HEIDEGGER’S BEING AND TIME

PARAPHRASED AND ANNOTATED

Thomas Sheehan

FOREWORD

A
ristotle famously said that a small error in the beginning gets multiplied ten-thousandfold down
the road.1 In approaching SZ it is important to get off on the right foot, and that entails
understanding the presuppositions underlying his work. Although he never completed the book,
Heidegger projected SZ in two Parts, each of which was to have three Divisions.

Part One (of which only the first two Divisions were ever published) was to demonstrate that
we always understand the being of things in terms of becoming, which he provisionally (and
misleadingly) called “time.”
• First, SZ would show (and this is only as far as Heidegger got) that the
essence of human being is becoming, which he called Zeitlichkeit or
“temporality” (= SZ I.1-2).2
• Then it was to demonstrate (in the never published climax of Part One) that
therefore we necessarily understand the being of things in terms of our
essence as becoming, which in this instance he called Zeit or “time” (=SZ
I.3).
Part Two was to show, by a selective history of ontology (viz., Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle)
that Western metaphysics had missed that point.

The Exergue to SZ, with its citation of Sophist 244a6-8, sketches out only what Heidegger intended to
accomplish in Part One. It a severely compressed statement that requires considerable unpacking. Before
presenting the specific annotations to that text, I offer some preliminary remarks about major issues in SZ.
The remarks unfold as follows:

1 Aristotle, De caelo et mundo I 5, 271b8-9; see Plato, Cratylus 436d2–4 and Aquinas, “parvus error in principio
magnus est in fine,” De ente et essentia, Proemium.
2 I always place “temporality” and “time” in scare quotes to indicate that ins SZ and “Zeit” and “Zeitlichkeit”

do not have their ordinary meanings but refer instead to the ex-sistential becoming that gives all instances of
Sein their kinetic meaning.
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1. Phenomenology vs. metaphysics

1.1 The phenomenological correlation
1.2 Heidegger’s topic: why the correlation is necessary
1.3 Elements of a phenomenological investigation
1.4 Logos: making sense of things
1.5 “Being” as significance
1.6 The two meanings of “Sein”
2. SZ as fundamental ontology
2.1 The structure of SZ
2.2 Der Sinn von Sein: enactment and content.
2.2.1 Enactment
2.2.2 Content
2.3 Intelligibility all the way down
3. SZ: analytic and protreptic
________

1. PHENOMENOLOGY VS. METAPHYSICS

Heidegger remained a phenomenologist modo suo throughout his career.3 SZ is a
phenomenological ontology that investigates being (Sein) in a radically different way from metaphysics. It
is important to understand what Heidegger means by phenomenology and how that changes what “being”
means.

1.1 The phenomenological correlation. Phenomenology studies phenomena, a term we would

misunderstand if we thought it referred to things-out-there like Mt. Everest, the Supreme Court, or World
War I. In phenomenology, phenomena are human experiences. Of course, there are things out there in the
universe, and we certainly do experience them. But phenomenology studies them not as standing off by
themselves but only insofar as they are experienced by us, matter to us, are meaningfully related to us. A
phenomenon in phenomenology is a direct, first-person experience with the threefold structure of

1. the enactment of the experience

2. the thing as experienced by us
3. the relation between the two.4

The relation of experiencing and experienced—the in-between—is the unique space where we decide how
the experienced thing matters to us, for example, the way the jurors in Socrates’ trial decided how he
mattered: as a threat to Athens, a benefactor to the city-state, or a harmless confabulator. That in-between

3 Cf. GA 12: 114.25-27=29.3-5; GA 14: 54.10-14=45.4-7; 101.27-35=82.1-8; 147.15=200.46-201.5.

4 See GA 60: 63:1-16=43.17-28. See GA 56/57: 117.6-7=99.3-4: “sie [= die Bedeutungsfunctionen] gehen
(erlebend und Erlebtes erlebend) mit dem Erleben mit,” that is: The functions of making sense—the experiencing
(the Vollzug) and what is experienced (the Gehalt)—go together with experience itself.
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is what Aristotle called the topos eidōn,5 the place where the meaning of something—its current being as
experienced—gets established by whoever is engaged in experiencing it.6
The in-between, the unique space that we ourselves enact and are, is the single site of all
Heidegger’s thought. It is the specifically human space where we decide both the what and the how: what
the experienced thing is and how it is meaningful to us: what the philosophical tradition called the being of
the thing. Parmenides was the first in Western philosophy to discover that in-between space, which he
called the essential “togetherness” (to auto) of the act of thinking and what is thought.7

1.2 Heidegger’s topic: why the correlation is necessary. However, while the correlation or in-between is
the site of all Heidegger’s labors, it is not the ultimate topic of his work, that “single thought” which, in
imitation of Plato, he called “the thing itself.” 8 That issue, which he spent his entire career investing, is
what makes the correlation or in-between necessary, along with the consequences of that necessity. That is
to say, Heidegger’s main topic was
• not the being of things as it shows up within the correlation
• but why it is necessary that being binds us and things together.
Heidegger phrases his focal question in various ways: If being/Sein is necessary, how does it come about?

