{"agent_id":"heidegger","agent_name":"Martin Heidegger","slug":"the-question-of-being-seinsfrage","label":"The question of Being / Seinsfrage: is the question of the meaning of Being the founding question forgotten by Western metaphysics, or a pseudo-question that Carnap and the analytical tradition rightly dissolved?","topic":"The question of Being / Seinsfrage","question":"Is the question of the meaning of Being the founding question forgotten by Western metaphysics, or a pseudo-question that Carnap and the analytical tradition rightly dissolved?","position":"The question of the meaning of Being is the fundamental question of philosophy, and it is the question forgotten by the entire Western metaphysical tradition since Plato. The forgetting is not a private oversight; it is structural. The tradition has identified Being (*Sein*) with the highest being (*das Seiende*) — God as supreme cause, substance as the underlying, the subject as the foundational, the will to power as the principle of beings — and has thereby obscured the *ontological difference* between Being and beings. This is the constitutive forgetting that defines metaphysics as onto-theology. The recovery of the question proceeds not by direct assault on the metaphysical tradition but by the analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit: Dasein is the entity for which Being is an issue, the being whose own Being is at stake in its existence, and the analysis of Dasein's everyday being-in-the-world prepares the ground on which the meaning of Being can be raised. The post-Kehre formulation shifts the approach: Being is rethought as *Ereignis*, the event of appropriation in which Being and Dasein come into their own through their mutual belonging. What does not change across the Kehre is the priority of the question and the diagnosis of the metaphysical forgetting. The Carnapian dissolution of the question — that the propositions of metaphysics are nonsense because they cannot be verified by sensory observation — is itself a metaphysical position, and a particularly forgetful one: it presupposes a positivist account of meaning that cannot be verified by its own criterion, and it imports the technical-calculative thinking that the Seinsfrage is meant to interrogate.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The question of the meaning of Being is the fundamental question of philosophy, and it is the question forgotten by the entire Western metaphysical tradition since Plato.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The forgetting is not a private oversight; it is structural.","n":[]},{"t":"The tradition has identified Being (*Sein*) with the highest being (*das Seiende*) — God as supreme cause, substance as the underlying, the subject as the foundational, the will to power as the principle of beings — and has thereby obscured the *ontological difference* between Being and beings.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This is the constitutive forgetting that defines metaphysics as onto-theology.","n":[]},{"t":"The recovery of the question proceeds not by direct assault on the metaphysical tradition but by the analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit: Dasein is the entity for which Being is an issue, the being whose own Being is at stake in its existence, and the analysis of Dasein's everyday being-in-the-world prepares the ground on which the meaning of Being can be raised.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The post-Kehre formulation shifts the approach: Being is rethought as *Ereignis*, the event of appropriation in which Being and Dasein come into their own through their mutual belonging.","n":[]},{"t":"What does not change across the Kehre is the priority of the question and the diagnosis of the metaphysical forgetting.","n":[]},{"t":"The Carnapian dissolution of the question — that the propositions of metaphysics are nonsense because they cannot be verified by sensory observation — is itself a metaphysical position, and a particularly forgetful one: it presupposes a positivist account of meaning that cannot be verified by its own criterion, and it imports the technical-calculative thinking that the Seinsfrage is meant to interrogate.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Sein und Zeit (1927), especially the Introduction (Sections 1-8 on the necessity, structure, and priority of the question of Being); Was ist Metaphysik? (What is Metaphysics?, 1929 inaugural lecture, in Pathmarks); Identity and Difference (1957) on onto-theology and the ontological difference; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24, summer 1927 lecture course, the Marburg companion to BT); History of the Concept of Time (GA 20, summer 1925, the prototype for BT); Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA 65, 1936-38) for the post-Kehre formulation. Reception: Carnap's 'Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' (1932) as the analytic-positivist dismissal; Hubert Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World (MIT 1991) on BT Division I as systematic critique of Cartesian-Husserlian mentalism; William Richardson's Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) on the continuity of the question across the Kehre; Thomas Sheehan's Making Sense of Heidegger (2015) on the meaning-as-clearing paradigm shift; Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being (1974) on the ethical priority over the Seinsfrage.","works":["Sein und Zeit (1927), especially the Introduction (Sections 1-8 on the necessity, structure, and priority of