5
Ex-sistence as Openness
Heidegger’s basic question about the source of intelligibility was very much a post-Nietzschean inquiry. In an age when there is no Ground of Being under our feet and no Divine Ideas above our heads, how does meaning come about at all? Without invoking a divine standard of truth, or the myths of Platonic ideas or extractable essences, Heidegger’s question about Sein, aka Anwesen, becomes “the question of how meaningful presence as such can be given.”1
We have seen that the metaphysical tradition’s οὐσία or esse or Sein is always the being of things—“Being never occurs without things”2—and further that, within Heidegger’s phenomenology, the word “being” no longer refers to existentia and essentia as the guiding concern of traditional metaphysics but rather means the intelligibility of things in correlation with human intelligence. But Heidegger’s own question went a step further than that to what he called the basic question: Granted that being is the meaningful presence of things to man, how does such meaningful presence come about at all? What makes it both possible and necessary in human experience? And given the necessary correlation of being and man, the question of the “whence” of being is inseparable from the question of what makes possible man’s understanding of being at all.
Thus Heidegger’s basic question is actually about what makes intelligibility possible. But since intelligibility occurs only with human beings, the question about what makes it possible turns the tables and begins by putting questions to the human being who asks such questions: Why are we condemned to making sense of things? Why are we structurally required to mediate between things and their meaning? Can meaningfulness collapse, and what happens if it does? By understanding being as the meaningfulness of things
1. GA 14: 86.24–87.1 = 70.9–10: “[Die Grundfrage] nach dem Sein als Sein, d.h. die Frage, inwiefern es Anwesenheit als solche geben kann.”
2. GA 9: 306.17–19 = 233.28: “Das Sein nie west ohne das Seiende.” SZ 37.12 = 61.26–27: “Sein aber je Sein von Seiendem ist.” GA 73, 2: 970.3: “Sein und Seiendes sind unzertrennlich.” Also SZ 9.7 = 29.13 and GA 73, 2: 975.24.