In my past couple of posts on the topic, composed quickly (as this one will be), I moved too quickly over, and perhaps even muddled, the question of the difference between SZ-era and later Heidegger on the clearing. As I mentioned, in SZ Heidegger says "Dasein is the clearing of being" or some such. "Dasein" does not name the human being, but the way in which human beings exist. However, Heidegger did not always maintain complete clarity on this, often referring to Dasein as "a being" and even talking about individual "Daseins." As for the former, if we refer to Dasein as "a being," we must immediately remind ourselves that it is a being whose essence lies in its existence, i.e. it is a being whose enabling characteristics (i.e. "essence") are not qualities but potentialities that are enacted in the temporalizing motion of projection and retrieval. Dasein names this motion, i.e. the way of being for human beings. Thus when Heidegger talks about "Daseins" it must be seen as shorthand for "beings who exist in the manner of Dasein," i.e. "beings whose way of being in the world is clearing projection and retrieval."
After a troubling interlude in which he starts mouthing off about "German Dasein," Heidegger settles into a manner of speaking (this is not a particularly scholarly or well-researched claim, so feel free to contradict me) where human beings are referred to as "human beings" (menschen, let's leave "mortals" out of it for now) and Dasein is used more consistently to talk about the human manner of being. (A final wrinkle I won't explore here is that the bar is now higher for Dasein, so we aren't automatically existing in a Dasein-like manner).
In the interim, Heidegger discovers the "history of being," in other words the clearing is now explicitly historical-epochal. The giving of the clearing, or I would even like to say "a clearing", although I don't think Heidegger does, is not a result of human projection but, as we have seen in previous posts, is of the nature of an event--not in the sense of a thing among others that occurs within given conditions of manifestation, but in the sense of a happening that itself brings these conditions of manifestation into play .
At the same time, there is no clearing without Dasein, in a sense Dasein still "is" the clearing (H. may even maintain this formulation in some later stuff, I couldn't swear he doesn't, "Letter on Humanism" maybe?). Without a being who exists in the manner of temporalizing/disclosing, beings would be undisclosed. Human existence enacts the clearing. But the clearing no longer reflects human projects, humans are in a sense called to witness the disclosure of being.
Heidegger does not say that beings wouldn't exist without Dasein; in fact, there is a lacuna because Heidegger has no terminology to deal with things that do not be (forgive the formulation). Only Dasein is said to "exist," so that word is taken. Bare subsistence is associated with presence-at-hand, which is itself referred back to a particular disclosing comportment to beings, and hence it refers thinking back to the clearing. When things are, on the other hand, they are disclosed, since being is identified with disclosure (or "truth"). Heidegger awkwardly makes a pass at this from time to time, basically hinting that if he had words to say it, he'd admit there were still things hanging around before anything existed in the manner of Dasein, but this is not really a question for thinking--it is a question for science, which can happily disclose archaic beings (even "arche-fossils") without worrying about the conditions of their disclosure.
I'd suggest this is a perfectly acceptable situation for realists if and only if they are prepared to accept the implicit division of labor (Heidegger would hate that formulation) between thinking and science. We cannot think beings apart from their disclosure and our involvement in the latter, but we can know them, might be one way of putting it, although there's no reason to think Heidegger would put it that way. (This is a kind of reversal of Kant's stance toward the in-itself.)
Anyway these are provisional thoughts and I welcome criticism.
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