Thomas Sheehan
Stanford University
What about Plato’s and Aristotle’s most general name for being: οὐσία as stable presence? Heidegger espies in that term a hint of what he will eventually call by the (potentially misleading) term “time.”
And finally the basic term οὐσία (which is decisive for the future terms “substance” and essentia) harbors within itself the relation to “time”: it has the character of presence in itself (more pointedly: οὐσία—παρουσία as “one’s holdings,” something at one’s disposal, one’s possessions, something stable in itself and constant).125
“Presence” for the Greeks is παρουσία [παρά, “unto” + οὐσία], shortened to οὐσία; and “presence” for the Greeks means being. To say that something is means that it is present, or better, that it is (as we must say in German) present-to [west an] in the present moment [Gegenwart].126
And in speaking of being as a thing’s stability he says:
The stable constancy [of a thing] is [its] pure presence—being-present in the full sense… . This entails a gesture toward the present [Gegenwart] and thus toward “time.”127
Heidegger argues that the so-called “temporal” character of οὐσία can be gathered from Plato’s designation of the “really real” (ὄντως ὄν) as ἀεὶ ὄν and ἀΐδος οὐσία (usually “eternal being”),128 although Heidegger argues that “the more sharply οὐσία is grasped and associated with the [Aristotelian] ‘categories,’ the more the relation to time gets shrouded.”129 In fact, Heidegger’s own notion of “time” differs radically from what he found in the Greeks. The classical philosophy of time (χρόνος) worked out in Aristotle’s Physics, for example, was of no use to Heidegger in his search for the source of being, because Book IV of that treatise focuses on time as a continuous series of “nows” and considers time as a thing that is. Thus the Physics is caught up in the classical question about the being of things rather than about being taken for itself.130
The customary ideas of time—as well as those that work out time as “experienced” time—will not get to what is being sought after in the [basic] question, since each of these ideas apprehends time as an entity and as something that is in a state of becoming.131
[I]t became clear that the traditional concept of time was in no way adequate even for correctly posing the question concerning the time-character of presence, to say nothing of answering it. Time became questionable in the same way as being did.132
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Greek notions of time were utterly inadequate—if, that is, one relied only on fourth-century philosophy. But there was also fifth-century tragic poetry, and Heidegger saw in Sophocles’ Ajax (646–647) something close to the radical notion that he was searching for: “time” as that which lets what was heretofore hidden (ἄδηλα) emerge (φύειν as ἀληθεύειν).133
ἅπανθ᾽ ὁ μακρὸς κἀναρίθμητος χρόνος
φύει τ᾽ ἄδηλα καὶ φανέντα κρύπτεται
Great and measureless time
discloses all that is hidden and hides all that is disclosed.134
Such a non-“temporal” meaning of “time” in Heidegger’s work is the chief reason why his early use of “temporal” language can easily mislead the reader. I am referring to such words as:
Zeit: the “time” of the title Sein und Zeit;
Temporalität: the “time-character” of the clearing. (It is equivalent to Zeit in the title Sein und Zeit.)
Zeitlichkeit: the so-called “temporality” of ex-sistence.
In Heidegger’s texts these three terms have nothing specifically or directly to do with time in our usual sense of the word or with what Aristotle called χρόνος.135 Rather, Heidegger used those terms as only provisional names either for (1) ἀλήθεια-1 as the clearing (= Zeit and Temporalität) or for (2) the opening-up or holding-open of the clearing (= Zeitlichkeit). In other words, these so-called “temporal” terms actually refer to the openness that makes intelligibility possible. For that reason I will always put “time,” “temporality,” and “temporal” within scare quotes.
In that same vein, the terms Zeitigung and Sich-zeitigung should never be translated by such barbaric neologisms as “temporalization” (Macquarrie-Robinson) or “temporalizing” (Stambaugh) but rather always in terms of “opening-up.” If one were to follow the usual way of translating Heidegger, the phrase “Zeitigung als Sich-zeitigen” would come out as “temporalization as self-temporalizing,” which says absolutely nothing, not even in Heidegger-speak. According to Heidegger’s own gloss on this phrase, it means “unfolding, going forth, appearing,”136 and thus it might be interpreted (without the faux reflexive of “self-unfolding”) as “an opening-up as an intrinsic unfolding.” In any case, in his later writings Heidegger was finally clear: these so-called “time” words were only preliminary attempts to name the thrown-open or dis-closed clearing, ἀλήθεια-1.
