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Sense and Meaning

Chapter · October 2015

DOI: 10.1002/9781118529812.ch31

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 SENSE, MEANING, AND HERMENEUTICS

1
FROM ARISTOTLE TO HEIDEGGER

Thomas Sheehan
Stanford University

In Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, eds.,

The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, Hoboken,
N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 270-279

A short paper on “sense and meaning in hermeneutics”— the title that was originally assigned
for this chapter—would be an impossible task. When we consider how many philosophers have grap-
pled with this issue, and the large library of texts they have generated, we can easily see that this topic
is far too vast even to summarize in a short essay. Instead, I will narrow the scope of this chapter to
the question of sense and meaning in Heidegger’s hermeneutics. That task alone is immense, and I can
only offer some guidelines. My purpose is to sketch out how Heidegger’s doctrine of sense and
meaning grew out of his reading of Aristotle’s De interpretatione 1-4. But since sense and meaning are
matters of intelligibility, we must first see how Heidegger deals with that topic.

I. SENSE , MEANING , INTELLIGIBILITY

Phenomenology in Heidegger is about one thing only: sense or meaning – in a word, ἀλήϑεια
as he understood that term in Aristotle: the intelligible appearance of something to someone. Which is
to say that phenomenology in Heidegger is entirely about hermeneutical questions. At least that is the
case when we rescue his works from those Heideggerians who have colonized him with the shopworn
discourse of “being,” even after Heidegger himself declared he had abandoned it. “I no longer like to
use the word ‘Sein’” he said.2

“Being” remains only the provisional term. Consider that “being” was
originally called “presence” [Anwesen] in the sense of a thing’s staying-here-
before-us-in-disclosedness.3

1
Some preliminaries: I cite Heidegger’s texts by page and line (the line-number follows the period) in both the
Gesamtausgabe and the current ETs. Exception: Rather than GA 2, I use SZ in the Niemeyer 11th edition; ET by
Macquarrie-Robinson. Some translations: Dasein = “ex-sistence,” hyphenated (cf. Heidegger’s “Da-sein”) to
bring out its etymology: “being made to stand out [and ahead]”; das Seiende = “beings/things/entities” ex aequo;
Sein and Seyn = “being” (cf. GA 81: 76.18); Anwesen = “meaningful presence.” “Man” refers to human beings
in general, not to the male of the species. I take “intellect” in the broad sense of νοῦς and in the specific sense of
λόγος as discursive intellect, whether practical or theoretical. All German words referring to ἀλήϑεια (e.g.,
Wahrheit, Erschlossenheit, Unverborgenheit, Entborgenheit, etc.) are translated by “disclosedness.” Translations
from the German are often my own.
2
GA 15: 20.8-9 = 8.34.
3
GA 7: 234.13-7 = 78.21-4.

1
 Most Heideggerians agree that Sein and Anwesen are interchangeable. However, some hold-
outs would claim that Anwesen means merely the objective presence of things (their existentia or
Vorhandensein), which was operative even as far back as the Paleozoic Era, when there wasn’t a
human being in sight. Others would claim Anwesen is simply the spatio-temporal presence of things
“out there” in the universe in our own times, perceivable by the senses alone. But in Heidegger’s
Copernican Revolution, which he carried out in the 1920s under the banner of phenomenology,
Anwesen always and only means presence to ex-sistence, to Dasein. Therefore, it is the
intelligible/meaningful presence of a thing to us, and it shows up whenever we understand what a thing
currently means. (The statement “This is X” = “Currently this is meaningfully present as X.”)

Heidegger was quite clear on this. In the citation above, the phrase “staying-here-before-us-in-
disclosedness” (her-vor-währen in die Unverborgenheit) is Heidegger’s term of art for the presence of
something to ex-sistence (her-vor-), which occurs whenever that thing is known, whether in praxis or
theory, that is, whenever it is brought from an undisclosed but potential intelligibility into an actually
operative one (in die Unverborgenheit). This entails that we do not first have a dumb encounter with
things and only later assign them meanings.

It is not the case that objects are at first present as bare realities, as objects in
some sort of natural state and that then in the course of our experience they
receive the garb of a value-character so that they do not have to run around
naked.4

Rather, what is primary and what is immediately given to us without some

mental detour through a conceptual grasp of the thing is the meaningful [das
Bedeutsame]. When we live in the first-hand world around us [die Umwelt],
everything comes at us loaded with meaning, all over the place and all the
time.5

Which means: If beings are the meaningful (das Bedeutsame), their being is their meaningfulness
(Bedeutsamkeit), i.e., their intelligible presence to us.

