Thomas Sheehan
A short chapter on “sense and meaning in hermeneutics”? An impossible task! When we consider how many philosophers have grappled with this issue, and the large library of texts they have generated, we can easily see that this topic is far too vast even to summarize in a short essay. Instead, I will narrow the scope of this chapter to the question of sense and meaning in Heidegger’s hermeneutics. But that task, too, is immense, and I can offer only some guidelines. My purpose is to sketch out how Heidegger’s doctrine of sense and meaning grew out of his reading of Aristotle’s De interpretatione 1–4. But since sense and meaning are matters of intelligibility, we must first see how Heidegger deals with that topic1.
Phenomenology in Heidegger is about one thing only: sense or meaning—in a word, ἀλήθεια (“disclosedness”) as he understood that term in Aristotle: the intelligible appearance of something to someone. Which is to say that phenomenology in Heidegger is entirely about hermeneutical questions. At least, that is the case when we rescue his works from those Heideggerians who have colonized him with the shopworn language of “being,” even after Heidegger himself declared he had abandoned it. “I no longer like to use the word ‘Sein’” he said.2
“Being” remains only the provisional term. Consider that “being” was originally called “presence” [Anwesen] in the sense of a thing’s staying‐here‐before‐us‐in‐disclosedness.
And further, when it comes to “the thing itself,” he said “there is no more room even for the word ‘Sein.’”3
Most Heideggerians would concede that Sein and Anwesen are interchangeable. However, some have recently claimed that Anwesen means merely the objective presence of things (their existentia or Vorhandensein), which was operative even as far back as the Paleozoic Era, when there wasn’t a human being in sight.4 Others would claim Anwesen is simply the spatiotemporal presence of things “out there” in the universe, perceivable by the senses alone. But in Heidegger’s Copernican Revolution, which he carried out in the 1920s under the banner of phenomenology, Anwesen always and only means presence to ex‐sistence, to Dasein. Therefore, it is the meaningful presence of a thing to us, and it shows up whenever we understand what a thing currently means. (The statement “This is X” = “This is meaningfully present as X.”)
Heidegger was quite clear on this. In the foregoing citation, the phrase “staying‐here‐before‐us‐indisclosedness” (her‐vor‐währen in die Unverborgenheit) is Heidegger’s term of art for the meaningful presence of something to ex‐sistence (her‐vor‐), which occurs whenever that thing is known, whether in praxis or theory, that is, whenever it is brought from an undisclosed but potential intelligibility into an actually operative one (in die Unverborgenheit). This entails that we do not first have a dumb encounter with things and only later assign them meanings.
It is not the case that objects are at first present as bare realities, as objects in some sort of natural state and that then in the course of our experience they receive the garb of a value‐character so that they do not have to run around naked.5
Rather, what is primary and what is immediately given to us without some mental detour through a conceptual grasp of the thing is the meaningful [das Bedeutsame]. When we live in the first‐hand world around us [die Umwelt], everything comes at us loaded with meaning, all over the place and all the time.6
Which means: If beings are the meaningful (das Bedeutsame), their being is their meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit), that is, their intelligible presence to man.
In Heidegger’s work, the term “Sein,” along with all other traditional names for the “realness of the real” (the οὐσία of τὸ ὄν, the esse of an ens, etc.), is always written under phenomenological erasure.7 Traditionally, those terms referred to the what‐ness, that‐ness, and how‐ness of things that exist “outside of [i.e., independent of] our thinking.”8 However, Heidegger’s Copernican Revolution recasts the “being” of traditional ontology in phenomenological terms: Sein = Bedeutsamkeit = Verständlichkeit = the intelligibility of things whether in the practical or theoretical orders. This entails that the only entrance into Heidegger’s work is through the phenomenological reduction. To be sure, Heidegger does not understand this reduction in a Husserlian sense, as leading things back to a “transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic‐noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness.”9 Rather, it means
leading the phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a thing, whatever may be the character of the apprehension, to the understanding of the being [Sein] of the thing: understanding the thing in terms of the way it is disclosed.10
Note that this being (Sein) to which the re‐duction (Zurück‐führung) leads a thing back is “the way the thing is disclosed,” that is, the way in which it is meaningfully present to someone within a specific set of concerns. This disclosedness of a thing in its intelligibility or meaningfulness takes place always and only in correlation with the understanding of the meaning of the thing.