“Time” is a preliminary name for the openness of the clearing.137
“Time” as a preliminary name for the thrown-open domain.138
The unfolding of Temporalität is a preliminary name for the openness of the clearing.139
“Time” is … the clearing of being itself.140
“Temporality” [Zeitlichkeit] and its [correlative, the] time-character [of the clearing,] as a way of announcing the open-ness of the open.141
“Temporality” constitutes the clearedness of the open [the Da] in an thrown-open, horizon-forming way.142
We note two things: (1) Zeitlichkeit—“temporality” as ex-sistence’s (“ex-static”) maintaining of the openness of the open—is always in correlation with Zeit and Temporalität (see chapter 7). And (2) these latter two terms— “time” and the “time-character of the clearing”—are co-equal names for what Being and Time called the “horizon” for all forms of the being of things, and what the later Heidegger re-articulated as the clearing.143 Thus in Heidegger’s early work “time” refers to the “horizonal” space within which being as the meaningful presence of things occurs,144 and “temporality” refers to ex-sistence’s thrown-openness as sustaining that open space.145
In Being and Time I have attempted to develop a new concept of “time” and “temporality” in the sense of thrown-openness.146
Meaningful presence (being) belongs in the intrinsically concealed clearing. The intrinsically concealed clearing (“time”) brings forth meaningful presence (being).147
Thus Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of “time” as the ever-hidden openedness-for-the-sake-of-intelligibility explains an otherwise enigmatic text from 1964. In a lecture he presented in France, titled “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger suggested that a more accurate title for the whole of his major work (and not just of SZ I.3) should be not Sein und Zeit but rather Zeit und Sein, “‘time’ and being.” But he then paraphrased Zeit und Sein as “Lichtung und Anwesenheit”—that is, “clearing and meaningful presence.”148
Moreover, the question of “time” as the thrown-open-but-hidden clearing plays a fundamental role in what Heidegger called his “history of being.” He unfortunately misspoke when he taxed Western metaphysics with Seinsvergessenheit—“the forgottenness of being”—when in fact metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche spoke of virtually nothing else but “being.” Indeed, absent a familiarity with being, no one could be human. (“Being is the atmosphere we breathe, without which we would descend to [the level of] the mere beast.”)149 What Heidegger meant to say, rather, was that metaphysics overlooks or forgets the so-called “temporality-and-time” correlation—that is, the clearing sustained by appropriated ex-sistence. It was in terms of this overlooking and forgetting that Heidegger charted the devolution of Western culture that begins with Parmenides’ “original and in fact necessary failure to experience ‘time’ as the openedness of the clearing” and eventually became “necessarily and unconsciously a suppression of this region and of every impetus to question in this direction.”150 This oblivion and suppression becomes thicker, Heidegger claims, with the “in-break of Christianity into Western thinking” with its notion of God as “eternal truth.”151 And further along in the history of philosophy:
The merely ostensible de-Christianizing of this relation in modern times— when the ground of being is taken as reason, consciousness, absolute spirit, life, and will to power—only further intensifies the suppression… . Thus finally the forgottenness of [the clearing for] being grows, the most obvious sign of which is the belief that “being” is the most general, most empty, and most self-explanatory “concept.”152
At the end of this centuries-long devolution Heidegger found his work cut out for him: to articulate for the first time in Western philosophy the ever-operative yet hidden clearing as the reason why there is any meaning at all.
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This is as far as Heidegger goes with οὐσία and the question of “time” in his 1937 text “The Question about Being.” But we have to ask: Why did Heidegger settle on “time” at all?—even when it is properly understood as the throw-openness of the clearing?
