Abstract

Being and Time begins by asking, “Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’ [seiend]?” (SZ1). Heidegger’s project is thus often understood as an attempt to answer this question of being. But Heidegger immediately goes on to say that the problem is not that we lack an answer to this question so much as that we do not even have a sense of the question: “But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’ [Sein]? Not at all” (SZ1). Instead of, or at least before, giving us an answer to the question of being, Heidegger wishes to gift us the openness of that question. I argue that the question of being asks after the meaningful presencing of entities, where this means it asks what it is to hold entities up to, or grasp them in light of, ontological standards. I show that the metaphors of holding, grasping, and light mask a deep perplexity about this phenomenon, and I suggest that the ontological-epistemological problem of being that Heidegger wants to bequeath to us has general philosophical significance beyond the scope of his own philosophising.