A note on terminology: In Being and Time, Heidegger was not entirely clear about the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung. The two are closely related in that book and are usually translated into English interchangeably as “sense” and “meaning.” Bedeutung always refers to the sense or meaning of a particular thing (i.e., of a Seiendes). But when it comes to Sinn, we must make some distinctions:
1. When Sinn is used in conjunction with things (as in fact it rarely is), it refers to their meaningfulness or intelligibility.11
2. When it is used in conjunction with Sein (der Sinn von Sein), Sinn is (a) only a formal indication of (b) whatever is responsible for meaningful presence at all.12 Stated as a question, the phrase der Sinn von Sein is: What accounts for the intelligibility of Sein?
3. Being and Time does in fact argue to the content of the formally indicative word Sinn, and that turns out to be the ex‐static (i.e., “thrown‐open”) horizon within which the presence (“being”) of things appears as itself intelligible.13
4. In Heidegger’s middle and later work, after he had abandoned Being and Time’s transcendental-horizonal approach, the word Sinn gets replaced by a number of co‐equal terms: the open, the thrown‐open domain, and especially the clearing for meaningful‐presence‐at‐all. Other formally indicative terms are the “essence” or “place” or “truth” of being, where “essence” means that which accounts for—is responsible for—the fact that there is Anwesen at all.14
Thus, from beginning to end Heidegger’s goal was not any form of “being,” if only because metaphysics had already done a bang‐up job on that under the rubric of εἰ̃δος, ἐνέργεια, esse, and so on. But what about “das Sein selbst”? In Heidegger’s works “being itself” is not a phenomenon at all. It is simply a term that, like Sinn, is only a formal indication of whatever is responsible for “being.” That is, “being itself” is only a heuristic stand‐in, a lorem ipsum, for the clearing.15 What Heidegger was searching for was the Woher or “whence” of being, “that from which and through which being [the meaningful presence of something] occurs.”16 His question went beyond being (ἐπέκεινα τη̃ς οὐσίας) to ask for what is responsible for being:
What is the reason for the inner possibility and the necessity of being and of its openness to us?17
In Heidegger’s words, “understanding the Sein of a thing = understanding the what‐it‐is and how‐it‐is of the thing”18 —and that is the same as making sense of the thing. But how does such making‐sense-of‐something come about? Heidegger’s answer comes in three steps:
First:
Intelligibility is an existentiale of ex‐sistence. . . . Ex‐sistence alone “has” intelligibility.19
And thus:
When an innerworldly thing is discovered with the being of ex‐sistence—that is, when it comes to be understood—we say it has intelligibility.20
And therefore:
Because the very nature of ex‐sistence is to make sense of things, ex‐sistence lives in meanings and can express itself in and as meanings.21
Metaphorically speaking, the clearing is the “space” within which I can take something as something and thus understand how and as what the thing is meaningfully present to me. The clearing is the wiggle room (der Spielraum) wherein and whereby I can take this thing in terms of one of its possible functions (this rock as a mallet for pounding in tent pegs) or in terms of one of its possible meanings (“This rock goes back to the Late Archean era.”) These are only two of the contexts within which the rock can be meaningfully present (or can “have being”): in the first case, within the world of camping in the woods, and in the second case, within the world of petrology. The clearing as the open space for “taking‐as” goes by a series of cognate and mutually reinforcing names throughout Heidegger’s career—for example: Da, Welt, Erschlossenheit, Zeit, Temporalität, Zeit‐Raum, Speilraum, Offene, Entwurfbereich, Weite, Gegend, Zwischen, and the list goes on. In his later work, all these terms tend to gather around Lichtung, the clearing as the reason why things have intelligibility at all.
But how is the clearing itself opened up? (1) In Being and Time, the answer is: by the thrown-openness (Geworfenheit) of ex‐sistence. Ex‐sistence holds open and thus constitutes (and in short is) the clearing. (2) In the later work, the answer is: by the ap‐propri‐ation of ex‐sistence to its proprium, where its proprium is to be the thrown‐open clearing.22 Thus, the clearing—which is the same as the thrown‐openness or ap‐propri‐ation of ex‐sistence—is “the thing itself ” (die Sache selbst) of Heidegger’s work, what he called the Urphänomen or Ur‐sache responsible for the fact there is being (meaningful presence) at all.23
But many questions about sense and meaning remain to be answered. Why is discursive sense‐making necessary for us? That is: Why must we understand things only by taking‐them‐as, rather than by intellectually intuiting their essence? Answering those questions will require a bit of background, some of it from Heidegger’s greatest teacher, Aristotle.
