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HEIDEGGER’S BEING AND TIME

Paraphrased and Annotated

by Thomas Sheehan

INTRODUCTION

1. Approaching Being and Time

In May of 1971 Heidegger told a young visitor fresh out of graduate school that if he wanted
to understand Heidegger’s work, he first had to master two things: the categorial intuition in
Husserl’s Logical Investigations VI/6 and Aristotle’s doctrine of movement in Physics III. In a
phrase: meaning and movement. He went on to say that the first text had led him to revise his
previous understandings of the second. That is, once he understood the breakthrough Husserl had
achieved with the categorial intuition, Heidegger applied that insight to a rereading of kinēsis in
Aristotle that started him on his lifelong pursuit of the question of being.

Meaning and movement—what he would later call “being” and “time”—are the focal
issues of all Heidegger’s work. Taken together, they are the key that unlocks his major contribution
to philosophy published in 1927 as Sein und Zeit and fifty years later as Being and Time.

The paraphrase that follows underlines the phenomenological method that Heidegger
employed in dismantling traditional metaphysics and recasting the question of being in a radically
new form. He reinterpreted the problems of classical ontology as lived, first-person experiences,
and in so doing gave traditional philosophical terms wholly new meanings. Most importantly he
construed the human being not as a rational animal but as a movement of open-ended sense-
making.

In Being and Time Heidegger frequently and unfortunately employs the lexicon of
metaphysics without foregrounding how he had transformed its meaning. A prime example is
“Sein” (traditionally, “being”), the central topic of metaphysics. For Heidegger, “Sein” does not
refer to the classical notions of einai, ousia, or esse. That is, it does not express the traditional in-
itself-ness of something, the fact that a thing “exists out there” on its own with a certain whatness
or essence independent of any relation to human beings. On the contrary, in Heidegger’s work the
Sein of anything names the significance that the thing has for someone who is involved with it.

In phenomenology, to say “is” is to say “is meaningful as. . . .” In other words, “Sein” is
not the tradition’s stand-alone “is-ness” or “being” that is somehow built into things.
Phenomenology deals with things as what and how they are insofar as they show up in direct, first-
person experience. The “being” of a thing is thus the current significance something has (for me,
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you, or others) given our interests in and involvement with the thing. Its “being” is the way the
thing is
• meaningfully present to someone
• as something
• in correlation with that person’s interests in the thing
• within a meaning-giving context.

For example, when I go camping in the woods, I might experience a large stone I run across
in a number of different ways: first of all as an ersatz hammer for pounding in tent pegs (since I
forgot to bring along a mallet); later as a paperweight to hold down my map in the wind; and later
still as a missile for driving off a bothersome critter. Phenomenologically speaking—that is,
experientially—in the space of a couple hours that stone will have gone through three distinct ways
of being.

Heidegger’s momentous shift from the metaphysical independence of “things-out-there”

to the phenomenological correlation between what we encounter and the interests we have in them
is what undergirds Being and Time’s analysis of meaning and movement. At the beginning of the
book, Heidegger announces, “Phenomenology is the only way we can do ontology,” a
methodological principle that he adhered to until the very end of his career.

That notwithstanding, readers of Being and Time often lose sight of Heidegger’s
phenomenological revolution and end up trapped in mistaken notions of what he was trying to
achieve. That predicament will persist unless and until scholars and lay readers alike realize that
virtually every important term in Heidegger’s technical lexicon means something different from
what it denotes in either traditional philosophy or everyday German. For example,
Sein does not mean being
Zeit does not mean time
Wahrheit does not mean truth
Da does not mean there
Existenz does not mean existence
Sorge does not mean care
Geschichte does not mean history
Ereignis does not mean event
. . . and the list goes on. Discovering what these terms do mean in Heidegger’s phenomenology is
one of the tasks of the present work.

2. The Genesis of Being and Time

In an important sense, Being and Time is Heidegger’s effort to confront and resolve a
philosophical and religious crisis that he himself had undergone during his student years in
Freiburg. Raised in the archconservative Catholicism of late nineteenth century rural Germany and
having briefly studied for the priesthood, the young university student was faced with the
challenges posed to his faith by the clash between the academic ideas to which he was then exposed
and the revanchist backlash of the Catholic church’s anti-modernist crusade against such things as
human evolution and the historical criticism of the Bible.
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In addition he was repelled by the Church’s strict confinement of philosophical and

theological questioning to the procrustean bed of neo-Thomism. During those years he was deeply
moved by an intense reading of Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard, to the point where he felt
compelled to transition from traditional Catholicism to the existentialisant Protestantism of Karl
Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Heidegger would later describe this crisis as a painful separation
(schmerzliche Ablösung) from his religious origins, deeply rooted as they were in a personally
lived Catholicism, that he had to “overcome from the ground up.”

