Gatherings2011-01Sheehan

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Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, ():

Astonishing!

Things Make Sense!

Thomas Sheehan

With the appearance of human being, meaning dawned in the uni-verse, and nothing has been the same since. For the rst time in the .billion years of the cosmos, things were no longer just out there butinstead became meaningfully present (anwesend). As far as we know,only human beings can question things, recognize them for what theyare in themselves, name them, talk about them in soliloquy or dia-logue, and even talk about that talking. Once man is possessed by thePromethean re of intellect and language, human history begins as acomplex unfolding of meaningful lives.1

Heideggers philosophical focus never strayed from die Sache selbst,the astonishing fact that with human existence sense irrupts into anotherwise meaningless universe.2 Throughout his career he remainedxed on the twofold question of () the meaningful presence (Anwesen)of things, and () above all, what lets such meaningful presence hap-pen (das Anwesenlassen).3 The latter is what Heidegger called his basicquestion or Grundfrage. If philosophy begins with astonishment, thenthe the origin and ordering of all Heideggers thought was thewonder of all wonders: that things make sense.4

The back story of this essay has been argued in recent publicationsand, given the necessary brevity of the present text, cannot be detailedhere.5 The main point is that Heideggers work unfolds with unprec-edented clarity, simplicity, and force once one realizes that by equating


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Sein withAnwesen and by casting his thought in the mode of phenom-enology and hermeneutics, Heidegger himself placed the problematicof being squarely within the parameters of meaning.

For example, in , during his rst course after the Great War,Heidegger asked what it is we immediately encounter in lived experi-ence. Is it blanched out beings that only later acquire the hue ofmeaning? No, what we rst encounter and always live with is:

the meaningful [das Bedeutsame] that is what is rstand immediately given to you without any mental de-tour through a conceptual grasp of the thing. Whenyou live in the everyday world [die Umwelt], everythingcomes at you loaded with meaning, all over the placeand all the time. Everything appears within a mean-ingful context, and that contextgives those things theirmeaning.6

And in he remarked:

For a long time, I have been designating the being-character of human existence as meaningfulness. Thisbeing-character is the primary one in which the world

is encountered.7

Again in his course on Logic he signaled the centrality ofmeaning to human being:

Because by its very nature existence is sense-making,it lives in meanings and can express itself in and asmeanings.8

A year later, in Being and Time, Heidegger declared that the herme-neutics of Dasein was the indispensable basis for the doctrine of mean-

ing (Bedeutungslehre) that he presented there.9

The center of thatdoctrine of meaning is being-in-the-world. But the essence of world ismeaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit).10 Therefore, we may interpret being-in-the-world (In-der-Bedeutsamkeit-sein) as mans thrown-projective


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Astonishing! Things Make Sense!

engagement-with-meaning. In addition, throughout his career Heideg-ger interpreted the pre-Socratic thinkers as proto-phenomenologists fo-cused on the conjunction () of meaningful presence () andhuman apprehension of it (). And when it came to Plato and Aris-totle, Heidegger read , the Greek word for being, as -o,meaningful presence in and to o. No o, no o.

The danger of hypostasizing Sein always a Heideggerian tempta-tion readily dissolves once we understand that human existence isforthe sake of meaning (early Heidegger) or is a prioriappropriated intothe meaning-process (later Heidegger). Meaning is the raison dtreof human being. The clearing grants Dasein as such.11 In this shift

to an emphatically phenomenological-hermeneutical way of readingHeidegger, the Da-sein / Sein correlation is transformed into the Da-sinn / Sinn conjunction: man as the only place where meaningfulpresence orAnwesen occurs.12 We can read the Da-sinn / Sinn conjunc-tion from either side: No man, no meaning (Heidegger ), or no mean-ing, no man (Heidegger ).13 The crux of the reversal (Kehre) betweenthe earlier and later Heidegger is the recognition that human beingsdo not generate the space of meaning sua sponte but are pulled into it a

priori. In the nal analysis, to fail to see that sense-making is the mostbasic thing that human being is and does, is to entirely miss the pointof Heideggers thought.

