| (1) DAS SEIN SELBST (2) IN DESSEN WESEN | |
| In ontological terms: | |
| Befragtes = das Sein selbst. | The very being [of things] is under investigation. |
| Erfragtes = in dessen Wesen. | We seek the essence, i.e., the whence of such being. |
| In more appropriate phenomenological terms: | |
| Befragtes = das Anwesen selbst. | The very intelligibility of things is under investigation. |
| Erfragtes = in dessen Woher. | We seek what accounts for such intelligibility at all. |
Heidegger’s way of expressing this matter is certainly confusing, and at this point one is tempted to mutter Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate qui. Or to switch from Dante to Dodgson, Heidegger often sounds like Humpty-Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”121 But lest one despair, there is a way out of this Alice-in-Wonderland world.
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In his later work, especially from 1960 until his death in 1976, Heidegger expressed himself a bit more clearly. He declared that the merely formal indication “das Sein selbst” finally turns out to be die Lichtung, the thrown-open clearing, which he designated as the Urphänomen of all his work.122 The clearing is the always-already opened-up “space” that makes the being of things (phenomenologically: the intelligibility of things) possible and necessary. Heidegger calls it “the open region of understanding” and “the realm of disclosedness or clearing (understandability)”123—that is, that whereby the understandability of things occurs in the first place. The heuristic X now has actual, real content; and what previously was only formally indicated now has material content and is properly named. How so?
121. Carroll/Dodgson, Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6, 66.21–24.
122. GA 14: 81.13–14 = 65.30–32: Urphänomen, Ur-sache.
123. Respectively, GA 9: 199.21 = 152.24: “[das] Offene des Begreifens” (E.T. by John Sallis) and GA 16: 424.20–21 = 5.19–20 “der Bereich der Unverborgenheit oder Lichtung (Verstehbarkeit).” Verstehbarkeit is a philosophical neologism that does not appear in the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch.