1. I read his work strictly as what he himself declared it to be—namely, phenomenology, which means that it is about one thing only: sense or meaning (I take them as the same), both in itself and in terms of its source.
2. Heidegger understands both “beingness” (Seiendheit) in traditional metaphysics and “being” (Sein) in his own work as formally the same.1 Both of these terms are formal indications of the “realness” of things, however that realness might be read.2 But as a phenomenologist Heidegger argues that both of these co-equal expressions, whether implicitly (in metaphysics) or explicitly (in Heidegger’s own work) bespeak the Anwesen of things—that is, their meaningful presence within the worlds of human interests and concerns, whether those be theoretical, practical, aesthetic, religious, or whatever.
3. However, Heidegger’s project finally makes sense only when we realize that he was after the source of such meaningful presence, whatever that source might turn out to be. To put it in formally indicative terms, that source would be whatever makes it necessary and possible for us to understand things only discursively—that is, only in terms of their meaningful presence, whatever form that presence might take. Heidegger argued that this source turns out to be what he called “the appropriated clearing” (die ereignete Lichtung),3 which is the same as thrown-open/appropriated human ex-sistence (das geworfene/ereignete Da-sein).
I argue that the “being” discourse, the Sein-ology that has dominated Heidegger research for the last half-century, has hit the wall. Since 1989, when Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie was published (English translation, Contributions to Philosophy), it has become increasingly clear that what I call “the classical paradigm”—the various ways mainstream Heidegger scholarship has understood his work over the last fifty years—is no longer able to accommodate the full range of his lectures and writings as they are now published in his virtually complete Gesamtausgabe. As my late colleague Richard Rorty once advised me, “When your argument hits the wall, start making some distinctions.” The present work takes that advice seriously. In the spirit of Aristotle’s διορίσωμεν,4 it is all about distinctions, and especially the distinctions
1. See chapter 2, note 11.
2. I use the word “realness” in what Heidegger calls its “traditional” (and still formally indicative) sense of “being”: SZ 211.26 = 254.32–33. See also below, chapter 2, note 6.
3. GA 71: 211.9 = 180.1–2.
4. Metaphysics X 6, 1048a26: “Let us make some distinctions.” All citations from Aristotle in Greek are taken from Aristotelis opera, ed. Immanuel Bekker.