δ. Being in the Sense of the Categories
Therefore, it can now be said of this being that can stand within both conditions, within constancy and δύναμις—being-there-character of meaningfulness: “As far as it is concerned, it is, on the other hand, a ‘this here’ or a ‘so much’ or a ‘such’ or, in the same way, another of the categories of being.”57 Τοιόνδε, τοσόνδε, and so on: -δε proceeding from δή, “manifestly there,” “present”—ways of being-present, by which the presence of beings themselves is determined, according to the possibilities of their looking. These characters, τόδε τι, and so on, are designated as categories. The categories are simply introduced as though self-evident. No discussion of a system of categories! Wherever they are spoken of in the writings handed down to us, they are spoken of in this way. Thus Aristotle’s categories have been criticized as being empty, that he did not set up a principle for deriving them, and that he had no definite number of categories, that his workmanship was shoddy. But in such criticisms, one exempts oneself from asking what the categories genuinely are.
In previous considerations, the emphasis was put on λόγος, and this of course with the purpose, from the beginning, of interpreting being-there and the conceptual: λόγος as the mode of being-in-the-world, such that this mode constitutes the discoveredness, uncoveredness, the being-present of the world. That which is, here, designated as ‘category’ is designated by an expression that stands in the closest relation with λόγος; κατηγορεῖν stands in the closest connection with λέγειν. Ἀγορεύειν is not simply “to talk about something,” “to assert,” but rather “to talk in the market-place,” “to talk publicly,” where being-with-one-another takes place, there, where everyone understands it. Κατηγορεῖν means: “to publicly reply to each about something,” that it is this or that, “to accuse it,” “to draw out” a definite fact. Κατηγορία is a speaking insofar as I speak of κατηγορία τοῦ ὄντος, that which addresses a being to each in a certain way, such that it speaks of it, that it is this or that, specifically that it is. Κατηγορίαι: modes of addressing beings in their being. Therefore, the categories are the basic modes in which beings that are there are uncovered there, with regard to definite possibilities of being-there and modes of being-there. This is not to say that the categories are already explicit in natural speaking, in the λόγος of the everyday. Rather, the fact of the matter is such that all λέγειν already operates in, and is guided by, definite categories. They do not mean just any forms that I can bring into a system, nor principles for the classification of statements, but they must be understood in accordance with what their name means, on the basis of what λόγος itself is in its distinctive mode: the beingdiscovered of the world, which is constitutive in such a way that this discoveredness shows the world in its basic respects. If one has, to a certain extent, a
57. Phys. Γ 1, 200 b 27 sq.: τὸ μὲν τόδε τι, τὸ δὲ τοσόνδε, τὸ δὲ τοιόνδε, καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν τοῦ ὄντος κατηγοριῶν ὁμοίως.