5 De Anima, III 4, 429a27-28: the place where meanings show up, which is the eidos eidōn (ibid., III 7, 432a2),
the very appearing of what and how things are.
6 In phenomenology the being (Sein) of something is always the thing’s current (and changeable) way of being

(das jeweilige Sein) depending on how and as what the thing is experience—as in the case of Socrates above.
7 Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, I, 231. In earlier editions of Diels (and in SZ) this is listed as fragment 5.
8 Die Sache selbst/to pragma auto: Plato, Seventh Letter, 341c7; Protagoras, 330d15. Re Heidegger’s “one

thought”: GA 8: 53.18-19= 50.5: “Jeder Denker denkt nur einen einzigen Gedanken.” GA 4: 52.34 = 75.26: “das
Einfache des Wunderbaren.” GA 13: 76.8=4.8: “Auf einen Stern zugehen.”
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And regarding the correlation: Where does it come from and how does it come about?9

1.3 Elements of a phenomenological investigation

Phenomenology begins by describing a direct, first-person experience, perhaps the act of viewing Monet’s
The Customhouse at Varengeville (1882). Note, however, that as a phenomenologist, my focus is not
directly on the painting hanging on the wall but rather on my experience of the painting.10 Through a close
description of the particular experience, phenomenology seeks to discover the recurrent patterns common
to any and all experiences of that kind. In this case, it is after the triadic structure that constitutes the essence
of experiencing any work of art. In so doing, phenomenology is following the medieval axiom operari
sequitur esse: how something functions reveals what that thing is, or in Heidegger’s words: “Each thing
does only what it is.”11 Carrying out a phenomenological investigation entails (1) analyzing my first-person
experience to discover the recurrent patterns whereby the object “does its thing” (in Greek, its ergon); and
then (2) generating and testing hypotheses about the structure of those recurrent patterns (the energeia of
that kind of ergon) in order to see (3) if those patterns constitute the necessary and sufficient structure (the
“essence”) of the experience.12

9 Heidegger often discusses the question of how being comes about under the rubric of “es gibt Sein.” On what
the correlation is and how it comes about see, for example, GA 14: 46.4–5=37.14–15: “von woher und wie es
‘das Offene’ gibt”; ibid., 90.3–4 = 73.3: “Woher aber und wie gibt es die Lichtung?” GA 77: 112.20–21= 73.1:
“Was ist diese Offene selbst?”; A 66: 422.5–6=373.6–7: “wie west die Wahrheit des Seyns”; Cf. GA 3: 242.28-
29=170.15-16: the “and” or “in-between” is where the central problem is hidden.
10 In 1895 Monet expressed that dimension of experience from the point of view of the painter: “Le motif est

quelque chose de secondaire, ce que je veux reproduire, c'est ce qu'il y a entre le motif et moi,” i.e., the motif—
the object being painted—is for me altogether secondary; what I want to represent is what exists between the
motif and me, viz., the “how,” which for Monet is the “enveloppe” of light. Cf. Hoschedé, Claude Monet, ce
mal connu, II, 109-115, and Valbuena, ‘L’enveloppe’, esp. 55-58.
11 “es [= ein Jegliches]... je nur das leistet, was es ist”: GA 4: 65.26-28=87.27-29. Cf. §27, ¶1: “sie sind das, was

sie betreiben,” SZ 126.6=163.38. For the medieval axiom: Aquinas, S.T., 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.
12 That essence is neither detached from nor a deeper level of he experience but simply its fundamental structure,

the ensemble of elements that the experience has and cannot not have if it is to be that kind of experience. (There
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1.4 Logos: making sense of things. Aristotle defines the human being as the living entity who possess
logos. Heidegger, however, reverses Aristotle by insisting that it is logos that possesses us, with the result
is that we not only can but also cannot not make sense of whatever we encounter.13 Making sense does not
necessarily mean getting it right. We make sense of things even when we get it wrong, or go insane, or
mutter incoherently on our death beds. Jean-Paul Sartre was making sense of things in the 1930s when he
saw a pair of crabs following him around Paris.14 Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea,
was making sense of things when he saw the seat on the Bouville tram turn into an animal’s bloated and
bleeding belly.15 The reason we both can and cannot not make sense is that we are the phenomenological
correlation, ineluctably locked into the back-and-forth of sense-making and the sense-made.16
Sense or meaning is basically a thing’s relatedness-to-oneself (Mich-Bezogenheit); and because
our essence is logos, all such relations are enactments of sense.17 Whatever we encounter has either actual
or potential intelligibility. Things do not have intelligibility of and by themselves; rather, it is we who bring
intelligibility to whatever we encounter. And that intelligibility is not undone by the fact that we may not
yet understand something. Only absolute nothing—what is not—is entirely unintelligible, which means
there is nothing we cannot question, thereby making at least interrogative sense of it.18
In the spirit of Aristotle’s Prooemium to the Metaphysics, Heidegger studies everyday lived
experience in order to extract from it the structures that SZ will analyze. Heidegger affirms the legitimate
roles of subjectivity and objectivity in lived experience but rejects both subjectivism and objectivism. We
are not Leibnizian monads that have “no windows through which anything could enter or exit,” nor are we
an interior consciousness with windows through which we peer out at the world.19 We are not confined to

is an inevitable circularity here: I must already have a sense of what constitutes “the kind of experience” in order
to see if the ensemble of elements corresponds to it. Heidegger treats this issue at §32, ¶¶11-13.) Discovering
the essence of anything is a lifelong task, an asymptotic process of (1) gathering data from my direct, first-person
experience, (2) discovering recurrent patterns, (3) testing hypotheses about the unifying structure of those
patterns, (4) making reasonable and reformable judgments about whether those structures are necessary and
sufficient to describe what and how the experience is, and (5) then repeating those steps over and over again in
order to refine and improve the investigation. — On energeia as eidos see Tugendhat, TI KATA TINOS, 166-71.
13 Re possessed by logos: Heidegger rewrites Aristotle’s to zōion logon ekhon (e.g., De Anima III 9, 432a31) as

logos anthrōpon ekhon (GA 40: 184.11=187.6-7). Re can and cannot not make sense, see GA 60: 15.14-
15=11.13-14, “fällt die faktische Lebenserfahrung ständig ab in die Bedeutsamkeit”: we are a priori the ability
and the necessity of making sense of everything we meet.
14 He sought out therapy from a young Jacques Lacan, and the crabs went away when he finally got bored of

them. See Gerassi, Talking With Sartre, 62-63 and “When Sartre Talked to Crabs (It Was Mescaline),” New York
Times, November 14, 2009.
15
Sartre, La nausée, 157–171=123–135.
16 GA 9: 42.25-26=36.35-36., 103.19=82.16, etc.

