Denker: The question of being

During his WS 1924-5 lecture course on Plato   (GA19  ), Heidegger’s main discovery was that the question of the stranger from Elea: "What is being?" should be the starting point of radical phenomenological research. The consequences of this ontological turning become visible in the lecture course on the history of time.35 "The question of being as such, however, when it is put in a sufficiently formal manner, is the most universal and emptiest, but perhaps also the most concrete question, which a scientific inquiry can ever raise" (GA20  : 186).36 To ask this question in a phenomenological way, we have to make a being as being visible in its being. Through this radicalization of phenomenology in its own most possibility, the questioning of Plato   and Aristotle   becomes alive again. Phenomenology is: "the repetition, the retaking of the beginning of our scientific philosophy" (GA20  : 184). Heidegger next shows that the question of the meaning of being has a threefold structure. We can distinguish between (1) that which we want to know, (2) that which is asked (the being of beings), and (3) that which is questioned (the being in question; GA20  : 195). Posing the question of being is a way of being of a specific being, which is characterized by an implicit understanding of being and that in its being cares about its being (GA20  : 405). Heidegger formally indicates this being as being-there. A phenomenology of being-there is a necessary preparation for the question of the meaning of being because being-there has an explicit relation to being.37

The ontological turn in his phenomenology poses four problems for Heidegger. First, what is the question of the meaning of the being of beings (GA20  : 200)? As we will see, this question is really posed by being-there itself which in its being cares about its being (GA20  : 185).38 It is only through our own being that we have access to being. Being concerns us; we are involved in it. Second, what is being-there? The answer to this question is the hermeneutics of primal facticity that Heidegger developed from 1923 on. The being of being-there is not only historical (Dilthey  , Yorck) but is thoroughly temporal. Third, what is the reason the question of being was forgotten? The forgetfulness of being is a consequence of being-there’s falling in to the world and the "They" in its everydayness and ends in the crisis of modernity.39 Finally, this implies that a solution to this crisis can only be found when being-there retrieves its authenticity - that means, it poses the question of being again (GA20  : 179-80). (ALFRED DENKER   in WRATHALL  )