In this paper I argue that Heideggers extensive corpus from begin-ning to end remained a hermeneutics ofDasein or an analytic of humanexistence, in which Heidegger, like Theseus,

made fast the guiding thread of all philosophical inquiryat the point where it arises and to which it returns,14

namely, human being. This entails that all the key terms in Heideg-gers lexicon Ereignis, ,Lichtung, even Seyn are existentials

precisely in the sense that the early Heidegger gave this term: neces-sities and abilities that a prioridetermine the human way of being.In Heideggers world, apart from the fact ofDa-sinn/Sinn, there is nofurther, higher level where things like Seyn andEreignis carry on their


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business. That would be metaphysics in its worst form (even thoughit is frequently peddled about as Heideggers thought). Heideggerremained on one level only, that of the man-meaning conjunction, andeverything in his corpus is about that. No matter how wide his thinkingranged or how deep it reached, Heidegger never got beyond human be-ing, and never intended to. Nor did he need to. This may be a scandalum

piis auribus, but so be it. The onlypietas philosophers should respect isthat of thinking qua questioning.

The questioning that this essay pursues is twofold, even though Ican only sketch out the second part: () How do human beings makesense of the things they encounter? And () What does this have do to

the basic question (Grundfrage) of Heideggers thought?

I. HOW WEMAKESENSE

The rst page ofBeing and Time proper oers the clue to why humanbeing is intrinsically and exclusively bound up with making sense ofthings. There Heidegger designates the rst characteristic of humanexistence as having to be (Zu-sein).15 I hope to show that having tobe entails having to make sense of things. This requires a number ofsteps, some of which Heidegger laid out in his course BasicConcepts of Metaphysics under the rubrics of () animal life as projectedinto possibility and () human being as world-forming.

A. ANIMALLIFEASPROJECTEDINTOPOSSIBILITY

. Life as possibility

For Heidegger as for Aristotle, life, whether it be the of plants andanimals or the of human beings, is necessarily bound up with pos-sibilities of itself. It is an Entheben in das Mgliche: a being lifted up

and away into the possible. Lifes actuality is caught up in possibility.16

In the last analysis, potentiality and possibility belongprecisely to the essence of the [living being] in its actu-ality, in a quite specic sense.17


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In its most basic form, life is a natural drive to be underway to moreof itself, an on-going genesis (Sichzeitigung) of itself as appearing in anew , which in turn generates ever more possibilities.18 Insofar aslife consists in constantly bringing forth something new of itself, it is anatural process of, of revealing itself as this or that.19 The rea-son? Life is a kind of, and is a kind of, and isa kind of (change whereby something hidden comes to light),and is a kind of. /=/,the single process of bringing-forth from itself what was heretoforehidden from view.

But the living being is not thrown or appropriated into just any

possibilities. Most basically it is an intrinsicErmglichung, an enablingof itself, in the sense of making itself possible. A living being naturallysets forth its own whereunto (Wozu) and sets itself forth into it, whilealways remaining with itself as source of this drive.20 Unlike an imple-ment, which gets its capacity to serve some end from its maker, livingbeings pro-duce their own ability to achieve their Wozu. They are self-enabling acts of becoming.21

. Self-preservation

Every living being and not just human being is stamped with theessential characteristic ofZu-sein, not just having to be, but having tobecome in order to stay alive. A living thing has its as self-preser-vation.22 It is driven to sur-vive, to keep on keeping on, until its abilityto supply its own self-sustaining self-empowerment runs out naturallyor is cut oaccidentally. This also entails that something that is alive isable to die at any moment. This does not refer to the obvious fact thatthe living being, whether human or animal, moves diachronically intothe future in the direction of its demise. Rather, the living being isalways zum Ende, zum Tode, that is, ever-at-the-point-of-death . For some-

thing to live is to always live mortality, at the very edge of its ultimatepossibility, which is to have no more possibility and so to be dead.23

All of this, we stress, is structural and essential to life it is ofapriori necessity. When we speak of the living being as thrown or


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appropriated into possibility, both of those terms indicate a livingbeings facticity, that which it cannot not be. (The term facticity,like being-at-the-point-of-death, applies properly only to human be-ing, but analogically to all life.) Life entails being always more than itis de facto (tatschlich), but never more than it is faktisch, never morethan the self-possibilizing that it is obliged to be.24

. Movedness and ownness

Another aspect of the structure of life is the bivalence of its .Living is not only an instinctual movement that is stretched out intopossibility (Hin zu, Weg-von-sich).25 It also remains one with itself: anexiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoningitself.26 Life is a constant presence to itself, a retaining itself withinitself. A living thing, Heidegger says,

does not lose itself in the sense that an instinctual im-pulse to something would leave itself behind. Rather itretains itself precisely in such a drive and remains itsself, as we might say, in this drive and driving.27

On the one hand, life is bound to its future, a further becoming beyond

what its previous becoming has already achieved. On the other hand, itconstantly remains with the source of movement that it itself is. Thisis what Heidegger calls a living beings self-like character or own-ness throughout change.28 To take the plant as an example: Out of itsroot and stem emerge the leaves, then the bud, which opens up as theower, which in turn gives way to the fruit. The plant actualizes newpossibilities for itself while still remaining the same plant, the sourceof its own growth.