17 Re Mich-Bezogenheit, see GA 58: 105.12-13=84.3.

18 Cf. GA 58: 104.19–24 and GA 58: 106.27–31=85.2–6. When we are unable to something out, we might well

make up myths and legends about it, which Aristotle says is already a way of philosophizing: Metaphysics I 2,
982b18-19: ho philomuthos philosophos pōs estin.
19 Monadologie, no. 7 (“keine Fenster”), 603=643. For Heidegger are relational entities who are already

“outside,” concerned about and involved with whatever we run across. Heidegger will speak of human beings
as “entities of distance” (“ein Wesen der Ferne” GA 26: 284.18=221.17), expansively stretched out (er-streckt
und aus-streckt) beyond ourselves (SZ 371.32=423.15; GA 26: 173.34=138.17; GA 66: 315.18=280.31). Cf.
 6

an “inside” from which we make occasional sallies “outside” to grab something and drag it back into our
minds. Far from being worldless and detached observers of things, we are thrust into the world as purpose-
driven entities, thrown out ahead into our needs and desires. We live our lives before we step back and
theorize about them, and in living, we encounter things as siren-calls that appeal to us, seduce us, intrigue
us, make us wonder. Before we are homo theoreticus dispassionately viewing the world as just stuff-out-
there, we are homo habilis, actors and doers who see things as what we can use to pursue our goals.
In the language of phenomenology, we are intentional, a priori directed to and making sense of
whatever we meet.20 Even when we find things uninteresting, boring, or repulsive, that is the sense we are
making of them. Intentionality is grounded in the fact that we are a priori in movement, always becoming
ourselves, making our way forward, needing to sustain our lives.21 Things make sense to us insofar as they
figure into our drive to live on, to keep on keeping on (Latin, supervivere).22

1.5 “Being” as significance. One of the first difficulties one encounters in reading SZ is Heidegger’s
language, where virtually every technical term has a meaning that is different from ordinary German and
often from philosophical German. For example:
Sein does not mean being
Zeit does not mean time
Wahrheit does not mean truth
Verstehen does not mean understanding
and the list goes on. We may start with the first and most important term—Sein—which is repeated
hundreds of times in the text.

After he published SZ in 1927, it took Heidegger well over two decades before he acknowledged
that his use of the word “being” had been “the occasion of immense confusion.”23
• In 1951 he said that being was only a preliminary and provisional term, merely
a formal indication of what he was after.24
• In 1955, in a homage to Ernst Jünger, he took to crossing out the word (Sein).25
• In 1962 he declared that being was nor the proper object of his work.26
• Again in 1962 he insisted that when it comes to “the thing itself,” there is no
longer room for even the word “being.”27

Aquinas De unitate intellectus, caput 5 (110) where, following Aristotle, he says, “De rebus enim est scientia
naturalis et aliae scientiae, non de speciebus intellectis,” that is, when we know a rock (natura lapidis), we know
the rock out there, not representations of it in our mind (cf. loc. cit., species quibus).
20 GA 17: 179.29-20=135.13: “zur Natur des intellectus gehört das Entgegengerichtetsein auf res.” Cf. §4, ¶11,

below and De anima III 8, 431b21: panta pōs.

21 Re in movement cf. SZ 79.18-19=110.13-14, unterwegs.

22 Ex-sistence is the telos hou heneka, the ultimate goal for the sake of which we live. See Metaphysics IX 6,

1048b22-23 and 8, 1050a 36-1050b 2; Nicomachean Ethics I 7, 1097b20-21. Also Aquinas, S.T. I-II, 94, 2,
corpus: “quaelibet substantia appetit conservationem sui esse secundum suam naturam.”
23 GA 12: 103.23-24=19:28-29: “Anlaß einer großen Verwirrung.”

24 GA 7: 234.14=78.21: “nur das vorläufige Wort.”

25 GA 9: 385.6=291.7.

26 GA 14: 50.2-3=41.5: “nicht mehr das eigens zu Denkende.”

27 GA 15: 365.17-18=60.9-10: “ist sogar für den Namen Sein kein Raum mehr.”
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• In 1967 he said, “I do not like to use the word [Sein] any more.”28
How to explain this retractatio? SZ is an ontology, but a phenomenological ontology that views the issues
of traditional philosophy through the lens of lived experience. Greek and medieval ontology bracketed out
the person who asks the question about being and instead studied being as a mind-independent object. By
contrast, Heidegger holds that “the philosophizing person...belongs together with the matters being
discussed.”29 He studies being not as an object standing off on its own but rather in terms of our relation to
it. The question of being is about how we experience what we experience, where the “how” is the thing’s
significance to us.30
In traditional philosophy, Sein/being is the existence or essence of something viewed objectively:
“being” names the fact that something is as well as what it is in itself when considered as independent of
any relation to human beings.31 In phenomenology, on the other hand, Sein is always viewed in its
correlation with human beings and hence is not a “what” but a “how”: how something is meaningful present
to us, how it is present to mind (praesens intelligibile).32 In keeping with Aristotle’s position that “to be”
and “to be intelligible” are interchangeable,33 Heidegger shifts the focus of ontology from the classical
notion of being as ousia, the objective presence of things, to the phenomenological reading of being as
parousia, the meaningfully presence of things. Being is how things matter to us—it is their “mattering,” the
way they actually are for us in lived experience. In SZ, therefore, “Sein” has the experiential sense of
• the current significance (Bedeutung, Anwesen)
• that something has for the person experiencing it34
• within a meaning-giving context (Welt)
• that is shaped by the person’s interests, purposes, or objectives (Woraufhin).
Heidegger uses various terms to express this phenomenological sense of Sein. I paraphrase some of those

