(Sartre: plan) is entirely and exclusively human. “Being” is not some “higher dimension” added on to and surpassing ex-sistence. It is simply what we do, finitely and mortally, in our groundless freedom.
3. οὐσία/παρουσία
We continue to sort out the “whence” of being as Heidegger retrieved clues about that from the early Greek names for “being.” What about Plato’s and Aristotle’s most general name for being: οὐσία as stable presence? Heidegger espies in that term a hint of what he will eventually call by the (potentially misleading) term “time.”
And finally the basic term οὐσία (which is decisive for the future terms “substance” and essentia) harbors within itself the relation to “time”: it has the character of presence in itself (more pointedly: οὐσία—παρουσία as “one’s holdings,” something at one’s disposal, one’s possessions, something stable in itself and constant).125
“Presence” for the Greeks is παρουσία [παρά, “unto” + οὐσία], shortened to οὐσία; and “presence” for the Greeks means being. To say that something is means that it is present, or better, that it is (as we must say in German) present-to [west an] in the present moment [Gegenwart].126
And in speaking of being as a thing’s stability he says:
The stable constancy [of a thing] is [its] pure presence—being-present in the full sense. . . . This entails a gesture toward the present [Gegenwart] and thus toward “time.”127
Heidegger argues that the so-called “temporal” character of οὐσία can be gathered from Plato’s designation of the “really real” (ὄντως ὄν) as ἀεὶ ὄν and ἀΐδος οὐσία (usually “eternal being”),128 although Heidegger argues that “the more sharply οὐσία is grasped and associated with the [Aristotelian] ‘categories,’ the more the relation to time gets shrouded.”129 In fact, Heidegger’s own
125. GA 73, 1: 86.12–16: “birgt . . . ουσία . . . den Zeitbezug.”
126. GA 34: 51.20–24 = 38.29–32. Anwesen translates the Latin praesentia.
127. GA 73, 1: 85.25–27 and .30: “In-sich-ständige Beständigkeit ist reine Anwesenheit—Anwesung im vollen Sinne. . . . Hierin liegt der Wink auf Gegenwart und damit auf die Zeit.”
128. Respectively, Symposium 211a1, Timaeus 27d6–a1 and 37e5. See chapter 2, note 41.
129. GA 73, 1: 86.16–18: “Aber je schärfer . . . um so mehr verhüllt sich der Zeitbezug.”