Openness and

When it comes to animals, the a prioristretch into possibility wherein theanimal retains its ownness has a certain (delimited) character of opennessabout it. As an instinctual drive to more of itself, animal life has


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the character of a traversing, of a dimension in the for-mal sense. Dimension is not yet understood in a spa-tial sense here, although the dimensional character ofdrive is presumably the condition of the possibilityof the animals being able to traverse a spatial domainin a quite determinate manner.29

This dimension names the animals very limited openness thatclears the way for sense perception. In their very dierent ways ofbeing , both animals and humans are open and intentionalin the broadest sense of () going beyond any supposedly monadic self-enclosure and () being disclosive of what is other than themselves.30We recall that, for Heidegger, the nature of, i.e., of life, is entbergen,uncovering something heretofore hidden.31 To live is to be beyond any sup-posed encapsulation, to be open to and disclosive of something other, whichin the animals case is the of the corresponding .32

Captivation

Heidegger speaks of the animal, qua sentient, as captivated by what itis open to. The sense organs have no choice, as it were, about theircorresponding objects. The eye sees light, no matter what. The alterna-tive to seeing light is not to see at all. We noted that animals as sentientare open, and to that degree alethic, disclosive of their correspondingobjects. Or to reverse the trajectory, the senses objects open them up in aprocess that Heidegger callsEnthemmung(disinhibiting). However,such sense-openness is restricted to merely taking what the sensible ap-pearances oer and dealing with that within the limitations of instinct.The animal behaves (benehmen) rather than properly relating itselfto (sich verhalten zu) in the way that human being does. This conne-ment to behavior is what Heidegger means by captivation (Benom-

menheit) and also by putting aside (Beiseitigung), i.e., the animal doesnot recognize those appearances as what and how they are in them-selves. The objects as such remain withdrawn from animal perception,


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unable to be apprehended as something intelligible. In that sense, theanimal is separated from man by an abyss.33

B. HUMANBEING:HERMENEUTICALOPENNESS

When we turn to the human being, a vast new dimension of freedomand possibility breaks out, which Heidegger describes with the imageof the open. By its very essence, human being is the genesis of ormind: The primary openness of human beings is grounded in .34Mind as we use it here is neither a subjects consciousness nor the neu-rological processes at work when it feels something, knows something,or chooses among options. Rather, it is the condition of the possibility ofall of those. It is what allows for the specically human form of know-ing: discursiveness or , the ability to understand something assomething. With , one is no longer conned to receiving things inperception but is freed to relate oneself to them, to take them as they arein themselves and in terms of how they relate to us. ruptures thelimitations of the animals sense experience and instinctual behavior aswell as the constraints of its encircling ring. Human being is now ableto make sense of things.

Over the course of his career Heidegger analyzed human , un-

derstood as the possibility of intelligibility, under a number of rubrics,among them: openness or clearing; world; ; ; the as;In-zwischen; Austrag;and time. I briey take up each of those in turn.

. Open-ended receptivity and the clearing

Unlike the restricted range of the animal soul, the human is, in Aris-totles words, , which Heidegger glosses as openness to ev-erything.35 We can become everything we meet in the universe notontically by fusing our identity with the thing, but by understanding

the things meaning (receiving its form). We understand things intheirpossibilities by taking them in terms ofourpossibilities, whateverthey might be.36 Thus they become familiar, a part of our family. Wehave learned to live with them. They make sense to us.


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Heideggers preferred image for human openness is that of a clear-ing (Lichtung). By this spatial image, he understands the conditionof the possibility of understanding anything at all. The clearing, hewrites, is the open region of understanding37 into which human beingis appropriated by its very nature. This ur-openedness is

the region of unhiddenness or clearing (intelligibility)wherein for the rst time all understanding, i.e., project-ing, is possible in the sense of bringing into the open.38

By intelligibility Heidegger is referring to every kind of accessibil-ity to specically human experience, whether theoretical, practical,

or whatever.To be sure, man is still a , a being-approachedby the world

through the senses.39 Here Heidegger employs Aristotles technical termfor the structural ability to receive () what the senses convey.But this is not the mere givenness of things to an -bound andinstinct-ruled animal, captivated and merely stimulated by the thingsin its environment. Drawing on De Anima, a , Heideggersays: The is possible only through the ,i.e., a that uncovers the world.40 In other words, the aspect of whereby we receive things through the senses ()is possible only because the that allows intelligibility to happenat all () has always already done its work such that whatwe receive through the senses can be known as what and how it is.

