Getting to the Topic

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What, after all, was Heidegger's philosophy about? The usual answer has been "being" (das Sein), at least since the early 1960s when William J. Richardson and Otto Pöggeler crafted their brilliant and still dominant paradigms for understanding Heidegger. But the uncertainty of Heidegger scholarship is nowhere more evident than with that key term. What, in fact, does Martin Heidegger mean by "being"? This is the first question we must take up.

To show that the problem of being has troubled Western philosophers from ancient times, Heidegger opens his major work, Being and Time, by citing a passage from Plato's Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger asks his dialogue partners Theaetetus and Theodorus:

How are we to understand this being ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of yours? ... We are at an impasse, so explain to us what you mean when you say "being" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). It's obvious that you have long known what you mean by these things, whereas we who formerly imagined we knew are now baffled.

Much the same thing might be said about Heidegger. He may have known what he meant by "Sein," but he did not always make that clear to the rest of us. In fact, we might well make our own the plea that the Eleatic Stranger expresses in the next sentence of The Sophist: "So first teach us this very thing so that we won't seem to know what you told us when in fact we do not." Heidegger's remark on Heraclitus' fragment 72 articulates that same problem in yet other terms. Without naming who the "they" might be, he says, "They say 'is' without knowing what 'is' really means."

This puzzlement goes to the heart of Heidegger's project. So, as Aristotle advises, "Let us make some distinctions." Was Heidegger's central and final topic "being"? In his later years he said it was not. When it comes down to "the thing itself" (die Sache selbst) of his work, he declared "there is no longer room even for the word 'being.'" Then was his topic something "being-er than being" (wesender als das Sein)? And could that perhaps be "being itself," das Sein selbst, understood as "something that exists for itself, whose independence is the true essence of 'being'"? And if so, how exactly does "being itself" differ (if it differs at all) from "being" as the being-of-beings (das Sein des Seienden) or being as the beingness-of-beings (die Seiendheit des Seienden)? Or was his topic not Sein but perhaps Seyn? Or was it rather Seyn qua —