More important philosophically was Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche between 1910 and
1914, including the second, enlarged edition of The Will to Power. The effect on him was like an
earthquake. The death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed was not simply that “belief in the
Christian God [had] become unbelievable.” By “God” Nietzsche meant nothing less than that the
“really real” world, which stretched back philosophically to Plato, further back institutionally to
the Neolithic revolution, and perhaps ultimately to the emergence of Homo sapiens. The “death of
God” meant the collapse of the overarching paradigm that had ordered human thought and culture
for countless millennia. The resultant crisis left Heidegger the young philosopher, not unlike the
protagonist in Nietzsche’s parable, with the challenge of what to do “now that we have unchained
the earth from its sun.”

The “death of God” marked the crash-and-burn of the metaphysics that had long sustained
belief in the stability of reality and in the rationality and purposiveness of life. As Heidegger
absorbed the breadth and depth of that collapse (perhaps concretized for him in the implosion of
the German Reich in 1918), he become intensely engaged, in the words of William Barrett, “in
nothing less than the Herculean task of digging his way patiently and laboriously out of the
Nietzschean ruins, like a survivor out of a bombed city.”

The task that Nietzsche set for those born after the “death of God” was to invert the
traditional hierarchy of reality, to take what had been called “being”—the stable presence
determining a thing’s degree of reality—and to forcibly restamp it with the character of becoming.
The goal of life and philosophy was to realize that what constitutes the realness of everything in
the universe is its asymptotic becoming, with no goal or purpose other than to keep on keeping on.
The basic conatus driving everything that exists—“the force that through the green fuse drives the
flower”—was the desire for a “deep, deep eternity” that ultimately is an eternity of endless
becoming.

As different as Heidegger’s project would eventually turn out to be, it was nonetheless
shadowed by Nietzsche’s call to recast being as becoming—in Heidegger’s language, to rewrite
being as time. From the beginning to the end of his career, the bedrock of Heidegger’s work would
be the unfathomable ultimacy of becoming.

3. Movement

Although his doctrine of movement informs all of Heidegger’s work, that fact is too little
remarked in the scholarship. The result: the less the centrality of movement is thematized, the
harder Heidegger’s work is to understand. What he said in 1951 about reading Nietzsche—“first
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study Aristotle for ten or fifteen years”—applies as well to studying his own work. Aristotle
famously declared that if you do not understand kinēsis, you will never understand nature, and
Heidegger would add: If you do not understand kinēsis, you will never understand human being.

Heidegger’s reading of movement runs through all his courses on Aristotle and forms the
core of his first major text on Aristotle, the renowned “Report to Professor Natorp” (1922), in
which Bewegung (movement) is mentioned 52 times in a 51-page manuscript. Later, in a 1928
seminar, he would declare that human being is the Urbewegung, the original and basic form of
movement, such that the being of things can be understood only in terms of movement. In the
language of SZ, insofar as we are ex-sistential becoming (Zeitlichkeit), we necessarily understand
being in terms of ontological becoming (Zeit). Not only that, but the bond that correlates our ex-
sistential movement with Sein as movement is itself kinetic, a fact that underlies Heidegger’s
reading of ex-sistence as Ereignis in the latter half of his career.

When Heidegger in 1971 said that understanding his work requires first understanding
kinēsis, he of course meant his interpretive retrieval (Wiederholung) of that issue. The proper
interpretation of a text, he says, does not understand the text better than its author did, but it does
understand it differently. That is, a genuine interpretation deals with the same issue as the author
originally did but ferrets out unthematized meanings that the text still contains—what Heidegger
called “the unsaid” that is still sayable. To be sure, one must make every effort to understand the
text in its original context. But unlike a merely philological-doxographical interpretation, the
philosophical reading of a text does not just establish its original meaning. Instead, the
philosopher’s task is to let the possibilities latent in that text from the past speak to issues of the
present.

