DOI: 10.1111/ejop.

12277

Haugeland’s Heidegger and the Metaphysics of

Normativity
Katherine Withy

Abstract: John Haugeland’s distinctive approach to Heidegger’s ontology rests on

taking scientific explanation to be a paradigmatic case of understanding the being
of entities. I argue that this paradigm, and the more general account that
Haugeland develops from it, misses a crucial component of Heidegger’s picture:
the dynamic character of being. While this dimension of being first comes to the
fore after Being and Time, it should have been present all along. Its absence grounds
Heidegger’s persistent confusion about whether world is an entity, as well as
problems that both Haugeland’s Heidegger and Heidegger’s Plato run into with
the ontological difference. Retrieving the dynamic character of being reveals the
proper object of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as well as a distinctive feature
of his metaphysics of normativity, which is all but impossible to see if we grasp
Heidegger’s account through the special case of scientific explanation—at least
as usually understood.

John Haugeland glossed Heidegger’s notoriously difficult talk about being by

turning to the physical sciences, especially physics and chemistry, because he took
the physical sciences to offer particularly clear and self-contained cases of
understanding the being of entities. According to Haugeland, ‘standard accounts
of scientific explanation are effectively special cases of Heidegger’s more general
formulation’ of what it takes to understand being (Haugeland 2013:197; 2000:54).
This is because scientific laws or theories amount to special cases of the possibilities
in terms of which entities make sense. By specifying what is possible and
impossible for physical entities, for instance, the laws of physics specify both what
it takes to be there as a physical entity (rather than not) and what it takes to be this
sort of physical entity (rather than another). The laws specify both the that-being
and the what-being of those entities. Haugeland works backwards from these
special scientific cases to hold more generally that, for Heidegger, understanding
the being of entities is understanding entities in terms of possibilities or
constitutive standards for that and what they are. This reading licences translating
Heidegger’s language into the more contemporary language of normativity: the
possibilities in terms of which entities make sense are norms, and since being is
that in terms of which entities make sense, being is a norm (or set of norms).
This interpretive approach to Heidegger’s philosophy is powerful and
compelling. But I will argue that it misses a crucial component of Heidegger’s
picture: the dynamic character of being. While this dimension of being first comes
to the fore after Being and Time, it should have been present all along. Its absence

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464 Katherine Withy

grounds Heidegger’s persistent confusion about whether the world is an entity, as

well as problems that both Haugeland’s Heidegger and Heidegger’s Plato run into
with the ontological difference. Retrieving the dynamic character of being reveals
the proper object of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as well as a distinctive
feature of his metaphysics of normativity, which is all but impossible to see if we
grasp Heidegger’s account through the special case of scientific explanation—at
least as it is usually understood.

1. Possibilities and Norms

When Heidegger speaks of understanding an entity in its being, he typically says

that we free some entity for its being, that we let it be, or that the entity encounters
us as such and such. Haugeland would add to this list: We project the entity onto
its possibilities. While he nowhere makes an explicit case for this interpretive
move, it is clear that Haugeland holds that ‘understanding entities [in their being]
is projecting them onto their possibilities’ (Haugeland 2013:176; 2007:101) and that
the possibilities onto which entities are projected are, contain, or spell out their
being. It is by taking the being of entities to be the possibilities onto which they
are projected that Haugeland is able to link being to scientific laws.
Unfortunately, this interpretation immediately confronts a textual difficulty. In
Being and Time, Heidegger officially (although not exclusively) reserves the
language of possibility for Dasein alone. He introduces it while discussing Dasein’s
understanding self-disclosure, which is the foundational moment in the tripartite
account of discovering entities in their being. Such discovery requires not only a
three-dimensional structure of disclosedness (findingness, understanding, and
discourse) but also, orthogonally, a tripartite performance of self-disclosure,
world-disclosure, and the discovery of entities. ‘Possibility’ belongs not to the third
part of the story (discovering entities) but to the first (self-disclosure). In this
section, I work through this three-part story in order to lay out Haugeland’s
interpretation of Heidegger’s account while making the case on his behalf that
understanding entities in their being is projecting entities onto their possibilities.
Understanding entities in their being requires, first, that a case of Dasein
projects its own being onto possibilities. Most fundamentally, the possibility onto
which Dasein projects is its own ability to be as Dasein (SZ143).1 But Dasein also
projects itself onto some specific possible way(s) of living out its life as a sense-
maker. These can be understood as Kierkegaardian subjective categories or
Korsgaardian practical identities, such as being a friend, being a juggler, or being
a physicist. Strictly, however, the possibility is not the practical identity itself but
the ability to go about inhabiting that practical identity—an ability that consists
not in logical possibility but in concrete, real life competence at being a friend,
juggler, or physicist (Blattner: 1996). Possibilities are competencies at being a case
of Dasein and at being me, whoever I am.
It is in terms of such possibilities that I organize my life and make sense of
myself. Heidegger calls this ‘projecting’ oneself onto the possibility, and he glosses