. The world

Heidegger writes, The clearing, and it alone, is world.41 But world isthe matrix of meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit). If things make sensewithin the open/clearing/world, where does that sense or meaningcome from?

In Being and Time Heidegger argues that the meaning of some-thing is its intelligibility to man.42 Meaning is not a property attachedto things, nor is it to be found behind or above them. Meaning isan existentiale of human being, and existence alone has meaning.43


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That is, mans a prioriengagement-with-meaning opens a region inwhich things can be understood as what they are. Thus only humanexistence is meaningful or meaningless. Other things are meaningfulonly insofar as they enter the range of human understanding and arediscovered together with human existence.44 Only then do they have

Anwesen which entails that their Anwesen is their meaning. Theirbeing consists in their involvement in the meaningful context thathuman being generates a priori. If we say that entities have meaning,this signies that they have become accessible in their being.45

But things come in wholes or sets, not as just one thing by itself noras an undierentiated wall of things out there. That is because hu-

man being is not imprisoned in some kind of monadic subjectivity butis embodied, situated, and contextual. Human being is a hermeneuticaleld of force that, like a magnet, draws things together into the unities ofmeaning. World is not a sum total of things a what but rather is hu-man being itself as appropriated to sustaining the clearing. As existing,human being is its world.46 World is human being writ large, so to speak,as the matrix of intelligibility. World is another name for the open-ended human that gathers () things into unities of sense.47

A specic world is a particular lived context within which thingscan have some meanings but not others. In that sense a specic worldis a restrictive context: it constrains the range of possibilities in termsof which we can understand something. To cite Heideggers famousexample (): At night in the Black Forest, you might mistake a bushfor a deer, but you probably wouldnt mistake it for the Shah of Iran. Andyet strictly speaking (and at a huge stretch) it is not impossible that theShah might show up at night in the woods around Todtnauberg; but youwould never mistake the bush for the cubed root of sixty-nine.48

Another term for the open clearing () is disclosedness as such, in its primary sense. We must rescue this key term from itsgeneral translation as truth. As Heidegger understands it, re-fers most basically not to the correct correspondence between thoughts


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and things but rather to meaningfulness on at least three analogouslevels. Only on the third and most derivative level does it mean truthas the conformity of a mental or spoken proposition to a given stateof aairs. Heideggers interests lie primarily with the rst two sensesbelow, and ultimately with the rst, -, as the ground for thederivative forms of- and -.

-: The most basic meaning of is hu-man beings thrown-openness or dis-closedness as such,the ability to make sense of whatever one encounters.It is the structure of human existence as world-open,both disclosed and disclosive.49 This marksthe a priorifact that meaning is ever possible withinthe world of

- : In a second and derived sense, refers to the disclosedness of things to understandingin our everyday, pre-propositional involvement withthem. We cannot encounter anything except under therubric of meaningfulness. Even if we merely wonderwhat something is, we have already brought the thinginto the realm of possible sense. And unless somethingwere disclosed already, we could not make propositionalstatements about it.

- : The third and most derivative sense of refers to that particular (and utterly necessary)state of meaningfulness that we call the correctnessof a judgment, the agreement of a propositional state-ment with the already disclosed state of aairs it refersto. Only at this third level do we have truth as adaequa-tio intellectus et rei, a position that goes back through

Kant and Aquinas to Aristotle.50

It is the rst of these three levels that corresponds to the clearing.


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. Zwischen, Austrag

Heidegger likewise speaks of the clearing as das Inzwischen, the spacebetween a thing and its meaning that allows for the combination ofthe two.51 Further, echoing Aristotles (Latin, abs-tractio: Deanima, b ), he calls itAus-trag, the possibility of distinguish-ing and uniting a thing and its meaning. With this latter term webegin to see the hermeneutical dynamics of the opening up of the clear-ing. Heidegger begins spelling this out under the rubric of/, which is bound up with his analysis of.52

.and the as

In Heideggers interpretation, is not speech but what makesspeech possible: the ur-openedness (-) thanks to which some-thing can be disclosed as meaningful (-). To see how this is thecase, we take up two dierent kinds of or sentences: one that ismeaningful simpliciterand another that is apophanticallymeaningful.

