The full sway in determining the way things are involves what might be deemed Heidegger’s first major contribution to philosophy in its historical unfolding in the twentieth century: Da-sein, being-in-the-world, being always already meaningfully engaged in the world, prereflectively. Da-sein’s holding-to what emerges, what unfolds, what comes to presence. Leaving subjectivity, thinking’s possibility is not grounded in objectifying subjectivity.
If the being of Da-sein is not of subjectivity, then being as objectivity must also be relinquished. This is the other ‘half’ of the ‘shift’ that Heidegger’s fundamental-ontological thinking in Being and Time makes. Heidegger’s reading Aristotle’s reflections on being opened up this second half, thinking being as Anwesenheit, παρουσία – and then as ἀλήθεια. With this, thinking comes to what may perhaps be called the second ‘fold’ in the unfolding of the being- question: the ontological difference, beings and being in their difference. In a marginal note to the title ‘Time and Being,’ the title of the third section of part 1 of Being and Time, as conceived in its fullness – and we should keep in mind that this third section of part 1 and the whole of part 2 were never published as Being and Time – Heidegger calls this ‘die transzendenzhafte Differenz’:1 (ontological) difference understood as transcendence. Transcendence of Da-sein says being always already ‘beyond’ subjectivity, being-in-the-world, ec-stasis.
Both the transcendence character of Da-sein and the Anwesenheit character of being intimate and lead thinking to the time character of being. To be Da-sein is to have the understanding of being as what is own to its (Da-sein’s) way of being.
Anwesenheit can be translated as ‘presence.’ That translation would imply a certain static presence, maybe even a unity – a metaphysical unity. Thus one might be tempted to say that, whereas Heidegger says that his thinking moves out from within a metaphysics of presence or unity, this word here indicates that his thinking remains (imprisoned?) within that metaphysics of presence.
But I suggest that we back up a bit. In Being and Time Heidegger says that beings are oriented to ‘world’ or ‘nature’ – that we see beings ‘out there’ in nature, in the world – but that the understanding of ‘being’ is from within time, being as παρουσία, as Anwesenheit.2
1 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (GA 2), 53.
2 Ibid., 34.