Thomas Sheehan

Two traps currently ensnare Heideggerian scholarship: the “language trap” and the “being trap”. To avoid them, the text argues we should follow Heidegger’s important indication that movement (aka ex-sistential becoming or Zeit ) determines all forms of meaning (aka the significance of things or Sein). This requires a radical rewriting of the terminology and the structure of Zeitlichkeit in § 65 of Sein und Zeit . The text also argues for moving beyond Heidegger’s early and late formulations of fundamental ontology and into a meta- ontological ethics that would apply to the economic, social, and political worlds in which we live our daily lives.

(1) The “thing itself” of Heidegger’s thinking was Ereignis. (2) But Ereignis is a reinscription of what Being and Time had called thrownness or facticity. (3) But facticity/Ereignis is ex-sistence’s ever-operative appropriation to its proper structure as the ontological “space” or “clearing” that makes possible practical and theoretical discursivity. (4) Such facticity is the ultimate and inevitable presupposition of all activities of ex-sistence and thus of any understanding of being. (5) Therefore, for ex-sistence – and a fortiori for Heidegger as a thinker of Ereignis – there can be no going beyond facticity.