Making Sense of Heidegger

A Paradigm Shift

Thomas Sheehan

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783481200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Making Sense of Heidegger presents a radically new reading of Heidegger’s notoriously difficult oeuvre. Clearly written and rigorously grounded in the whole of Heidegger’s writings, Thomas Sheehan’s latest book argues for the strict unity of Heidegger’s thought on the basis of three theses: that his work was phenomenological from beginning to the end; that “being” refers to the meaningful presence of things in the world of human concerns; and that what makes such intelligibility possible is the existential structure of human being as the thrown-open or appropriated “clearing.” Sheehan offers a compelling alternative to the classical paradigm that has dominated Heidegger research over the last half-century, as well as a valuable retranslation of the key terms in Heidegger's lexicon. This important book opens a new path in Heidegger research that will stimulate dialogue not only within Heidegger studies but also with philosophers outside the phenomenological tradition and scholars in theology, literary criticism, and existential psychiatry.

PART ONE Aristotelian Beginnings

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Being in Aristotle

“Philosophy,” Heidegger says, “is knowledge of the essence of things.”¹ Itsearches for the causes and principles of things in order to get at the ultimate reasons that explain what, why, and how things are. With Socrates and Plato the philosophical question formally emerges in the West as the dialectical inquiry beyond, for example, virtues to virtue-ness (the Meno) or beyond pious acts to pious-ness (the Euthyphro). In general terms the philosophical question asks for the X-ness of any X. We may designate this “-ness” dimension as the essence of X, if we may use the word “essence” broadly and prescind for now from the distinction of essence/existence.

But the highest form of philosophy—what Aristotle called “first philosophy”² —asks not about the essence of particular things or regions of things (the X-ness of all Xs, the Y-ness of all Ys). It asks instead about the very “is-ness” of all-that-is, the realness that makes anything be real. It is “justified speech about the whole and the first,” or in Heidegger’s terms, about “the whole with regard to its origins.”³ It encompasses everything that exists, and inquires into it from the most universal viewpoint, that of its realness as such. In that sense, this question does not belong to any of the “partial” or “regional” sciences.⁴ Such sciences cut off one or another attribute of things (motion, for example, in Aristotle’s Physics) and study things under that aspect. By contrast, the question of first philosophy becomes: What is a thing, any particular thing, insofar as it is real? For Aristotle, a thing (τὸ ὄν) = something that “is” or “has being,”⁵ something that is “real.” But, of course, this prompts the question of what “real” means—which is the core question of all metaphysics: “What constitutes the realness of the real?” To articulate this “realness of the real,” Heidegger (like most all other philosophers) employs the two most formally indicative words in the lexicon, in his case, “das Sein” for “realness” and “das Seiende” for “the real.” As formally indicative, all such words (and their equivalents in any other language) are only placeholders, stand-in terms, for whatever Aristotle or Heidegger or any other philosopher thinks the realness of the real consists in. For Plato the realness of a thing consisted in its “ideal intelligible appearance” (εἶδος). Aristotle thought the realness of a thing consisted in its possession of or its functioning unto perfection (ἐντελέχεια, ἐνέργεια), whereas Aquinas thought it lay in the thing’s participation, via creation, in the very life of God. In other words, the terms “realness” or Sein or esse or “being” are only formal indications of what philosophers will argue is the content or meaning of the “realness” of things. For Heidegger, as we shall see, das Sein is only a formal indication of what he will argue is the content of that term—namely, the meaningful presence of something in and for human intelligence. Therefore, in what follows I will use the words Sein, Seiendheit, and “realness” as ex aequo formal indications of the specific, not-yet-determined content that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger—and we ourselves—have yet to argue for.⁶

The circularity here is obvious. To ask for the realness of whatever-is-real promotes that question to the level of a second one: What is meant by—what constitutes—the “realness” that things are said to “have” to the degree that they are “real”? Two questions converge here: What is a thing insofar as it is real? What is the very realness that such a thing is said to have? These two questions comprise the work of traditional ontology. Asking and answering a third question—“What is the highest instance of the real-in-its-realness?”—is the work of “natural” (i.e., philosophical) theology. Insofar as metaphysics traditionally comprises both ontology (general metaphysics) and natural theology (special metaphysics), Heidegger refers to it as “onto-theology.”

Aristotle opens up the ontological moment of metaphysics when he declares that “there is a certain science that investigates things insofar as they are real at all.”⁷ But he also hints (and only that) at the second and more important question at the beginning of Book VI of the Metaphysics, when he says in effect that we will not find an adequate answer to the first question, focused on real things, until we first answer the second question: What do we mean by “realness as such”?⁸

The question that was raised of old and is raised now and will always be raised, the question that is always a puzzle—“What is a real thing?” [τί τὸ ὄν;]—comes down to the question “What is realness itself?” [τίς ἡ οὐσία;].⁹

If the second question, about realness as such, were systematically asked, one possible solution would be to trace all instances of realness back to the entity that is the most real of all, God as das Seiendste.¹⁰ However, to anchor realness in some thing or person, even theologically in the highest divine thing or person, is to leave unresolved the question of what constitutes the realness of that thing as well as the nature of realness at all.