The principle controlling Heidegger’s retrieval of the unsaid-but-sayable in Aristotle’s

kinēsis is the same principle that governs his interpretation of being as becoming: “Higher than
actuality stands possibility.” What does that principle mean, and how does it function in
Heidegger’s analysis of human being as “the basic form of movement”?

4. Ex-sistence as “thrown becoming”

Heidegger’s term of art for the being of human beings as contrasted with every other kind
of entity, is Existenz, one of those technical terms in SZ that does not have its usual meaning.
Existenz is unique to human beings and is not the same as “existence,” the kind of being that non-
human entities have. Heidegger occasionally writes the German as Ex-sistenz, and in keeping with
that usage I will translate it as “ex-sistence,” hyphenated and intentionally misspelled so as to
emphasize its inherently kinetic sense.

Etymologically, Existenz derives from the Latin causative verb sistere, “to make something
stand” (the way you might stand a framed photo on your desk) conjoined with the prefix ex, which
has the kinetic sense of “out of” or “forth from,” and in the present case “out ahead of.” In form,
the Latin existere parallels the Greek existēmi.
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“Thrown” is Heidegger’s dynamic and somewhat dramatic term for “a priori,” referring to what is
ontologically always already the case. It pertains to the way/s of being that we necessarily are and
cannot not be if we are to be at all. As ex-sisting, we are “thrown” (= a priori made to stand)
“ahead” of ourselves, that is to say, in movement. As thrown into movement ex-sistence is thrown
becoming.

Not only am I thrown into becoming the way all natural entities are, but in addition I also
relate to my becoming and am cognizant that this is how I have to be if I am to be at all. Those
two elements taken together—“self-cognizant becoming”—constitute Heidegger’s basic
definition of ex-sistence.

To that very formal delineation he adds another crucial element. My ex-sistence is not only
mine and mine alone; it is also mine to become. Human beings are fundamentally purpose-directed
entities: we live forward into our desires and goals. Ex-sistence is not a Gabe, a “given,” so much
as an Aufgabe, a task; it is not something I have so much as what I have to enact. It is less a
possession I can hold on to than it is what I must perform if I am to ex-sist at all.

I am thrown into the necessity and the possibility of personally enacting myself such that
my ability to become transcends what I have already become. This is what Heidegger means by
saying that possibility is higher than actuality. I am nothing but the need and the ability to
become—that is, to continue surpassing myself by reproducing and enacting my ability to become
. . . until I can no longer do so, at which point I cease to ex-sist and am dead.

To use the verb “to be” in the present tense (e.g., “I am”) might seem to indicate a static
“now,” which, however long or short, gives way to yet another static “now” and then to another,
as if I were stepping from one self-contained moment to another in a journey from the past into
the future.

But for Heidegger my being—my “I am”—is a becoming. Moreover, this “becoming that I am” is
also what I have become, a condition expressed grammatically by the present-perfect tense. I
always have been and still am the child of my parents; and because my being is actually a
becoming, I will always be what I have-been-and-still-am: the child of my mother and father.
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Therefore, insofar as the becoming that I have been is likewise the becoming that I both am and
will be, Heidegger can say, “My past does not follow along behind me but goes ahead of me.”

My “am” is my current way of being, in the etymological sense of “current,” viz., “running
on, flowing,” a self-presence in which my past is neither lost nor left behind (as Faulkner says, “it
is not even past”) but is me as becoming. My present, in the sense of my presence to myself, is at
one and same time the ingathered becoming that I have been and the forward-reaching becoming
that I am and will be. My “now” is in flux, a nunc fluens. One is reminded of Heraclitus statement
that you cannot step into the same river twice—with Cratylus going him one better by claiming
you cannot step into the same river once.

5. Ex-sistential movement as ahead-and-return

What is common to both movement and meaning—to both making my way forward and
making sense of things—is the dynamic structure of ahead-and-return. My ex-sistence is a matter
of living ahead of myself while at the same time living with myself, that is:
• living into the future (into particular purposes, always in the interests of my ultimate
purpose: to keep on keeping on) and
• living in the present (but always as a present-future).
The inseparable if tense unity of those two moments constitutes being-in-movement, something
that both Aristotle and Heidegger agree is difficult to define. Heidegger calls it “the hardest thing
Western metaphysics has had to ponder in the course of its history.”

