Dasein - Monoskop

HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS THE UNIVERSAL MEDIUM 153
from his notion of world. I shall first try to explicate the importance
of Aristotle's philosophy for Heidegger. It was Heidegger's admiration
for Aristotle's inquiry into the meanings of Being (Sein) that
stimulated not only Heidegger's ontological project but also his critical
study of the Stagirite. What Heidegger gained from this study
was above all two insights: first, in his ontological investigations,
Aristotle falls prey to the same 'mistake' (favouring the theoretical
attitude over the practical) that Heidegger—following the lead
of Dilthey and Natorp—identified in Husserl and the neo-Kantians.
Ultimately, Aristotle reads the meanings of Being from the declarative,
theoretically-oriented sentence. Second, despite this 'mistake'
Aristotle shows appreciation for the need to study practical life; in
the Rhetorics he provides his reader with something of an existential
analysis of the speaking Daseiny and in De Anima he studies the
ontology of life.
In so far as Aristotle—at least potentially—had the conceptual
tools for an unbiased investigation into Being qua Being, he was
ahead of Husserl. Even though Heidegger owed to Husserl's theory
of categorial intuition the idea that an understanding of Being
is already involved in prepredicative experience, he regarded the
phenomenological reductions as an obstacle to ontological inquiry;
what the reductions reduce, after all, is precisely Being qua existence.
Thus Heidegger's own ontological project does not take its
lead from Husserl; rather, it is based on the idea that our pretheoretical
understanding of Being has already to be presupposed
in its investigations, and that therefore, ontology can proceed only
hermeneutically-circularly. As a result, the conception of philosophy
as a strict, objective science has to go by the board.
Further support for attributing the conception of language as
the universal medium to the middle Heidegger can be adduced as
we turn to his pronouncements concerning language and truth. Although
Heidegger's remarks on language in the period under investigation
here are scarce, they are nevertheless plain: we cannot
grasp the world independent of our historical language; language
and world cannot be abstractly separated; and language plays with
us. Equally unequivocal are Heidegger's pronouncements concerning
truth. Every defender of the universal medium conception—in the