55 Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 41, Number 1, 2020 A Running Leap into the There Heidegger’s “Running Notes on Being and Time” Richard Polt 1. Introduction In 1936, Martin Heidegger picked up a copy of Being and Time and reread his own work, written largely in 1926, with a critical eye. 1 In the intervening years, the Weimar Republic had collapsed, Heidegger had enthusiastically joined the National Socialist Party, and he had served for a year as rector of the University of Freiburg. He had lectured on the pre-Socratics and on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymns, and was beginning an intensive study of Friedrich Nietzsche. 2 A manuscript opaquely titled Contributions to Philosophy was gestating—a text that would attempt to envision “the other inception” of western history. 3 After such a dramatic decade, Being and Time now felt “alien” to its own author. 4 Heidegger’s reactions to his own book in 1936, titled “Running Notes on Being and Time” (“Laufende Anmerkungen zu Sein und Zeit”), have now been published as part of the eighty-second volume of his writings (see GA82 7–136). The notes are hardly a meticulous explication of the intricate conceptual network of Being and Time; they are impatient, even irritable reactions that characterize both major and minor moments in that book as “superfcial” (GA82 60), “inadequate” (GA82 36), “ridiculous” (GA82 123), or “wholly of track and erroneous” (GA82 52). The “Running Notes” largely consist of exclamations, telegraphic comments, and sometimes indecipherable allusions. But this is not to say that they are not serious; crucial issues are at stake, and Heidegger evidently considered these notes to be a signifcant efort, since he eventually returned to them and reread them with care. 5 Among the many thoughts in the “Running Notes,” one theme emerges as paramount: what was presented in Being and Time as a phenomenology of Dasein—understood as the human way of being— should instead be conceived as projecting a new possibility for humanity, a possibility into which we are invited to “leap” to initiate a