The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being
§1 The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being
In the opening epigraph and the initial section of the Introduction, Heidegger develops what will come to be the central concern of his whole philosophical project, not just in Being and Time, but throughout his career, although it will take on different forms after 'the turn [Kehre]' in his thought beginning around 1930. It amounts to a seemingly simple question: what is the meaning [Sinn] of 'being' [Sein]? According to Heidegger, today not only do we lack an answer to this question, but we have forgotten it entirely. Even more, we aren't even 'perplexed' by our inability to define the meaning of being. As a result, he wants to 'reawaken' an appreciation for our understanding of being. Heidegger sees the aim of his analysis in Being and Time as 'to work out the question of the meaning of being' by way of 'an interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being.'1
Before we go any further, I want to skip around a bit here in order to draw out just what Heidegger means by 'being' [Sein]. He defines 'being' as 'that which determines entities [Seiendes]2 as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in detail.'3
By 'determines' Heidegger does not mean anything causal. Since being is itself 'not an entity,' it would be misguided to go about 'defining entities as entities by tracing them back in their origin to some other entities, as if being [Sein] had the character of some possible entity.'4
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 1. At this point, I'm going to use the somewhat standard English translation of Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson. I have the Joan Stambaugh translation, which has been revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, as well. I'll give a heads up by way of a footnote to which translation I use. But, initially, it should be assumed that the quotations I grab from Being and Time are from the Macquarrie and Robinson edition. Also, it should be pointed out, I take liberties with the translation at points where I disagree with the interpretation of Macquarrie and Robinson. Specifically, I've chosen to not translate Sein as 'Being' here, but as 'being,' since it takes away the mystical connotation.
2. Seiendes can be translated as 'entity' or 'entities,' as in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation (this is in order to distinguish it from being [Sein]), or as 'existent' (Stambaugh's choice, though she usually simply translates it as 'being' wherever the difference between Sein and Seiendes is explicit). But Charles B. Guignon makes the case that it's better to translate Seiendes as 'what-is': 'Such translations ignore the fact that das Seiendes is singular and refers not to a collection of items or (even more misleading) "things" or "objects." See his Preface in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd ed., edited by Charles Guignon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. xxiv-xxv. I somewhat sympathize with this view, but I'm going to go with the standard 'entities,' considering it's used predominately in a lot of the secondary literature, although Dreyfus, Blattner and Haugeland have together developed an agreed upon terminology of their own.
3. Heidegger, op cit., p. 25-26.
4. Ibid., p. 26.