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it as pressing forward or pressing ahead into possibilities (SZ145). To project

(L. pro-, forward, out, in front of; iacere, to throw), entwerfen (ent-, away from; wurf,
throw), is to throw oneself out onto the relevant possibility—to move oneself into
the ability to be (a friend, juggler, physicist). This is not a matter of planning or
preparing to be someone but rather of going about being a friend (juggler,
physicist) by leading one’s life as a friend does. In doing this, a case of Dasein
discloses or understands itself as that and what it is—and so, in its being.
Understood as the ability-to-be-me, possibility belongs to the structure of
Dasein’s being as an existentiale (SZ143). Thus, only Dasein, and no other entity,
has possibilities. How, then, can understanding entities in their being be projecting
them onto possibilities? Not only is it Dasein that is projected onto possibilities, but
what is projected is not an entity but Dasein’s being (SZ145,324). Still, Heidegger
will occasionally speak of projecting the being of entities (SZ324), and he does
speak of projecting the entities themselves—not onto possibilities but onto the
world or onto meaning (SZ151). ‘Meaning’ is defined as ‘that wherein the
intelligibility of something maintains itself’ and as ‘the “upon-which” of a projection
in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something’ (SZ151). Like possibility,
meaning is an existentiale; thus only Dasein has meaning (SZ151). But Heidegger
does use ‘meaning’ in (presumably) an expanded sense in relation to entities other
than Dasein. He gives examples of entities being intelligible as this or that: ‘In
dealing with what is environmentally ready-to-hand by interpreting it
circumspectively, we “see” it as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge’ (SZ149).
Table, door, carriage, and bridge are meanings in terms of which entities are
understood. Perhaps ‘possibility’ (in a similarly extended sense) refers to the same
thing and so can stand as that upon which entities are projected when they are
discovered in their being. If projecting entities onto meaning is projecting them
onto possibilities, then the textual problem is (more or less) solved.
So, let me continue telling the story of understanding entities in their being,
extending the language of possibility into the second and third moments of that
story. Recall that, in the first moment of the story, Dasein projects its own being
onto some possibility (self-disclosure). In the second moment, this projecting opens
a world. By virtue of projecting its being onto some possible way of being itself,
Dasein is able to encounter various sorts of entities. Entities can be usable for,
serviceable in, or even detrimental to (SZ144) Dasein’s ability to be a juggler, friend,
or physicist—or even its ability to be a self or a case of Dasein at all. Projecting itself
onto a possibility thus first illuminates what it is possible for other entities to be,
qua how they can be involved in Dasein’s living out its life as what it is.
The network of possible relationships between entities and Dasein’s abilities-
to-be is the world. Thus Dasein’s self-disclosure is also a world-disclosure. Earlier
in Being and Time, Heidegger had thought the world as a referential context of
significance, which consists in a totality of (possible) involvements of entities—
such as in order to, with which, towards which (§15)—as well as the for the sake of which
that ultimately organizes this contexture: the possibility onto which Dasein
projects its being. But we can extend the language of possibility and think the
world instead as a possibility space. As Heidegger himself says, ‘[t]he totality of

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involvements is […] the categorial whole of a possible interconnection of the ready-

to-hand’ (SZ144). While this possibility space is oriented around the particular and
concrete possibility or possibilities onto which Dasein projects its being (i.e. the
for-the-sake-of-which), it is itself populated not by specific possibilities but by kinds
of possibilities: sorts of things that entities can be. We saw Heidegger mention
serviceability, usability, and detrimentality (SZ144), and we can add further kinds
of possibility such as tangibility, disposability, verifiability, and intersubjective
accessibility.2
Understood as a possibility space, the world is a constellation of kinds of
possibilities, opened up by Dasein’s own self-understanding projecting onto some
possibility of its being and organized in terms of that possibility or ability-to-be.
Heidegger claims further that this understanding disclosure of the world ‘has its
own possibility—that of developing itself’ in what Heidegger calls ‘interpretation’
(SZ148). This is to say that disclosing the world as a possibility space permits one
to discover particular entities in terms of those various kinds of possibilities. To
discover entities as that and what they are is to take entities as this or that—as
usable, tangible, verifiable, and so on—in relation to my projects. Thus we
have all three moments of the story: As I press forward into the possibility of
being-(i.e. ability-to-be-)a-juggler (self-disclosure), there is a range of possible ways
in which things can make sense to me (world-disclosure), and when I engage with
things, I make sense of them in light of some or other of those possibilities
(discovery).
The possibilities in terms of which I make sense of an entity spell out the range
of things that it can (and cannot) be and do, which is not necessarily a matter of
what is physically or even logically possible for the entity but depends on what
sort of thing it is. A violin can be used to play Beethoven but it cannot—qua
violin—be used for batting practice. ‘Cannot be used’ here means ‘cannot
appropriately be used’, since the possibilities (and impossibilities) that belong to
an instrument are those that spell out public norms of appropriate use. The sorts
of (im)possibilities involved will differ for different sorts of entities: ‘[t]he character
of the possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the kind of being of the entity
which is understood’ (SZ151). We know that serviceability and usability are
appropriate sorts of possibilities for tools. Living entities are presumably
discovered in terms of their self-sustainability and perishability, and other cases
of Dasein are discovered in terms of their abilities-to-be who they are. Within each
way of being, we can make further distinctions: The sorts of (im)possibilities that
belong to musical instruments differ from those that belong to writing implements,
and those that belong to violins differ from those that belong to bassoons.
Possibility, then, is not the empty possibility of logical space but the (im)possibility
that limits and defines the scope of what an entity can do and be as the sort of
entity that it is.
Indeed, the (im)possibilities in terms of which an entity makes sense fill out
what it is to be the sort of entity that it is and so give the entity’s what-being. What
it is to be a violin or a bassoon consists in a particular range of (im)possibilities. It is
to be able to be and do what a violin (or bassoon) is and does, and not to be able to

