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WHAT IS A THING?

the proposition according to which the subject-predicate relationship is fourth (cf. p. 34). We should certainly not forget that we cited the reference to the so viewed connection as the opinion of the common and "natural" conception of this question. But this "natural" opinion is absolutely not natural. This means that its supposed firmness dissolves itself into a series of questions. These run as follows: Was the essential structure of truth and of the proposition suited to the structure of the things? Or is it the opposite: Was the essential structure of the thing as a bearer of attributes interpreted according to the structure of of the proposition, as the unity of "subject" and "predicate"? Has man read off the structure of the proposition from the structure of the things, or has be transferred the structure of the proposition into the things.

If the latter were the case, then the further question would immediately arise: How does the proposition, the interpretation, come to present the measure and model of how things in their thingness ate to be determined? Since the proposition, the assertion, the positing, and the telling are human actions, we would conclude that man does not adjust himself to things, but the things to man and to the human subject, as which one usually understands the "I." Such an interpretation of the relation of origin between the determination of the thing and that of the proposition seems improbable, at least among the Greeks. For the "I" standpoint is something modern and, therefore, nonGreek. The polis set the standard for the Greeks. Everyone today is talking of the Greek polis. Now, among the Greeks, the nation of thinkers, someone coined the sentence: πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἔστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν δὲ μὲν οντῶν ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὠς οὐκ ἔστιν ("Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that "are not that they are not.") The man who made this statement, Protagoras, supposedly wrote a work with the simple title ἡ Ἀλήθεια, The Truth. The statement of this proposition is temporally not too far from Plato's time.


Martin Heidegger (GA 41) What Is a Thing?