The advice Heidegger gave his students about reading Nietzsche applies as well to understanding his own works: “First study Aristotle for ten or fifteen years.”24 Heidegger’s intense study of Aristotle—first within a traditional Thomistic framework during his early university years, and then within a phenomenological paradigm in the 1920s—laid the bases for his single, lifelong project. If Husserl taught Heidegger the method of phenomenology, Aristotle led him to its content by opening a window onto hermeneutics (granted, in Heidegger’s peculiar understanding of that term). If we can unpack this confluence of method and content, we will have made a start on understanding how Heidegger’s hermeneutics and phenomenology converge in the togetherness of sense/meaning on the one hand and the thrown‐open clearing on the other.
Heidegger’s hermeneutics grew out of his interpretation of Aristotle’s treatise Περὶ ἑρμηνείας (“Concerning ἑρμηνεία”)—and yet in that entire text we do not find a single reference to “hermeneutics.” If Aristotle had written a book about hermeneutics in our contemporary sense of the word, the title would have been Περὶ ἑρμηνευτικής (= Περὶ τῆς τέχνης ἑρμηνευτικής), “Concerning the Art of Interpreting,”25 and its Latin translation by Boethius would have been entitled De interpretativa (= De arte interpretativa) instead of De interpretatione. But that is not the case. If, then, ἑρμηνεία in Aristotle does not mean “hermeneutics,” what does it mean? The answer is, quite simply: a declarative sentence. But how did Heidegger get his doctrine of sense and meaning from a treatise on the parts and forms of declarative sentences?26
Aristotle’s definition of ἑρμηνεία in De interpretatione 1–4 has many moving parts. In the broad sense of the term, animals as well as human beings can enact a ἑρμηνεία. We will work through Aristotle’s broad sense of the term on our way to his narrow sense: a declarative sentence.
Derived from “Hermes,” the messenger of Zeus, the word ἑρμηνεία in its broadest sense means a communication. More specifically it is (1) any expression, animal or human, (2) that is meaningful, (3) that intends to communicate, and (4) that seeks to stimulate attention, acknowledgment, or agreement. Thus, the Aristotelian definition of a ἑρμηνεία would be
1. Any expression, whether in the form of inarticulate sounds, gestures, spoken words, or written words that are …
2. [meaningful/disclosive:] tokens or signs that disclose “affects in the soul,” which themselves are already tokens or signs of things in the world.
3. [communicative:] Such expressions are intended to communicate those “affects in the soul” to someone (even to oneself in an inner dialogue) …
4. [attention, etc.:] with the intention of gaining someone’s attention, acknowledgment, or agreement.
1. Any expression, whether in the form of inarticulate sounds, gestures, spoken words, or written words. As rich as an animal’s or a person’s mental life might be, there is no ἑρμηνεία—no communication—until that life gets expressed. Here Aristotle restricts the possibility of such expression to entities that have life or soul: “ensouled” entities (τὰ ζῷα ἔμψυχα).27 However, he excludes plants, even though they, too, are ensouled.28 (Do plants “express themselves” and “communicate” through their scent? their color? the seeds they produce?) In any case, for Aristotle the only relevant expressions are those of animals and human beings. In the case of animals, a ἑρμηνεία takes the form of an unarticulated noise, such as the screech of a monkey or the chirping of a cricket. In the case of human beings (although Aristotle does not say so), the ἑρμηνεία need not be spoken or written. It can be a wordless gesture (a raised eyebrow, even a stare), a sound (a whistle, the beating of a drum), a spoken word (“Yes”), a sentence (“No, I won’t”), or a set of sentences, even in poetry (The Iliad).29
2. … that are tokens or signs of “affects in the soul,” which themselves are already tokens or signs of things in the world: The function of tokens or signs (σύμβολα, σημεῖα) is to disclose something, to make it manifest (τὶ δηλοῦν or τὶ ἀληθεύειν).30 Even the inarticulate sounds of animals can do this. The monkey’s screech may disclose its fear of a hawk overhead. A donkey’s bray can disclose, for example, its pain or pleasure or fear.31 Insofar as these animal sounds (ψόϕοι) disclose something, they are “semantic” (σημαντικοί) and therefore “meaningful” at the level of the physical senses.32
