Being and Time is an extraordinary work of phenomenology. Husserlian ego is displaced by Heidegger’s Dasein and the noematic content is transformed into a world around us. The theoretical subjectivity of phenomenology descends to earth. Originally lost in an impersonal world, it is confronted with death to gain an existence facing its deepest possibilities of being. The text is clear and systematic. Yet, it starts with seven paragraphs that promise a new ontology opened up by a new a radical question: “the meaning of Being” (die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins). The phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses fall short in offering a new ontology. Being and Time was very well received as a work of phenomenology, as a new transcendentalism, as philosophical anthropology, as the universalization of hermeneutics, etc., not as a new ontology. Heidegger claimed, however, that the only question he cared about was that of being, and that Being and Time was a relatively failed attempt.
Being is the pedal note of Heidegger’s work. From Dasein’s access to the question of Being, to the posterior history of Being, and finally to poetic language as the shepherd of Being, Heidegger’s always revolved around ontology. But not only did he fail to provide an ontology; he insisted that we were not mature enough to even raise the question. We were too early for Being and too late for God. He understood his work as prolegomena to the real issue at stake.
Alfred Hitchcok coined the term McGuffin to describe mysterious objects inserted in a plot to motivate the characters, but which were devoid of all meaning. It could be a letter, a box, a secret. The object in itself was unimportant or even empty but played the role of the most extraordinary thing. It was like the holy grail. Lacan recognized the same recourse in Poe’s The Purloined Letter. A complicated triangle of power and deception develops around a secret letter, whose content could sink the very king. We ignore the content of the letter; but also the characters of the short story. The oblivion of Being is like the purloined letter and Hitchcock’s McGuffin. Nobody knows what was lost, nor what could be recovered, it is devoid of all content, but it motivates the development of a great philosophical story called “the history of metaphysics”.