Heidegger describes the movement of ex-sistence as Sich-vorweg-sein als Zurückkommen,

“being ahead of myself as coming back to myself.” This phrase is easily misunderstood, beginning
with the ambiguous term “coming back to myself” (Zurückkommen). In fact, Heidegger’s 1928
diagram of ahead-and-return could well abet such a misunderstanding.

The term “coming back to myself,” when reinforced by Heidegger’s diagram, might give the
impression that movement is a two-step, boomerang-like process: first, I am thrown ahead of
myself; second, I return to where I was before. But on the contrary, those two moments are
simultaneous and inseparable: at one and the same time I am both ahead of myself and yet still
with myself. In Heidegger’s words, I am stretched ahead of myself but “without leaving myself
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behind.” As thrown ahead of myself, I am always “remaining in and with myself.” What does this
mean?

One way to clarify this ahead-and-return is to review the Greek and medieval doctrine of
the analogy of being. For Aristotle, being and oneness are interchangeable; and in the metaphysical
tradition stretching from Aristotle to Proclus (d. 485), the degree of oneness that an intellectual
entity possesses—and thus its realness— is defined by its degree of self-coincidence. Proclus
measures such oneness by how completely an intellectual entity “returns to itself” (cf. pros heauto
pantēi epistreptikon). Seven centuries later, Aquinas appropriated that view when defining an
intellectual entity’s degree of being: it is itself (in se subsistit) to the degree that it returns
completely to its own being (reditio completa in seipsum). The crux of the matter, however, is that
this return to oneself is an ontological rather than an “ontic-chronological” state of affairs.

In the first place, an intellectual entity does not first “go out of itself” and then subsequently
“return to itself.” Aquinas’ reditio in seipsum, like Proclus’ epistrophē, is a metaphorical way of
describing an entity’s presence to itself. It would be best, therefore, to understand the “return to
oneself” not as a movement of looping back to oneself but instead in terms of “staying with
oneself.”

Second and more importantly, the “return to oneself” is meant analogically. That is, an
intellectual entity has oneness and therefore realness to the degree that it is self-coincident. The
more an entity is present to itself, the more real or “being-ful” it is. The model here is God as the
highest instance of realness. Aquinas’ God, like Aristotle’s, is completely self-coincident: pure
actuality, perfectly self-realized, with no potentiality that still needs to be actualized. Human
beings, on the other hand, are imperfectly self-coincident insofar as they are continually and
asymptotically becoming self-coincident. This is how Heidegger interprets Heraclitus’ hapax
legomenon, agchibasiē: ex-sistence is “ever approaching” but never actually arriving.

It is this idiosyncratic sense of “return” that Heidegger is channeling when he describes

movement as Sich-vorweg-sein als Zurückkommen. His formula of “being ahead of myself as
returning to myself” is to be understood as: I am myself insofar as I am becoming myself. Ex-
sistence is an open-ended if finite movement that I have to enact with no final goal to be attained.
Taken together, my prior having-become and my current “am” are in a state of becoming—not,
however, as if in the process of arriving anywhere. Rather, ex-sistence is simply self-cognizant
becoming as an end in itself.

6. Movement and meaning

If movement and meaning are the two underlying issues in Being and Time, what does
Heidegger’s doctrine of movement have to do with how we make sense of things? How is
Heidegger’s doctrine of meaning grounded in ex-sistential movement?

One of Heidegger’s terms for human being is unterwegs, being-underway, modeled on

Aristotle’s doctrine of physis (the self-generated growth of natural things) as a form of kinēsis. In
describing physis as a process of becoming, Aristotle calls it a hodos, usually translated as a “path”
or “road.” However, in this case physis qua hodos does not mean the stretch between a starting
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point and a goal. Traveling along that kind of road is over and done with once I reach the goal.
Heidegger, however, reads Aristotle’s text differently. Becoming-qua-hodos is a matter of (1)
moving through an area and thereby (2) opening it up—analogous to the way pioneers “open up a
territory” as they travel through it. As thrown into becoming, we live forward, projected
purposively ahead towards goals that we endlessly surpass as soon as we achieve them. In moving
forward, we “clear our own path” and, in so doing, open up and clear the space within which we
also decide the meanings of things in terms of our purposes.