But what exactly do such “signs or tokens” disclose, particularly in the case of human beings? Here Heidegger radically redefines Aristotle’s terms, beginning with παθήματα, the so‐called “affects in the ψυχή,” which our expressions make known.33 First, Heidegger reads ψυχή not in terms of an “inner self ” that can receive “affects” in the form of sense‐impressions that lead to “ideas in the mind.” And second, he interprets “the mind” as “being‐in‐the‐world” (i.e., in‐the‐world‐of‐meaning): the ability to make sense of something. Heidegger interprets ψυχή as ex‐sistence, from ex + sistere, “being made to stand out” in the specific sense of being “thrown open” as the clearing within which the meanings of things occur. He describes ex‐sistence as our “being outside” (Draußensein);34 and when it comes to a human ἑρμηνεία, “what gets expressed is precisely our outsideness,”35 that is, our meaning‐fraught involvement with things.36 Thus, Heidegger reinterprets παθήματα phenomenologically and intentionally, and not as internal impressions made by external things, or as “inner representations” of “things outside.” Παθήματα are just as much “outside” in the world as is ex‐sistence. A παθήμα is what we undergo experientially in our bodily minding of things. In phenomenology, a phenomenon is not some objective thing “out there” in the universe, and a παθήμα is not some subjective state “in here” in my mind. A phenomenon in the phenomenological sense is the union of an act of experiencing and of what is experienced in it. It is the experiencing‐of‐the‐experienced; or to reverse matters: the what‐is-experienced‐in‐the‐way‐it‐is‐experienced. Such a worldly correlation is what gets expressed and communicated in a ἑρμηνεία; and the so‐called “tokens and signs” of that communication are public expressions of an event that takes place in our meaning‐fraught lives‐in‐the‐world. Heidegger comments: “Just as road markers indicate where we are ‘at,’ so too signs always indicate primarily where we live, where our concern dwells, what sort of involvement we have with something.”37
To summarize Heidegger’s reading of De interpretatione 1, 16a3–8, and to move ahead: Language as ἑρμηνεία is the disclosure and communication of a παθήμα, that is, of a meaningful engagement with some worldly state of affairs. Different languages use different words, but what all those different words first and properly disclose—namely, the state‐of‐affairs‐as‐experienced, or the-experience‐of‐the‐state‐of‐affairs—is formally the same for all, regardless of differences in spoken language. Language expresses our meaningful involvement with (or “assimilation to”) things in their meaning. Heidegger famously reinterprets De interpretatione 1, 16a6–8, where Aristotle says the παθήματα in the soul are òμὁιώματα (“likenesses”) of the things in the world. Heidegger reads the issue of ὁμοίωσις not in terms of likenesses qua inner mental images of outer things but rather in terms of our “being made like unto,” and specifically our “assimilation to” the meaningful presence of the thing we experience. Such “assimilation to” is our familiarity with and understanding of the way the thing is disclosed.38
4.–5. The purpose of a ἑρμηνεία is to communicate something to someone in hopes of getting their attention, acknowledgment, or agreement. Recalling that the etymon of ἑρμηνεία is “Hermes,” we can see that the nature of language is communicative and therefore social. Aristotle says, for example, that the meanings of sounds are established by social convention: κατὰ̀ συνθήκην.39 Insofar as a ἑρμηνεία, whether animal or human, is semantic (σημαντική) in the broad sense, it gives notice of (discloses) something, even if that “something” turns out not to be the case. The monkey’s screech manifests the monkey’s fear‐of‐a‐hawk or of a hawk‐as‐provoking‐fear—and yet there may be no hawk in the sky. In that case, the monkey is “mistaken”—but nonetheless its screeching was intentional in the phenomenological sense: disclosive of something and therefore meaningful. The monkey did disclose something “in the world” (its fear‐of‐a‐hawk), even when there was no hawk in the sky; and perhaps the screech got other monkeys to take notice. Whether monkey or man, the purpose of a ἑρμηνεία as disclosive and communicative is to get another to stop and pay attention.40
But in the case of human beings, Aristotle ups the ante—and, in the event, narrows the meaning of ἑρμηνεία. In the full and strict sense, a ἑρμηνεία is not just a meaningful utterance about something (e.g., “Would that I were king!” or “Hermes, please help me!”).41 Rather, there is a proper ἑρμηνεία only when the speaker takes a stand and declares the state of affairs to actually be the case, or not.42 The real communicator (ἑρμηνεύς) is not the one who merely expresses something meaningful (a wish, a prayer) but only the one who makes a claim of truth or falsity for what he or she communicates. 43 And the claim could be correct or incorrect, in which case the interpreter is right or wrong. This position, which is Aristotle’s, narrows down the referent of the word ἑρμηνεία to declarative sentences only, to the exclusion of sentences in the subjunctive, optative, or imperative moods. A de‐clarative sentence is what Aristotle calls a λόγος ἀπο‐ϕαντικός, a statement (λόγος) that purports to show (ϕαίνειν/clarare) something true or false about (ἀπό/de) a state of affairs itself, rather than showing one’s feelings or wishes or hopes about the state of affairs. Thus, the sentence “Hermes, please help me!” is not apophantic, whereas “I was just asking Hermes to help me” is. A declarative/ apophantic sentence is one that claims (rightly or wrongly) to disclose a state of affairs in words exactly as it is in reality. (For example, one might say: “I swear: I really wasn’t asking Hermes to help me!”—which in fact is false rather than true but still is apophantic). With this, we have arrived at a proper translation of the title (as well as the subject matter) of Aristotle’s treatise Περὶ ἑρμηνείας: “Concerning Declarative Sentences.”
