What Is the Problem of the Meaning of Being? > 77


and follows, with some qualifi cations (Heidegger thinks φρόνησις is also a sort of making, of deeds) Aristotle’s prioritization of φρόνησις, commonly translated as practical wisdom, knowing what to do. Such a knowing has no logos; no formalization is possible, no method. Knowing what to do is highly contextual and its wisdom cannot be formulated in an assertion. It is simply to do what the practically wise person would do. Φρόνησις is not theoretical knowledge of the good but knowing what to do; the knowledge is practical knowledge only if it issues in an action, not an assertion about what is to be done. Heidegger says that the final object of φρόνησις is Dasein itself. Of course, a determinate action results from the exercise of such wisdom, and that can be described, but the deliberation and the practical knowing itself is not a form of propositional knowledge (PS 34–36).

So we have now a series of attempts, not at all exhaustive, to pin down the distinctive way in which the question of the meaning of Being can be formulated. As:

Manifestness as such Presencing Availability Meaningfulness Pre-discursive familiarity/intelligibility Phusis Prevailing Disclosedness Openedness (Aufgeschlossenheit) Announcing itself/appearing Clearing (Lichtung/lighting)

And this gives us a way of understanding how Heidegger approaches the history of philosophy. There are beings available for us for our comportment towards them. How is this possible? In Plato, the answer would be: by virtue of any being’s participation in an idea. The meaning of Being is εἶδος. This, though, treats Being as another being and raises the question of the availability, the mode of access, the being or the disclosedness potential, of the Ideas (and so the “third man” problem, among others).

Or in Descartes, a being is available by being represented. The meaning of Being is being representable in clear and distinct ideas. For Heidegger, this produces only confusion and equivocation; Being is res cogitans, res extensa, and God, and the mode of Being itself throughout all such substances is unclarified. Or, as he puts it: cogito ergo sum. But Descartes never enquires into the sum.


The Culmination by Robert Pippin