| But if we're Not asking for a Definition of "being," what is the question of being after? We make progress in understanding being, Heidegger argues, by getting clearer about the "meaning" or "sense" (Sinn) of being. The way Heidegger uses the term "sense" is akin to the way we say in English that something "makes sense." Things make sense when they fit together, when there is an organized, stable, and coherent way in which they interact and bear on us and each other. We grasp the sense of something when we know our way around it, we can anticipate what kind of things can happen with respect to it, we recognize when things belong or are out of place, and so on. This is what Heidegger means when he says that "sense is that within which the intelligibility of something maintains itself. . . Sense is that onto which projection projects, in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something" (GA2 p.151, translation modified). Sense is the background way of organizing and fitting things together, which guides and shapes all our anticipations of and interactions with anything we encounter. | But if we're Not asking for a Definition of "being," what is the question of being after? We make progress in understanding being, Heidegger argues, by getting clearer about the "meaning" or "sense" (Sinn) of being. The way Heidegger uses the term "sense" is akin to the way we say in English that something "makes sense." Things make sense when they fit together, when there is an organized, stable, and coherent way in which they interact and bear on us and each other. We grasp the sense of something when we know our way around it, we can anticipate what kind of things can happen with respect to it, we recognize when things belong or are out of place, and so on. This is what Heidegger means when he says that "sense is that within which the intelligibility of something maintains itself. . . Sense is that onto which projection projects, in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something" (GA2 p.151, translation modified). Sense is the background way of organizing and fitting things together, which guides and shapes all our anticipations of and interactions with anything we encounter. |
