32   Part I: Studies


persisted in the modern manner of measuring out Being from the human being; that is, his focus remained on subjectivity in the “constitution” of the phenomenon. As we have observed, the early Heidegger was tempted along this way, too, but certainly after Being and Time – and as reflected in these notebooks – he clearly came to understand Aletheia as another name for Being itself. The phainomenon is not merely a “constituted” content for ever more rigorous consideration and description, but rather a vibrant temporal emergence: Being as aletheia – as physis. Husserl, according to Heidegger, missed this altogether and, in fact, for whatever reasons, actively “closed himself” against precisely this exposure to the experience of Being as aletheia – an experience which, as Heidegger also suggests here, would have turned Husserl out of the certainty and security of his transcendental-phenomenological program.

On the matter of Being as physis as aletheia, the many “observations” in GA 97 do not break new ground, as we have noted, but they do give us further evidence of the central importance of this motif in his thinking in the 1940s. He had found in the Ur-words of the earliest Greek thinkers a way out of the transcendental approach to Being that had ensnared him in Being and Time. His entries in this volume time and again seek to counter the transcendental- phenomenological inflection that it is the human being who is the “source” of Being and truth. Rather, as with the ancient Greeks, it must be recognized that Being, not the human being, is the “source” of unconcealment and concealment, no matter what our own activity of unconcealing and concealing. Thus:

Unconcealment unfolding as Being; Being is the whence – where-unto and wherein of the unfolding of revealing-concealing.

(GA 97: 456)

III. Being as Aletheia as Independent of the Relation with Human Beings

One additional entry in GA 97 regarding this core theme of Being as Aletheia stands out because it brings into even sharper relief the radicality of Heidegger’s position in relation to any


Richard Capobianco - Heidegger's Way of Being