In Heidegger’s work, the term “Sein,” along with all other traditional names for the “realness
of the real” (the οὐσία of τὸ ὄν, the esse of an ens, etc.), is always written under phenomenological
erasure.6 Traditionally those terms referred to the what-ness, that-ness, and how-ness of things that
they exist “outside of [i.e., independent of] our thinking.” 7 However, Heidegger’s Copernican
Revolution recasts the “being” of traditional ontology in phenomenological terms: Sein =
Bedeutsamkeit = Verständlichkeit = the intelligibility of things. This is to say that the only entrance

4
GA 61: 91.22-5 = 69.6-9.
5
GA 56/57: 72.31-73.5 = 61.19-28.
6
I use the words “realness” and “reality” in what Heidegger calls their “traditional” (and still formally
indicative) sense: “das Sein im Sinne der puren Dingvorhandenheit”: SZ 211.26 = 254.32-3, that is, their
existence-as-things in what one takes to be “the nature of things.” See GA 84, 1: 396.9-10, citing Suarez, Dis-
putationes metaphysicae, XXXI, section I, 2: “esse aliquid in rerum natura” and “aliquid reale”:
http://www.catedraldevalencia.es/castellote/d31.htm
7
Aristotle’s ἔξω [τῆς διανοίας]: Metaphysics, VI 4, 1028a 2, taken with 1027b34-1028a1; ibid., XI 8, 1065a24:
ἔξω ὂν καὶ χωριστόν: things that exist outside of (separate from) our thinking. See GA 6, 2: 380.2-13 = 16.17-26.
2
into Heidegger’s work is through the phenomenological reduction. To be sure, Heidegger does not
understand this reduction in a Husserlian sense, as leading things back to a “transcendental life of
consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of
consciousness.”8 Rather, it means

leading the phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a

thing, whatever may be the character of the apprehension, to the
understanding of the being [Sein] of the thing: understanding the thing
in terms of the way it is disclosed.9

Note that this being (Sein) to which the re-duction (Zurück-führung) leads a thing back is “the way the
thing is disclosed,” that is, the way in which it is meaningfully present to us within a specific set of
concerns. This disclosedness of a thing in its intelligibility or meaningfulness takes place always and
only in correlation with the understanding of the meaning of the thing.

A note on terminology: In Being and Time, Heidegger was not entirely clear on the difference
between Sinn and Bedeutung. The two are closely related in that book and are usually translated into
English interchangeably as “sense” and “meaning.” Bedeutung always refers to the sense or meaning
of a particular thing (i.e., of a Seiendes). But when it comes to Sinn, we must make some distinctions:

1. When Sinn is used in conjunction with things (as in fact it rarely is), it refers to their
sense, meaningfulness, or intelligibility.10

2. When it is used in conjunction with Sein (der Sinn von Sein), Sinn is (a) only a formal
indication of (b) whatever is responsible for meaningful presence at all.11 Stated as a
question, the phrase der Sinn von Sein is: What accounts for the intelligibility of Sein?

3. Being and Time does in fact argue to the content of the formally indicative word Sinn,
and that turns out to be the ex-static (i.e., “thrown-open”) horizon within which the
presence (“being”) of things appears as itself intelligible.12

4. In Heidegger’s middle and later work, after he had abandoned Being and Time’s
transcendental-horizonal approach, the word Sinn gets replaced by a number of co-
equal terms: the open, the thrown-open domain, and especially the clearing for
meaningful-presence-at-all. Other formally indicative terms are the “essence” or

8
GA 24: 29.12-5 = 21.24-6.
9
GA 24: 29.15-9 = 21.27-30 (= lecture of 4 May 1927), my emphasis. Cf. GA 20: 423.4-5 = 306.29-30. Re
“understanding”: GA 16: 424.21-2 = 5.15-6: “Verstehen, d.h. Entwerfen.”
10
For example at GA 19: 205.13-4 = 141.33-4; SZ 151.22-4 = 192.35-7; and ibid., 12.14-5 = 32.23-4. That last
text has stood through some seventeen editions of SZ (thirteen of them during Heidegger’s lifetime). But at GA
2: 16.23 = Stambaugh 11.15 it has been criminally changed from “Sinn des Seienden” to “Sein des Seienden,”
even though GA 2 advertises itself as the “der unveränderte Text.”
11
In turn, the intelligibility of Sein accounts for why any particular thing can have a Bedeutung, a meaning. For
example, SZ 151.29-31 = 193.6-8: We take a thing in terms of its intelligibility [Sinn = Woraufhin des
Entwurfs], and thus the thing is able to have a meaning, i.e. to be understood as this-or-that (“etwas als etwas
verständlich wird.”)
12
“Thrown-open: cf. geworfener Entwurf.
3
 “place” or “truth” of being, where “essence” means that which accounts for – is
responsible for – the fact that there is Anwesen at all.13