How did Heidegger get from De interpretatione 1–4 to his own doctrine of sense and meaning? Answer: by burrowing beneath Aristotle’s text and “saying the unsaid” that he found hidden there. In outline, these are the steps of Heidegger’s progress.
1. He began with the structure of the λόγος ἀποϕαντικός, the declarative sentence, which consists in discursively synthesizing a subject with a predicate (σύvθεσις) while keeping them distinct (διαίρεσις): Latin compositio/divisio.
2. From that, he argued that the structure of ex‐sistence is what makes such discursive knowledge possible and necessary. That is: to know anything, we have to take it in terms of some form of what‐it‐is and how‐it‐is, that is, in terms of some instance of its current meaningful presence to us (its “being”). But to be able to perform that existentiel act, we must be already existentially thrown open and “ahead” of the thing into its possible meanings.
3. Therefore, thrown‐open or appropriated ex‐sistence, as the clearing, is responsible for all forms of the meaningful presence (the being) of things. Es gibt Sein because Ereignis gibt Sein, that is: The reason why there is “being” at all is that the appropriation of ex‐sistence to its proprium as the clearing makes that possible.44
Heidegger did what neither Frege nor the Husserl of Logical Investigations had attempted to do. He explicitly and systematically grounded his theory of sense and meaning in an ontology of human being. His goal was to show how his Bedeutungslehre or doctrine of sense/meaning flowed from his analysis of ex‐sistence.45 Three steps:
1. Synthesis‐distinction as the structure of a declarative sentence. Discursive thinking, Aristotle says, is a matter of σύvθεσις and διαίρεσις, synthesizing a thing with its meaning while keeping the two distinct. Synthesis: I declare that Socrates is an Athenian. Diairesis: I keep the subject and predicate distinct by declaring that Socrates is only an Athenian and does not exhaust the set of “all Athenians.”46 Aristotle had made the point over and over in his De anima.47 Heidegger reads this structure of synthesis‐and‐diairesis in terms of the “as” (“I take Socrates as an Athenian”), which expresses the relatedness of the relata: the unity‐and‐distinguishing of the thing and its meaning, the subject and the predicate, or, in the practical order, the tool and the task. The “as” stands for “is understood in terms of ” and thus “has its current being (sein jeweiliges Sein) as this or that.” Socrates is now understood in terms of his membership in the class “all Athenians,” and at the same time he is understood as not exhausting that class. The “as” is the mark of discursivity. Things do not show up to us directly as what and how they are, the way they might to a divine intellectual intuition. Rather, they appear only to a mediating and dis‐cursive intellect, one that must “run” from subject to predicate, or from tool to task, and back again (dis‐currere: to run to and fro) in order to synthesize the two that lie apart one from the other: subject and predicate in theoretical knowledge, tool and task in practical action.48
2. To perform such dis‐cursive acts, we must ourselves be a kind of dis‐cursivity. 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.49 Or as Heidegger puts it: “Each thing . . . always accomplishes what it itself is.”50 Thus, for Heidegger, the interpretive “as” functions existentielly‐personally in human speech (declarative sentences) only because it functions existentiallystructurally as our very way of being. Ex‐sistence in its essence is a bivalent structure of “futurity” and “present‐ness”:
1. “being made to stand out ahead” as what it always already is: as existential possibility among the existentiel‐ontic possibilities of oneself and of things; and at the same time
2. “returning” to its present self and to the things it encounters in the present, in order to render them meaningful in terms of one of those possibilities.
