This is so simple that it is extremely difficult to explain philosophically. Basically, Heidegger adds, it is not yet understood at all. A participant in the seminar intervenes: is not the passage from consciousness to Dasein originally the “revolution of the mode of thinking” of which Kant spoke, or the “reversal of all modes and forms of representation” of which Hölderlin spoke?112 Heidegger rectifies: It would be better to speak of a revolution of the location of thinking. Further, instead of “revolution,” this should be understood simply as displacement [Ortsverlegung], in that original sense in which the thought engaged in Being and Time displaces what philosophy has placed in consciousness. It is then noted that it is philosophy that, situating the place in consciousness, dis-places [verlegt] everything, by replacing what Heidegger calls Da-sein by that selfenclosed place which is consciousness. Here finally the relation between consciousness and Da-sein is presented in its full scope. Here one can understand what it means to say that consciousness is grounded in Da-sein.
At this point, recalling the text “My Way Into Phenomenology,”113 Heidegger returns to Husserl. He underlines that Husserl’s philosophical point of departure was Franz Brentano, the author of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Now, my own point of departure, he remarks, was the same Franz Brentano—but not this work of 1874; it was far rather in On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle (1862, Freiburg) that Heidegger learned to read philosophy. A strange and significant commonality between Husserl and Heidegger, who both took their first steps with the same philosopher, but not with the same book. My Brentano, Heidegger says with a smile, is the Brentano of Aristotle!
Why stress this difference? To clarify the difference between Greek thought and the scholastic-modern thought. All the attempts to precisely situate this difference must take the utmost care and employ rigorous terminology. Thus, Heidegger reports, Romano Guardini sought to name the particularity of Greek thought and spoke of a thought “more objective” than modern thought. Now, this term “objectivity” can in no way characterize Greek thought. First, there is no word in Greek that says “what stands against” [Gegenstand]—“object.” For Greek thought, there is no object, but instead that which, from itself, presences.
On the question as to whether, despite everything, one could understand object in the above named sense, Heidegger answers that it is impossible, since the object is constituted by representation. The representation, namely, that is prior in regards to the object, posits the object across from it, in such a way that the object is never able to first presence from itself.
One must therefore leave the domain of consciousness and its representations if one wants to think what the Greeks thought.