Thus, from beginning to end Heidegger’s goal was not any form of “being,” if only because
metaphysics had already done a bang-up job on that. But what about “das Sein selbst”? In Heidegger’s
works “being itself” is not a phenomenon at all. It is an abbreviated way of saying “being as regards
its source/essence.” Stated as a question, “being itself” comes out as: “What is the source of being?
What makes it possible?” “Being itself” is simply a term that (like Sinn) is only a formal indication of
whatever is responsible for “being.” “Being itself” is only a heuristic stand-in, a lorem ipsum, for the
clearing.14 What Heidegger was searching for was the Woher or “whence” of being, “that from which
and through which being [the meaningful presence of something] occurs.”15 His question went beyond
being (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) to ask about what is responsible for being:

What is the reason for the inner possibility and the necessity of being and
of its openness to us?16

In Heidegger’s words, “understanding the Sein of a thing = understanding the what-it-is and
how-it-is of the thing”17 – and such an “understanding of something” is the same as making sense of
that thing. But how does such making-sense-of-something come about? Heidegger’s answer comes in
three steps:

First:
Intelligibility is an existential element of ex-sistence . . . . Ex-sistence alone “has”
intelligibility.18

And thus:

When an innerworldly thing is discovered with the being of ex-sistence – that

is, when it comes to be understood – we say it has intelligibility.19

And therefore:

Because the very nature of ex-sistence is to make sense of things, ex-sistence

lives in meanings and can express itself in and as meanings.20

13
Thrown-open domain: Entwurfbereich: GA 9: 201.31 = 154.13. See GA 15: 335.11-6 = 41.5-9 and 344.29 =
47.7: Sinn, Wahrheit, Ortschaft/Ortlichkeit.
14
On ‘being itself” as a formal indication of the clearing see this writer’s, “What, after all, was Heidegger
about?” Continental Philosophy Review 47, 2 (2014).
15
GA 73, 1: 82.15-6: “das von woher und wodurch . . . das Sein west.” See also GA 14: 86.24-87.1 = 70.9-10;
GA 15: 405.30 = 96.12; GA 88: 9.7; and GA 65: 78.22 = 62.30.
16
GA 16: 66.15-6: “worin gründet die innere Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der Offenbarkeit des Seins.”
17
GA 9: 131.21-2 = 103.33-5: “Verständnis des Seins (Seinsverfassung: Was- und Wie-sein) des Seienden.”
18
“Sinn ist ein Existenzial des Daseins . . . . Sinn ‘hat’ nur das Dasein,” SZ 151.34 and .36 = 193.11 and .13.
19
“Wenn innerweltliches Seiendes mit dem Sein des Daseins entdeckt, das heißt zu Verständnis gekommen ist,
sagen wir, es hat Sinn”: SZ 151.22-4 = 192.35-7, my emphasis; ibid. 207.12-3 = 251.3-4: “Mit dem Dasein . . .
erschlossen.”
20
GA 21: 151.4-5 = 127.30-2: “Weil Dasein in seinem Sein selbst bedeutend ist [= das Sein des Seienden
versteht], lebt es in Bedeutungen und kann sich as diese aussprechen.”
4
 Metaphorically speaking, the clearing is the “space” within which I can take something as
something and thus understand how and as what the thing is meaningfully present to me. The clearing
gives me the wiggle room (der Spielraum) to take this thing in terms of one of its possible functions
(this rock as a mallet for pounding in tent pegs) or in terms of one of its possible meanings (“This rock
goes back to the Late Archean era.”) These are just two of the contexts within which the rock can be
meaningfully present (or can “have being”): in the first case, within the world of camping in the
woods, and in the second case, within the world of petrology. The clearing as the open space for
“taking-as” goes by a series of cognate and mutually reinforcing names throughout Heidegger’s
career—for example: Da, Welt, Erschlossenheit, Zeit, Temporalität, Zeit-Raum, Speilraum, Offene,
Entwurfbereich, Weite, Gegend, Zwischen, and the list goes on. In his later work all these terms tend to
gather around Lichtung, the clearing as the reason why things have intelligibility at all.

But how is the clearing itself opened up? (1) In Being and Time the answer is: by the thrown-
openness (Geworfenheit) of ex-sistence. This openedness of ex-sistence, in fact, constitutes, and is the
clearing. (2) In the later work the answer is: by the ap-propri-ation of ex-sistence to its proprium, its
“own-most” state, which is to be the thrown-open clearing.21 The clearing – which is the same as the
thrown-openness or ap-propri-ation of ex-sistence – is “the thing itself” (die Sache selbst), of
Heidegger’s work, what he called the Urphänomen or Ur-sache responsible for the fact there is being
at all.22

But many questions about sense and meaning remain to be answered. Why is discursive sense-
making necessary for us? That is: Why must we understand things only by taking-them-as, rather than
by intellectually intuiting their essence? Answering those questions will require a bit of background,
some of it from Heidegger’s greatest teacher, Aristotle.

