Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existênciaHeidegger’s use of Sinn and Bedeutung evolves over time and is not always consistent, but in any case he does not use these terms the way either Frege or Husserl do. Sinn does not refer to an ideal unity of sense, a pure, unchanged ideality that is unaffected by the psychological acts that grasp it, nor is it the noema of a Husserlian noesis. Likewise Bedeutung does not mean “reference” (or “referent”), as in Frege, and it does not refer merely to a linguistic expression, as in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In Being and Time , Sinn and Bedeutung are closely related, although Sinn is broader than Bedeutung, and they are usually translated interchangeably as “sense” and “meaning.” Bedeutung always refers to the sense or meaning of a particular thing. 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. [1]
2. When it is used in conjunction with Sein (der Sinn vom Sein), Sinn is a formal indication of the clearing that accounts for intelligibility at all. [2] Other such formal indications include the “essence” or “place” or “truth” (Wesen , Ort /Ortschaft/τόπος , Wahrheit ) of the being of things.
3. Being and Time, Division 2, does in fact argue to the content of the formally indicative word Sinn, which turns out to be the thrown-open horizon within which being appears as itself intelligible.
4. In his middle and later work, Heidegger abandons the transcendental -horizonal approach of Being and Time, and the word Sinn gets replaced by a number of co-equal terms, some of which I indicated above: the “open” (Offene ) or the “thrown-open domain” (Entwurfbereich) [3] or especially “the clearing” (Lichtung ) for meaningful presence at all.
Heidegger’s search for the der Sinn von Sein was not a search for a definition or a concept of being. As far as he was concerned, such a concept was already available throughout Western philosophy, at least implicitly, since the Greeks: Sein has always meant Anwesen, “presence,” and in Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation , it means specifically the meaningful presence of things to man. And so, again, “der Sinn von Sein” is merely a formally indicative phrase that points towards the eventual outcome of Heidegger’s search: whatever will turn out to be responsible for the fact that things can and must be discursively intelligible (= must “have being”) if we are to encounter them at all. And that answer eventually will be this: the ever-operative yet intrinsically hidden thrown-openness that is the appropriated clearing.
