On Heidegger's understanding of Being

>On the question "what is Heidegger's definition of Being?"

Heidegger explicitly eludes giving an outright answer for the meaning of Being because it would cage it within a defined framework of understanding, depending on the context of the question “what is Being?”. Furthermore, language in this epoch doesn’t have words to access Being directly (he believed the pre-socratics, specifically Parmenides and Heraclitus, were on their way to developing an understanding of world which asks the question for Being by unfolding φύσις's mysteries (physis) through the Λόγος (logos), which is the connection between the gods and mortals——but then the Socratic/Platonic methods emerged and civilization took another direction).

The fact that German capitalizes nouns easily lends itself to confusion for non-German readers, as it suggests that Heidegger conceived of the notion of being as a noun (when for a native German the word for that is "Seiende"), instead of a verb. It helps to think of Heidegger's capitalized Being as meaning to say to "to be". I'll continue capitalizing Being for the purpose of keeping semantic attention on the word.

Dasein literally means that-being (being in the sense of "currently being") or being-there. Heidegger uses Dasein to point to particular human activities taking place in one given moment, which are connected to other previous (historic) and future (possible) activities. This takes place because Dasein lives within a transparent framework of care or concern for what is being done. I hammer this nail *in order to* put two boards together, *in order* to add legs to a chair, *towards* getting this task done and getting paid for it, *for the sake of* being a good carpenter and a family provider. There's also the factor of disposition that Dasein has when daseining, namely its mood (stimmung).

Of note is that we are each Daseins/Daseining because we are an entity that is *in each instance* our own, which is not the case with any other entity that we know. In other words, all things have in common that they are, but in the case of our own being, we are separated from the other things because we are *our-selves* in each case.

Being allows for every ontical (ὄντος, the root word for "entity") thing to disclose itself to Dasein as-something, in an already articulated framework of practical understanding, all happening in a transparent/unnoticeable way. A more obscure way of describing Being's operation, but useful in the shades of meaning that Heidegger beckons us towards, is that Being (remember: to be) grants itself to things, or makes things be, necessarily through Dasein itself in virtue of its particular mode of existing (being its own), and all without Dasein's awareness.

However, if/when awareness of all the above does suddenly happen, or is forced on the above, then traditional metaphysics forcibly takes over, which Heidegger calls a third modality for Dasein's understanding: Vorhandenheit (present-at-hand, the method of understanding objects through modern "technics", instead of Zuhandenheit: handy-ness or ready-to-hand). Again, vorhandenheit is a third modality of Dasein's understanding of world. Heidegger wants, among many other things, to unconceal two prior modes that Dasein exhibits before any kind of question can be asked: Dasein already articulates with the world transparently (2nd) and Dasein can do this because there's a transparent grounding or framework of tangibility that allows for articulation to take place (1st).

It is important to remark that Being, a notion, can also be understood as that which enframes (gestell) daily life in a way that makes the world tangible and readily accessible for Dasein, disclosing its contents in each case as-something to Dasein in a given context. The particulars of how the world is tangible so that it can be hospitable depends on each historical and geographical epoch Dasein is in: in each epoch, different things "make sense" to do, ask, wonder, dream, wish, etc. To my recollection Heidegger never remarks this in B&T, but he does touch on epochs or "historical peoples" later in his life.

More important to remark is that Being/"to be" is a purely ontological notion: it does not have any kind of grounding or presence in the ontical world like other ontological things do (for example, a notion like "friendship" has its phenomenical grounding on the concrete actions that two humans might selflessly do for one another). Therefore, Heidegger realizes that Being cannot be accessed directly, at least in this epoch & with the way Being discloses world to us. However, Being can be accessed indirectly through other notions that are not purely ontological, such as Dasein’s own mortality (death as the possibility that cancels every other possibility)——a notion which he chooses as the centerpiece of B&T.

Being inevitably grants notion-ness (we can't use the word "meaning" here) to every other thing, so it stands on its own as a question separate from all other things and notions. Maybe this is something that was clear to Parmenides when he utters the seemingly tautological phrase “to be is to be” (or “being is being”), but whatever that phrase pointed to is completely lost to us because our modern language has no concern for the nature or essence of Being. Add to that the fact that the original writings don't survive: we only receive them through quotes from other posterior authors, who were themselves quoting Heraclitus or Parmenides to advance their own theses.