As such, we are the entities who have logos. As thrown into living forward, we break into
the solid, dark compactness of things and bring light to bear. We open up a sphere of dynamic
intelligibility within which those things can be distinguished one from the other and subsequently
brought together again. We distinguish and unite things, first to let them serve as means for
attaining our particular goals, and ultimately to sustain our overriding purpose: to keep on keeping
on. Such distinguishing and synthesizing (diairesis, synthesis) are the two most basic functions
of logos, the sense-making that we ourselves are. l

In terms of its etymology, “sense” has a kinetic-directional connotation along with a

derivative epistemic one. The directional connotation is preserved in such French and Italian terms
as sens unique and senso unico, which indicate a one-way street. The derivative connotation, on
the other hand, underlies the English phrase “making sense of something.” For Heidegger, it is the
kinetic-directional connotation that has priority. In making our way forward towards our
asymptotic goal of ever-more becoming (cf. the basic connotation of sentire), we make sense of
the things we encounter (the derivative connotation) by employing them as means for achieving
our ends.

This dynamic-kinetic structure of ex-sistence—both living forward and distinguishing-

and-synthesizing things in order to achieve our purposes—is the genesis of all meaning. By making
our way forward we make sense of things.

The question then becomes: What kind of sense do we primarily make? In focusing on
things as means for achieving ends, Heidegger is foregrounding his claim that we are homo habilis
before we are homo theoreticus. We are practical entities who enact our lives by working with
things before we are entities who sit back and observe them objectively. Heidegger’s view here is
decidedly Aristotelian, in keeping with his effort “to make Aristotle’s Greek interpretation of ex-
sistence accessible and understandable to us.”

Aristotle’s world was not Galileo’s, where nature is seen as a mathematized manifold in
which disinterested subjects happen across things that are objectively out there. Such a notion,
Heidegger says, was entirely foreign to the Greeks. To recapture Aristotle’s perspective “we must
free ourselves from traditional ways of posing philosophical questions” and realize that viewing
the world with disinterested objectivity is something of an unnatural act. We relate to the world
not primarily with stand-off-ish neutrality but rather with interest, involvement, absorption, and
fascination.

Even though theoretical observation (theōrein) was the Greek ideal of knowledge,
Aristotle was at pains to illustrate how theory derives from our practical dealings with things. We
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are fundamentally purpose-directed entities who live forward into our druthers and goals. We
relate to the world not primarily by “taking a look” at things or “peering into them” (in-tueri) to
grasp their essence. As intelligent, we pick and choose (-legere) among things (inter-) with an eye
to doing something with them. First and foremost we do not stare at things but look past them
towards what we want to effect with them. Rather than just observing things, we heed them, caught
up as we are in how they matter to us for achieving our goals and ultimately for continuing to
survive. .

In practical activity I use things for a purpose, and that purpose is what gives things their
significance:

In theoretical activity I see things as this-or-that, i.e., in terms of a predicate, and that predicate is
what gives the thing its significance:

Heidegger argues that practical activity reveals the forward directionality of sense-making better
than theoretical activity does, insofar as the purpose or goal of practical activity (the what-the-
thing-is-for) lies ahead of us in the future. In theoretical statements, by contrast, the predicate we
apply to a subject emphasizes the subject’s present status (what it is rather than rather than what it
is for) and thus tends to obscure the ex-sistential movement that underlies all sense-making.

With Heidegger’s thesis on the interconnection of movement and meaning we have the key
to what Being and Time is about. What makes possible all sense-making—including making sense
of “being”—is our ex-sistential becoming, which Sein und Zeit will analyze in terms of ex-
sistential time and temporality.
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7. “Being-in-the-world,” intentionality, and transcendence

As physical entities, we are embedded in the world of spatio-temporal things. But more
importantly, as possessed of logos, we are immersed in the significance of such things. The phrase
“being-in-the-world” refers to both our embeddedness in things and our immersion in their
significance, but the term refers primarily to the latter. In-der-Welt-sein is Vertrautheit mit der
Bedeutsamkeit, intimate familiarity with the meaningfulness of things and first of all with their
practical significance. We are principally involved with things insofar as they are matter to us.
This issue of “mattering” underlies Heidegger’s claim that we encounter things mainly as useful
(zuhanden). But even when I run across something that is not useful for a purpose, that is, when I
see it as just “out there” (vorhanden), that thing nonetheless still matters to me—precisely as
inconsequential to my current projects.

Heidegger’s point here is the basic one of the phenomenological correlation, namely that I
ex-sist in an a priori reciprocal relation (cf. reci-proci-tas, “back-and-forth”) with whatever I
encounter. As the young Heidegger put it,

An object is an object only as an object of knowledge, and knowledge is knowledge

only as knowledge of an object. No object without a subject, and no subject
without an object.

