(Capobianco2023)
Your question goes to the heart of a clarification that must be made in order to understand Heidegger’s original and distinctive thinking about Being, and it is a clarification that I seek to make in both of my books. What we may glean from his life-long reflections and meditations is that Being itself or Beyng (Sein selbst/Seyn) lets beings (das Seiende) be in their beingness (die Seiendheit). As he put this simply and elegantly in 1945: “Now Beyng is that which lets each and every being be what it is and how it is, precisely because Beyng is the freeing that lets every single thing rest in its abiding fullness; that is, Beyng safeguards each and every thing.” In other words, Being, which is not a particular being, is the temporal-spatial ontological “way” whereby and wherein all beings issue forth, come to be, in their beingness (Seiendheit), that is, in their full appearance or “full look” (the ancient Greek philosophical terms eidos, morphe and the medieval terms essentia, quidditas). Being is the pure emerging of all that emerges (physis). Being is the pure manifesting of all that is manifest (aletheia). Being is the pure laying-out and gathering of all that is (the primordial Logos). This understanding of Being, although already in evidence in the early work, came into fullest view in his “later” writings and reflections. So, yes, indeed, “knowing” Being is possible, but we do not know – and say – Being in the same way that we know and say beings; and that is the challenge.