When it comes to “being,” Heidegger, like Mao, seems to have let a hundred flowers bloom.71 Or perhaps in the spirit of Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”72 Long ago Aristotle famously declared that “being” (the Greek word he used was the participle ὄν in the sense of “the real”) is an analogical term that accommodates many diverse meanings, all of which, however, refer to one principal meaning that anchors the rest. Such an analogical view may well apply to Heidegger’s work. But we shall see that even when Heidegger establishes—correctly as far as it goes—that the word Sein refers to the disclosedness of something to human understanding, he still had not arrived at his goal—because Sein was not his final topic.73
* * *
So we repeat the sentence with which we began: What, after all, was Heidegger’s philosophy about? In his Four Seminars we read at 6 September 1973, “The only question that has ever moved Heidegger is the question of Sein: what does Sein mean?”74 But right there we run into a major problem. The word Sein or “being” comes from the lexicon of traditional realist metaphysics, where it usually refers to the “substance”—the essence and/or existence—of anything insofar as it is understood to be real. However, Heidegger’s own work takes two major steps away from metaphysics and its traditional concern with “being.”
In the first place, Heidegger’s philosophy was not in pursuit of Sein at all. Rather, he was after das Woher des Seins, the “whence” of being, “that from which and through which . . . being occurs.”75 (We note the frustrating ambiguity in the meaning of “Sein” in this case. It could refer either to the clearing or to the being of things. Here I take it in the second sense.) Originally Heidegger called this “whence” the intelligibility of being (= der Sinn von Sein). Over the years he reformulated that as the “disclosedness” or “place” or “clearing” or “openness” or “thrown-open realm” for the being of things, all ex aequo.76 His
71. Mao Zedong, “百花齐放” “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”
(speech at the enlarged Eleventh Session of the Supreme State Conference, 27 February 1957),
section VIII.1.
72. Whitman, Song of Myself, 51.
73. See GA 14: 27.8
= 22.3–4: “Sein verschwindet im Ereignis.”
74. GA 15: 377.18–20
= 67.13–14.
75. GA 73, 1: 82.15–16:
“das von woher und wodurch . . . das Sein west.”
76. GA 15: 335.11–16
= 41.5–9,
and 344.29
= 47.7:
Sinn, Wahrheit, Ortschaft/Ortlichkeit/τόπος. Also ibid., 345.15–16 = 47.24–25;
403.32–404.1 = 94.28–29 and
SZ 170.23–25
= 214.23–26.
GA 16: 424.21 = 5.14–15: “Unverborgenheit oder Lichtung (Verstehbarkeit).”
GA 65: 295.3
= 232.30: “das Offen für das Sein.” Entwurfbereich as the thrown-open domain:
GA 9: 201.31
= 154.13 and
GA 14: 35.23–24
= 27.31–33 with
GA 49: 41.25–28:
“Ent-wurf besagt: “Er-öffnung und Offenhalten des Offenen, Lichten der Lichtung, in der das, was wir Sein (nicht das Seiende) nennen und somit unter diesem Namen auch kennen, eben als Sein offenkundig ist.”