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Well into its seventh decade, Heidegger scholarship in America has yet to reach a firm consensus on what Heidegger's main topic was. But we cannot understand Dasein without first getting clear on the central issue of Heidegger's thought-what he called “the thing itself” (die Sadie selbst). Therefore, this chapter investigates “the thing itself” as a way of coming to understand Dasein. That may seem like a roundabout approach. But no, it is a straight path to our theme-because Dasein is the thing itself.Or is it? Many scholars still insist that the central topic of Heidegger's work was “being” or “being itself” (das Sein, das Sein selbst) despite Heidegger's unambiguous assertion that it was not. In 1962 (Wednesday morning, September 12, to be exact) Heidegger declared emphatically that once we get beyond metaphysics' dispensations of being (Seinsgeschichte) and begin to think within Ereignis—from that moment on, “being [das Sein], rooted as it is in those dispensations, is no longer the proper topic of thinking.”Heidegger made the same point seven years later, on September 11, 1969, during an informal seminar at Le Thor, Provence. First he reiterated his threefold distinction between beings (das Anwesende), being itself (das Anwesen), and that which gives being itself (das Lassen des Anwesens). Then he declared that at that third level-which is proper area of his own thought – “there ... log in or subscribe to read full text