Every human utterance whether Hello, Lets go, or I hopethe revolution succeeds gives forth something to be understood.However, some sentences go further and make a claim about what theygive forth as understandable, a claim that could be either true or false.As regards the rst case: If Im standing in the kitchen and say Handme the spatula, my fellow cook will no doubt understand what thesentence means. I too understand: I need it for the scrambled eggs. Thissentence or gives forth something that people can understand: itis , meaningful.

As regards the second case: When I follow up and say The spatulasin the drawer, my statement, in addition to being meaningful, makes aclaim. It is a declarative sentence insofar as it declares something aboutthe status of the spatula. In this second instance I have made not only a

meaningful statement, a , but in addition an indica-tive one, a . The second, unlike the rst, purports toshow something (-) about (-) the spatula itself. A declara-tive sentence can be in either the armative or the negative. But the


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important thing is that, to be a declarative sentence, it must necessarilybe true or false. It indicates something as regardless of whether theindication is right or wrong, or whether I am sincere (I really believeits in the drawer) or deceitful (I know its not there).

A further step: When I utter the declarative sentence Socrates isan Athenian, I synthesize Socrates with the category Athenian.However, Socrates does not exhaust the category of all Athenians.Therefore, while synthesizing the two, I also maintain a distinctionbetween them. A declarative sentence is constituted by both and the uniting-and-distinguishing of the subject and thepredicate. Both together are necessary, whetherthe sentence be true or

false and in orderforthe sentence to be true or false. But such / is possible only because of the basic openness or freedom ofhuman being, which in turn generates the interpretative as-factor, i.e.,the ability to take Socrates as one thing (an Athenian) or another (per-haps a Theban).53


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TRUE

AFFIRMATIVE

FALSE

DECLARATIVESENTENCE

IDECLAREPOFS

TRUE

NEGATIVE

FALSE

EVERY= AMEANINGFULUTTERANCE

NON-DECLARATIVESENTENCE IWISH, HOPE, ASK, OR COMMANDSOMETHING


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. The existential and the hermeneutical as

For Heidegger, the phenomenon of the as functions apophantically indeclarative sentences only because it functions existentially as the verystructure of human existence. Here Heideggers argument reects themedieval Scholastic axiom operari sequitur esse:activities are consonantwith and derive from natures; or in the reverse: natures determine ac-tivities.54 In the present case, ones sense-making activities follow fromones a prioriengagement-with-meaning (being-in-Bedeutsamkeit).

In what sense does as dene the structure of human being? Themovedness of human life is analogous to the bivalent movedness of theanimal, which we noted above: being stretched ahead beyond itself(Weg-von-sich) while ever remaining present to itself (Bei-sich-sein).In the case of man, Heidegger calls this movedness a fortnehmendeZukehr, a being carried away into itself as possibility (fortnehmende)that always returns to and stays with itself (Zukehr).55

This being-ahead-of-oneself as a returning [Sich-vorweg-sein als Zurckkommen] is, if I may put it thisway, a peculiar kind of movement that existence itselfconstantly makes.56

Heidegger now reads that movement of thrown-ahead-returning interms ofexistential/.

Projection is this simple, unied happening that canbe formally characterized as and both at the same time. Projection is insofaras, qua taking away, it takes away the one projecting.In a certain sense it stretches him apart from himself,endows him with a stretching forth [Erstreckung].It takes him away into the possible, not so as to lose

himself there but rather so as to let the possible, as thepossibilizing of the actual, speak back precisely uponthe projector himself as binding uniting and binding:57


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In other words, the structural movedness of human being is anexistential, world-opening /, which in turn servesas the basis for the apophantic synthesizing-that-distinguishes. Its bi-valent self-presence-while-stretched-ahead generates the as of sense-making in this case the apophantic as of declarative sentences. Thusthe appropriated projection that is man

is also that happening in which there originates whatwe problematize as the as-structure. The as is theexpression for what breaks out in the in-break [of manamong things]. Only because we have broken intothe dimension of this distinction between the actualand the possible between being and entities in thebroadest sense do we have the possibility of graspingand understanding something as something.58

The as-structure that is human being is thus responsible for the as-structure of making sense of things whether predicatively or pre-pred-icatively. Man is appropriated for sustaining the clearing in such a waythat the as emerges and discursive meaning becomes possible. Thisconstitutes a new kind ofErmglichung, the enabling that lets humanbeings make sense of themselves and other things. In Heidegger-code,Da-sein as thrown or appropriated is the occurrence of disclosure: dasGrundgeschehnis der Wahrheit.59 In another, perhaps more accessiblecode, human being is pan-hermeneutical. Our environment no longerjust a natural encircling ring but now an as-structured world is anopen-ended hermeneutical space of mediation in general and of sense-making in particular. Whatever we meet, we meet under the rubric ofis manifest as, i.e., is accessible as and therefore is meaningful as.We can make sense of whatever we meet (even if only interrogatively),and if we cannot make any sense of something, we cannot meet it. We

are condemned to ur-.