That is, the structure of ex‐sistence is “to‐be‐ahead‐of‐itself‐while‐always‐returning‐to‐itself ” (Sich‐vorweg‐sein als Zurückkommen), which Heidegger will eventually describe as “temporality.51 As an “aheadness‐and‐return,” ex‐sistence is the clearing, the “open space” within which I can take this‐thing‐here in term of that‐possibility‐there. In fact, I must do so if I want to know anything in the world. See figure 31.1 on the following page.
The larger arc, which moves from left to right, describes ex‐sistence as stretched out beyond the actuality of the commonsense self, thrown ahead as possibility among the possibilities of things.52 This arc also describes the area of “the open,” that is, the “Da” of Da‐sein or the “ex‐” of ex‐sistence. In turn, the smaller arc, which moves from right to left, indicates what Heidegger calls the Zurückkommen, the
“return” of ex‐sistence to itself and to the things it encounters, in order to render them meaningfully present. This “return” is actually a matter of existence always remaining with itself in its stretched‐forwardness. That is, it is not a matter of one moment (the return) occurring after the other moment (the being‐ahead), diachronically as it were. Rather, the diagram presents what Heidegger described as the non‐chronological, ever‐operative, bivalent existential structure of human being that makes possible the existentiel acts of taking‐as and thus making sense of things.
3. Therefore, the clearing “gives” or “sends” being. Thrown‐open or appropriated ex‐sistence, as the clearing, is what accounts for all forms of the meaningful presence of things. It is the “open space” that gives us the wiggle room to take this‐here as that‐there and thus to manifest its current “being” for us. The clearing thus makes possible and accounts for the fact that “this” currently has its being as “that.” It is the reason why sense or meaning occurs at all. Or in the later Heidegger’s formulation: the thrown‐open/appropriated clearing “gives” or “sends” the various forms of being (es gibt Sein, es schickt Sein). It is important to remember, of course, that this aheadness‐and‐return is the structure of ex‐sistence. It is existential and thus always‐already operative, not an existentiel human act that we ourselves perform at will.
Heidegger’s doctrine of sense and meaning, his Bedeutungslehre, is not an afterthought or an add‐on to his supposed central concern about “being.” Rather, sense/meaning are the subject matter—the Befragtes—of all Heidegger’s work. However, the origin of sense/meaning—what Aristotle would call its ἀρχή and αἰτία53 —is the Erfragtes, what Heidegger is looking for—namely, τò πράγμα αὐτό,54 the “single thought” that drove all his philosophy.55 And that origin, that single thought, is appropriated ex‐sistence as the clearing.
1 Some preliminaries: I cite Heidegger’s texts by page and line (the line number follows the period) in both the Gesamtausgabe and the current ETs. Exception: Rather than GA 2, I use SZ in the Niemeyer 11th edition; ET by Macquarrie‐Robinson. Some translations: Dasein = “ex‐sistence,” hyphenated (cf. Heidegger’s “Da‐sein”) to bring out its etymology: “being made to stand out [and ahead]”; das Seiende = “beings/things/entities” ex aequo; Sein and Seyn = “being” (cf. GA 81: 76.18); Anwesen = “meaningful presence.” “Man” refers to human beings in general, not to the male of the species. I take “intellect” in the broad sense of νου̃ς and in the specific sense of λόγος as discursive intellect, whether practical or theoretical. All German words referring to ἀλήθεια (e.g., Wahrheit, Erschlossenheit, Unverborgenheit, Entborgenheit, etc.) are translated by “disclosedness.” Translations from the German are often my own.
3 Respectively: GA 7: 234.13–7 = 78.21–4 and GA 15: 365.17–18 = 60.9–10, my emphasis: “ist sogar für den Namen Sein kein Raum mehr.”
4 See Richard Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) and Heidegger’s Way of Being (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014) as well as his lecture “Heidegger’s Way of Being: Reaffirming and Restating the Core Matter,” Fifteenth Annual Heidegger Circle Meeting, May 9, 2015.
6 GA 56/57: 72.31–73.5 = 61.19–28.
7 I use the words “realness” and “reality” in what Heidegger calls their “traditional” (and still formally indicative) sense: “das Sein im Sinne der puren Dingvorhandenheit”: SZ 211.26 = 254.32–3, that is, their existence‐as-things in what one takes to be “the nature of things.” See GA 84, 1: 396.9–10, citing Suarez, Disputationes metaphysicae, XXXI, section I, 2: “esse aliquid in rerum natura” and “aliquid reale”.
