Dasein - Monoskop

178 PART III
whatever. Here we have the reason why Heidegger characterizes his
investigation into Being as hermeneutical.
Heidegger's awareness of the hermeneutical tradition enables
him to adopt the view of Being (and of the world) as a universal
medium of meaning, while still engaging in its investigation. Once
logicians like Frege or Wittgenstein came to realize the circle implicated
in doing semantics, they were forced to put the strictest ban
on the explicit expression of semantical ideas. 166 This is so, because
for them a circle is per se a vicious one. Not so, however, for a
philosopher who, like Heidegger, is familiar with the hermeneutical
tradition. Heidegger acknowledges the circle involved in investigating
the notion of Being, but to him this circle is not vicious but
rather hermeneutical, a circle which is also involved in Daseiris very
understanding of its world.
Heidegger claims that any attempt to philosophically clarify
one's understanding of Being must necessarily presuppose a prephilosophical
understanding of Being. This is brought out clearly in the
following passage:
Inquiry, as a kind of seeking must be guided beforehand by what
is sought. ... We do not know what "Being" means. But even
if we ask, 'What is "Being"', we stay within an understanding
of the 'is' .. . 167
The circularity involved in an inquiry into the meaning of Being
is discussed by Heidegger early on in Being and Time by conceptualizing
research as a process of questioning. With respect to
questioning, Heidegger tells us, we have to distinguish the following
three aspects:
(t) that about which we ask something,
(it) that which we are asking about (i), and
(iii) that by way of which we want to obtain an answer to (it).
For instance, we find an answer to the question about the intelligence
(ii) of some student (i), by comparing his testsheet to those of
his classmates (iii). In the Heideggerian ontological inquiry—in his
"fundamental ontology"—(i) is Being, (ii) is the meaning of Being,
and (iii) is that singular being—Dasein—from which we are trying