For Heidegger the human need to understand things discursively—that is, as mediated to us qua meaningful—is an epistemological deficiency and a sign of ontological imperfection, at least by comparison with the highest model of perfection, the self-coincident and thus self-intuiting God of Metaphysics XII 7–9.153 God cannot do ontology. Here the word “ontology” does not refer to the science that considers things insofar as they are real (“have being”). Rather, it refers to the necessity of raising questions and answering them—that is, knowing things not directly through an intellectual intuition but mediately, through their meanings. Insofar as we are thoroughly determined by (and in fact are) λόγος, we know something only by synthesizing it with one or more of its possible meanings, while at the same time keeping those meanings distinct from the thing in question. For example, “Aristotle is a philosopher”: here we have a σύν-θεσις or putting-together of the man Aristotle and the predicate “philosopher.” However, as good as he was (and for Aquinas he was even the philosopher), Aristotle does not exhaust the class of “all philosophers.” Here we have διαίρεσις or dis-tinction (διά + αἵρεσις), a keeping-separate of Aristotle and the class of “all philosophers,” and by this act of synthesizing-and-distinguishing we come to know Aristotle as a philosopher—that is, as one of the class “philosophers.” God does not do such synthesizing and distinguishing, because God cannot. As perfectly self-coincident, with no unrealized potential (μὴ ὕλην ἔχει),154 Aristotle’s God is the apex of immediacy, perfectly closed in upon itself in a divine narcissism of pure self-presence.
This reference to a theological limit-situation helps clarify why “time”— thrown-openness—is associated with the understanding of being. In order to know anything at all we must synthesize and distinguish the thing and its possible meanings; and in order to do that, we must (metaphorically speaking) “traverse an open space” (eine offene Weite zu durchgehen) within which the synthesizing-and-distinguishing can take place.155 This “open space” is what Heidegger calls the clearing that lets us relate things and meanings.156 As thrown-open, human beings are a priori thrown into the labor of mediation, condemned to (or better, liberated for) making sense of things both practically and theoretically. This fatedness to mediation is emblematic of finitude, proof positive that we are not completely self-present and thus are bereft of a godlike intuition of the “unchanging reality” of things. Meaningful presence is never pure presence and actuality, but always open-ended, suffused with further possibilities. Our knowing is not perfect light but chiaroscuro, not the divine’s eternal rest but an ever ongoing movement of disclosure coupled with an inevitable failure-to-disclose.
At the very beginning of his 1915 inaugural habilitation lecture, “The Concept of Time in the Science of History.” Heidegger placed an epigram taken from Meister Eckhart that define time in terms of possibility: “Time is what changes and becomes multiple. Eternity remains simple.”157 Before Eckhart, St. Augustine had likewise drawn a contrast between the concentrated unity of the eternal God and the dispersion and distraction of human beings (inter te unum et nos multos in multis per multa),158 which is further evidenced in the simplicity of eternity versus the distention of time: “Nothing passes away in eternity; all is present. Time, on the other hand, is never completely present, but the past is always driven on by the future.”159 Over against God’s ever-actualized self-coincidence there is the dispersion and stretching out of the human spirit, the distentio animi, a phrase that Augustine borrowed from Plotinus’ διάστασις ζωῆς, the “spreading out of life.”160 This is a perspective that Heidegger took over in Being and Time under the rubric of “die ‘zeitliche’ Erstreckung des Daseins.” the so-called “temporal” stretch of ex-sistence.161 For Heidegger, this “stretchedness” was not a matter of multiple now-moments strung out in a line (hence his scare quotes around the word “zeitliche”), but rather a two-pulse movement of
living “ahead” as possibility among possibilities and
“returning” from that aheadness to synthesize one of those possibilities with whatever one encounters in the present.
