel’s treatment of the Aristotelian strand exemplifies his ability to let philological detail illuminate conceptual ascent. The repeated readings of De Anima, the “practicum” ethos that binds textual philology to phenomenological concept formation, the withdrawal of a planned course on ancient skepticism to free time for the Einleitung, the subsequent lecture circuit on Nicomachean Ethics VI under the title “Dasein und Wahrsein,” the reverberations with contemporaneous Marburg theology—all form a pressure field in which it becomes intelligible why Dasein was first approached in “phronetic” key. What matters is not that Aristotle “influenced” Being and Time; it is that the logos of phronesis—an insight that takes sight of what can be otherwise in a unique situation, that must be decided in light of what one already is—offered a non-theoretical paradigm for thinking a being whose mode of being is precisely to understand being. The contrast with the eternal archai of theoretical contemplation is not simply polemical; it is a structural necessity once the phenomenon to be accessed is the temporality of concernful existence rather than the presence of a subsistent thing. Kisiel’s argument is that this structural necessity is visible not first in the published book but in the order of courses, abandoned plans, and private typescripts.
The Dilthey-Yorck axis, for its part, allows Kisiel to puncture another simplification: that historicality is a late arrival in the Dasein-analysis. On the contrary, the very first draft that aligns with the book’s architecture—Der Begriff der Zeit of 1924—places the interest in historicality at the centre and uses Dilthey’s problematic as the external “occasion” for unfolding an internal necessity. The fact that a portion of this text migrates into §77 almost verbatim is telling: it suggests that the book’s later placement of historicality as the culmination of Division II is the result of formal architecture rather than of a belated discovery. If so, then the destruction of the history of ontology—projected at the end of the article—was not an afterthought accessory to a completed analytic but an integral requirement of a project that, from the outset, understood itself as operating within, against, and through a past. Kisiel, to his credit, refuses to romanticize this past; he treats it as a set of documents with a complicated editorial fate and as an argumentative resource that had to be forced into transparency by the question at hand.
At several junctures, Kisiel turns from narration to methodological reflection on the very historiography he is practicing. He invokes the old triad—biography, chronology, doxography—not to resurrect a scholastic genre but to insist that in the case at hand each element bears philosophical load. The biography matters because Heidegger’s own letters to Krebs and Löwith disclose how he understood his shift out of Catholic scholasticism and into a “free” Christianity, and how he identified himself, in 1921, as a “Christian theo-logian”—a formulation that places the emphasis on logos rather than dogma and so returns us to the phenomenological fundamenta of religious life. The chronology matters because editorial practices and retrospective ordering can efface the sequence in which terms became available; it makes a conceptual difference, for example, that the adoption of “existentialist” vocabulary occurs only at the final draft stage and not in the earlier Marburg lectures. The doxography matters because, confronted with missing autographs and published editions that conflate original and later material, only the triangulation of multiple student transcripts, marginalia, and external correspondence can recover what was actually taught when; and this, in turn, yields insight into what was conceptually possible at a given moment. Kisiel’s work thus becomes a propaedeutic to reading Being and Time historically in the precise sense that the old Heidegger’s own motto—ways, not works—prescribes: the systematic cannot be understood without the historical.
What emerges in Kisiel’s reconstruction is a picture of developmental necessity that is neither deterministic nor arbitrary. The necessity is this: once the phenomenon at issue is defined as the factical happening of life, once the task is to keep the stream moving while saying what must be said of it, and once the path of approach is the formal indication—an indexical pointing that refuses to stabilize what it points to—then several further moves become inescapable. First, some form of radicalized phenomenology must be articulated against the horizon of a critique of neo-Kantian value-philosophy. Kisiel shows how Heidegger performs this critique from within, borrowing and then undermining its terms: “facticity,” “value,” the apriori, the very sense of the immediate. Second, a deconstruction of the tradition is demanded not as cultural criticism but because the inherited concepts are oriented to a kind of being other than the one at issue; only by retrieving a different layer of the Greek lexicon—one more attuned to kinesis, to aletheia as unconcealment rather than proposition—can the access be secured without translation losses fatal to the phenomenon. Third, an account of temporality must displace presence as the default ontological mode, not only because history is “interesting,” but because the structure of care is unintelligible apart from the ecstatic unity of past, present, and future—what will be further schematized via Kant. Fourth, the project, when completed as far as it could be, must expose its own insufficiency, not because the author changed his mind but because the very discipline that brought the analytic to its point of formal cabinetry risks reifying the stream it sought to keep moving. This is the sense in which the “turn” is a return: not to a different subject matter but to the earliest names for the same matter—es weltet, es ereignet sich—now heard as a way to keep open what the scientific posture had tended to close.