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be and do what a violin (or bassoon) is not and does not (similarly for an entity’s
that-being, although this is harder to spell out). The possibilities in terms of which
we discover entities are or give the what-being and that-being of those entities.
We can now bring the argument together: If the possibilities in terms of which
we discover entities give the being of those entities, if being is ‘that on the basis
of which entities are already understood’ (SZ6), and if that on the basis of which
entities are understood or are intelligible is their meaning, then ‘possibility’ and
‘meaning’ must say the same thing. We can now follow Haugeland in taking
Dasein’s discovering entities as that and what they are, or its understanding entities in
their being, to be Dasein’s projecting entities onto their possibilities.
But what of table, door, carriage, and bridge—Heidegger’s examples of the
meanings onto which we project entities in making sense of them? These are
plausibly the what-being of entities, and they are plausibly shorthands for
possibilities: usable-as-a-table, -door, -carriage, and -bridge, where that means usable-
for-placing-things-on, usable-for-access-and-egress, usable-to-convey-objects-and-people,
and usable-for-crossing-a-river-or-gully. Similarly, scientific principles, definitions,
and laws are shorthands for the (im)possibilities that define the entities that are
the object of that science.3 Thus, we reach Haugeland’s interpretation of scientific
explanation as a special case of understanding the being of entities. He explains,
using the example of physics:
[S]pecifying what is possible and impossible for physical entities is
precisely what the laws of physics do. (Indeed, they specify the possible
relationships among the values of physical variables so precisely—that
is, strictly—that it is often easier to think of them as specifying what is
necessary; but that is just another way of saying the same thing). So,
understanding physical entities in terms of these laws is projecting them
onto their possibilities. (Haugeland 2013:196–197; 2000:53)
The laws of natural sciences like physics, chemistry, or geology specify what is
possible and impossible for entities to be and do qua physical, chemical, or
geological, respectively. Haugeland goes on to talk about projecting entities onto
their possibilities by using more familiar language from the philosophy of science:
Notice that, for sciences like physics, the essential connection between
understanding and possibility is a commonplace in the philosophy of
science even though it is expressed in a different vocabulary. The usual
focus is explanation, but explaining something (perhaps something already
known) is nothing other than a way of rendering it intelligible. And
standard models of explanation always involve subsumption under
lawlike generalizations—where ‘lawlikeness’ amounts to some sort of
modal force (necessity or possibility). (Haugeland 2013:197; 2000:53)
Thus, Haugeland finds that natural scientific explanation, which subsumes
particulars under lawlike generalizations in order to make them intelligible, is
‘the scientific version of what Heidegger means more generally when he allows
that understanding entities is projecting them onto their possibilities’ (Haugeland

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2013:176; 2007:101). This is because ‘the being of the physical—the essence and
actuality of physical entities—is spelled out by the laws of physics’ (Haugeland
2013:192; 2000:48). Thus, ‘standard accounts of scientific explanation are effectively
special cases of Heidegger’s more general formulation’ (Haugeland 2013:197;
2000:54).
Further, laws either are or give standards or norms for that and what entities
are. Extrapolating from this special case, world—as the entire possibility space—
will be a normative context. And projecting an entity onto its possibilities—
understanding it in its being—will be grasping it in light of the relevant norm or
holding it up to the relevant standard. Finally, that standard or norm is (or
introduces, or establishes) the being of that entity. Thus, Haugeland: ‘The notion
of standards for entities themselves introduces the being of those entities. [… …]
The standards for the entities in a domain effectively establish both the how and
the way of their being’ (Haugeland 2013:21; 1989:54). It follows that the being of
an entity is—or is introduced, established, or spelled out by—a norm or a
standard, or a set of these.
But why the coy language of ‘introducing’ and ‘establishing’? Why does
Haugeland not simply say that being is a norm? I suspect that he thought that
identifying being with norms would violate the ontological difference. That this
is indeed a risk will become clear in the next section, through Heidegger’s reading
of Plato. In subsequent sections, I will explain how both Plato and Haugeland got
themselves into this difficulty, as well as how to get out of it.