The aheadness-moment (sich schon vorweg-sein) “carries us away and gives us distance [διάστασις, distentio]”162—it opens up the clearing. Thus, in keeping with Augustine, Heidegger defines “time” as “the fact that I am dis-closed.”163 But along with this “distance,” human being also “returns to” (i.e., remains with) itself and the things it encounters as it renders them meaningfully present in terms of one or another possibility (Sein bei as Gegenwärtigung). Our structural κίνησις—a combination of absence and presence, of living ahead and returning—is what allows us to make sense of ourselves and of whatever we meet. That is, the interpretive “as” functions existentielly in human thought and practice only because it functions existentially as the very structure of human ex-sistence. Here Heidegger’s argument reflects the medieval Scholastic axiom operari sequitur esse: activities are consonant with and derive from natures; or in the reverse: natures determine activities.164 In the present case, our being stretched between the actual thing and its possible meanings follows from our kinetic bivalence, the fact that we have our actuality as our stretched-aheadness as possibility.
But how exactly do we sustain the openedness of the clearing that we ourselves are? The movedness of human life is analogous to the bivalent movedness of any living thing: a matter of being relatively self-absent—stretched beyond itself (Weg-von-sich)—while remaining relatively self-present (bei-sich-selbst ein-behalten).165 In the case of man, Heidegger calls this movedness a fortnehmende Zukehr, a being carried away into possibilities (fortnehmende) that is always “returning to” itself (Zukehr), in the sense of always remaining with itself.166
̓This being-ahead-of-oneself as a returning [Sich-vorweg-sein als Zurückkommen] is, if I may put it this way, a peculiar kind of movement that ex-sistence qua “temporal” constantly makes.167
Being carried away into possibility and returning to oneself as actuality opens the discursive space that Heidegger calls the world, the clearing, or the open. “To ex-sist.” Heidegger says, “might be more adequately translated as ‘sus-taining a realm of openness.’”168 Within that existential space we carry out our existentiel mediations. The “re-turn” or turning back to our here-and-now selves from out of the possibility that we are is also a “re-turn” to the things we currently encounter as we render them meaningfully present in terms of this or that specific possibility. This dynamic structure of ahead-and-return is what Heidegger is getting at with his notion of “temporality” as thrown-openness. We are an ec-centric self, an incompletely self-present aheadness-in-possibility that “returns” to make sense of ourselves and of things.
In 1930 Heidegger interpreted that structural movement of thrown-ahead- and-returning in terms of existential thrown-openness (“thrown projectedness”: geworfener Entwurf) that makes possible the existentiel synthesizing of things with possible meanings. First, the existential structure:
[Existential] projection is a simple, unified “occurrence” that can be formally characterized as σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις, both at the same time. Projection is διαίρεσις—i.e., as “taking away,” it takes us away as projection. In a certain sense it stretches us apart from ourselves, endows us with a stretching [Ers- treckung]. It takes us away into the possible, not so as to lose ourselves there but rather so as to let the possible, as the rendering-possible of the actual, speak back precisely upon ourselves as projection, as binding—uniting and binding: σύνθεσις.169
From this existential structure there follow existentiel acts of making sense of things, whether by way of the apophantic “as” of declarative sentences or the hermeneutical “as” of practical activity. Our ever-operative existential identity as stretched-ahead (being present to ourselves as living ahead in possibilities) is what makes possible the discursive “as” whereby we under- stand what and how things currently are. Thus the thrown-openness that is our very being
is also that “occurrence” in which the thing we problematize as the as-structure has its origin. The “as” is the expression for what breaks open in the in-break [of us among things]… . Only because we have broken into the dimension of this distinction between the actual and the possible—between things and being in the broadest sense—do we have the possibility of grasping and understanding something as something.170
Ex-sistence as appropriated to sustaining the clearing is the basic occurrence of openedness: das Grundgeschehnis der Wahrheit.171 We are structurally dis-closed (erschlossen) and thus sustain the space within which the “as” can function and the discursive understanding of things can take place.172 As such, we are pan-hermeneutical. Our lived environment is not just a natural encircling ring of instinctual drives that befits an animal, but an open-ended as-structured world of possible meanings that we can talk about, argue over, and vote on. Whatever we meet, we meet under the rubric of “is manifest as”—that is, “is accessible as” and therefore “is meaningful as.” Our existential thrown-openness entails that we can and must make sense of whatever we meet. We are ur-ἑρμηνεία.173
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125. GA 73, 1: 86.12-16: “birgt … οὐσία … den Zeitbezug.”
