Malpas (2006:9-10) – ser e questionabilidade

No entanto, em grande medida, quando se trata da questão do ser, a nossa orientação para essa questão é primeiramente dada como uma certa forma de desorientação. Porque, embora possamos falar sobre o ser, há de fato uma questão sobre o que esse discurso — o que "ser" — significa. A este respeito, o fato de procurarmos uma explicação do que é o ser como forma de entrar no pensamento de Heidegger é em si mesmo indicativo da dificuldade que a própria questão do ser apresenta desde o início. É precisamente esta dificuldade, esta "desorientação" em relação ao ser, que é indicada pela passagem do Sofista de Platão   que Heidegger coloca no início de Ser e Tempo  : "Porque, manifestamente, há muito que tens consciência do que queres dizer quando usas a expressão "ser". Nós, no entanto, que pensávamos compreendê-la, ficámos perplexos. " De certa forma, o ponto de partida adequado para pensar o ser em Heidegger é simplesmente a sua questionabilidade — de fato, essa questionabilidade é ela própria central para a compreensão que Heidegger tem do ser enquanto tal. Pode parecer trivial dizer que não pode haver uma questão do ser na ausência de questionabilidade, mas o ponto é, no entanto, importante no contexto heideggeriano. Pois o que está em causa na questão do ser é, nos termos mais simples, como é que algo pode ser a coisa que é. Para que algo seja o que é, é necessário que o ser seja o que é. No entanto, para que algo seja o que é, é necessário que a coisa se apresente de uma certa forma — que se apresente de modo a que o seu próprio ser seja revelado. No entanto, para ser revelado desta forma, é também necessário que a coisa se apresente de tal forma que o seu ser também esteja aberto a questionamentos — para que seja possível que a pergunta "o que é?" (em Aristóteles  , a questão do "ti esti  ") seja possível.

Although many discussions of Heidegger’s work begin by trying to say just what is the question of being—and so trying to give some account of what “being” itself “is”—it should be clear that there is a certain difficulty associated with such attempts since the meaning of the question, and so how being itself should be understood, is precisely what is at issue. We can certainly say how being has been understood historically, and Heidegger does this on many occasions, but this does not   answer the question of being so much as provide a way into that question. We may also give a preliminary account of the understanding of being that seems to be developed in Heidegger’s thought, but if this is taken as a way of establishing the character of the question to which Heidegger’s work provides an answer, then the risk will always be that an appearance of circularity will be the result—as Heidegger himself acknowledges [SZ:152-153]. Yet the appearance of circularity is only that—an appearance—and reflects the fact that thought must have some orientation to its subject matter if it is even to begin.

To a large extent, however, when it comes to the question of being, our orientation to that question is first given as a certain form of disorientation. For while we can talk about being, there is indeed a question as to what such talk—what “being”—means. In this respect, the fact that we look for some account of what being is as a way into Heidegger’s thinking is itself indicative of the difficulty that the question of being itself presents from the start. It is just this difficulty, this “disorientation” with respect to being, that is indicated by the passage from Plato’s Sophist that Heidegger places at the beginning of Being and Time: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it, have become perplexed.” In some ways, then, the proper starting point for thinking about being in Heidegger is simply its questionability—indeed, such questionability is itself central to Heidegger’s understanding of being as such. It may seem trivial to say that there can be no question of being in the absence of questionability, but the point is nevertheless an important one in the Heideggerian context. For what is at issue in the question of being is, in the simplest terms, how anything can be the thing that it is. For something to be what it is, however, is for the thing to stand   forth in a certain fashion—to stand forth so that its own being is disclosed. Yet to be disclosed in this way is also for the thing to stand forth in such a way that its being is also open to question—for it to be possible for the question “what is it?” (in Aristotle, the question of the “ti esti”) to be possible.

One way of moving forward in the face of such questionability is, as I noted above, by reference to the way the question of being has been understood within the preceding philosophical tradition  . Heidegger, of course, looks especially to the Greek understanding of the question as determinative of the understanding of being within the Western philosophical tradition as a whole, and for Greek thought, the focus of the question of being is what Aristotle called “ousia  ,” the really real, the primary being, “substance.” Heidegger claimed that one of the great breakthroughs in his own thinking was to realize that this Greek understanding of being was based in the prioritization of a certain mode of temporality, namely the present, and so understood the being of things in terms of the “presence” or “presencing” of things in the present [1]—in terms of the way they “stand fast” here and now. The way in which temporality comes to be at issue here (and so the connection between “presence” and “the present”) is important, but its entrance into the discussion should not distract us from the way in which the issue of being is indeed tied here directly to the idea   of presence or presencing as such. The introduction of this idea of “presence” or “presencing” is indicative of a key problem in contemporary discussion of Heidegger’s thought—although it is an issue that, for those not especially interested in the details of Heideggerian interpretation  , may seem somewhat obscure. Yet the issue is one that is important to address before I proceed much further. The interpolated excursus on presence that follows is thus something that some readers may choose merely to skim or completely skip over—but I would hope that it is a discussion to which such readers would later return.