The "Facticity of Life"
of the "meaning of being." Even Plato himself, the great master of European thinking, did not formulate this question. However, this does not mean that Plato or Aristotle were not familiar with the "meaning of being." On the contrary, the reason why Plato and Aristotle did not pose the question of the meaning of being is because this meaning was too "obvious" for them. From here onward, the "meaning of being" forms something like the unthematized backdrop of Greek - and thus European - philosophizing. With Heidegger, a "subsequent interpretation" is supposed to make "this uninterrogated self-evident fact" explicit. Heidegger's philosophy understands itself as this "subsequent interpretation." However, here one must consider the extent to which the philosopher's interpretation modifies and reinterprets the "meaning of being" in a way that liberates him from the immediate influences of the Platonico-Aristotelian beginning of European philosophy.
In a concise manner, Heidegger raises this "obvious" "meaning of being," which surreptitiously guided Plato's and Aristotle's thought, to the level of the concept. As he puts it in a nutshell: "being = presence [Anwesenheit]."65 Heidegger comes to this knowledge by referring to a specific sense of the Greek word ousia. In Greek, ousia does not simply mean "being" or "essence" (Wesen). Just as the German word Anwesen also means "property" or "house," ousia also means Anwesen in this sense of "property." When someone refers to his "property," his grounds and land, he means something on which he can rely. His property does not first have to come into being nor is it something bygone. It is present (anwesend) to him. For Heidegger, this connection between ousia and Anwesen indicates that the "meaning of being" must have something to do with time.
The "meaning of being" as "presence" does not emerge out of a particular philosophical idea. Rather, it emerges out of "factical life," as the sense of ousia as Anwesen (in the sense of property or house) demonstrates. According to Heidegger, neither Plato nor Aristotle, nor the philosophers who came after them, ever considered the "meaning of being," which thus remained unthematized. However, this meaning is the gravitational center of European philosophy because "it includes the whole problem of time and consequently the problem of the ontology of Dasein."66 It thus became
65 GA 19: 466/323.
66 Ibid.: 467/323.
49 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken (GA 9), 194; “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, 148.
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