8 Aristotle’s ἔξω [τῆς διανοίας]: Metaphysics, VI 4, 1028a 2, taken with 1027b34–1028a1; ibid., XI 8, 1065a24: ἔξω ὂν καὶ χωριστόν: things that exist outside of and separate from our thinking. See GA 6, 2: 380.2–13 = 16.17–26.
10 GA 24: 29.15–9 = 21.27–30 (= lecture of 4 May 1927), my emphasis. Cf. GA 20: 423.4–5 = 306.29–30. Re “understanding”: GA 16: 424.21–2 = 5.15–6: “Verstehen, d.h. Entwerfen.”
11 For example at GA 19: 205.13–4 = 141.33–4; SZ 151.22–4 = 192.35–7; and ibid., 12.14–5 = 32.23–4. That last text has stood through some seventeen editions of SZ (thirteen of them during Heidegger’s lifetime). But at GA 2: 16.23 = Stambaugh 11.15 it has been criminally changed from “Sinn des Seienden” to “Sein des Seienden,” even though GA 2 advertises itself as the “der unveränderte Text.”
12 In turn, the intelligibility of Sein accounts for why any particular thing can have a Bedeutung, a meaning. For example, SZ 151.29–31 = 193.6–8: We take a thing in terms of its intelligibility [Sinn = Woraufhin des Entwurfs], and thus the thing is able to have a meaning, that is, to be understood as this‐or‐that (“etwas als etwas verständlich wird.”)
13 “Thrown‐open: cf. geworfener Entwurf.
14 Thrown‐open domain: Entwurfbereich: GA 9: 201.31 = 154.13. See GA 15: 335.11–6 = 41.5–9 and 344.29 = 47.7: Sinn, Wahrheit, Ortschaft/Ortlichkeit.
15 On “being itself ” as a formal indication of the clearing, see Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 3–23.
16 GA 73, 1: 82.15–6: “das von woher und wodurch . . . das Sein west.” See also GA 14: 86.24–87.1 = 70.9–10; GA 15: 405.30 = 96.12; GA 88: 9.7; and GA 65: 78.22 = 62.30.
17 GA 16: 66.15–6: “worin gründet die innere Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der Offenbarkeit des Seins.”
18 GA 9: 131.21–2 = 103.33–5: “Verständnis des Seins (Seinsverfassung: Was‐ und Wie‐sein) des Seienden.”
19 SZ 151.34 and .36 = 193.11 and .13.
20 SZ 151.22–4 = 192.35–7, my emphasis; ibid. 207.12–3 = 251.3–4: “Mit dem Dasein … erschlossen.”
21 GA 21: 151.4–5 = 127.30–2: “Weil Dasein in seinem Sein selbst bedeutend ist [= das Sein des Seienden versteht], lebt es in Bedeutungen und kann sich as diese aussprechen.”
22 On the sameness of Geworfenheit and Ereignis, see GA 65: 34.9 = 29.7; ibid., 239.5 = 188.25; ibid., 304.8 = 240.16; ibid., 252.23–5 = 199.3–4; GA 9: 377, note d = 286, note d: “Geworfenheit und Ereignis”; and SZ 325.37 = 373.14–5 with GA 65: 322.7–8 = 254.36–7.
25 Compare the title [Περὶ τῆς] τέχνης ῥητορικής I, 1354a1.
26 The treatise itself is divided into: I. Introductory (sections 1–4): 1. thought and language, truth and falsehood; 2. nouns and verbs; 3. sentences in general; 4. declarative sentences. II. The Forms of Declarative Sentences (sections 5–14): regarding the quality, quantity, and modality of declarative sentences. Heidegger focused on only sections 1‐4 of the treatise.
27 See De anima II 2, 413a2.
28 Plants have a “nutritive soul,” ψυχή θρεπτική: De anima II 3, 414a29–33.
29 Note that for Aristotle The Iliad itself is a ἑρμηνεία in the strict sense, whereas an interpretation of it, even though it is given in declarative sentences, is specifically a “hermeneutics” of the text, an exercise of the τέχνη ἑρμηνευτική.
30 De interpretatione 5, 17a16 and 18; and Nicomachean Ethics VI 3, 1139b15: ἀληθεύει ἡ ψυχή. See SZ 32.23–4 = 36.4–5.
31 De interpretatione 1, 16a29: ἀγράμματοι ψόϕοι. Cf. Politics I 2, 1253a10–2; De partibus animalium II 17, 660a35–6. For other examples, Historia animalium IV 9, 536b13–9 (partridges and birds) and b21–3 (elephants).
