PHIL304: Existentialism

The novelty of Heidegger's formulation of the Seinsfrage in Being and Time consists, not in its orientation towards the sense of being in general, but rather in the way in which he understands the Seinsfrage and the path he lays out in order to answer it. Heidegger's principal thesis in Being and Time is that time constitutes the horizon for "any understanding whatsoever of being" and, therefore, that time effectively constitutes the sense of being in general (Sinn von Sein überhaupt). This means that time organizes the manifold senses of being (in both its categorial and existential determinations) by referring them back to a "general" or "focal" sense. Before one examines Heidegger's thesis that time constitutes the sense of being, however, it is important to underline the following point: it does not go without saying that the question of being should be framed in terms of the concept of "sense". Even after Heidegger defines the concept of "sense" as an existential in Being and Time, the decision to formulate the Seinsfrage in terms of the concept of sense conceals a number of suppositions, the most important being the supposition that the manifold senses of being can be organized around or referred back to a focal sense. This supposition does not depend on the thesis that the sense of being turns out to be constituted by time. The entire problem of the sense of being, and the possibility of a science devoted to this problem, arises from the elementary fact that the sense of being is manifold; being has many different senses. It is not initially clear whether these senses can be organized around a focal sense. In nearly all of his courses both before and immediately after Being and Time, Heidegger continually reminds his readers and students that being is a pollachôs legomenon (πολλαχῶς λεγόμενον). He introduces the Seinsfrage by referring to the universally recognized, even pre-philosophically available fact that being has many senses, i.e., that the understanding of being, which constitutes Dasein in its being, is as diverse and differentiated as the kinds of being that there are. Furthermore, he consistently restricts the multiplicity of the senses of being to the level of beings alone. It is beings in their diversity that differentiate the sense of being and distribute it over the whole territory of beings. Nevertheless, for Heidegger, the diversity of the senses of being is never so radical as to affect the sense of being in general. The sense of being, once determined, can account for the many senses of being, for however different these senses may be both from one another and from being itself, the focal sense of being does not evaporate in mere equivocation. Being is not equivocal, and only insofar as it is not equivocal can the question regarding its sense first arise. And yet being is not univocal either. It does not always and everywhere have the same sense. Hence the problem: if being is neither equivocal nor univocal in its sense, but rather has an Aristotelian "unity of analogy," as Heidegger put it in Being and Time, what does being mean, and how can the sense of being organize its manifold senses?

The manner in which Heidegger formulates the Seinsfrage as a question about the relation between the focal sense of being and the many senses of being in no way depends on any substantive phenomenological thesis. It is entirely Aristotelian, and can be formulated without reference to the phenomenological method or phenomenological concepts. Indeed, Heidegger sets out to demonstrate why ontology is only possible as phenomenology in Being and Time. He sets out to demonstrate why the Seinsfrage can only be raised and answered by means of phenomenology. The manner in which Heidegger formulates the Seinsfrage also does not depend on any theses about the correlation between being and time. That time constitutes the horizon for any understanding of being whatever is Heidegger's answer to the Seinsfrage, and forms no part of the formulation of the Seinsfrage, which can and has throughout the history of metaphysics been raised without any explicit reference whatever to the correlation between being and time. The correlation between being and time, as the explicit and privileged object of ontological inquiry, is peculiar to Heidegger's own project in Being and Time. Thus, I will postpone discussing the correlation between being and time until, in order to focus first on how the concept of sense operates in Heidegger's formulation of the Seinsfrage in Being and Time. My hypothesis will be that Heidegger's interpretation of time, or the way in which he understands the relation between being and time, is deeply determined by the concept of sense he employs in his formulation of the Seinsfrage. I will argue that Heidegger's strategy for motivating the Seinsfrage consistently failed to establish the thesis that being has a focal sense that can be the object of ontological inquiry. I will conclude by suggesting (but only suggesting) that Heidegger's thesis that time constitutes the sense of being is philosophically problematic and historically questionable. The Greeks (Aristotle) did not (not even unthematically) understand being in terms of time in the way that Heidegger suggests. Rather, I will argue, they understood time in terms of motion, and motion in terms of power (dunamis-energeia, δύναμις-ενέργεια), a fact Heidegger knew very well, and which he analyzed in many contexts, but which he consistently interpreted in ways that favor the priority of time (constant presence) over every other "horizon" of the understanding of being.

Source: Tarek R. Dika, https://inprjournal.pubpub.org/pub/crossing1-expositio-dika/release/3
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