In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

440 FRAMES
on June 18, again urging Heidegger's appointment, he adopted the candidate's
own strategy of simply not mentioning the fragmentary status
of the text: "The faculty believes itself justified in making this request,
since Heidegger has in the interim committed his work on 'being and
time' to print." 15 The truth was, however, that after returning another
fifty-five pages of corrections to the typesetter in early June, Heidegger
had suspended work on Sein und Zeit due to his current occupations at
the university, as he wrote in a letter to his friend Karl Jaspers on July
31 (the last day of the summer semester). It would be some time before
he could give better news-as usual, from his cabin in the Black Forest.
This news didn't come until October, when, in letters to Jaspers and to
the Marburg theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Heidegger announced that
the "pause in revising and typesetting" had yielded positive results,
enabling him to finish a clean copy of the book's second section by
November 1. But he had lost the race to meet the demands of the Berlin
bureaucracy. On November 25, Dean Deutschbein received the secondand
now definitive-rejection of the faculty's nomination: "I wish to
communicate that the minister, upon reexamining all the represented
points of view, cannot follow the recommendation to grant Professor Dr.
Heidegger the tenured full professorship." 16
Understandably, Heidegger in the following weeks sought consolation
and support through correspondence with his philosophical friends. Nobody
offered stronger words of solidarity and appreciation than Edmund
Husserl: "[I am happy to see] that you are committed to the work
through which you will become who you are, and with which (as you
well know) you have already begun fulfilling your own being as a philosopher
... Nobody believes more firmly in you than I, and I am also
convinced that, in the end, no resentment you might feel will be able to
throw you off the track. Nothing can divert you from the importance of
doing what you alone can do."l? Husserl's passionate words were designed
to persuade Heidegger that, although he had failed to reach the
concrete professional goal of an Ordinariat, there was still great philosophical,
even existential significance to finishing Sein und Zeit. Since
Heidegger was indeed no longer under any time pressure, he seems to
have entertained, at least for a few weeks, the idea of completing the
entire book as it is outlined at the end of the introductory chapter. But
the published text represents only about two-thirds of the first part. 1S
More than ever-and more understandably than ever-Heidegger was