However, that relation is not one of an indifferent subject bumping up against a neutral object. It
is one of reciprocity. Within the phenomenological correlation things can affect me—whether
physically, affectively, or intellectually—only because as I am actively disposed to being affected
by them. I a priori transcend any supposed self-enclosed interiority and lay myself open to people
and things, allowing them to affect me. In other words, the phenomenological correlation is bound
up with the mind as actively intentional, that is, with the fact that, in Aquinas’ phrase, the mind “is
made to come together with all entities,” glossing Aristotle’s “the psychē is in some way all
things.”

For Heidegger there is no “inside” to ex-sistence-qua-mind. If anything, it is the reverse:

my “inside” consists in being “outside” (Draußensein), exposed to and able to make sense of things
other than myself. The mind is not a static substance but the constant activity of minding things.
Nor is it a passive receptacle of data (even worse, a receptacle inside my head). That is the view
Sartre parodied as “digestive epistemology,” the nutritional model of knowledge where “to know
is to eat.” Hungry for nourishment, my mind allegedly sallies forth into the world to snatch prey
(think of the chameleon’s projectile tongue darting out to snare a bug), which it then drags back
into the stomach of consciousness to be steeped in gastric juices and peristaltically reduced to
mental mulch that gets absorbed into the muscles and sinews of my mind.

The human psychē is not a mental stomach; it is our power to contact what is other than
ourselves and to be in touch with ourselves as related to whatever we contact. We do so not by
magically transubstantiating “outside things” into “mental images” that get stored inside our
minds. Nor (pace Aristotle’s ginesthai) do we physically become what we know. Instead, we
assimilate ourselves to the intelligible content of the encountered other—for Aristotle the eidos,
for Heidegger the Gehaltsinn—by conforming ourselves to the significance that we take the thing
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to have within a specific meaning-giving context. Aristotle’s “becoming all things” refers to
participating cognitively in the meaningful presence of whatever we encounter.

Franz Brentano’s rediscovery of the intentionality of mind and Husserl’s refinement of that
in Logical Investigations marked for Heidegger the decisive breakthrough into the possibility of
finally resolving, in a phenomenological context, two fundamental issues in Western philosophy:
1. the question Aristotle raised in the Metaphysics, “What is realness?” and
2. the question Aristotle did not raise: “How does such realness become
understandable? How is it intelligible at all?”
Even though Being and Time was never completed as originally projected, it did resolve both
questions at least in inchoate form. Once transposed into a phenomenological modality, the
question “What is realness ( ousia, esse, Sein)?” is answered as: the significance of things, their
Bedeutsamkeit or Anwesenheit. Much of Division 1 of Being and Time is devoted to this task,
which is the initial focus of Heidegger’s phenomenology. Likewise the second question, which is
focused on the intelligibility of such significance and which remains the ultimate focus of that
phenomenology, is answered more or less explicitly throughout the entire book.

The two tasks overlap, and it is often difficult to keep them distinct in Being and Time, first
of all because of Heidegger’s use of metaphysical terms for phenomenological issues (e.g.,
Sein/being for significance) and, second, because the line is frequently blurred between the
importantly different issues of the intelligibility of things and the intelligibility of significance
itself. That first issue is what Heidegger refers to as das Sein des Seienden (in English, the being
of beings/entities/things—but better understood as: the significance of things.) The second issue
is what Heidegger calls der Sinn von Sein (in English usually and unfortunately: the meaning or
sense of being), which is about how significance is understandable at all.

8. Phenomenology-1: “being” as significance

Heidegger’s path to his basic question was opened up not only by Aristotle treatise on
kinēsis in the Physics but also by Husserl’s doctrine of sensuous and categorial intuitions in Logical
Investigations. By distinguishing two kinds of intuition and the objects given to them, Husserl had
opened the door to reformulating the traditional metaphysical question of being as the
phenomenological issue of the meaningfulness of things. Nonetheless, in Being and Time
Heidegger posed a needless obstacle to understanding the book by his insistence on using the
inadequately clarified term Sein, a word with one foot firmly planted in metaphysics.