28 GA 15: 20.8-9= 8.34-35: “Obwohl ich dieses Wort nicht mehr gern gebrauche.”
29GA 9: 42.25-26=36.35-36: “zu den Sachen der Philosophie aber der Philosophierende selbst...mitgehört”; see
ibid., 103.19=“der Fragende—als ein solcher—in der Frage mit da.”
30 On “what” and “how” see GA 87: 101.3-4: “was zeigt sich, wie zeigt es sich, [d.h.] auf welche Weise (Weg –

Grund).” Also GA 17: 45.17-33=34.18-32.

31 The implicit contradiction is captured perfectly by Jorge Semprun: “Maintenant, elles [les maisons] sont là,

réelles. Tout à coup, elles heurent son regard. Toutes proches, instalée là, dresses, n’ayant besoin de rien pour
être là, d’aucune regard.” La guerre est finie, 45. The houses are just-there—they require no explanation (n’ayant
besoin de rien pour être là)—and yet they nonetheless catch Domingo’s gaze.
32 Cf. “id quod sibi est praesens intelligibile,” Aquinas, Scriptum super sententias, lib. 1, d. 3 q. 4 a. 5, corp., and

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A249: coram intuitu intellectuali (misspelled in the Cambridge edition, p. 347.5).
By “presence” (Anwesenheit) Heidegger means presence within the phenomenological correlation, hence
“presence-to-mind” in keeping with Parmenides’ fragment 3 on the correlation of einai and noein. (See the
annotation to ¶14, below, and the second annotation to §4, ¶11.) In terms of Figure A-0.2, Sein is neither the
Vollzug (our relating to...) nor the Gehalt (the thing we relate to) but instead the Bezug: how the thing we relate
to is meaningful to us.
33 The interchangeability of being and intelligibility: Aristotle, Metaphysics II 1, 993b30-31: hōs hekaston hōs

ekhei tou einai, houtō kai tēs alētheias; also Aquinas, De veritate I, 1, respondeo: “verum... convertitur cum
ente.”
34 GA 87: 101.4: “wem zeigt sich das ‘Sich’-zeigende.”
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terms as follows, where the German and English terms frequently overlap or are interchangeable.35
• Bedeutung: The meaning/significance of something.
• Anwesen: the meaningful presence of something, how it is “present-to-mind.”36
• Sinn, Verständlichkeit, Bedeutsamkeit (taken ex aequo): intelligibility/under-
standability/meaningfulness, either as such or as regards a particular thing.
The present paraphrase of SZ is informed by Heidegger’s insistence that “Sein” bespeaks (1)
intelligibility, meaning, and significance that is brought about by our ex-sistential movement.37
Nonetheless, given Heidegger’s constant use of “Sein” in SZ and the endless, if unclarified, repetition of
the word in Heidegger scholarship, I will (reluctantly) use “being” and “significance” interchangeably, but
with a preference for the latter term and with the understanding that “being” always means being-as-
experienced.38

1.6 The two meanings of “Sein.” Heidegger’s retractiones show that Sein was not what he was finally
after. But what is equally important—and a source of major confusion in Heidegger scholarship—is the
hair-pulling fact that throughout his career Heidegger used “Sein” in two very different senses. As we have
just seen, “Sein in SZ” refers to the meaning/significance of things. But in the later work, “Sein” can mean
either
1. the meaning/significance of things (das Sein des Seienden)
or
2. what brings about the meaning/significance of things.39
Only that second meaning is what Heidegger called “the thing itself,” the ultimate a priori he was after. It
is inevitably confusing that Heidegger’s post-SZ work will often call that ultimate a priori by the word
“Sein” without distinguishing it from “Sein” as the meaning/significance of things. As we shall show, the
“thing itself” of all Heidegger’s efforts is Existenz, the unique form of being that we alone have, whereby
we are thrown open as the field of primary intelligibility, the source of the secondary intelligibility of

35 E.g., GA 20: 287.13=210.10: “Bedeutsamkeit ist zunächst Modus der Anwesenheit” (in italics).
36 On “mind” as “minding,” see the second annotation to §4, ¶11.
37 See “[In phenomenology] there are no other philosophical problems except those of sense, meaning, and

signification.” Gurwitsch, 652.8–9 (italicized in the original). In the present text, therefore, “is” always means
“is significant/meaningful as...,” and the being of things always refers to their significance.
38
Heideggerians should take the pledge and swear off the Sein-sauce once and for all, the way Heidegger himself
finally did. It is time to hit the pause button on what Heidegger called Seinsgerede (GA 5: 335.17=252.33), all
that banging on about “being,” if for no other reason than that such being-babble is the greatest obstacle to
understanding Heidegger’s work and to making any progress beyond it.
39 The distinction between things and their being (Sein) is the metaphysical difference, known to all philosophers

since Parmenides. The distinction between things-and-their-being and Existenz as the field of intelligibility is
the ontological difference. See GA 77: 244.19 and 245.1-3=160.24 and .32-33: “Aber anfänglicher denn dies
[the difference between Being and beings] ist das Seyn, auf das die Unterscheidung
Sein und Seiendem...nicht anwendbar,” that is: Existenz as the thing itself [das Seyn] is prior to the metaphysical
difference, which does not apply to das Seyn.
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everything we encounter.40 As a priori, Existenz is not our own doing but is “done unto” us (factum est), it
is the ultimate Factum, the “fact” that constitutes our “facticity” (see §12, ¶10).

