avoid a regressus ad infinitum has a definite sense and weight for the Greeks, and it is not to be carried over into current investigations, because it exhibits a completely different sense of being-there. In order to use the maxim more broadly, one must be justified with regard to what one calls being. The being-characters carry in themselves the there-moment of the πέρας. The presence of a being in its completedness determines a being in its there, that is, it simply characterizes it. This sense of being is not anything invented by the Greeks, but arises from a definite experience of being. That is to say, insofar as humanity lives in a world, and the world is overarched by οὐρανός, “heaven,” insofar as the world is οὐρανός, which is enclosed within itself and is completed in itself. Being is interpreted by the Greeks through being-there—in this, the only possible way. A definite experience of the world is the clue for the explication of being of the Greeks.
You see that what we have found to be the upshot of our considerations, as a technical issue of thinking and intellectual tidiness, is manifest as ὁρισμός. The ὁρισμός is a λόγος, a definite being-in-the-world, which meets with the world that is there in its genuine there-character, that addresses it in its genuine being. We have a concrete reference to that place where the genuinely indigenous character of the concept is to be sought. Conceptuality is no arbitrary matter, but rather an issue of being-there in a decisive sense, insofar as it has resolved to speak radically to the world—to question and to research. So, λόγος, “speaking,” is to exhibit beings in themselves, if this speaking is of such a character that it shows beings in their having-of-limits, that it limits beings in their being. That λόγος which is ὁρισμός is the genuine mode of entry into beings; speaking as ὁρισμός is the genuine addressing of the world. One can designate this λόγος as the genuine mode of entry into beings insofar as πέρας is the basic character of the there. Ὁρισμός is the speaking to beings that are in the mode of presence and are limited in this way, since ὁρισμός pertains to them as something limited.
When οὐσία was later translated as “essence,” which is still done today to an exceptional extent and is recalled more or less explicitly, one had to be clear about what was understood in using the determinations “essence,” “intuition of essence,” “essential context”; one must be clear as to whether or not one wants to exhibit beings with the same sense of being meant by the Greeks. If that is not the case, what one means by being must be exhibited; to the extent that this does not happen, all intuition of essences is suspended, which indeed is the case. The Greek being-concept did not fall from the sky, but had its definite ground.
If we question basic concepts in their conceptuality, we see that the ὁρισμός is an issue of being-there, of being-in-the-world. In concrete being-there, we must understand the basic Aristotelian concepts, and we must do so in their basic possibilities of speaking to their world, in which being-there is.
That, in fact, all clarification of concepts in their conceptuality proceeds in this way can be demonstrated by a consideration of the concept οὐσία. What