2. Norms and Forms

Haugeland’s interpretation brings Heidegger’s talk of the being of entities into

proximity to talk of norms qua constitutive standards. To assess the viability of this
sort of interpretation, consider another thinker who also thought being as a norm:
Plato. In The Essence of Truth, Heidegger approaches Plato’s thought through an
extended interpretation of the allegory of the cave. He identifies the realm of the
cave with the (das Man-inflected) discovery of entities and associates and the forms
or ideas outside the cave with the what-being and how-being of those entities:
‘In the idea we see what every entity is and how it is, in short the being of entities’
(ET39).4
Plato’s words for the forms, ‘idea’ and ‘eidos’, derive from both ‘idein’, to see, and
‘eidenai’, to know, which is in turn based on ‘eidon’, saw. For the Greeks, sight is the
dominant metaphor for and source of knowledge: To know is to have seen. Thus,
Heidegger’s Plato thinks the forms as what is sighted or seen in the ‘look’ that
discovers entities.5 The forms are ‘what everyone sees and grasps in comportment
to entities’ (ET38). This is to say that in discovering entities, we recollect the forms.
Through this recollection, Plato’s forms account for our ability to let entities
encounter us as what they are: We see in them a ‘look’ of some form that we have
seen before and which we recollect. Further, one also ‘consider[s] whether the
similarity [of the look] to that which one recollects [i.e., the form] is deficient in

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any respect or complete’ (Plato 1997a:74a). We judge the look of the entity against
the recollected form in order to determine whether and to what extent it counts as
this or that. Thus, the form functions as a paradigm or standard: a norm.
Conversely, Heidegger describes Plato’s forms as the ‘look’ that entities give off:
‘the look of something as something’, such that ‘[i]t is through these looks that
individual things present themselves as this and that, as being-present’ (ET38). Thus,
the forms account not only for our ability to encounter entities as what they are but
also for the very fact that entities are in the ways that they are. Entities are in the
ways that they are because they participate or share in certain forms and not others.
Thus, Socrates in the Phaedo claims, of a beautiful thing, that ‘nothing else makes it
beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may
describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned’ (Plato 1997a:100d).
So, the form is both what gives (via participation) the entity the look that it has
as this or that and that which is seen (or recollected) in the look that discovers the
entity as this or that. The form ‘thus gives what something presences as, i.e., what a
thing is, its being’ (ET38). Notice that Heidegger’s language here is just as coy as
Haugeland’s: The form gives the what-being. In the passage that I quoted at the
beginning of this section, he said that in the form, we see the what-being and
how-being of the entity. Why does Heidegger not simply identify the forms, as
normative standards, with being?
Sometimes, he does. In fact, Heidegger’s Plato thinks the forms both as the being
of entities and as a very special sort of entity. The forms are special ‘because they
make being comprehensible, “in whose light,” as we still say today, a particular
entity is an entity and is what it is’ (ET71). As such, the forms or ideas are the most
unhidden and ‘[t]he genuinely unhidden must also be what genuinely is’: what has
the most being (ET49). Thus, Plato ‘calls the ideas to ontōs on, the beingly entity
[das seiendlich Seiende]—the entity [das Seiendes] which is in the way that only entities
[Seiendes] can be [seiend]: being [das Sein]’ (ET49, translation modified). The claim is
that the forms are entities that are being. This obviously violates the ontological
difference, according to which being ‘is’ not an entity. If forms are the what-being
and how-being of entities, then they cannot be entities. If they are entities, then
they cannot be the what-being and how-being of entities.
Plato presented the forms as the ‘second best’ sort of explanation of why entities
are the ways that they are (Plato 1997a:99d). We can now see one reason to be
dissatisfied with this explanation. Heidegger diagnoses the problem in Introduction
to Metaphysics: Plato has overlooked the dynamic character of being. The pre-
Socratics were attuned to this character when they thought being as phusis, the
emerging, abiding sway (Heidegger 2000:14). Being is a sway (Walten) in the sense
that it holds sway. It rules or presides over (walten) entities. This in a relatively
obvious sense: Being is ‘that which determines entities as entities’ (SZ6). As that
which determines entities as entities, being is both abiding and emerging. It is
emerging in that it consists in presencing; it is the coming into appearing of entities
as that and what they are. It is abiding in that, once they have come into presence,
entities (to a greater or lesser extent) remain stably present as that and what they
are. According to Heidegger, Plato (and later, Aristotle) seized on this stability of

