Magda King: Sinn / Sentido

Heidegger’s special use of the term “meaning” (Sinn) was pointed out already in our introductory remarks. Our present difficulty thus seems to be purely terminological and should be capable of an easy solution: we must simply find out how Heidegger defines the word “meaning.” The matter, however, is not quite so simple, as can be readily seen when the definition is actually given. Meaning, in Heidegger’s sense, is that from which something is understandable as the thing it is. This definition, while perfectly correct, is for our purpose quite insufficient. Heidegger’s terminology grows from a way of phenomenological thinking, which cannot be explained merely by defining words. Phenomenology will be made the subject of one of our later studies, but in the meantime we must find a rough-and-ready way to understand Heidegger’s use of “meaning.” This can be done by a concrete illustration.

Supposing in a strange town we ask what a certain building is, we may be told that it is a theater. With this explanation the building has explicitly come to our understanding as a theater — that is, as the thing it is. Supposing, however, that we are not familiar with theaters, we must take a further step and have explained to us what a theater is. We shall be told that it is a building intended for the production of plays. Provided that we know at all what a play is, this particular building has now become manifest in what it essentially is. When we understand something as the thing it is, we have understood it in its essential being.

But where in all this is the meaning? Is it in our understanding of the word “theater?” No. Is it in this concrete thing, the theater itself? No. Is it perhaps in the explanation “for the production of plays”? The “for” shows that this thing, the theater, is in advance understood by reference to a purpose. Is that where we find the meaning? This comes much nearer to Heidegger, but is not quite there yet. Meaning, according to Heidegger, is that from which something is understandable as the thing it is. From where can a thing like a theater be understood at all? Only from a world of human existence.

Writing, producing, and appreciating plays is one of our distinctively human possibilities, for the sake of which we have things like theaters. Only from a human world can a thing be understood as a theater. That which makes such understanding possible, Heidegger says, is the meaning. The meaning of the theater is the world to which it belongs.

The world of our own existence is the horizon in which our everyday understanding moves, so that from it and in reference to it the things we come across are intelligible to us as theaters, as buses, as [7] knives and forks; that is, as things that can be useful for some purpose. The horizon of our world is primarily “meaning-giving”; it is a meaning in which we constantly move as a matter of course, so that it usually remains implicit.

One way to make this implied meaning explicit is to turn away from our everyday world and enter into the realm of one of the sciences, say, theoretical physics. At one stroke, things like theaters, buses, knives and forks, become “meaningless.” The horizon from which things are now understood is the substantiality of matter. Why has such a startling change taken place? Because the horizon, in which the physicist’s understanding moves, has undergone a profound modification. The world of human existence has become modified into a theoretical conception of material nature, articulated into such categories or basic concepts as mass, motion, or energy. Since this horizon alone is “meaning-giving” for the physicist, anything whatever that falls under his observation must show itself and can only show itself as a complex motion of material bodies. This horizon gives nothing from which things could even be questioned as to their possible relevance to a purpose; their only possibility now is to show themselves in their material properties as moving bodies in a spacetime continuum.