2. SZ AS FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY

2.1 The structure of SZ. A thing cannot be experienced without someone experiencing it, and the content
of the experience is correlative to the act of experiencing. Within the phenomenological correlation,
Heidegger highlights that issue by pulling the philosophical gaze back from the enacted content of the
experience (the Gehalt) and redirecting it to the very enacting of the experience (the Vollzug). Pulling-the-
gaze-back (re-ducere) is called the Rückführung, the phenomenological reduction.41 In performing that
reduction, Heidegger turns the inquiring subject into the subject of the inquiry, on the promise that the
Vollzug will reveal the Gehalt: understanding how we enact significance (= SZ I.1-2) will reveal the nature
of significance itself (= SZ I.3). The enactment and the enacted, taken together, constitute what Heidegger
called “der Sinn von Sein,” a phrase that comprises both how we understand being at all and what we
understand “being” to mean.42
For Aristotle, the question motivating all ontology was: tis hē ousia? “What is the being of
things?”43 Such “being” is not a higher level of reality, separate from the things under investigation. “Being”
(hē ousia) is simply the substantivized form of the infinitive “to be” (einai), finite forms of which include
“is,” “was,” “will be,” etc. In traditional ontology, “being” is a term for an entity’s

• thatness: the fact that the thing is in existence, the thing’s very “is-ing”—in answer to the
Latin question “an sit?” i.e., does it exist or not?44
• whatness: what kind of thing it essentially is, its essence or quiddity—in answer to the
question “quid sit?” i.e., what is it?45
• howness: how is the thing kind of thing that it is—in answer to “quomodo sit?”

Those three elements constitute a thing’s being, its “is-ness” (Seiendheit) or “in-itself-ness” (inseitas),
which Aristotle saw as baked into the thing, independent of any relation to a human observer. Aristotle’s
question is about the intrinsic is-ness of things, whereas Heidegger takes a step back and asks about the
experience of that is-ness, with the final goal of discovering what “is” actually means in our experience of
things.
Heidegger takes human being as the starting point of his search for the experiential foundations of
ontology, and he projected SZ in two Parts, each of which was to be composed of three Divisions.

40 On primary and secondary intelligibility see §32, ¶8.

41 See GA 24: 29=21-22, also Prenote 1 to §7, and Figure A-7.1.
42 Von Herrmann III, 79.26-31 summarizes all of SZ I: Our own being, as ex-sistential “temporality”

(Zeitlichkeit), unfolds (sich zeitigt) as the “temporally” structured field (Zeit) that accounts for intelligibility as
such and thus for the significance of whatever we encounter.
43 Metaphysics VII 1, 1028b 4.

44 See GA 35: 82.8-9=62.33: “ob ein Seiendes eines bestimmten Wesens ist oder nicht ist.”
45 On Heidegger’s understanding of essence (Wesen), see GA 33: 223.10-20=192.2-12.
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Part One (SZ I) was to work out a fundamental ontology grounded in human experience.46
• Division 1 (SZ I.1) shows in a preliminary fashion how we make sense of things,
i.e., how we enact their significance.
• Division 2 (SZ I.2) shows that we are able to make sense of things because our
being is fundamentally a matter of becoming (“temporality”).
• Division 3 (SZ I.3) was to show that we understand all forms of significance (i.e.,
“being”) in terms of our becoming.47
Part Two (SZ II) was to dismantle the traditional notion that the ideal form of being is stable presence.48 It
was to work backwards through the history of ontology, dismantling the notion of being in three major
figures:
• Division 1 (SZ II.1): Kant
• Division 2 (SZ II.2): Descartes
• Division 3 (SZ II.3): Aristotle.49

2.2 Der Sinn von Sein: enactment and content. By “der Sinn von Sein” Heidegger means the dynamic
field of intelligibility (die Lichtung, the clearing, i.e., ex-sistence itself) that is responsible for the fact that

46 See §6, ¶3, SZ 21.4-7=42.21-22: “Die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins ist gemäß der ihr zugehörigen
Vollzugsart, d. h. als vorgängige Explikation des Daseins in seiner Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit,” that is:
SZ works out the question of what “being” means [= SZ I.3] in correlation with the enactment of that question,
that is, by first explaining human ex-sistence as “temporality” and historicity [= SZ I.1-2]. On fundamental
ontology as embracing all of Part I and reaching its climax in SZ I.3, see von Herrmann I, 15.10-14 and Sheehan,
Making Sense of Heidegger, 210-18.
47 See von Herrmann I, 126.26: Zeit as “[das] von woher sich alle Seinsarten bestimmen”
48 For Heidegger, being has always been understood in terms of “time”: “von alters her das Sein alles Seienden

aus der Zeit begriffen wurde,” GA 49: 52.20-21=41.13-14.