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. Time as hermeneutical openness

To exist, Heidegger says, might be more adequately translated assustaining a realm of openness.60 What is this sustaining? How doeshuman being open up and maintain the disclosive realm of?

When Heidegger speaks of the genesis of the space of meaning, hedescribes it in terms of mans being stretched out into the possible (Er-strecktheit). For this he drew on Augustines distentio animi, which inturn derives from Plotinus .61 In man, being-stretched-forward is mans already-aheadness in the world of meaning, i.e., in thepossibility of sense-making (schon vorweg sein). This carries us awayand gives us distance, i.e., opens up the clearing.62 But along with thisdistance, human being also returns to itself and renders things mean-ingfully present, both itself and others (Sein beias Gegenwrtigung).The actuality of the human being is its living in possibility, which inturn generates the possibility of making sense of things. We recognizethis schon vorweg Sein beias the structure of care (Sorge).

Care, in turn, maps on to, and in fact is grounded in, what Heideg-ger initially called temporality. Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is what opensup the eld of ur-time (Temporalitt), which Heidegger later dened as-, hermeneutical disclosure: The term time is a preliminary

word for what was later called the truth of being.63

The structure of-qua ur-time is discoverable through the structure of tempo-rality, which isgewesend-gegenwrtigende Zukunft. This parses out asthe a prioribecoming (gewesende Zukunft) that opens a clearing fortaking something as something and thus rendering it meaningfullypresent (gegenwrtigende).64

Understanding itself and its world ecstatically in theunity of the open, factical existence comes back fromthese horizons to the things encountered within them.

Coming back to these things understandingly is theexistential meaning of letting them be encountered bymaking them present.65


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The conjunction of time/temporality is an early name for what theexistential as sustains: the clearing.

I I. HEIDEGGERSGRUNDFRAGE

What eect, if any, does the above have on our understanding of Hei-deggers basic question, his Grundfrage?

A.

First, a word about the question of not method but thepath to be followed in pursuing the Grundfrage. In its most basic form,phenomenological-hermeneutical method is a matter of learning howto stand thematically where we always already stand existentially. Theupshot of Heideggers phenomenological reduction is that we engage withthings () from a rst-personal experiential stance that () is inevitablysense-making. Even if I get information about a thing from someoneelse, it is stillIwho get that information in the rst person. (This is theunavoidable truth of Descartes ego cogito.) And no matter where I getthe information from, I cannot notmake sense of it. (In other words,human being is pan-hermeneutical). This rst-person experiential sense-

making, whereby what I encounter is ineluctably signicant to me, iswhere I stand prior to any move into the theoretical or the practical.

Someone could deny this basic stance, but that would entail mak-ing sense of human being some other way but still making sense, anddoing so from a rst-personjemeinigstance. Hence, by an argumentfrom performative contradiction or retorsion, the denial can be shownto cancel itself out and to conrm the prior point.

All this means that I have no reality, no being, other than thatof making rst-person sense of things. Take away rst-order herme-neutics and I am not left with a remainder, some more basic level ofexistence as the supposed bottom-line me-ness of me. No, take awaysense-making and Im no longer there. To be human is fundamentallyto render things intelligible insofar as existence is thrown open as aspace of possible as-structured relations. As such I have always already


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enacted the hermeneutical transcendence that bridges the thing andits meaningfulness, what Heidegger referred to above as the dierencebetween an entity and its beingness.66

B. HEIDEGGERSBASICQUESTION

But to go only this far is merely to have restated metaphysics questionabout beings in a phenomenological-hermeneutical framework. Onehas simply taken the beingness of beings out of its vorhanden status ofexistentia and transposed it phenomenologically into its hermeneuticalstatus as the meaningfulness of the meaningful. But what if we tookthe next step, into the Grundfrage itself?