126. GA 34: 51.20–24 = 38.29-32. Anwesen translates the Latin praesentia.
127. GA 73, 1: 85.25-27 and .30: “In-sich-ständige Beständigkeit ist reine Anwesenheit— Anwesung im vollen Sinne… . Hierin liegt der Wink auf Gegenwart und damit auf die Zeit.”
128. Respectively, Symposium 211a1, Timaeus 27d6–a1 and 37e5. See chapter 2, note 41.
129. GA 73, 1: 86.16-18: “Aber je schärfer … um so mehr verhüllt sich der Zeitbezug.”
130. See GA 24: 327–361 = 231–256.
131. GA 73, 1: 90.10–13. “Experienced” time: literally, the time of “experience,” “die Zeit des ‘Erlebens.’”
132. GA 11: 147.16–20 = xii.23–27, my emphasis. Time-character: “Zeitcharacter.”
133. In this regard, see Bernini’s unfinished group “La Verità svelata dal Tempo” (“Truth unveiled by Time”), Galleria Borghese, Rome, http://www.galleriaborghese.it/borghese/it/verita.htm. (While “truth” is certainly unveiled in Bernini’s sculpture, the planned companion statue of “time” was never begun.)
134. GA 73, 1: 134.8. In 1946 Heidegger cited this text in a letter to Prof. Eduard Baumgarten in an effort to apologize (?) for a secret, blackballing letter that Heidegger had written in 1933, accusing Baumgarten of “associating with the Jew Frankel,” not being a National Socialist, and so on (see GA 16: 774–775 and 417–418). In his 1946 letter to Baumgarten Heidegger suggested letting bygones be bygones, and he translated line 647 as follows (my English rendering of his German): “[Time] leaves tasks unopenable [! ἄδηλα] and takes appearances back into itself.” See Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” note 14.
135. See Schellings Abhandlung, 228.28–229.6 = 188.24–40 for notions of time that Heidegger excludes (numbers 1–3), and for the one he accepts (number 4).
136. Zollikoner Seminare, 203.7–8 = 158.10–11: “Zeitigung als Sich-zeitigen ist Sich-entfalten, aufgehen und so erscheinen.”
137. GA 9: 376.11 = 285.26–27: “die ‘Zeit’ als der Vorname für die Wahrheit des Seins.” GA 49: 57.2–3: “Der Name ‘Zeit’ is hier der Vorname für die Wahrheit des Seins.” GA 65: 331.23–24 = 263.1–3: “ἀλήθεια—Offenheit und Lichtung des Sichverbergenden … verschiedene Namen für dasselbe.” GA 14: 36.11–12 = 28.20–21. GA 65: 74.10–11 = 59.20–23: “‘Zeit’ ist … Wahrheit der Wesung des Seins.” GA 66: 145.25 = 124.6: “Lichtung (Zeit).” GA 73, 1: 758.2: “‘Zeit’ hier als Zeit-Raum im Sinne der Gegend.”
138. Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung, 229.4 = 188.38.
139. GA 9: 159 note a = 123 note a: “Zeitigung der Temporalität als Vorname der Wahrheit des Seyns.” Also: GA 69: 95.3–5: “Zeitlichkeit zeitigt den Lichtungsbereich für das Sein (die dort [in Sein und Zeit] sogennante ‘Temporalität’). Zeitlichkeit ist der Vorname für die Wahrheit des Seyns.” GA 68: 36.11–12: “Das Offene des Da (Da-heit).”
140. Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung, 229.4 and .6 = 188.38–40. Here Heidegger himself puts “Zeit” in scare quotes.