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entities in their look or what-being but overlooked the way that entities emerge
into presence, their coming-into-their-looks.6 Plato does give this a name
—‘participating’ or (from the human side) ‘recollecting’. But he says no more about
it. Instead, Plato focuses on the static look or form, which he then (Heidegger is
unclear on the precise reasoning here) takes to be an entity. Thus, Plato ends up
treating the form as both the being of entities and as a very special sort of entity.
Haugeland’s hesitation about identifying being with a norm or set of norms
plausibly stems from a worry about making the same mistake.7 Norms are entities,
after all. They are objects of ontic human sciences like anthropology and cultural
studies. Indeed, scientific laws are also in some sense objects of the sciences, and
so by Heidegger’s stipulation must be entities—as Heidegger plainly takes
Newton’s laws to be (SZ226). At the same time, however, norms and laws must
be very special sorts of entities if they are that in terms of which entities are
intelligible. And if being is ‘that on the basis of which entities are already
understood’ (SZ6), then does not this special status mean that these entities count
as the being of entities? We end up in the same position as Heidegger’s Plato:
Norms seem to be both entities and the being of entities. How did we get into this
mess and how do we get out of it?

3. World and Worlding

Before answering this question, let me show that Heidegger himself runs into the
same problem. To do this, I need to translate the Platonic picture into the Being
and Time language of the world.8 As we saw, the world is ultimately organized
by a for-the-sake-of-which: the possibility onto which Dasein projects its being
(most fundamentally: being Dasein). In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic and
‘On the Essence of Ground’, Heidegger identifies this for-the-sake-of-which with
the sun in the cave allegory, which represents the highest form: the form of the
good (Heidegger 1984:182; 1998:124). If the for-the-sake-of-which is the good or
the sun, then the realm of the forms will correspond to the world opened up and
rendered visible by Dasein’s projecting onto that for-the-sake-of-which, and the
shadows (and puppets) in the cave will correspond to the entities that can show
up intelligibly on the basis of world. The three realms in Plato’s allegory
correspond to self-disclosure, world disclosure, and the discovery of entities.
So, Plato’s forms correspond to Heidegger’s world. Just as Heidegger’s Plato
asked whether the forms are entities or being, so too we can ask whether the world
is an entity or is the being of entities. And just as Heidegger’s Plato answered
‘both’ of the forms, so too will Heidegger answer ‘both’ of the world, thereby
straddling the ontological difference.
In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger claims that the world has to
do with being: ‘“World” as a concept of the being of entities designates the
wholeness of entities in the totality of their possibilities’ (Heidegger 1984:180). In
Being and Time, however, Heidegger introduced the concept of world as an ontic
concept and so as designating an entity: ‘“World” can be understood in another

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ontical sense […] as that “wherein” a factical Dasein as such can be said to “live”’
(SZ65). Of course, world must be an entity quite unlike any other, since it is that
in terms of which all other entities make sense. Heidegger captures this by saying
that ‘[t]he world itself is not an entity within-the-world’ (SZ72). But if the world
is not an entity within the world, then what sort of special entity is it?
At one point, Heidegger appears to identify world and Dasein: ‘Dasein is its
world existingly’ (SZ364). This might mean that the world is an entity that is the
same as the entity that is Dasein (of course, even in Being and Time, it is unclear
whether ‘Dasein’ refers to an entity [SZ8,11,196,212], to a ‘character’ that entities
may have [SZ41], or to ‘man’s being’ [SZ25]). Alternatively, the world could be
some sort of epiphenomenal entity that arises out of Dasein’s being what it is.
The world—like sciences (SZ11)—‘has Dasein’s kind of being [Seinsart]’ (SZ364),
in such a way that ‘[i]n so far as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too’ (SZ365).
But Heidegger also insists that the ‘world is not an entity’ (Heidegger 1998:122)
and describes it as an aspect of Dasein’s being: ‘Ontologically, however, the world
belongs essentially to Dasein’s being as being-in-the-world’ (SZ187);
‘[o]ntologically, “world” is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein
essentially is not; it is rather a characteristic of Dasein itself’ (SZ64). The
qualification ‘ontologically’ might direct us beyond the world as an entity to its
being, worldhood, and so the point might be that worldhood, not world, belongs
to Dasein’s being. But recall that the for-the-sake-of-which, which organized the
world and belongs to it, is most fundamentally Dasein’s own being, onto which
it projects itself. This suggests that Dasein’s being is an aspect of the world. Or,
world might be an aspect of Dasein’s being: ‘a constituent of transcendence’
(Heidegger 1984:180; cf. 1998:109). Dasein’s being, after all, is being-in-the-world,
and ‘world shows itself to be that for the sake of which Dasein exists [….] Yet that
for the sake of which Dasein exists is itself’ (1998:121–122). World might thus
simply be Dasein’s being:
Anticipating, we can name the fourth [concept of world] the ontological
concept of world that indicates, not human society in an ontical way, but
indicates ontologically the metaphysical essence of Dasein as such with
respect to its basic metaphysical constitution, i.e., transcendence.
(Heidegger 1984:180)
This would make the world a remarkably strange phenomenon. It would be
both (an aspect of) Dasein’s being and that in terms of which all entities are
intelligible: ‘The world thus belongs precisely to human Dasein, even though it
embraces in its whole all entities, including Dasein’ (Heidegger 1998:112). And
world belongs to Dasein while remaining an entity: ‘world is indeed subjective,
i.e., belongs to Dasein, but precisely on this account does not fall, as an entity, into
the inner sphere of a “subjective” subject’ (Heidegger 1998:122).
Sometimes, however, Heidegger entirely surrenders the idea that world is a
special sort of entity and treats it as a purely ontological phenomenon. When he
insists that ‘[w]orld never is, but worlds’ (Heidegger 1998:126), he is signalling that
the world is not an entity. Like being, temporality, and the nothing, the world is not