II. A RISTOTLE ’S D E INTERPRETATIONE 1-4

The advice Heidegger gave his students about reading Nietzsche applies as well to
understanding his own works: “First study Aristotle for ten or fifteen years.”23 Heidegger’s intense
study of Aristotle – first within a traditional Thomistic framework during his early university years,
and then within a phenomenological paradigm in the 1920s – laid the bases for his single, life-long
project. If Husserl taught Heidegger the method of phenomenology, Aristotle led him to its content by
opening a window onto hermeneutics (granted, in Heidegger’s peculiar understanding of that term). If
we can unpack this confluence of method and content, we will have made a start on understanding
how Heidegger’s hermeneutics and phenomenology converge in the togetherness of, i.e., the
phenomenological correlation between, sense/meaning on the one hand and the thrown-open clearing
on the other.

Heidegger’s hermeneutics grew out of his interpretation of Aristotle’s treatise Περὶ ἑρµηνείας
(“Concerning ἑρµηνεία”) – and yet, depite its title, in that entire text we do not find a single reference
to “hermeneutics.” If Aristotle had written a book about hermeneutics in our contemporary sense of

21
On the sameness of Geworfenheit and Ereignis see GA 65: 34.9 = 29.7; ibid., 239.5 = 188.25; ibid., 304.8 =
240.16 ; ibid., 252.23-5 = 199.3-4; GA 9: 377, note d = 286, note d: “Geworfenheit und Ereignis”; and SZ 325.37
= 373.14-5 with GA 65: 322.7-8 = 254.36-7.
22
GA14: 81.13-14 = 65.30-2.
23
GA 8: 78.9 = 73.33.
5
the word, the title would have been Περὶ ἑρµηνευτικής (= Περὶ τῆς τέχνης ἑρµηνευτικής),
“Concerning the Art of Interpreting,” 24 and its Latin translation by Boethius would have been entitled
De interpretativa (= De arte interpretativa) instead of De interpretatione. But that is not the case. If,
then, ἑρµηνεία in Aristotle does not mean “hermeneutics,” what does it mean? The answer is, quite
simply: a declarative sentence, an ἀπόϕανσις. But how did Heidegger get his doctrine of sense and
meaning from a treatise on the parts and forms of declarative sentences?25

Aristotle’s definition of ἑρµηνεία in De interpretatione 1-4 has many moving parts. In the
broad sense of the term, animals as well as human beings can enact a ἑρµηνεία. We will work through
Aristotle’s broad sense of the term on our way to his narrow sense: a declarative sentence.

Derived from “Hermes,” the messenger of Zeus, the word ἑρµηνεία in its broadest sense
means a communication. More specifically it is (1) any expression, animal or human, (2) that is
meaningful, (3) that intends to communicate, and (4) that seeks to stimulate attention, acknowledge, or
agreement. Thus the Aristotelian definition of a ἑρµηνεία would be:

1. Any and all expressions, whether in the form of inarticulate sounds, gestures, spoken
words, or written words, that are . . .

2. [meaningful/disclosive:] tokens or signs that disclose “affects in the soul,” which “affects”
are themselves already tokens or signs of things in the world.

3. [communicative:] Such expressions are intended to communicate those “affects in the

soul” to someone (even to oneself in an inner dialogue) . . .

4. [attention, etc.:] with the intention of gaining someone’s attention, acknowledgement, or

agreement.

1. Any expression, whether in the form of inarticulate sounds, gestures, spoken words, or
written words. As rich as an animal’s or a person’s mental life might be, there is no ἑρµηνεία – no
communication – until that life gets expressed. Here Aristotle restricts the possibility of such
expression to entities that have life or soul: “ensouled” entities (τὰ ζῷα ἔµψυχα).26 However, he
excludes plants, even though they, too, are ensouled. 27 (Do plants “express themselves” and
“communicate” through their scent? their color? the seeds they produce?) In any case, for Aristotle the
only relevant expressions are those of animals and human beings. In the case of animals, a ἑρµηνεία
takes the form of an unarticulated noise, such as the screech of a monkey or the chirping of a cricket.
In the case of human beings (although Aristotle does not say so) the ἑρµηνεία need not be spoken or
written. It can be a wordless gesture (a raised eyebrow, even a stare), a sound (a whistle, the beating of

24
Compare the title [Περὶ τῆς] τέχνης ῥητορικής I, 1354a1.
25
Heidegger focused on only the introductory, first four sections of the treatise. The entire treatise is divided
into: I. Introduction (sections 1-4), comprised of: 1. Thought and language, truth and falsehood; 2. Nouns and
verbs; 3. Sentences in general; 4. Declarative sentences in particular. II. The Forms of Declarative Sentences
(sections 5-14): regarding the quality, quantity, and modality of declarative sentences.
26
See De anima II 2, 413a2.
27
Plants have a “nutritive soul,” ψυχή ϑρεπτική: De anima II 3, 414a29-33.

