Given this chain of argument (which is Heidegger’s), we may clarify his Alice-in-Wonderland use of das Sein and das Sein selbst by simply substituting for those ambiguous ontological terms what Heidegger actually meant by them in his phenomenology.
1. As regards the subject matter or Befragtes of his question: We should always understand the misleading ontological terms “the being” or “beingness” of things as the intelligibility of things: their meaningful presence to man.
2. As regards the sought-for answer or Erfragtes of his question: Instead of the merely formally indicative term “das Sein selbst” (which is only Heidegger’s lorem ipsum for the goal of his thought), we should speak of “thrown-openness” or “the thrown-open clearing”; or, in his later terminology: the appropriation of ex-sistence, or the appropriated clearing. All of these terms name ex aequo what “being itself” only provisionally stands in for. All those terms name “the thing itself” that Heidegger was ultimately after.
Hence the solution to the Humpty-Dumpty-ism of das Sein selbst: Heidegger’s basic question breaks down as follows:
1. Field: the intelligibility of things, taken for itself.
2. Focus: What accounts for it, what makes it possible and necessary?
3. Final answer: thrown-open or appropriated ex-sistence as the clearing for intelligibility.
Of course (ὃ μὴ γένοιτο), one could use the surpassed language of Sein in speaking of Heidegger’s phenomenological work (as is unfortunately the fashion in the scholarship today). But even if one were to do so, it is clear that Sein is not at all what Heidegger was after, for again: Once one gets to the thing itself, there is no longer room even for the word “being.”128 Instead, what one finds at the core of Heidegger’s thought is what he called either appropriated ex-sistence129 or the appropriated clearing.130 His earlier work stressed ex-sistence insofar as its thrownness has always already opened up the clearing and holds it open (Da-sein), whereas his later work stressed the clearing as held open by thrown-open ex-sistence (Da-sein). But as he declared to
128. GA 73, 2: 1319.21 and .23: The clearing as appropriated-open is “wesender als das Sein.”
129. See GA 12: 249.4–6 = 129.11–13: “Die Vereignung des Menschen . . . [entläßt] das Menschenwesen in sein Eigenes”—that is, ex-sistence as appropriated into its proper state of thrown-openness as the clearing; also ibid., 247.2–4 = 127.18–19; and 249.1–2 = 129.9; GA 14: 28.18–19 = 23.15–17; GA 65: 407, note = 322 note 1; GA 94: 448.31.
130. GA 71: 211.9 = 180.1–2: “die ereignete Lichtung.”