141. GA 88: 46.7–8: “(Zeitlichkeit und ihre Temporalität als Anzeige der Da-heit des Da.)”
142. SZ 408.7–8 = 460.20–21: “Weil die Zeitlichkeit die Gelichtetheit des Da ekstatisch- horizontal konstituiert …” italicized in the original; ibid., SZ 411.25–26 = 464.20–21: “als ekstatisch-zeitliches je schon erschlossen”; ibid., SZ 410.34–35 = 463.29–30: “Zeitlichkeit … Erschlossenheit des Da” (italicized).
143. After 1931 the term “Temporalität” no longer appears in Heidegger’s lecture courses.
144. GA 14: 40.10–11 = 32.8–9: “jenes Eigene der ‘Zeit’ … von woher sich ‘Sein’ als Anwesen er-gibt.” GA 65: 451.4–5 = 355.15–16: “‘Sein und Zeit’ ist aber doch darauf angelegt, die ‘Zeit’ als den Entwurfsbereich für das Seyn zu erweisen.” See the equation of “Zeit” and “Lichtung” in the chiasmic phrase at GA 14: 90.1–2 = 73.1–2.
145. Re “sustains”: Zollikoner Seminare, 273.31–274.1 = 218.14–15: “‘existieren’ mit ‘aus- stehen eines Offenheitsbereiches’ zu übersetzen.” Also GA 65: 352.28–29 = 278.37–38: “Ausstehen der Lichtung”; and GA 66: 217.9–10 = 191.10: Ausstehen der Lichtung. In another formulation: GA 66: 308.13 = 274.21 (et passim in GA 65): “[die] Gründung der Lichtung im Da-sein.” “Ausstehen” should never be translated as “to withstand” as at GA 9: 374.7 = 284.4, but always as “to sustain.”
146. GA 16: 708.10–11 = 85.39–44: “[Ich habe] in ‘Sein und Zeit’ einen neuen Begriff der Zeit und Zeitlichkeit im Sinne der ekstatischen Offenheit zu entwickeln versucht.” GA 49: 54.28–29: die ekstatische Offenheit der “Zeit.”
147. GA 11: 151.26–28 = xx.31–33: Heidegger’s 1962 letter to William J. Richardson.
148. GA 14: 90.1–2 = 73.1–2: “statt ‘Sein und Zeit’ Lichtung und Anwesenheit.”
149. GA 42: 169.22–25 = 98.13–14. “Being” here translates Seyn. 150. GA 73, 1: 86.26–29.
150. GA 73, 1: 86.26–29.
151. GA 73, 1: 86.30–32.
152. GA 73, 1: 86.32–87.4.
153. Re highest model: GA 3: 21.27 = 15.22: “Erkennen ist primär Anschauung.” The principle applies beyond Kant. See SZ 33.35–38 = 57.20–22 and GA 83: 80.8; also Aquinas, Scriptum super sententiis I, distinction 3, quaestio 4, articulum 5, corpus: “Intelligere … dicit nihil aliud quam simplicem intuitum intellectus in id quod est praesens intelligibile.”
154. Metaphysics XII 9, 1075a4.
155. GA 15: 380.6 = 68.43. See GA 14: 81.35 and 84.3–4 = 66.19 and 68.9; and GA 7: 19.12 = 18.32.
156. Also “world.” Cf. “Die Lichtung des Seins, und nur sie, ist Welt”: GA 9: 326.15–16 = 248.37–38. GA 38: 168.13–14 = 140.7–8: “Das Sein im Ganzen … ist die Welt.” GA 79: 51.34–52.1 = 49.18: “Die Welt ist … das Sein selber.”
157. GA 1: 415.1–3 = 61.2–4. Heidegger’s italics.
158. Augustine, Confessiones XI 29, 39, Patrologia Latina, 32, 825.8–9.
159. Confessiones XI 11, 13, Patrologia Latina, 32, 814.48–51: “non autem praeterire quidquam in aeterno, sed totum esse praesens; nullum vero tempus totum esse praesens; et videat [quisquis] omne praeteritum propelli ex futuro.”
160. Respectively: Confessiones XI 26, 33, Patrologia Latina, 32, 822.47–49: “mihi visum est, nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem: sed cuius rei, nescio; et mirum, si non ipsius animi”; and Enneads III 7: 11.42. “The spreading out of life” is A. H. Armstrong’s translation in his Plotinus, Enneads, III, p. 341.11–12. Heidegger translates distentio as “Ausgestrecktheit” at GA 83: 69.2.