The basic question of Heideggers thinking concerns how Sein/An-wesen comes about, i.e., comes to be disclosed a prioriin human being.He calls this the allowing of meaningful presence, Anwesenlassen(see note above). In other words, Heideggers basic question asks forthe essential provenance67 of meaningful presence. In another formu-lation it asks, What is the ground for the inner possibility and necessityof the openness ofSein?68 Or yet again: Insofar as openness/clearing/ is the most worthy of questioning,69 the Grundfrage becomesWhere does the clearing come from? Woher die Lichtung?70 In short:

How does meaningful presence occur at all? Wie west das Anwesen?Such an inquiry marks the surpassing of the twofold guiding ques-

tion of traditional onto-theology: () What is the beingness commonto all things? and () What is the highest instance of such beingness?That is, Heideggers basic question overcomes the ontological dier-ence between things and their being71 by asking: What and how isthe disclosure of be-ing and its grounding in human being? 72 Or inanother iteration: How does the disclosure of be-ing come about?73This question, of course, forces us into the question of man74 insofaras the a priorithrownness or appropriation of existence is what opens

up the clearing as the realm of possible intelligibility. To say that theanswer to the question isEreignis is to point back to mans a priorithrown-openness or appropriation whereby the dynamic realm of pos-sible meaning is generated (zeitigt). The appropriation of human being


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to the meaning-process opens the clearing within which things can beunderstood and so be meaningful.

In other words, granted the inevitability of the man-meaning con-junction and the pan-hermeneutics that is human being, HeideggersGrundfrage is necessarily changed into How come meaning at all?Wie west dieBedeutsamkeit? What is the source or provenance of worldor clearing? With this question, the meaningful presence of this or thatentity is no longer the focal topic but instead yields to the questions: Wieaber dieses, das Seyn?75 How does - get opened up at all?

The answer forms the center of Heideggers work: the insight thatman is for the sake of meaning or, equally, that meaning is the raison

dtre of man.76 From that center, which is without why and remainsa mystery, there unfolds all the rest of his thinking.

But after the reversal (Kehre), didnt Heidegger give being i.e.,Bedeutsamkeit the primacy over human being? No, that primacy wasalready established at least from Being and Time on, and the reversalmerely exfoliated its a prioristatus. We can see the reversal already inthe core phenomenon, being-in-the-world, i.e., engagement-with-mean-ing. Such engagement is designated as thrown (geworfen) in the earlywork and as appropriated (ereignet) after the reversal. In showing, aswe have done here, that meaning of appropriated humanbeing, we have also shown that Sinn is the reason that Da-sinn exists.Since the clearing is why human being is at all, one need not in fact,cannot leave the precincts of Heideggers central topic, human beingin the fullness of its essence.


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Notes

Note: () I cite texts by page and line, separated by a period. Theline-count does not include headers but does count titles within thetext. The numbers that appear after the equals sign indicate pageand line/s in the English translations. () I use the term manas gender-neutral and as referring to human being as such, i.e.,Dasein.

: . : der Mensch [ist] das Seiende , das denEinbruch in das Seiende so geschehen lsst, dass dieses in ihmselbstoenbar wird.

: . =On Time and Being, . . The Greek for mean-ingful presence is ; forAnwesenlassen: .

: . =Pathmarks, . (). : ., erstaun-lich; also : . =On the Question Concerning the Deter-mination of the Matter for Thinking, Epoch (), .. : . =Pathmarks, . Wunder aller Wunder: daSeiendes ist, and : . .

5 Thomas Sheehan, Facticity and Ereignis in Daniel O. Dahl-strom, ed., Interpreting Heidegger: New Essays (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, ), . The Turn, in BretW. Davis, ed., Heidegger: Key Concepts (Durham, : AcumenPublishing, 2009), . What If Heidegger Were a Phenom-enologist? in Mark Wrathall, ed., The Cambridge Companionto Being and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,).

/: . = Towards the Denition of Philosophy, .. : . = Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy,

. . : . =Logic: The Question of Truth, . .

. =Being and Time (), . . . = . ; . = .. : . = ..


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OnEreignis as that conjunction see : . =Identity andDierence, . bereignet.

: . = . : Wre der Mensch nicht seiend,dann knnte auch diese Lichtung nicht geschehen.

. = . . Cf. : .. . = .. / : . =Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, .

Entheben; . = . nicht anderes ist als dieses;. = ., Fhigkeit gehrt zum Wirklichsein.

Ibid. . = . . Ibid. . = ., Drngen zu; . = . , treibt

sich, Vorgetriebensein; . = . Hineintreibenzu. Sich-zeitigung or Zeitigung is never to be translated astemporalization; see Zollikoner Seminare, . = ZollikonSeminars. : Zeitigung als Sich-zeitigen ist Sich-entfal-ten, aufgehen und so erscheinen.

: . =Basic Questions of Philosophy, . , Her-vor-bringen heit Ans-licht-bringen. This is said properly of hu-man being but applies analogously to all life.