6
a drum), a spoken word (“Yes”), a sentence (“No, I won’t”), or a set of sentences, even in poetry (for
example, the Iliad).28

2. . . . that are tokens or signs of “affects in the soul,” which themselves are already tokens
or signs of things in the world. The function of tokens or signs (σύµβολα, σηµεῖα) is to disclose
something, to make it manifest (τὶ δηλοῦν or τὶ ἀληϑεύειν).29 Even the inarticulate sounds of ani-
mals can do this. (Even a yawn might communicate something, perhaps unintentionally.) The monkey’s
screech may disclose its fear of a hawk overhead. A donkey’s bray can disclose, for example, its pain
or pleasure or fear.30 Insofar as these animal sounds (ψόϕοι) disclose something, they are “semantic”
(σηµαντικοί) and therefore “meaningful” at the level of the physical senses.31

But what exactly do such “signs or tokens” disclose, particularly in the case of human beings?
Here Heidegger radically redefines Aristotle’s terms, beginning with παϑήµατα, the so-called “affects
in the ψυχή,” which our expressions make known.32 First of all, Heidegger reads ψυχή not in terms of
an “inner self” that can receive “affects” in the form of sense-impressions that lead to “ideas in the
mind.” And secondly, he interprets “the mind” as being-in-the-world – not just in space-and-time but
specifically in-the-world-of-meaning. Being-in-the-world is the ability to make sense of something.

Heidegger interprets ψυχή as ex-sistence, from ex + sistere, “being made to stand out” in the
double sense of (1) being “thrown open” as the clearing and (2) being thrown beyond things and into
their possible meanings. He describes ex-sistence as our “being outside” (Draußensein);33 and when it
comes to a human ἑρµηνεία, “what gets expressed is precisely our outsideness,”34 i.e., our meaning-
fraught involvement with things.35 Heidegger reinterprets παϑήµατα phenomenologically and inten-
tionally, and not as “internal impressions” and “inner representations” of “things outside.” Παϑήµατα
are just as much “outside” in the world as is ex-sistence. A παϑήµα is what we undergo experientially
in our bodily minding of things. In phenomenology, a phenomenon is not some objective thing “out
there” in the universe, and a παϑήµα is not some subjective state “in here” in my mind. A phenomenon
in the phenomenological sense is the union of an act of experiencing and what is experienced in it. It is
the experiencing-of-the-experienced; or to reverse matters: the what-is-experienced-in-the-way-it-is-
experienced.

28
Note that for Aristotle the Iliad itself is a ἑρµηνεία in the primary Greek sense of that term (a
“communication” in verse), whereas an interpretation of the Iliad is a “hermeneutics” of the text in our modern
sense: an exercise of the τέχνη ἑρµηνευτική.
29
De Interpretatione 5, 17a16 and 18; and Nicomachean Ethics VI 3, 1139b15: ἀληθεύει ἡ ψυχή. See SZ 32.23-
4 = 36.4-5.
30
De interpretatione 1, 16a29: ἀγράµµατοι ψόϕοι. Cf. Politics I 2, 1253a10-2 and On the Parts of Animals, II
17, 660a35-6. For other examples, Historia animalium IV 9, 536b13-9 (partridges and birds) and b21-3
(elephants).
31
Cf. SZ 33.30-2 = 57.11-3. Such expressions are intentional acts: they indicate and disclose something
(σηµαίνειν or kundgeben) and thus are “alethic” at the sense level.
32
The noun παϑήµατa (De interpretatione 1, 16a3-4) – in the singular, παϑήµα – comes from πάσχω, to
receive something; here it means “to be affected by.” The Latin translation is passiones, from patior, to undergo.
33
SZ 162.27 = 205.31, which Heidegger glosses at GA 2: 216 note a = 157 note, as “Ausgesetztheit als offene
Stelle.”
34
SZ 162.27 = 203.31-2: “Das Ausgesprochene ist gerade das Draußensein.”
35
Meaning-fraught: GA 56/57: 71.29-31 = 60.23-4: Everything we encounter is “mit einer Bedeutung behaftet.”

