On Wed, 10 Apr 1996, Martin Weatherston wrote:
>
> (This is a reposting of a query that doesn't seem to have gone out.
> Apologies if you have received this twice).
>
> On page 8 of Beitraege, there is a passage that puzzles me. The passage
> reads:
>
> "Niemand versteht was "ich" _denke_: aus der _Wahrheit des Seyns_ (und
> d.h. aus der Wesung der Wahrheit) das _Da-sein_ entspringen lassen, um
> darin das Seiende im Ganzen und als solches, inmitten seiner aber den
> Menschen zu gruenden."
>
> The part that troubles me most is the "inmitten seiner aber den
> Menschen". The German specialist I consulted thought that this phrase
> was grammatically odd. The best I can do with the passage is this:
>
> "No one understands what "I" _think_ here: _Da-sein_ is allowed to arise
> out of the _truth of Being_ (and that means out of the essencing of truth)
> in order to ground therein the being as a whole and as such, but in the
> midst of man."
>
> I would be grateful if anyone could shed light on this. Thanks.
>
I take the troublesome *seiner* to be a neuter genetive possessive
adjective, genetive because of inmitten. The antecedent would be either a
masculine or a neuter noun, in this case it seems logical to see
*Seiende* as the anticedent. The declension of the adjective depends on
the word it modifies, and this would be feminine, given the *er* ending.
Such a word is not explicitly given where we would expect it (i.e.
following *seiner*), but from the sense of the passage, I would put my
money on the Heideggerian *Wesung*, or essencing, which is feminine. I
would then ammend your translation as follows: "No one understands what
"I" _think_: out of the _Truth of Being_ (and that means out of the
essencing of truth) Da-sein is allowed to emerge, in order to ground in
it beings as such in their totality, and only then within those
beings' [essencing], to ground the Being of man." This is clumsy, but
the point is that The Truth of Being is at the most general level,
Da-sein arises in that, beings are then described within the field of
Da-sein [i.e. Sein und Zeit], and man as a being is described under that
last rubric. Man, therefore, cannot be equated with Da-sein, since the
ontological level of description that identifies Da-sein is far beyond
the level of local being within which the notion of man is formed.
That's just my stab at it.
James McFarland
Dept. of German
Princeton University
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