/: . = . , Sich-vor-in das eigene Wozu;. = . Sich-in-sich-selbst-Vorlegen. : . =., in seine zurckstellen.

/ : ., = . , : Sie [die Maschine]kann sich nicht selbst auf einen Betrieb einstellen und umstellen,whrend der Organismus seine eigene Bewegtheit leitet, einleitetund umleitet . sich selbst wiederherstellt und erneuert. Selbst-herstellung berhaupt, Selbstleitung und Selbsterneuerung sindoenbar Momente, die den Organismus gegenber der Maschinekennzeichnen .

Ibid. . = . and . = . Selbst-erhaltung.

Ibid. . = . : Nur was fhig ist und noch fhig ist,lebt; was nicht mehr fhig ist, das lebt nicht mehr. Cf. :. . , [Dasein] existiert stndig entlang diesem Rande


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des Nicht. This is said properly of human being but analogouslyts animal life.

. = . . / : . = . . Ibid. . = . . This is said properly of human being

but applies analogously to animal life. Ibid. . = . . ; . = . bei sich selbst

einzubehalten. Ibid. . = . Selbstcharakter; . = . Eigen-

tmlichkeit (McNeill: proper peculiarity); . =.,Bei-sich-sein.

Ibid. . = . . Regarding animal intentionality, see / : . = .

: die Bewegung ist in sich selbst eine Bewegung nach ;ein Greifen nach Das Sehen ist das Sehen des Gesichteten, dasHren ist das Hren des Gehrten.

Zollikoner Seminare. =Zollikon Seminars. . . = . . / : . = .. : . = .. Ibid. . = .. See De anima, , b . Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, , , intellectus

noster potentiam per potentiam cognoscat. : . = .. : . . : . = .. Ibid. . = . . : . = . . . = . , Verstndlichkeit. Ibid. . = . Sinn hat nur das Dasein.

Ibid. . = . . Ibid. . = . . Ibid. = Dieses [=Dasein] istexistierend seine

Welt.


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: . = . , zusammenbringen In das Unver-bor-gene der Anwesung.

: , no. = , no. . : .= . die Weltoenheit des Daseins; : .

erschlieend erschlossenes; : .: ein geworfener. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, = ; Aquinas, Quaestiones

disputatae de veritate, quaestio, articulum, respondeo ; Aristotle,Metaphysics , b .

Cf. / : . = . : Das als ist die Bezeichnungfr das Strukturmoment jenes ursprnglich einbrechenden Zwi-schen. For a brief statement on the clearing as hermeneutical

space and time, see : . . = . . In what follows I treat only the apophantic as, not the herme-

neutical as. : . . = . . See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, , , ,

respondeo, adnem:similiter unumquodque habet esse et opera-tionem. Or to reverse the direction, qualis modus essendi talis mo-dus operandi: a things way of being determines its way of acting.

/ : . = . . : . = . . I here correct my earlier reading

(ibid.) of Zeit in place of Dasein. I cite Heideggers words spoken in the classroom (Thursday,

February ) from the typescript of the Simon Moser Nach-schrift, p. . , corresponding to the much abbreviated pas-sage at / : . = . .

This text is from theNachschrift(see previous note), . .,corresponding roughly to / : . . = . .

/ : . = . ; ibid. . = . ,Grundgeschehen im Wesen des Menschen.

Zollikoner Seminare. = . aus-stehen eines Oenheits-bereich. Respectively Confessions .. andEnneads, , , , line .


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: . = . uns entrckt und die Ferne gibt;Wesen der Ferne.

: . = . . See also : . = . and : . .

. = . . Ibid. . = . . /: . =. Unterschied vom Sein und Seien-

dem. . : . (alternately Nietzsche ,. )=Nietzsche :

. Wesensherkunft, Herkunft von Anwesen. Japan und Heidegger, ed. Hartmut Buchner (Sigmaringen: Jan

Thorecke, ), . . : . =., Oenheit, Fragwrdigsten; ibid., . =

. . : . = .. : . berwindung der ontologischen Dierenz zwi-

schen Sein und Seiendem. : . =Mindfulness, . nach der Wahrheit des Seyns

und ihrer Grndung im Da-sein. Ibid. .= . wie west die Wahrheit des Seyns. : . =The Essence of Human Freedom, . drngt

in die Frage nach dem Menschen. : . = . . : . = . : der Mensch west so, da er das Da,

das heit die Lichtung des Seins, ist. Cf. : . : DieLichtung-sein in sie als Oenes sich loswerfen das Da-sein.

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Gatherings2011-01Sheehan