When we encounter something, our senses intuit sense data—color, shape, weight, and so
on. But we are also aware that these data are meaningful, that they make some kind of sense. Such
an insight is direct and immediate, hence intuitive rather than discursive. Husserl argued that this
insight into meaningfulness arises from a categorial rather than a sensuous intuition, something
that Heidegger also came to discover in Aristotle and Aquinas. Whenever we see something, we
see that
1. it is (has being) in one way or another (Aquinas: illud quod primo cadit sub
apprehensione est ens,) and
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2. insofar as it falls within the scope of intellect, it is meaningful, i.e., it can be understood,
whatever specific meanings I may eventually end up ascribing to it.
Here we encounter Heidegger’s initial breakthrough from the mind-independent metaphysical
notion of being (ousia, esse, etc.) to the phenomenological insight that “to be” = “to be
meaningful/intelligible/understandable.”

At first blush, Aristotle seems to have understood being (ousia) as a thing’s existence and
essence apart from any human relation to that thing. However, one of Heidegger’s most
consequential discoveries was that, far from being a naïve realist, Aristotle was a phenomenologist
avant la lettre, armed with an implicit awareness that we are a priori locked into a correlation with
whatever we encounter.

For Aristotle human beings as logon echontes do not “have” logos as an ontic-entitative
property, like having Athenian citizenship or a B.A. in philosophy. Rather, we are “had by” logos,
possessed by it as our essential way of being: what we are and cannot not be if we are to be at all.
Heidegger argues that Aristotle (mostly implicitly but often explicitly) understands everything we
meet as an on legomenon, an entity that is gathered up into logos, the sphere of dynamic
intelligibility that we ourselves are. We are the sole site of intelligibility, “the locus of intelligible
appearances” (topos eidōn), the only means whereby intelligible appearances show up at all (eidos
eidōn). Hence whatever we encounter is a priori understood within a phenomenological
correlation.

However, a thing does not have its intelligible appearance built into it. Instead, the thing
enters intelligibility (eis to eidon) only when we take it as having such-and-such a significance.
We are a priori/structurally thrown forward, pro-jected into open-ended becoming. Consequently
we can take whatever we meet and throw it forward, i.e., pro-ject it towards either a practical
purpose or a theoretical predicate, thereby making sense of it. Because we are logos, the mere fact
that we encounter something makes that thing understandable (potentially intelligible). But when
we actively and personally pro-ject it, i.e., take it as this-or-that or as for such and such a purpose,
the thing moves from being understandable to being understood: it becomes actually intelligible
(perhaps better, actually “intellected”). That is the case whether or not our understanding of the
thing happens to be right. There is a difference between understanding something and
understanding it correctly. (I can understand the statement “Socrates was born in Thebes” even
though it is incorrect.)

The import of all this is that when I say that X is Y or X is for Y—that is, when I articulate
the being of X either practically or theoretically—I am in fact saying that X is currently significant
to me as Y. In phenomenology “is” means “is meaningful as…,” and that meaning can change, in
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the same way that the stone at my campsite went through three different meanings in a brief couple
of hours. Phenomenology in its first moment (= phenomenology-1) is about the experienced being
of the thing. That is, it is about my direct, first-person experience of how and as-what that thing is
currently significant to me within a meaning-giving context structured by my present interests and
intentions. Phenomenology then goes on from there, first to spell out that significance, and then to
discern whether it accords with how the thing in question presents itself.

In passing, we should note that Being and Time is hardly the first time this position emerges
in the history of philosophy. Heidegger’s phenomenological thesis merely restates and then further
develops Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ position that “to be” and “to be intelligible” are one and the
same.

7. Phenomenology-1: From practical activity to being engaged in ex-sisting

Part 1, Division 1, of Being and Time is devoted to phenomenology-1, that is, to unpacking
how movement-and-meaning structure the phenomenological correlation. It does so under the
threefold rubric of

Division 1 opens with two preliminary chapters that set the stage for the analysis. Chapter 1
presents some fundamental elements of ex-sistence (§ 9), while chapter 2 discusses ex-sistence as
a priori immersed in meaning (In-der-Welt-sein: § 12). The analysis proper then begins with
chapter 3, which spells out movement and meaning as
• the dynamic structure (= the ahead-and-return movement)
• of the world of practical significance (= the means-to-end relations that generate the
significance of things around me).