7
 Such a worldly correlation is what gets expressed and communicated in a ἑρµηνεία; and the
so-called “tokens and signs” of that communication are public expressions of an event that takes place
in our meaning-fraught lives-in-the-world. Heidegger comments: “Just as road markers indicate where
we are ‘at,’ so too signs always indicate primarily where we live, where our concern dwells, what sort
of involvement we have with something.”36

To summarize Heidegger’s reading of De interpretatione 1, 16a3-8, and to move forward:

Language as ἑρµηνεία is the disclosure and communication of a παϑήµα, i.e., of a meaningful
engagement with some worldly state of affairs. Different languages use different words, but what all
those different words first and properly disclose – namely, the state-of-affairs-as-experienced, or the-
experience-of-the-state-of-affairs – is formally the same for everyone, regardless of differences in
spoken language. Language expresses our meaningful involvement with things in their meaning. At De
interpretatione 1, 16a6-8 Aristotle says the παϑήµατα in the soul are ὁµοιώµατα (“likenesses”) of the
things in the world. But Heidegger famously reinterprets the issue of ὁµοιώσις not in terms of
likenesses qua inner mental images of outer things but in terms of our “being made like unto,” and spe-
cifically our “assimilation to” the meaningful presence of the thing we are experiencing. Such
“assimilation to” is our familiarity with and understanding of the way the thing is disclosed.37

4. The purpose of a ἑρµηνεία is to communicate something to someone in hopes of getting

their attention, acknowledgement, or agreement. Recalling that the etymon of ἑρµηνεία is “Her-
mes,” we can see that the nature of language is communicative and therefore social. Aristotle says,
for example, that the meanings of sounds are established by social convention: κατὰ συνϑήκην.38
Insofar as a ἑρµηνεία, whether animal or human, is semantic (σηµαντική) in the broad sense, it
gives notice of (discloses) something, even if what it refers to turns out not to be the case. The
monkey’s screech manifests the monkey’s fear-of-a-hawk or of a hawk-as-provoking fear – and yet
there may be no hawk in the sky. In that case the monkey is “mistaken” – but nonetheless its screeching
was intentional in the phenomenological sense: disclosive of something and therefore meaningful. The
monkey did disclose something in the monkey’s “meaningful world” (its fear-of-a-hawk), even when
there was no hawk in the sky; and perhaps the screech got other monkeys to take notice. Whether
monkey or man, the purpose of a ἑρµηνεία as disclosive and communicative is to get another to stop
and pay attention.39

But in the case of human beings, Aristotle ups the ante – and, in the event, narrows the
meaning of ἑρµηνεία. In the proper and strict sense, a ἑρµηνεία is not just a meaningful utterance
about something (e.g., “Would that I were king!” or “Hermes, please help me!”).40 Rather, there is a
proper ἑρµηνεία only when the speaker takes a stand and declares the state of affairs to actually be the

36
SZ 80.9-12 = 111.6-8.
37
“So ist die Seele beteiligt am Anwesen des Anwesenden”: Heidegger, 13 February 1952, as recorded by Ernst
Tugendhat in the ms. Übungen im Lesen, winter semesters 1950-51 and 1951-52, Stanford University, Green
Library Archives, 45.19-20; omitted from GA 83: 654.8. See GA 21: 166.31-167.30 (with note 2) = 139.36-
140.30 (with note 25).
38
De interpretatione 4, 16b26 and 17a2.
39
De interpretatione, 3, 16b21: ἵστησι γὰρ ὁ λέγων τὴν διάνοιαν, καὶ ὁ ἀκούσας ἠρέµησεν, (paren-
thesized in Bekker). The person making ἑρµηνεία “arrests the hearer’s mind and fixes his attention” (Edghill).
40
This is Boethius’ “vox . . . quae per se aliquid significant”: an articulate expression that, of and by itself,
indicates something, i.e., is semantic: meaningful. See Aquinas, Expositio libri Peryermeneias, Proœmium 3.

8
case, or not.41 The real communicator (the ἑρµηνεύς) is not the one who merely expresses something
meaningful (a wish, a prayer) but only the one who makes a claim of truth or falsity for what he or she
communicates.42 And the claim could be correct or incorrect, in which case the interpreter is right or
wrong. This position, which is Aristotle’s, narrows down the referent of the word ἑρµηνεία to
declarative sentences only. A de-clarative sentence is what Aristotle calls a λόγος ἀπο-ϕαντικός,
a statement (λόγος) that purports to show (ϕαίνειν/clarare) something true or false about (ἀπό/de) a
state of affairs itself, rather than showing the speaker’s feelings or wishes or hopes about the state of
affairs. Thus, the sentence “Hermes, please help me!” is not apophantic, whereas “I was just asking
Hermes to help me” is.

A declarative/apophantic sentence is one that claims (rightly or wrongly) to disclose a state of

affairs in words exactly as it is in reality. (For example, one might say: “I swear: I really wasn’t asking
Hermes to help me!” – which in fact is false rather than true, but still is apophantic). With this, we
have arrived at a proper translation of the title and a corresponding indication of the subject matter of
Aristotle’s treatise Περὶ ἑρµηνείας: “Concerning Declarative Sentences.”

III. F ROM A RISTOTLE TO H EIDEGGER

How did Heidegger get from De interpretatione 1-4 to his own doctrine of sense and
meaning? Answer: by burrowing beneath Aristotle’s text and “saying the unsaid” that he found hidden
there. In outline, these are the steps of Heidegger’s progress:

1. He began with the structure of the λόγος ἀποϕαντικός, the declarative sentence. That structure
consists in σύνϑεσις and διαίρεσις (compositio et divisio): discursively synthesizing, while at
the same time distinguishing – the subject matter of the sentence and a possible predicate.