The virtues of Kisiel’s book, then, are inseparable from its documentary stubbornness. He refuses to cite the “legend of Heidegger” as an authority, he tests the old man’s recollections against the archive, he cross-checks editorial policies of the Gesamtausgabe with contemporaneous student notes and he follows unpublished seminar sheets into dead ends that, precisely as dead ends, explain why certain projects were abandoned or reconfigured. In doing so, he gives to future readers what the book promises in its first sentence: the first factual and conceptual history of Being and Time—and the first that shows why factual and conceptual cannot be teased apart without losing the phenomenon. He neither idolizes nor disparages, rather, he describes, and in describing, exhibits the conceptual pressure points that any reading of Being and Time must respect if it is to be responsive to the work’s genesis rather than to a legend. The achievement is more than antiquarian: it supplies an axis for interpretation along which seemingly intractable questions—about the priority of the historical, the role of Aristotle, the place of religious motifs, the aporetic status of the unpublished Second Division and the projected parts on time and truth—can be repositioned without collapsing into doctrinal camps.
If there is a single through-line in Kisiel’s presentation, it is that the “erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions” of Heidegger’s path are not defects to be ironed out but the positive structure by which the path remains a path. Errancy belongs to discovery; finitude belongs to the temporality that was being thought; tentativeness belongs to a method that can only indicate. That he can show this, with sustained reference to dates, manuscripts, philological minutiae, and course rooms, is itself a philosophical act, for it compels us to read Being and Time as a one-time achievement inside an ongoing questioning—a composition in March 1926 that, precisely by its power, threatened to conceal its own origins and so required the subsequent “turn” to reopen them. Kisiel’s closing gesture—following the trajectory beyond 1927 back to the earliest formulae—is thus not nostalgia for beginnings rather than a reminder that the book’s claim to think being-time is inseparable from the first discovery that it worlds and properizes, a discovery already named in 1919 and then, for a decade, both used and muted in favour of the analytic disciplines the book needed to gain recognition. In returning to that beginning, he is not demoting the 1927 text; he is restoring its conditions of possibility. This is the peculiar exactness of his history: it discloses not simply how Being and Time came to be, but why its being the book it is required those conditions and why its afterlife, including the “turn,” could only be read as a re-articulation of that originary insight under different linguistic auspices.
Against the charge that such a genesis threatens to relativize the book, one can answer in Kisiel’s own manner: what he supplies are not excuses but coordinates, not reductions but constraints on legitimate interpretation. To read the analytic of Dasein without the religion courses is to mishear the existential pathos of care as a psychological mood detached from its phenomenological pedigree; to read the destruction of ontology without the Aristotle work is to misplace the source of a vocabulary that was forged under pressure to avoid presence metaphysics; to read the discussion of historicality without its Dilthey-Yorck moment is to mistake a formal architecture for a late add-on; to read the “turn” as the abandonment of the 1927 project is to neglect the early formulae that had been waiting, since 1919, to return. In this sense, Kisiel’s book is not merely about Heidegger; it is a proposal about how to write conceptual history when the concept in question insists on being temporal. The archive is the very organon of such writing, and its use is itself governed by the same discipline of formal indication: one must point to what compels, without pretending that the pointing eliminates the phenomenon’s mobility.
For readers of Being and Time, the gain is practical. Kisiel makes available a set of landmarks by which to orient interpretations, the schema and its methodological outcome, the role of formal indication and its disappearance from overt discourse, the hermeneutic of facticity as the earliest name of the topic, the “Einleitung” as the first systematic fusion of the historical and the analytic, the 1924 Begriff der Zeit as the skeleton of the book’s architecture, the 1925 summer course as the phenomenological recalibration that brings Husserl anew into the story, and the Kantian turn to ecstatic-horizonal temporality as the last-minute reframing that licenses ex-sistence without capitulation to existentialist jargon. With these landmarks, one can navigate the book’s difficulties not by smoothing them over but by recognizing them as traces of the path that produced them. Kisiel’s achievement is to turn these traces into a map that, while detailed, refuses to pretend that the terrain is flat. It is indeed a major event for Heidegger specialists that the background which had been conspicuously absent should be reconstructed with this degree of accuracy and interpretive tact; but it is equally an event for the philosophy of philosophical historiography, for it models a way to render genesis intelligible without subordinating thinking to biography.
If the book asks anything of its reader, it is patience to follow a conceptual thread as it moves through semesters, through changes of topic that are in fact changes of vantage on the same topic, through editorial accidents and cancellations, through the rhetorical lights and shadows that teaching imposes, through the difference between what could be said then and what can be said now. Such patience is rewarded with a denser comprehension of Being and Time’s internal necessity and an expanded capacity to hear, in later texts, the re-sounding of what had been struck early and then damped. In this sense, Kisiel’s book does what it claims for the text it reconstructs: it does not freeze a path into a monument; it shows a way, and in showing it, teaches how to make it again.
This book, ten years in the making, is indeed the first factual and conceptual history of Being and Time; it is grounded in painstaking archival work—European archives and private correspondence—which yields an unbroken account of the early development toward the masterwork; it begins with the 1915 dissertation and passes through the war years’ religious conversion, the 1919 hermeneutic breakthrough, the evolving relation to Husserl, and the three drafts of the book; it discusses the little-known but decisive readings of Aristotle, the late discovery of Kant and the ecstatic schematism, and the last-minute adoption of existential terminology; and it provides a wealth of narrative detail and documentary evidence that makes it possible at last to abandon the stale view of Being and Time as a book “frozen in time” and to appreciate, instead, the erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions of a philosophical path that remains, even after its canonization, a path.
Simon Gros 
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