Say that I arrive at my campsite only to realize that a downpour is imminent. I certainly
don’t want to catch my death of cold—which implies that my ultimate purpose in life is sur-vival:
living on, continuing to ex-sist. That fact issues in a stepwise agenda of what I have to do next.
1. My ultimate purpose prescribes a more immediate task, that of setting up a tent against
the rain.
2. That immediate task in turn prescribes a practical context or “world,” a set of means-
to-end relations that will guide the activity to fulfillment. Specifically, I will need a
hammer to drive in the tent pegs in order to set up the tent.
3. But damn it, I forgot to bring along a mallet. I then notice a heavy stone over there,
whose significance suddenly changes from “just a rock” to “ersatz mallet.”
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This scenario indicates that in practical activity we experience objects (e.g., a tent, some
tent pegs, a rock) not as separate things but instead as related to one another
• within a meaning-giving context (Welt)
• that is unified by a goal (Woraufhin)
• that is ultimately directed to ex-sistence as an end in itself (Worumwillen).
In turn, this concatenation of relations is bound up with performing certain practical activities
(Vollzug) in relation to (Bezug) what I want to effect (Gehalt: setting up the tent). That is, making
practical sense at my campsite entails a dynamic correlation comprised of three elements:
enactment → in relation to → content. That same pattern recurs in theoretical acts. For example,
as a juror in 399 BCE,

The enactment of sense-making in both practical and theoretical activities is the focus of
chapter 5, which analyzes how ex-sistence has to be structured in order for me to be able to
perform sense-making acts. Broadly speaking, Heidegger’s phenomenological method follows the
traditional axiom of operari sequitur esse: how a thing functions follows from what it is. Or to
reverse the order: what something is determines what it is capable of doing. Accordingly, if I want
to discover the nature of, say, a fox or a hedgehog, I have to carefully observe how it functions
and then draw my conclusions from that. In the present case, chapter 3 has already spelled out in
some detail how practical activity functions, not so as to teach us how to use hammers but instead
to illustrate that all practical activity operates according to the pattern of ahead-and-return. The
task is then to probe what the structure of ex-sistence must be in order for such functioning to take
place.

Chapter 5 argues that structurally I must be open and ahead (cf. Befindlichkeit and
Verstehen). The openness is my ability to be affected by whatever I encounter, whereas the
aheadness is my ability to make sense of whatever affects me. These two elements occur
simultaneously and interdependently. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin, and together
they are the source of all significance. That is: My open-and-ahead-ness is what allows me to have
things meaningfully present. Under the rubric of movement and meaning, we have already argued
that living into my future (Sich-vorweg-sein) defines my presence to myself (Zurückkommen).
Chapter 5 reconfirms that point by showing that ex-sistential movement (affectable openness and
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sense-making aheadness) is the source of all significance—here, the meaningful presence of

whatever I encounter.

Chapter 6 of Division 1 then concludes by drawing these issues together into a definition
of the unity of movement and meaning under the title of Sorge. This term is usually and
ambiguously translated as “care.” However, Heidegger excludes from Sorge any psychological
resonances of care, concern, worry, or the like. Instead, he understands Sorge as our being a priori
given over to the ex-sistential dynamism of movement-generating-meaning in the form of
aheadness-and-return. Sorge is a name for the bivalence of ex-sistence as
• thrown ahead and immersed in a meaning-giving world,
with the result that
• whatever we encounter has significance.
That bivalent structure is what each of us is “given over to,” i.e., what we cannot not be. In other
words, Sorge names how we are a priori engaged in ex-sisting.

9. Phenomenology-2: the intelligibility of significance

Division 1 recasts metaphysics in a phenomenological mode by (1) reading human being

as an open-ended movement of sense-making and (2) reinterpreting “being” as the correlative,
current significance of whatever we encounter. Implicitly operative in the tasks of
phenomenology-1 is the question “How are we able to understand not just things but above all the
very significance of things? How is significance itself intelligible, and what structure on our part
correlatively accounts for that?”

Husserl’s doctrine of categorial intuition had taught Heidegger that (1) the being of things
is as immediately present to mind as sense data is to the senses—i.e., that human beings are
immersed in meaning—and (2) to say that something is is to say that it is understandable. With
that twofold insight Heidegger saw that Aristotle’s term ousia (the being of a thing) bespeaks the
parousia of that thing, that is, not its “is-ness” as independent of human beings but rather its
presence to mind. The parousia of a thing is its understandability or intelligibility, its dis-
closedness as what, that, and how it is in relation to and because of our essence as logos.

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