In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

450 FRAMES
Heidegger provides no arguments for this point, which is decisive for his
book inasmuch as it implies the two components that are indispensable
for an ontological analysis of human existence. The reader has to accept
that there is Being, and that Dasein-and only Dasein-is privileged to
understand "it. Heidegger could safely assume that his readers' longing
for ontological certainty was strong enough to accept any complex suggestion
of this kind. Sein und Zeit begins with a quote from Plato's
Sophist that points to the difficulty of understanding the meaning of the
word "being" (seiend). Heidegger continues by asserting that the meanings
of the words "being" (seiend) and "Being" (Sein) are lost, and that
moreover all questions concerning these meanings have been dismissed.
Thus, by presupposing Being's "forgottenness" (Seinsvergessenheit), he
replaces possible arguments with his assumption that Being exists.
Instead of Truth
Heidegger's definitions of Sein and Dasein do not yet contain or prefigure
his answer to the question concerning the meaning (Sinn) of Dasein. Not
until the second part of Sein und Zeit does he develop a new concept of
time, which constitutes the meaning of Dasein (and thus explains the title
of the book). Large passages of the book's first part,52 in contrast, are
dedicated to problems of conceptual readjustment that directly or indirectly
stem from the introductory definitions of Dasein and Sein. If we
can say, for example, that Dasein's understanding of Being, in Heidegger's
philosophy, takes over the place which the notion of "truth" had
traditionally occupied, how can we then think the relation between Being
and truth? Heidegger argues that truth is a condition of Dasein, that
Dasein is always "being in the truth."53 At the same time, "being in the
truth" is a condition for the possibility of "untruth,"54 which can only
mean that Dasein implies a potential-not a promise-of reaching truth.
But this does not explain how truth would be different from Being.
Heidegger provides no definitive answer to this question. What becomes
obvious, however, is his (perhaps unintended) tendency to relativize the
value of the notion of "truth" -which historically belongs to the conceptual
repertoire of the subject-object paradigm. Having stated that
"Being and truth 'are' equiprimordially" in their relation to Dasein, he
postpones any further clarification of how Being and truth relate to each