49 Although fundamental ontology does not include SZ II per se, Heidegger does say, “The question of the

intelligibility of being does not achieve its true concreteness until we have carried through the process of
destroying the ontological tradition”: SZ 26.29–30=49.8–9.
 11

things and their being are understandable.50 That field covers both poles of the phenomenological
correlation, Vollzug/enactment and Gehalt/the content that is enacted. The search for the Sinn von Sein
wants to discover, on the content side, what “being” means in all its forms (including: is, was, will be,
would be, and so on). But SZ first had to discover, on the enactment side, how we understand
being/significance at all.
• On the enactment side, the question is, “How must I be structured and what acts must I
perform in order to understand the significance of a thing?”

• On the content side, the question is “What does being-as-significance mean in all its various
forms?”—a semantic question about the lexical meaning of the word “being.” SZ I.3,
which was never published as projected, was to show that being necessarily has a
“temporal” or kinetic sense insofar as we can understand it only in terms of our
becoming.51

2.2.1 Enactment. In his early work, Heidegger expresses the enactment of the understanding of being-as-
significance in a number of ways, for example:
• how the understanding of Sein is possible52
• how Sein in general is able to be understood53
• the question about how we are able to understand being as such54
• the source that makes possible the understandability of being55
• the field within which the intelligibility of Sein is conceptually fixed56
• the field that determines how Sein can be understood57
2.2.2 Content. Heidegger expresses the issue of the semantic content of being-as-significance in various
ways, for example:
• what “being” means58
• what “is” means59

50 On the clearing as the field of intelligibility, see §§28, 31.

51 Heidegger worked out a version of SZ I.3 in his 1927 course “Basic Problems of Phenomenology.” The
“temporal” meaning of being is elaborated minimally at GA 24: 431-45=303-313. See Sheehan, Making Sense
of Heidegger, 201-205.
52 SZ 207.33.=251.22-23: “wie [das Seinsverständnis] möglich ist.”
53 SZ 230.5-6=272.32: “wie Sein verstanden werden [kann].”

54
GA 24: 444.30-31=313.1-2: “die Frage nach dem möglichen Verständnis des Seins überhaupt.” This text is
from Heidegger’s first lecture course after SZ was published.
55 “Worin gründet die innere Möglichkeit der Offenbarkeit des Seins?”—from a text published in 1929: “Vorrede

zur japanischen Übersetzung von ‘Was ist Metaphysik?” 209.13-14 (= GA 16: 66.15-16; cf. ibid., 423.11-13),
repeated at GA 67: 60.10-11=52.23-24.
56 SZ 5.34-35.=25.14-15: “den Horizont, aus dem her wir den Sinn [des Seins] fassen und fixieren sollten.” On

“Horizont” as field, see the fifth annotation to ¶1 of the Exergue.

57 SZ 100.25-26=133.22-23: “der Horizont seiner [= des Seins] möglichen Verständlichkeit.”

58 SZ 5.31=25.11 “was ‘Sein’ besagt.”

59 SZ 5.32=25.12: “was das ‘ist’ bedeutet.”
 12

• what is meant by the word “being” 60

• what being is.61
The phase “der Sinn von Sein” is usually translated as “the meaning of being” or “the sense of being,” terms
that are not wrong but are inadequate insofar as they cover only the content-side of the question of being
while eliding the enactment-side.62 The two sides are inextricably linked: how one answers either side
determines the answer to the other side. Although SZ’s question about der Sinn von Sein covers both
enactment and content, the book as published dealt only with the enactment side, and in his later work
Heidegger answers that question only in terms of enactment.63

2.3 Intelligibility all the way down. As possessed by logos, we are a priori involved in—indeed prisoners
of—intelligibility such that we always relate to things in terms of their ability to be understood.64
Intelligibility is the only issue that Heidegger as a phenomenologist is interested in, and SZ is focused on
• initially, the intelligibility of things, SZ I.1;65
• then the intelligibility of ex-sistence: SZ I.2;66
• and ultimately the intelligibility of significance itself: SZ I.3.
The main issue of the book is the last of these three, which Heidegger calls the “Fundamentalfrage” or
“Grundfrage.”67

60 SZ 26.38= 49.17-18: “was heißt ‘Sein’?”

61 GA 26: 13.1=10.33: “was das Sein sei”—from a lecture course delivered one year after the publication of SZ.
62 The decision of M-R and S-S to translate “Sinn” as “meaning” (other scholars translate it as “sense”) gives

rise to major problems when it comes to understanding Heidegger’s Bedeutungslehre, his theory of meaning,
(SZ 166.9-10=209.30-31). Neither “meaning” nor “sense” captures what “Sinn” properly refers to, namely ex-
sistence itself as the primary form of intelligibility, which dynamically clears the way for the intelligibility in its
secondary form, the intelligibility of things ( SZ 151.18-44=192.30-193.18 and GA 15: 262.5-10=161.31-34).
For a different analysis of Sinn in SZ, see Daniel Dahlstrom, “The Topic of Sense in Being and Time.”
63 He does that under various rubrics, all of which indicate Existenz, our own way of being. See GA 9: 201.30-

33=154.12-14: “Die entscheidende Frage (Sein und Zeit, 1927) nach dem Sinn, d.h. (S.u.Z. S. 151) nach dem
Entwurfbereich, d.h. nach der Offenheit, d.h. nach der Wahrheit des Seins, und nur nicht des Seienden.” Also:
das Anwesenlassen (GA 14: 45.29-30=37.5-6), die Lichtung, the Es of Es gibt Sein, das Sein selbst, das Wesen
des Seins, das Seyn, etc. GA 14: 46.5=37.14-15: “... von woher und wie es ‘das Offene’ gibt.” GS 14: 90.3=73.3:
“Woher und wie gibt es die Lichtung?”
64Re possessed: GA 40: 184.11=187.6-7. Re prisoners: GA 58: 104.32-33=83.30: bedeutsamkeitsgefangen (in

italics). PPF: The phrase “intelligibility all the way down” is a riff on “turtles all the way down,” which goes back
to Rev. Joseph Frederick Berg’s remarks (January, 1854) as recorded by Rev. Joseph Barker in his Great
Discussion on the Origin, Authority, and Tendency of the Bible, 48.35-38. Versions of the anecdote go back at
least to the Jesuit missionary in India, Emanuel da Veiga (1549–1605).
65 GA 19: 205.13-14=141.33-34: “der Sinn des Seienden.”