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but has its own distinctive way of ‘happening’: worlding. Yet, sometimes,
Heidegger treats world as the result or consequence of such a happening: ‘world
is the manifestness [Offenbarkeit] of entities as such as a whole’ (Heidegger:
1995:287,304,333,353), which says that world is neither an entity nor a happening
of manifesting but instead the resulting manifestness—presence or being—of
entities. And at other times, this manifestness is not world but merely belongs to
it or is characteristic of it.9
Finally, just as his Plato did with the forms, Heidegger will occasionally treat
world as both an entity and the being of entities. Consider this passage: ‘The world
worlds [Welt weltet], and is more fully in being [ist seiender] than the tangible and
perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home’ (Heidegger
1993:170). Note how much this language resonates with Plato’s allegory of the
cave. The point is the same as that which we saw Heidegger’s Plato making about
the forms: The world is the most in being of all entities, and so is some special sort
of entity—such a special sort of entity, in fact, that it is not at all but rather worlds.
The world appears to be situated on both sides of the ontological difference.
We saw that Heidegger attributes Plato’s confusion to his neglect of the dynamic
character of being, which led him to ignore being as emerging and to focus on it as
the abiding ‘look’ of entities. This in turn allowed Plato to think that ‘look’ as itself
an entity. Can we criticize Heidegger for doing the same thing? One might worry
that this criticism would be anachronistic, since the idea that being is the dynamic
emerging and abiding of phusis takes root in Heidegger’s thought in the mid-
1930s, while his discussions of the world are largely in the middle-to-late 1920s
and early 1930s. One might think it a mistake to criticize Heidegger for not
thinking the dynamic character of being when he had not yet reached the position
that being is dynamic and was presumably thinking being in some other, equally
appropriate way. In the next section, I argue that Heidegger does not have some
other, equally appropriate way to think being. He ought to have thought being
as dynamic from the very beginning. That he did not quite manage this in Being
and Time and contemporaneous texts is a culpable mistake, and it plausibly
underlies his confusion about the status of the world. Getting clear on how
Heidegger should have been thinking being and world will in turn allow me to
pinpoint exactly how we should deploy the language of normativity to translate
Heidegger’s talk about being and to highlight a feature of Heidegger’s
metaphysics of normativity that is obscured by Haugeland’s interpretive approach
to it.

4. Being and Is-ing

Should Heidegger have thought being as dynamic from the outset? That depends
on precisely what we mean by ‘being’. Although this is not a linguistic question,
looking at how we come to talk about being in the languages of Ancient Greek,
German, and English will shed light on what being ‘is’.