But what do we mean by translating Aristotle’s word οὐσία as “realness”? Figuring out what that key philosophical term means—both in Aristotle (οὐσία) and in Heidegger (Seiendheit)—requires a brief review of the Greek words that underlie it.

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The Greek verb “to be” (εἶναι) declines the nominative of its present participle as:

MASCULINE	FEMININE	NEUTER
ὤν	οὖσα	ὄν
he, being [e.g., tall],	she, being [tall],	it, being [tall]

To form the word “a thing,” Greek takes the neuter present participle ὄν, combines it with the definite article, and thereby turns it into the noun τὸ ὄν, parallel to the German neologism das Seiende, the Italian l’ente, and the article-less Latin ens. Tὸ ὄν can express either a single thing that is real or all things that are real. We may translate τὸ ὄν into English as “a thing,” or “things” or “the real,” when it refers in general to whatever “has realness.” “Things-that-are-real” is sometimes expressed by the plural, τὰ ὄντα.

On the other hand, to express the realness that these things “have,” Greek takes the feminine present participle οὖσα and turns it into a noun: οὐσία, which means “realness” (that which makes the real be real) or, inelegantly, “being-ness” (Seiend-heit), analogous to the way one might say that “treeness” makes a tree be a tree and not a loaf of bread. In the citation above (Metaphysics VI 1, 1028b2–4), Aristotle said that the answer to the question “What is a real thing?” comes down to what one means by realness, or, in Greek, what one means by οὐσία, the very “is-ness” of “what-is,” or the “being” of “what-has-being.” Heidegger rejects the usual translation of οὐσία as “substance,” from the Latin substantia (even though he might have appreciated its etymology: the rare verb substo, the basis of substantia, has the sense of “to be present”). Medieval translations of οὐσία as essentia (the “esse-ness” of what-has-esse) tend to understand that Latin term as “essence” in contradistinction to “existence,” whereas in Aristotle οὐσία covers both essence and existence. Therefore, to express the οὐσία of τὸ ὄν (the realness of the real) while avoiding those translation traps, Heidegger translates οὐσία as the “beingness of things” (“die Seiendheit des Seienden,” which is exactly the same as das Sein des Seienden in its traditional sense).¹¹ But again, this usage still leaves open the question of what Heidegger thinks Sein/Seiendheit/realness cashes out as in Aristotle and in his own work.

Οὐσία was a common Greek term before Plato and Aristotle brought it into the province of philosophy. In its primary sense it refers to a thing or things. But the philosophers used it to refer also to the realness of a thing; and one has to be clear on which of the two usages is operative in a given case—that is, whether in a text from Plato or Aristotle οὐσία means a particular thing or the very realness of that thing. When Heidegger refers to οὐσία, he means it predominantly in the second sense: as the Sein or realness of a thing.

In classical Greek, regardless of whether οὐσία is used non-philosophically to refer to the real, or philosophically to refer to the realness of the real, the notion of “real” has two connotations: a thing’s presence and its stability: being as the stable presence of something. Here “presence” means availability, with overtones of what belongs to a person. In its pre-philosophical sense, οὐσία meant what is one’s own: property in the form of goods or wealth, livestock, land, or even a worker’s tools. Oὐσία refers to one’s stable possessions or holdings, something that one has a stake in, as with John Locke’s “to have a property in something.”¹² Heidegger’s argument is worth citing at length.

In Greek οὐσία means things—not just any things but things that in a certain way are exemplary in their realness, namely the things that belong to you, your goods and possessions, house and home (what you own, your wealth), what is at your disposal. These things—goods and possessions—are able to stand at your disposal because they are fixed, steadfastly within your reach, at hand, present in your immediate environment. . . .

What makes them exemplary? Our goods and possessions are invariantly within our reach. Ever at our disposal, they are what lies close to us, they are right here, presented on a platter; they are steadfastly presented to us. They are the closest to us, and as steadfastly closest, they are in a special sense at-hand, present before us, present to us. Because they are exemplarily here, and because they are present to us, we call our goods, possessions, and wealth our estate—this is what the Greeks meant by οὐσία: our present holdings.¹³ In fact with οὐσία the Greeks meant nothing but steadfast presence, and this is what we understand by realness. This steadfast presence or present steadfastness is what we mean by the realness [of something]. Whatever measures up to this notion of realness as steadfast presence, whatever is always at hand, is what the Greeks called a thing in the proper sense.¹⁴

Clearly this “presence” (the presence of the thing, or equally, the thing as present) indicates not merely the fact that someth...

Table of contents

• Frequently Cited German Texts and Their Abbreviated English Translations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Aristotelian Beginnings
• Part Two: The Early Heidegger
• Part Three: The Later Heidegger
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliographies