Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

This determination, as well as the need to characterize the structure of the logos as synthesis and
diaresis founded ultimately on the presence of necessarily existing eternal entities, result from
Aristotle’s understanding of the synthetic unity of the logos as expressing an ontological state of copresence,
or presence-together. But this understanding itself has its root, according to Heidegger, in
Aristotle’s interpretation of being (in its most basic and general sense) as presence. (Cf. chapter 1
above). By contrast with this, Heidegger aims to show that the apparently synthetic structure of the
logos has real ontological and hermeneutic basis in the primary structure of the “existentialhermeneutic
as,” which cannot be basically characterized as any synthesis of already existing entities. 40
This more general hermeneutic “as” structure is, as Heidegger argues, the actual foundation of the more
specific possibility of the kind of synthesis that occurs, according to Aristotle, in the explicit logos. It
conditions the specific possibility of falsehood, as Heidegger goes on to say, through three structural
conditions that it has as inherent aspects. First, there is a basic “tendency toward the uncovering of
something” which amounts to a prior “meaning and having” of the subject matter [das Woruber], or an
“always already prior disclosure of world”. Second, “within” this comportment of uncovering, there is a
letting-be-seen [Sehenlassen] of the subject matter “from another;” it is on the basis of this moment,
that there arises the “possibility of something’s giving itself out as something”. Third and finally, the
encountering of something through the basic “as” structure always involves a possibility of the
“togetherness” [Beisammen] of something with something; this possibility is itself always determined by
the context of a particular “range of indications” that constrain what possibly can appear in a particular
environment. It is through this threefold structure that the possibility of error and illusion first arises,
even in cases that do not involve anything like explicit assertion, as Heidegger illustrates by considering
a simple case of mistaking a bush for a deer while walking in a dark forest. In this case, the first
condition is fulfilled in that I indeed have something coming before me that I regard in some way; the
second is fulfilled in that I encounter something as something (indeed, in this case, as a deer); and the
third is fulfilled in that I understand in advance that something like “a deer” can indeed be present in
this environment.
In Being and Time, (section 32, p. 150) Heidegger replicates these three constitutive structures precisely,
albeit more briefly and without explicit connection to the possibility of falsehood, as the three structural
moments of fore-having [Vorhabe], fore-sight [Vorsicht] and fore-conception [Vorgriff]. These
moments, together, found everyday circumspective interpretation [alltäglichen, umsichtigen Auslegung]
and thus structure, in an inexplicit way, the “whole of involvements” [Bewandtnisganzheit] from which
40 “This synthetic showing is a showing on the basis of, and is preformed within, a focus on something
else. The act of showing something by focusing on something else that has the feature of “can be
together-with,” is what we have already characterized as the determining act of speaking about
something as something – logos as a statement that determines something. This brings to light an inner
connection between the ontological structure of synthesis and of the as-structure, which we earlier
characterized as the basic hermeneutical structure.” (pp. 157-58)
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