52 < CHAPTER TWO


beings as the beings they are, from disclosedness of Being, or ontological truth. See EG, 103.)35 What is that sense? We know from BT that the way in which the question of the meaning of Being as such gets any kind of grip on Dasein is not as the result of judgmental claims. The manifestness of beings as such as a whole cannot be understood as the content of any “as such” judgment. That is the “apophantical as” (BT §44, 266–267) and cannot be original because it depends on a prior “hermeneutical as.” The way in which the problem of being as such shows up for us is what we are trying to point to, as Heidegger sometimes puts it, by discursive means, but the meaning should not be thought of in terms of discursivity—again, the cardinal sin of the metaphysical tradition, culminating in Kant and Hegel.

There is a natural, intuitively plausible way of construing how we are to think of this distinctive power or capacity human animals have—the capacity to attend to a reason or an ocean or any being as such, as what it is, not just unreflectively dealing with it being what it is. We do have this capacity to attend to any singular being or kind of being as such, according to Heidegger, but it is derivative. Any such reflection assumes something: that the beings in question are already “manifest,” or meaningfully accessible. They have shown up, appeared, are now available. If we ask: How do we explain this? What makes this manifestness possible? What does it mean? Is there anything more to say than just that there are beings that may be interacted with, perceived, used, wondered at, thought about, explained? Heidegger insists there must be, because this is just to say that they are manifest; it is not to ask about manifestness as such.36


35. “Unveiledness of being first makes possible the manifestness of Being” (EG, 103) (Enthülltheit des Seins ermöglicht erst Off enbarkeit von Seienden [GA 9, 151]).

36. None of this implies that there are not ontologically acceptable contexts appropriate for the apophantical “as such.” For example, one way to draw a line between the working of reason in the sensory capacities of human animals and those of nonhuman animals is presented by John McDowell in his 2009 essay “Cognitive Capacities in Perception.”

That wording [“responsiveness to reasons as such”] leaves room for responsiveness to reasons, though not to reasons as such, on the other side of the division drawn by this notion of rationality between rational animals and animals that are not rational. Animals of many kinds are capable of, for instance, fleeing. And fleeing is a response to something that is in an obvious sense a reason for it: danger, or at least what is taken to be danger. If we describe a bit of behavior as fleeing, we represent the behavior as intelligible in the light of a reason for it. But fleeing is not in general responding to a reason as such. (128)

McDowell goes on to say that this “as such” is what allows human animals to “step back” sometimes when they see danger approaching and reflect on whether that danger is a sufficient reason to flee or not. Cf. Heidegger in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics lectures: “The lizard basks in the sun. At least this is how we describe what it is doing, although it is doubtful whether it really comports itself in the same way as we do when we lie out in the sun, i.e., whether the sun is accessible to it as sun, whether the lizard is capable of experiencing the rock as rock. Yet the lizard’s relation to the sun and to warmth is different from that of the warm stone simply lying present at hand in the sun” (FCM, 197).


The Culmination by Robert Pippin