2. From that he argued that what makes such discursive knowledge possible and necessary is the
very structure of ex-sistence – namely, thrown-open as (= appropriated to be) the clearing.
Only because our ex-sistence is structured as an Erstreckung – a stretched-open space – can
we synthesize-and-distinguish subjects and predicates.

3. But to synthesize-and-distinguish a subject and a possible predicate is to take the subject in

terms of that specific predicate, to take S as being P (whether one is right or wrong, correct or
incorrect, in attributing that P to this S). In other words, to claim to know anything, we have to
take that thing in terms of some form of what-it-is and how-it-is, i.e., in terms of some form of
its meaningful presence to us (its alledged way of “being”).

4. Therefore, thrown-open or appropriated ex-sistence, as the clearing, is responsible for all

forms of the meaningful presence (the being) of things. Es gibt Sein because Ereignis gibt
Sein, that is: The reason why there is “being” (the meaningful presence of something) at all is
that the appropriation of ex-sistence to its proprium as the clearing makes that possible.43

41
De Interpretatione 4, 17a2-3.
42
De Interpretatione 4, 17a1-3: Every sentence is meaningful, but only a declarative sentence is “apophantic.”
43
G 73, 1: 642.27-8: “das Dasein ist das je vereinzelte ‘es’, das gibt; das ermöglicht und ist das ‘es gibt’.”

9
 Heidegger did what neither Frege nor the Husserl of Logical Investigations had attempted to do.
He explicitly and systematically grounded his theory of sense and meaning in an ontology of human
being. One of the major achievements of Being and Time was to show how its Bedeutungslehre or
doctrine of sense/meaning flowed from the treatise’s analysis of ex-sistence.44 Heidegger accom-
plished that in three steps:

1. Synthesis-distinction as the structure of a declarative sentence. Discursive thinking,

Aristotle says, is a matter of σύνϑεσις and διαίρεσις, synthesizing a thing with its meaning while
keep-ing the two distinct. Synthesis: I declare that Socrates is an Athenian. Diairesis (i.e., keeping the
sub-ject and predicate distinct): I declare that Socrates does not exhaust the set of “all Athenians.”45
Aristotle had made that point over and over in his De anima.46

Heidegger reads this apophantic structure of σύνϑεσις – διαίρεσις in terms of the “as” (“I take
Socrates as an Athenian”), where the “as” expresses the relatedness of the relata: the unity-and-
distinctness of the thing and its meaning, the subject and the predicate (or, in the practical order, the
tool and the task it’s to be used for). The “as” in “I take Socrates as an Athenian” stands for “is
understood in terms of” and thus “has its current being (sein jeweiliges Sein) as. . . .” Socrates is now
being understood in terms of his membership in the class “all Athenians,” and at the same time he is
understood as not exhausting that class: hence, “Socrates is an Athenian.”

The “as” of “Socrates as an Athenian” is the mark of discursivity. Things do not show up to us
as what-and-how-they-are immediately and directly, the way they might to a divine intellectual
intuition. Rather, their whatness and howness (their predicates) appear only to a mediating and dis-
cursive intellect, one that must dis-currere, “run back and forth,” so to speak, between the subject and
its possible predicates, or between the tool and the task-to-be-done, until it thinks it has “got it right”
and declares “S is P” or “This tool is suitable for that task.” Only at that point does the alleged “being”
of the thing show up to us. Such discursivity is necessary in order to synthesize the two that lie apart
one from the other: subject and predicate in theoretical knowledge, tool and task in practical
knowledge.47

2. To perform such dis-cursive acts, we must ourselves be a kind of dis-cursivity. Here

Heidegger’s argument reflects the medieval Scholastic axiom operari sequitur esse: activities are
consonant with and derive from natures; or in the reverse: natures determine activities.48 Or as