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All language has its home in our everyday talk of entities. Entities are ta on or ta
onta in Greek, das Seiende in Heidegger’s German, and entities or beings in English.
These terms refer to anything that is—purple, plankton, pains in the neck—or to
that which is, the entity as such. In an ontological investigation, we seek that by
virtue of which all these things are, or that by virtue of which the entity as such
is. What is ‘happening’, as it were, such that the entity is there rather than not and
is what it is rather than some other sort of thing? Compare a dancer. What is
happening such that they are a dancer rather than not? Obviously, that they
happen to be dancing. So too, if something is, then it is so by virtue of its is-ing. This
is being: seiend in German and on in Greek, both present participles. Here (unlike in
the case of the dancer), we have crossed the ontological difference and are no
longer talking about any thing that is but instead the is-ing by virtue of any thing
is a thing. Whatever this ‘is-ing’ names will account for both that and what entities
are. The project of ontology is to grasp this is-ing, in particular by grasping that in
terms of which it makes sense (the meaning of being), and—especially for later
Heidegger—interrogating what gives or allows such is-ing.
If we want to talk at any length about be-ing or is-ing, then we will need to turn
this participle into a noun so that it can serve as the subject of our sentences. Just as
we do not want to talk about they are dancing (participle) all the time but instead
about dancing (noun) itself, so too we do not always want to speak of entities is-ing.
We need to form a substantive from one of the verbal forms. According to
Heidegger, the infinitival form empties out all the determination of the other verbal
forms and gives the pure, isolated act itself (Heidegger 2000:71). To talk about this
pure act, then, we should follow the German language in forming the substantive
from the infinitive: sein yields das Sein, which is the substantive that Heidegger
uses.
The grammar is less ontologically ideal in Greek and English. In Greek, the
substantive is formed not from the infinitive (einai) but from the participle (on)—
specifically, the feminine nominative singular form (ousa), which becomes ousia.
In English, the substantive is also formed from the participle (be-ing) rather than
the infinitive (to be), yielding the noun ‘being’. This noun is capitalized in some
English translations of Heidegger’s ‘das Sein’, and for reasons that will shortly
become apparent, I disapprove of this practice. However, I follow it here for the
sake of distinguishing with maximal clarity the noun ‘Being’ from the participle
‘be-ing’.
While the substantive makes it easier to talk and think about be-ing, several
dangers lurk. One is thinking that we have found a new ontological phenomenon
when we have merely made a grammatical move. Being (noun) is nothing other
than the be-ing (participle) of entities, just in a different grammatical wrapper. This
is what Heidegger means (or should mean) when he says that ‘being [Sein] is
always the being [Sein] of an entity’ (SZ9).10 The second danger is the Platonic
mistake: losing sight of the dynamic character of what we are trying to express
in the substantive, which was present in the verb forms. This is a particularly big
risk for us in English, since we can use the same word, ‘being’, to talk about (i) a
being or an entity, (ii) its be-ing or is-ing, and (iii) that Being. This primes us to

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forget about (ii) and so to forget that there is something ‘happening’ here. We come
to think Being as some deep metaphysical property that entities possess—or
perhaps even as just another entity.
If by asking after Being we are asking after the be-ing or is-ing of entities as
such, then Heidegger should have thought Being dynamically from the very
beginning. The grammar of his terms demands this, since he is talking about a
verbal phenomenon. And if the be-ing or is-ing of entities as such as a whole is
the worlding of the world, then Heidegger likewise should have thought this
worlding. I suggest that he comes to be as confused about world and worlding
as he is because he falls prey to the two dangers I have mentioned: He forgets
the dynamic character of worlding, and he comes to think that the substantive
‘world’ refers to something apart from worlding, which he in turn (sometimes)
takes to be an entity.
Similarly for many interpreters of Heidegger. To show this, let me return briefly
to Heidegger’s Plato. To say that entities have a look as that and what they are is to
say that they have a meaning or are intelligible. To take the look or the form as the
being of entities is thus equivalent to taking the being of entities to be their
meaning, sense, or the norms in terms of which they make sense. This language
of meaning, sense, intelligibility, and norms is used by many contemporary readers
of Heidegger (including, as we have seen, Haugeland) to talk about being. Being is
‘the significance of beings as a whole’ (Polt 2006:5) and so ‘the background
meaning that enables us to recognize anything as given’ (Polt 2006:28); ‘the sense
they [i.e. things] make’ (Sheehan 2015:111); the ‘intelligibility, meaning’ (Crowell
2015:260); or ‘the norm for beings’ (Crowell 2007:316). These interpreters all gloss
‘being’, a substantive formed from a participle—or, strictly, ‘Sein’, a substantive
formed from an infinitive—with a substantive that is not based on a verb form
(‘meaning’ may be an exception). In doing so, these interpreters fail to capture
the dynamic character of Being as be-ing.
Dreyfus explicitly rejects any interpretation that attempts to preserve or
highlight this verbal character of Being. He says that the ‘attempt to make
“being” look more like a form of the verb “to be” than like a noun [by translating
“Sein” as “being” rather than “Being”] has its own risks. One might get the
mistaken idea that being for Heidegger is not an entity but some sort of event
or process’ (Dreyfus 1991:11). Dreyfus is of course right that thinking be-ing as
an event rather than a thing is not the same as thinking it as other than entities.
Taking be-ing as something that happens does not yet get us across the
ontological difference since, after all, events are themselves entities. Some story
will have to be told about how the sort of happening that being ‘is’ is not and
cannot be an entity, and that story will appeal not to the dynamic character of
being but instead to the sort of explanatory role that being (qua dynamic) must
play within ontology. So, while the dynamic character of being is not the same
as its distinctness from entities, it does not follow that it is a mistake to think
being (at least analogically) as an event rather than a thing. ‘Being’ refers to the
is-ing of entities—what Dreyfus himself will later call their ‘whooshing up’
(Dreyfus and Kelly, 2011:201), and which Heidegger later thinks under the

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headings not only of phusis (the emerging, abiding sway) but also of event
(Ereignis).