66 SZ 235.3=278.5: “der Seinssinn des Daseins.”

67 Respectively, SZ 5.3=24.9 and SZ 231.21=274.20. Heidegger names the main topic directing metaphysics

“die Leitfrage,” which is about the “Anwesenlassen [des Anwesenden]” i.e., “what-lets-things-make-sense.” He
designates the central topic of his phenomenology as “Anwesenlassen” GA 14: 45.28=37.5, i.e., “what-brings-
about-significance-at-all. Cf. GA 15, 363.27-29=59.6-7: “der nicht-kausale Sinn von ‘Lassen’ in ‘Zeit und
Sein.’” On the Grundfrage as the impetus for the analysis of ex-sistence, see GA 49: 47.26-32=37.24-29.
 13

3. SZ: ANALYTIC AND PROTREPTIC

The goal that Heidegger set himself both in SZ and throughout his entire oeuvre was not theoretical but
practical, nothing less than a transformation of human beings into their essence as ex-sistent. SZ is written
in two registers, the analytic and the protreptic. The analytic moment was to unfold in two steps of (1)
showing in SZ I that we understand the being/significance of things in terms of becoming, “time” and (2)
showing that this “temporal” nature of being had increasing eluded metaphysics from its inception in Plato
to its culmination in our day. On the other hand, the protreptic thrust of SZ argues that one can and should
personally take over and live out one’s finite and mortal thrown-openness, with transformative
consequences in one’s life. Although this transformation is somewhat muted in Heidegger’s later writings,
it remained the ultimate goal of his entire philosophical project, the reason why he taught and wrote at all.68

AFTERWORD

I n 1971, through the good offices of my teacher, William J. Richardson, I spent the better part of an
afternoon with Martin Heidegger at his home in Freiburg-Zähringen. In the spring of that year
Heidegger invited me to submit some questions and then to visit him on May 21. I was fresh out of
graduate school, and the questions I forwarded were admittedly naïve. Heidegger saw that, and as he poured
a glass of wine in his second-floor study, he cut to the chase. If you want to understand my work, he said,
you first have to understand two things:
• the categorial intuition in Logical Investigations and
• Aristotle’s doctrine of κίνησις in the Physics.
The first text, he said, led him to revise his understanding of the second. After seeing that Husserl’s
breakthrough to the categorial intuition had already been anticipated by Aristotle in Metaphysics IX 10,

68 See David Charles Abergel, “The Three ‘Fundamental Deceptions’ of Being and Time: Heidegger’s
Phenomenology Revisited” on Heidegger’s insistence that ex-sistence is “definitely not something given” (GA
82: 39.12-13) but rather is to be achieved in what he began calling a “leap” (Sprung; cf. Entschluß, resolve).
 14

Heidegger had the insight that launched him on his lifelong pursuit of “the thing itself.” He saw that
Bedeutung is made possible by Bewegung, that ex-sistential movement is what makes meaning possible. In
terms of the double etymology of the Latin sentire,69 Heidegger holds that (10 we cannot not make sense
of things (2) because we cannot not be making our way. The nature of human being as “temporal”
determines that meaning itself is “temporal.”70
***

That insight informs the present paraphrase of SZ just as it motivated the earlier Making Sense of Heidegger.
Both texts were written with three purposes in mind:
1. to correct my own mistakes in interpreting Heidegger over the years, mistakes perhaps
shared by other scholars;71
2. to clarify the main issue that Heidegger was driving at in SZ and throughout his career; and
3. to prepare for moving beyond Heidegger to confront the pressing issues of the day.
In short, both Making Sense of Heidegger and the present paraphrase are concerned to remedy what
Heidegger scholarship (or at least I) had missed about his project and to point out what Heidegger himself
had failed to address in his work.72

In the six decades of his career, Heidegger never got beyond human being, nor did he want to, nor
could he have gotten beyond it had he tried to. 73 His main topic is not things, das Seiende, and not even the
being of things, das Sein des Seienden (which is the only Sein there is). Nor is his topic that same Sein
viewed in distinction from thing. (That is the proprietary topic of metaphysics.) If we hope to understand
what Heidegger was about, it would be best to follow his example and dismiss the word “being” from the
discussion—or else understand it the way that Heidegger himself did.
What metaphysics calls the “being” of things is what Heidegger reads as the intelligibility of things,
something that only human beings understand.74 SZ is focused exclusively on the understanding of
intelligibility as it asks three interconnected questions:
1. How is that intelligibility possible?
2. What is that intelligibility?
3. Why is understanding that intelligibility necessary?