44
SZ 166.9-10 = 209.26-7: “Die Bedeutungslehre ist in der Ontologie des Daseins verwurzelt.”
45
De anima III 6, 430b1-4 and De interpretatione I 16a12. See GA 21: 137.1-141.23 = 115.12-119.24.
46
De Anima III 6, 430a26-28: σύνϑεσίς τις νοηµάτων (synthesis of ideas); ibid., 6, 430b1-2: τὸ ψεῦδος
ἐν συνϑέσει ἀεί (falsehood is always had in a synthesis); ibid. 6, 430b3-4: ἐνδέχεται δὲ καὶ διαίρεσιν ϕάναι
πάντα (all σύνϑεσις is also διαίρεσις).
47
Cf. SZ 34:1-4 = 57.25-8: “rekurriert.” Here Heidegger is following the tradition: see Aquinas, Summa contra
gentes, I, 57, 27: “Ratiocinatio autem est quidam motus intellectus transeuntis ab uno in aliud.” Discursive
thinking as a kind of movement of the intellect, going from one thing [the subject] to another [the possible
predicate]. Also Summa theologiae I, 58, 3, ad 1. Thus GA 29/30: 447.6-7 = 308. 39-40: “Es gibt Sprache nur bei
einem Seienden, das seinem Wesen nach transzendiert,” i.e., that is, with the entity that is thrown ahead and
returns discursively to things. Also GA 84, 1: 50.1-6: beziehendes Unterscheiden.
48
For example, Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 75, 3, corpus, ad finem: “similiter unumquodque habet esse et
operationem.” Or to reverse the direction, “qualis modus essendi talis modus operandi”: a thing’s way of being
determines its way of acting.
10
Heidegger puts it: “Each thing . . . always accomplishes what it itself is.”49 Thus for Heidegger, the
interpretive “as” functions existentielly-personally in human speech (declarative sentences) only
because it functions existentially-structurally as our very way of being. Ex-sistence, in its essence, is a
bivalent matter of “futurity” and “present-ness”:

1. “being made to stand out ahead” as what it always already is: existential possibility among
the existentiel-ontic possibilities of oneself, other people, and things; and at the same time

2. “returning” to its present self and to the persons or things it encounters in the present
moment, in order to render them meaningful in terms of one of those possibilities.

That is, the structure of ex-sistence is “to-be-ahead-of-itself-while-always-returning” (Sich-vorweg-

sein als Zurückkommen), which Heidegger will eventually describe as “temporality.” 50 As an
“aheadness/return,” ex-sistence is the clearing, the “open space” within which I can take this-thing-
here in term of that-possibility-there. In fact I must do so if I want to know anything in the world.

EX-SISTENCE AS THE CLEARING

thrown-aheadness and return

things possibilities

The larger arc, which moves from left to right, describes ex-sistence as stretched out beyond the
actuality of the common-sense self, thrown ahead as possibility among the possibilities of things.51
This arc also describes the area of “the open” i.e., the “Da” of Da-sein or the “ex-” of ex-sistence.

In turn, the smaller arc, which moves from right to left, indicates what Heidegger calls the
Zurückkommen, the “return” of ex-sistence to itself and to the things it encounters, in order to render
them meaningfully present. This “return” is actually a matter of existence always remaining with itself
in its stretched-forwardness. That is, it is not a matter of one moment (= return) occurring after the
other moment (= being-ahead), “chronologically,” as it were. Rather, the diagram presents what
Heidegger described as the non-chronological, ever-operative, bivalent existential structure of human
being that makes possible the existentiel acts of taking-as and thus making sense of things.

49
GA 4: 65.26-28 = 87.27-29 “Jegliches . . . je nur das leistet, was es ist.”
50
GA 21: 147.23-26 = 124.19-20.
51
At GA 26: 181.8 = 143.31, Heidegger calls this aheadness an ἐπόρεξις, a “being stretched towards,” (ἐπί +
ὄρεξις). To my knowledge, the term does not appear in Greek literature or philosophy.
11
 3. Therefore, the clearing makes possible (“gives” or “sends”) the being of things. Thrown-
open or appropriated ex-sistence, as the clearing, is what accounts for all forms of the meaningful
presence of things. It is the “open space” that gives us room to take this-S-here as that-P-there. The
clearing thus makes possible and accounts for the fact that “this” has its current being as “that.” It is
the reason why sense or meaning occurs at all. Or in the later Heidegger’s ontological formulation: the
thrown-open/appropriated clearing “gives” or “sends” the various forms of being (es gibt Sein, es
schickt Sein). It is important to remember, of course, that this aheadness-and-return is the structure of
ex-sistence. It is existential and thus always-already operative. It is not an existentiel human act that
any one of us performs at will.

Heidegger’s Bedeutungslehre, his doctrine of sense and meaning, is not an afterthought or an

add-on to his supposed central concern about “being.” Rather, the sense or meaning of things is the
very subject matter (the Befragtes) of Heidegger’s basic question – but only the subject matter. What
he was finally after (the Erfragtes of his basic question) was the origin of sense or meaning, in Aris-
totle’s language, its ἀρχή and αἰτία.52 The sought-for “thing itself,” the “single thought” that drove all
his philosophy, was not sense or meaning (aka “being”) but what makes being possible.53 And that
origin is appropriated ex-sistence as the clearing.

END

52
Metaphysics I 2, 982a5.
53
The “thing itself”: τὸ πράγµα αὐτό, Plato, “Seventh Letter” (ἐπιστολή Z), 341c7; Protagoras, 330d15.
The “single thought”: GA 13: 76.9-10 = 4.9-10.
12

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