Gegenwärtigen. Unfortunately, Macquarrie and Robinson translate Sein bei as “being alongside” things, and Stambaugh renders it as “being together with” things. Neither of those phrases captures Heidegger’s sense of rendering things meaningfully present, which is how we shall interpret the phrase.
Aheadness-and-return, the two unified moments of ex-sistence’s engagement with the world of intelligibility, come down to one thing only: λόγος as the structural possibility of making sense of things and of ourselves. Heidegger translates λόγος by the German term Rede; but here Rede does not mean “speech, talk, discourse” in the sense of a string of sounds endowed with meaning: ϕωνὴ σημαντική, vox significativa.81 Nor does it mean “language” as a rule-governed system of communication. Rede/λόγος refers, rather, to the dis-cursive structure of ex-sistence itself—that is, to the twofold movement whereby we transcend things and then return to render them meaningfully present by taking them in terms of one or another possibility.82 In fact, in SZ § 67 Heidegger equates Rede/λόγος with ex-sistence itself when he places discursivity and ex-sistence in apposition to each other:
[die] Zeitlichkeit der Rede, das heißt des Daseins überhaupt.
the thrown-openness of λόγος, that is, of ex-sistence in general.83
Heidegger understands λόγος in terms of the verb λέγειν: to collect, synthesize, unite. Ex-sistence as λόγος/Rede is first of all the holding together of one’s own existential structure as both possibility (thrown-aheadness) and actuality (return). In turn, λόγος/Rede as the existential structure of ex-sistence makes possible the existentiel act of holding together (synthesizing) a thing with its meaning. In ontological language this is the act of understanding something in terms of its being.
81. Respectively, De Interpretatione 4, 16b26, and Thomas Aquinas, Expositio libri Peryermeneias, Proemium 3, citing Boethius, Patrologia Latina, 64: 301.33 (“De nomine”). See GA 9: 74.24–25 = 59.14–15: “eine Abfolge akustisch objektivierbarer Töne, die mit einer Bedeutung behaftet sind.” Also GA 19: 18.33–35 = 13.4–5: “Das Sprechen is also ϕωνή, ein Verlautbaren, das in sich eine ἑρμηνεία hat, das über die Welt etwas sagt, welches Gesagte verstanden werden kann.”
82. Here λόγος is understood not “als der Aussage” but rather “als Grundwesen des Menschen”: GA 83: 168.18–19.
83. SZ 349.32 = 401.2–3: “Aus der Zeitlichkeit der Rede, das heißt des Daseins überhaubt.”