32 Cf. SZ 33.30–2 = 57.11–3. Such expressions are intentional acts: they indicate and disclose something (σημαίνειν or kundgeben) and thus are “alethic” at the sense level.
33 The noun παθήματa (De interpretatione 1, 16a3–4)—in the singular, παθήμα—comes from πάσχω, to receive something; here it means “to undergo, to be affected by.” The Latin translation is passiones, from patior, to undergo.
34 SZ 162.27 = 205.31, which Heidegger glosses at GA 2: 216 note a = 157 note, as “Ausgesetztheit als offene Stelle.”
35 SZ 162.27 = 203.31–2: “Das Ausgesprochene ist gerade das Draußensein.”
36 Meaning‐fraught: GA 56/57: 71.29–31 = 60.23–4: Everything we encounter is “mit einer Bedeutung behaftet.”
38 “So ist die Seele beteiligt am Anwesen des Anwesenden”: Heidegger, 13 February 1952, as recorded by Ernst Tugendhat in the ms. Übungen im Lesen, winter semesters 1950–51 and 1951–52, Stanford University, Green Library Archives, 45.19–20; omitted from GA 83: 654.8. See GA 21: 166.31–167.30 (with note 2) = 139.36–140.30 (with note 25).
39 De interpretatione 4, 16b26 and 17a2.
40 De interpretatione 3, 16b21: ἵστησι γὰ̀ρ o̔ λέγων τὴν διάνοιαν, καì o̔ ἀκούσας ἠρέμησεν (parenthesized in Bekker). The person making a ἑρμηνεία “arrests the hearer’s mind and fixes his attention” (E. M. Edghill). (Boethius’ Latin: “constituit enim qui dicit intellectum, et qui audit quiescit.”) Perhaps more literally: “The person speaking has stopped the mind [of the listener], and the listener has rested.”
41 These are merely examples of Boethius’ “vox . . . quae per se aliquid significant”: an articulate expression that, of and by itself, indicates something, that is, is semantic: meaningful. See Aquinas, Expositio libri Peryermeneias, Prooemium, 3.
42 De interpretatione 4, 17a2–3.
43 De interpretatione 4, 17a1–3: Every sentence is meaningful, but only a declarative sentence is apophantic.
44 GA 73, 1: 642.27–8: “das Dasein ist das je vereinzelte ‘es’, das gibt; das ermöglicht und ist das ‘es gibt’.”
45 SZ 166.9–10 = 209.26–7: “Die Bedeutungslehre ist in der Ontologie des Daseins verwurzelt.”
46 De anima III 6, 430b1–4 and De interpretatione I 16a12. See GA 21: 137.1–141.23 = 115.12–119.24.
47 De anima III 6, 430a26–28: σύνθεσίς τις νοημάτων (synthesis of ideas); ibid., 6, 430b1–2: τò ψεũδος ἐν συνθέσει ἀεί (falsehood is always had in a synthesis); ibid. 6, 430b3–4: ἐνδέχεται δὲ καὶ διαίρεσιν ϕάναι πάντα (all σύνθεσις is also διαίρεσις).
48 Cf. SZ 34:1–4 = 57.25–8: “rekurriert.” Here Heidegger is following the medieval tradition: see Aquinas, Summa contra gentes, I, 57, 27: “Ratiocinatio autem est quidam motus intellectus transeuntis ab uno in aliud.” Discursive thinking as a kind of movement of the intellect, going from one thing [the subject] to another [the possible predicate]. Also Summa theologiae I, 58, 3, ad 1. Thus, GA 29/30: 447.6–7 = 308. 39–40: “Es gibt Sprache nur bei einem Seienden, das seinem Wesen nach transzendiert,” that is: there is language only with the entity (= ex‐sistence) that is thrown ahead of and returns discursively to things. Also GA 84, 1: 50.1–6: beziehendes Unterscheiden.
49 For example, 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.
50 GA 4: 65.26–28 = 87.27–29 “Jegliches . . . je nur das leistet, was es ist.”
51 GA 21: 147.23–26 = 124.19–20.
52 At GA 26: 181.8 = 143.31, Heidegger calls this aheadness an ἐπόρεξις, a “being stretched towards,” (ἐπί + ὄρεξις). To my knowledge, the term does not appear in Greek literature or philosophy.
53 Metaphysics I 2, 982a5.
54 Plato, “Seventh Letter” (ἐπιστολή Z), 341c7; Protagoras, 330d15.
Thomas Sheehan - Sense and Meaning: From Aristotle to Heidegger
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