161. SZ 371.32 = 423.15. GA 26: 173.34 = 138.17: “Dasein als Erstreckung.” See GA 66: 315.18 = 280.31: “er-streckt und aus-streckt.” Heidegger first encountered the alleged etymology of Zeit in terms of “[ich] strecke mich” in Braig, Die Grundzüge der Philosophie, 88.32. Braig claims Zeit is traceable to τανύω, to stretch (see Iliad, XVII, 393: τάνυται, [a hide] is stretched). However, “Zeit” is more likely related to the Indo-European root dā-, “divide, division,” and the Greek δαίω, to divide.
162. GA 26: 285.18–19 = 221.17–18: uns entrückt und die Ferne gibt; Wesen der Ferne. SZ 192.4 = 236.19: Sich-vorweg-sein.”
163. “The fact that I am dis-closed”: “das ‘Offenbarmachen’ meiner selbst”: GA 83: 72.9–10. See SZ 147.2–3 = 187.13–14: “[die] Gelichtetheit, als welche wir die Erschlossenheit des Da charakterisierten.”
164. For example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 75, 3, corpus, ad finem: “similiter unumquodque habet esse et operationem.” Or, to reverse the direction, “qualis modus essendi talis modus operandi”: a thing’s way of being determines its way of acting. See GA 4: 65.26–28 = 87.27–29: “Jegliches … je nur das leistet, was es ist.”
165. GA 29/30: respectively 343.4 = 235.24–25 and 342.19 = 235.9. See chapter 5.
166. GA 29/30: 527.35 = 363.15–16. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, 14, 2 ad 1: “Redire ad essentiam suam nihil aliud est quam rem subsistere in se ipsum.” Aquinas here draws on Proclus, The Elements of Theology, proposition 82 (p. 76.29–30): Πᾶν τὸ ἑαυτοῦ γνωστικὸν πρὸς ἑαυτὸ παντῃ ἐπιστρεπτικόν ἐστιν. “All that is capable of self-knowledge is capable of completely returning to itself.”
167. GA 21: 147.23–26 = 124.19–20. I here correct my earlier reading (ibid.) of “Zeit” in place of “Dasein.”
168. Zollikoner Seminare, 274.1 = 218.15: “aus-stehen eines Offenheitsbereich.” See the translators’ note on the English page. GA 45: 169.24 = 146.28. GA 49: 41.25–28: “Ent-wurf besagt: “Er-öffnung und Offenhalten des Offenen, Lichten der Lichtung, in der das, was wir Sein (nicht das Seiende) nennen und somit unter diesem Namen auch kennen, eben als Sein offenkundig ist.”
169. The emphasis in the ET is my own. I cite Heidegger’s words spoken in the classroom (Thursday, 27 February 1930) from the typescript of the Simon Moser Nachschrift, p. 703.12–13, corresponding roughly to the much abbreviated passage at GA 29/30: 530.23–28 = 365.14–19. The Nachschrift is available at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (see bibliography).
170. This text is from the Nachschrift (see previous note), 703.28–704.6, corresponding roughly to GA 29/30: 530.30–531.7 = 365.21–30. See above, this chapter, note 94.
171. GA 36/37: 178.3–5 = 138.38–40: “Grundakt … Grundgeschehnis der Wahrheit”; ibid., 178.20–22 = 138.9–10: “Grundgeschehen im Wesen des Menschen.”
172. At GA 9: 377.22 = 286.29 and 377.28–378.1 = 287.2 “geworfene Entwurf” is defined as “entwerfende Offenhalten der Wahrheit des Seins.”
173. GA 21: 150.26-27 = 126.31-33: “das Verstehen, das dabei verstanden werden muß als eine Grundart des Seins unseres Daseins.” Ibid., 146.29–31 = 123.32–33: “ich bin—qua Dasein … verstehender Umgang.”