69 As in both “to perceive” and “to make one’s way” (cf. sens unique, senso unico, etc.).
70 At that meeting and in keeping with what he had said, Heidegger expressed his hope for an English translation
of his “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Φύσις. Aristoteles Physik β 1,” which was published first in 1976 and later
with slight revisions in Pathmarks, 183-230. Heidegger’s analysis of Metaphysics IX 10 is found in GA 21:
170-82=143-54.
71 Whom Heidegger might limn as “die Zunft der ernsten Forscher”: GA 54: 82.20-56.9-10.
72 Making Sense of Heidegger spells out in detail the philosophical positions informing the present paraphrase

of SZ.
73 Cf. SZ 14.31-33=35.7-8: “Jetzt hat sich aber gezeigt, daß die ontologische Analytik des Daseins überhaupt die

Fundamentalontologie ausmacht”; 15.2-4=35.14-15: “Die Seinsfrage ist dann aber nichts anderes als die
Radikalisierung einer zum Dasein selbst gehörigen wesenhaften Seinstendenz.”
74 GA 19: 205.13-14=141.33-34 and SZ 12.14–15 = 32.23–24 vs. GA 2: 16.23.
 15

The answers to those questions are:

1. Ex-sistential becoming makes possible intelligibility.
2. Intelligibility is itself a matter of becoming.
3. We cannot not understand such intelligibility as long as we live.

Once he had established that much in SZ I (= fundamental ontology), Heidegger would show that
metaphysics had failed to even ask those questions, much less answer them (= SZ II). Thereafter he said he
intended to address regional ontological issues in a “meta-ontology” as a follow-up to SZ. As it turned out,
however, the fundamental ontology was never completed and the regional ontologies were never addressed.

SZ has remained a torso: it got no further than answering the first of those three questions. The
book establishes merely that human being is a mortal movement that holds open the field of intelligibility
within which things get their significance. Our asymptotic becoming clears the way for things to be
understood; And to authentically be who we are, we have to make that mortal becoming our own and, in
Augustine’s words, vivere moriendo, “live mortally,” understanding that we ourselves, along with the
people and things we encounter, are radically finite.

***

Heidegger wrote SZ in opposition to the realism of ancient Greek metaphysics and the idealism of
classical modern metaphysics. In contrast to observational ontologies that measure the degree of an entity’s
realness against the ideal of stable presence and self-coincidence, SZ is a phenomenological ontology based
on our ex-sistential becoming as a priori involved in meaning. In opposition to subject-object ontologies
that theorize a worldless ego which must somehow transcend itself to encounter objects, SZ works with a
lived hermeneutical understanding in ex-sistential intentionality as a priori transcendent. We cannot step
over our shadow and attain an Archimedean standpoint from which to contemplate ourselves and things.
We are inescapably embedded in an affective understanding of the world; as prisoners of meaning, we
cannot not make sense of everything we encounter. 75 We are always minding the meant, and the meant is
always the meaningful.76

Heidegger conducts his work within the correlation of the enactment of meaning (Vollzug) and the
meaning it enacts (Gehalt), where the meaning of something (what metaphysics called its “being”) is how
that thing matters to us. Heidegger is searching for the a priori of human being, the ultimate explanans that
makes possible and accounts for our involvement in meaning. To that end he works out the three
aforementioned questions by moving from the what to the how to the why.

75 Cf. GA 41: 153.24-34=105.5-13

76 GA 58: 104.32-33=83.30: bedeutsamkeitsgefangen.
 16

His phenomenological approach shifts the paradigm of ontology on the issues of

1. the “what”: SZ recasts ousia as parousia, changing the focus from the metaphysical being of
things to their experienced intelligibility while abandoning the search for the stable presence
of things.
2. the “how”: SZ studies the enactment of meaning as kinetic and reads its final purpose as what
Aristotle called to eu zēn and to koinēi sumpheron: living fulfilled, mortal lives for the common
good of all.77
3. the “why”: SZ is premised on the ab-surdity of it all, the fact that we cannot explain the whence-
and-why of our being thrown into the task of making sense of our personal and social lives and
of the worlds we live in.

SZ’s progression from what to how to why is spelled out in two registers: analytic and protreptic. It is both
an analytic diagnosis of the structure and the everyday enactment of meaning, and an exhortation to
overcome one’s absorption in things and to authentically enact their meaning. Those two registers persist
in Heidegger’s later work even as he controversially broadens the perspective from the life of the individual
to a history of the entire globe, first as regards the analysis:
1. the “why”: The unexplainability of why we are thrown into meaning is what Heidegger calls
the intrinsic “hiddenness” or “mystery” of human being. Because facticity is unexplainable, it
is easily overlooked and forgotten. In SZ, the result is one’s non-authentic absorption in things.
In the later work, however, Heidegger argues that the whole of Western culture has
bracketed out (epekhein, epokhē) facticity, resulting in a global oblivion of the groundlessness
of meaning and an equally global non-authenticity that has colonized all but “the few.”78
2. the “how”: Absent an awareness of its ab-surd facticity, the now-global subject is freed to
dictate the terms to which meaning must conform, while that subject imposes its techno-think
and techno-do on everything that is.
3. the “what”: Correlatively, the meaning of things gets reduced to their production-for-
consumption in service of the global subject’s suicidal project of world-domination.

And likewise the protreptic:

77Nicomachean Ethics I 1098b20-21, VIII 9, 1160a11-12; Politics I 9, 1257a 9-10; III 7, 1282b17-18; III 9,
1280b33; 17-18;
78
 17

In the 1930s He hoped that entire societies (or at least National Socialist Germany) could regain its
sense of facticity, become authentic, and prevent the trainwreck to which Western civilization was
careening. By the 1960s, however, he had tamped down that fantasy and returned to SZ’s position
that only individual persons can overcome their oblivion of facticity, along with metaphysics, and
live authentically.

***