Heidegger’s “the essence of truth (ἀλήθεια) is the truth of essence” phrase is also an attempt to capture how Being operates. There's so much that has been written about this phrase, but my understanding of it is as follows.

1. ἀλήθεια/Alétheia differs from the latin understanding of truth as correspondence: it means to "away from the Léthes [river]", or to unforget. Heidegger chooses to translate it as unconcealment. In other words, to unconceal something means to bring something to light (see lichtung/forest clearing) from the nothing. But *not everything* can be brought to light, only that which is within our horizon of possibilties (for our epoch and culture). The nothing is not "absence-of", instead it's all possibilties that *are not* within the horizon of possibility. It is the conglomerate of possibilities that do not appear yet to "World" (see 4 paragraphs below), such as epochs and understandings of Being that are yet to come, or that have already been forgotten by World.

2. "Essence" for Heidegger stems from essere, he uses it as literally meaning "how something is". Therefore you could rephrase the "the essence of truth..." phrase as: truth operates by opening/disclosing/clearing world through unconcealment. Being's fundamental trait is disclosing things through truth, so it follows that Being reveals to a historical people all their possibilities (and limitations), enframed (gestell) by their own understanding of Being.

The later Heidegger would concern himself with how Poets had the task or the possibility of translating the notions of the divines (which are synonymous to the nothing as defined two paragraphs above) into the language of the mortals (mortals is H.'s new word for Dasein) so that those notions could be understood by them, thereby reconfiguring their understanding of Being, which brings about a new historical epoch for that people. There's a fantastic essay written by Daniel Sharp about the Fourfold (sky, earth, mortals and Divines) here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160115232431/http://philforum.berkeley.edu/blog/2011/11/20/heideggers-fourfold/.

(The Fourfold is a development that originally was only a dialectic (but still Hegelianly monoist) strife between "Earth" and "World" in The Origin of the Work of Art, where World seeks to unearth knowledge, possibility and horizons from Earth. Simultaneously, Earth operates by shutting itself and bury all possibilities, re-concealing them back into the nothing. In the Fourfold, the notions of Earth were inherited by Earth & the Divines, and World by the Mortals & Sky——the latter mainly insofar as temporality is concerned.)

With each epochal change, possibilities are both unconcealed and concealed, so where new horizons might appear, previous familiar notions are concealed back again into the nothing. E.g. the change from the pre-Socratics to Plato (going through the Roman and Christian epochs) eventually culminated in the age of technics/science (or "technical nihilism", as he calls our present day) bringing about many advances and improvements to man’s life through the stratification or atomization of disciplines (whose objects of study are always vorhandenheit), which was the ultimate “end” or “purpose” of Plato's and Aristotle's project.

It's worth noting that each culture behaves and acts according to what makes sense to do in their own disclosure of world, and most if not all cultures have always acted and articulated with the world as though their disclosure is the ultimate, singular truth (Nietzsche is a great critic of this). This has both led to great innovations and discoveries, as well as to terrible catastrophes and genocides.

The evolution of τέχνη (tékhne) into technics/science came at the cost of losing sight of the "ontological difference" (the difference between entities and the notion entities), which Heidegger argues the pre-socratics might've been in the process of developing. In other words, this epoch is almost blind to ontological notions, and can't help reducing all things to entities. (To be specific, because science discards everything that is ontological about something, and posits that the only thing real (understanding "real" as effective and permanent in its appearing) and worthy of study is the ontic. For example, science reduces god to the question “Is god real?” or "Does god exist?", which greatly misses the point of what a god is or how it operates for a culture. Another example is how "love" is reduced to an operation of chemicals in the brain and psychological behaviors, and discards everything else that has captivated writers, poets, musicians, playwrights and sensitive humans across all the epochs.

I took this as an opportunity to go over my understanding of the question of Being. I've continued editing this document as I grow older and have read more. It's purely my view of Heidegger's work adding my own interests to it, so by no means do I claim I've defined his project. If you disagree with, have corrections, additions or questions about any of the above, please share your thoughts with me: https://twitter.com/alonsomartin