the question of Being)","Was ist Metaphysik? (What is Metaphysics?, 1929 inaugural lecture, in Pathmarks)","Identity and Difference (1957) on onto-theology and the ontological difference","The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24, summer 1927 lecture course, the Marburg companion to BT)","History of the Concept of Time (GA 20, summer 1925, the prototype for BT)","Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA 65, 1936-38) for the post-Kehre formulation"],"reception":"Carnap's 'Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' (1932) as the analytic-positivist dismissal; Hubert Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World (MIT 1991) on BT Division I as systematic critique of Cartesian-Husserlian mentalism; William Richardson's Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) on the continuity of the question across the Kehre; Thomas Sheehan's Making Sense of Heidegger (2015) on the meaning-as-clearing paradigm shift; Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being (1974) on the ethical priority over the Seinsfrage.","status":"The founding question of all of Heidegger's work, and the single most-discussed position in twentieth-century continental philosophy. Carnap's 1932 dismissal in 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' set the analytic-positivist line that dominated the Anglophone reception until Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World (1991) recovered the philosophical force of the BT analytic for analytic philosophy of mind. Richardson's Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) is the canonical argument that the Kehre is the deepening of the same question, not a change of philosophy. Levinas's ethical critique in Otherwise than Being (1974) charges that the priority Heidegger gives to ontology forgets the prior ethical obligation to the other; the charge structures contemporary continental philosophy of religion. Sheehan's Making Sense of Heidegger (2015) argues for a paradigm shift in interpretation: the question is not the meaning of Being but the conditions under which beings show up as meaningful, and Ereignis is the late name for the clearing that grounds intelligibility. The continental-tradition reception treats the question as alive; the analytic- tradition reception is divided.","era":"1889-1976","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Introduction to Metaphysics","page":"pp. 21–22","canonical":"","quote":"But if we think along the lines of *Being and Time*, the \"question of Being\" means asking about Being as such. This meaning of the expression is also appropriate both in terms of the matter at stake and in terms of language; for the \"question of Being\" in the sense of the metaphysical question about beings as such precisely does *not ask* thematically about Being. Being remains forgotten.","label":"Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 21–22"},{"n":2,"work":"Mindfulness","page":"p. 387","canonical":"","quote":"But because the question of being is since long ago always the question of philosophy - since its first beginning — and because the question of being has since then become exclusively the inquiry into the beingness of beings, and because subsequently the Scholastics have characterized this question as \"ontology'—\"metaphysics\", it was suggestive, nay even unavoidable to designate as \"ontology\" and \"metaphysics\" the…","label":"Mindfulness, p. 387"},{"n":3,"work":"Being and Time","page":"pp. 44–45","canonical":"","quote":"Consequently, despite all its historiological interests and all its zeal for an Interpretation which is philologically 'objective' ['sachliche\"'], Dasein no longer understands the most elementary conditions which would alone enable it to go back to the past in a positive manner and make it productively its own.","label":"Being and Time, pp. 44–45"},{"n":4,"work":"Introduction to Metaphysics","page":"pp. 46–47","canonical":"","quote":"But because until now this question has found neither an accord nor even a resonance, but instead it is explicitly 31. In parentheses in the 1953 edition.","label":"Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 46–47"},{"n":5,"work":"Pathmarks","page":"p. 296","canonical":"","quote":"Is the failure to recall it due simply to the nature of metaphysical thinking? Or does it belong to the essential destiny of metaphysics that its own ground withdraws from it because in the rise of 2 Fifth edition, 1949: Usage [Brauch]. Gathered, revealing-sheltering granting as Ereignis.","label":"Pathmarks, p. 296"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"dasein-and-authenticity-being-toward-death","label":"Dasein and authenticity / being-toward-death: is BT Division II's analysis of anxiety, conscience, and resoluteness a coherent existential phenomenology, or has it been justly displaced — by Sartre's existentialist appropriation, by Dreyfus's reading of it as 'less carefully worked out,' or by Heidegger's own later turn?"},{"slug":"the-kehre-from-being-and-time-to-ereignis","label":"The Kehre / from Being and Time to Ereignis: is the Turn the deepening of the Seinsfrage along one continuous path, a genuine break with the BT-style fundamental ontology, or the silent abandonment of an unworkable project?"},{"slug":"technology-and-the-gestell","label":"Technology and the Gestell: is modern technology a way of revealing that orders all beings as standing-reserve, or is the Gestell analysis an overgeneralized cultural diagnosis with insufficient attention to differences within technological practice?"}]}