5. Meaningfulness, Meaning, and Mean-ing

For his part, Dreyfus holds that ‘[b]eing is not a substance, a process, an event, or
anything that we normally come across; rather, it is a fundamental aspect of
entities, viz. their intelligibility’ (Dreyfus 1991:xi). Specifically, being is ‘the
intelligibility correlative with our everyday background practices’ (Dreyfus
1991:10). We have seen that to say that entities have a look as that and what they
are is to say that they have meaning or are intelligible—or, are lawful or
constitutionally enacted. If we now take being to be the fact that entities have this
look, have this meaning, or are intelligible, then we can talk of being as
meaningfulness, intelligibility.
Many other interpreters use this and grammatically similar language: ‘[b]eing is
the givenness of beings as such and as a whole’ (Polt 2006:28; cf. 34); ‘the word Sein
refers to the disclosedness of something to human understanding’ (Sheehan
2015:9)11; ‘[i]f things are the meaningful (das Bedeutsame), their being is their
meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit)’ (Sheehan 2015:118; cf. 21); ‘[b]eing is the
intelligibility, or more precisely, the condition of the intelligibility, of entities as
entities’ (Carman 2003:15); finally, Heidegger: ‘world is the manifestness
[Offenbarkeit] of entities as such and as a whole’ (Heidegger 1995:287,304,333,353).
Haugeland makes a similar move when he uses an analogy between the being
of entities and the constitutionality of statutes. Just as being determines what it is
to be an entity by laying out what is possible and impossible for it, so too a
constitution ‘defines what it is for the government to enact a statute and, at the
same time, imposes strict conditions on which candidate statutes it could
legitimately enact, allowing some as constitutional while ruling out others as
unconstitutional’ (Haugeland 2013:53). Strictly, however, it is not the constitution
that is analogous to being but instead ‘constitutionality and enactedness—which
is to say, the being constitutionally enacted—of those statutes’ (Haugeland
2013:54). In the case of the sciences, the point would be that the being of entities
is exemplified not by scientific laws but instead by lawfulness. Rouse draws out
this point explicitly: ‘it is not laws (a special kind of entity) […but] instead the
lawfulness of a scientific domain, as an ontological determination of a ‘region of
being’, [that…] is an ontological issue’ (Rouse 2015b:96). He draws a
corresponding conclusion for the (what-)being of items of equipment: ‘what an
item of equipment is is its specific locatedness within a larger equipmental
complex and the social practices that complex makes possible’ (Rouse 2015b:93).
However, this sort of interpretation not only commits the Platonic mistake but
takes it one step further. Rather than hitting upon the is-ing or giving of entities,
it focuses on the is-ness, being-ness (Seiendheit), presence, or givenness of entities.
We can see the difference when Haugeland equates constitutional enactedness
(or lawfulness) with ‘the being constitutionally enacted’ of statutes (Haugeland

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2013:54) or the being lawful of the objects of the sciences. ‘Being’ is italicized
presumably because it shows that we have reached the ontological. But we have
not reached is-ing or be-ing, which would be not constitutional enactedness but
constitutional enacting, not lawfulness but be-ing lawful, not presence but
presencing, not givenness but giving, and not manifestness but manifesting. To take
being as the givenness, lawfulness, intelligibility, manifestness, or meaningfulness
of entities is to take it to be their is-ness, which is the abstract property that results
from having is-ed, rather than their is-ing.
Even if meaningfulness strays too far from the mean-ing or is-ing of entities,
does Heidegger not say that the being of entities is their meaning? As far as I am
aware, he does not. Meaning is ‘the “upon-which” of a projection in terms of which
something becomes intelligible as something’ (SZ151, italicized in the original; cf.
SZ324). If being were meaning, then it would have to be the ‘upon-which’ of the
projection. But, as we have seen, it is (Dasein’s) being that is projected, and
Heidegger says that the upon-which of this projection is what makes care possible
(SZ324), which is temporality. So, being cannot be meaning. Indeed, being is not
meaning but has meaning: ‘this being [implied: Sein], as projected upon its
“upon-which,” is what “really” “has meaning” first of all’ (SZ324). Further,
collapsing being into meaning makes nonsense of Heidegger’s project to find the
meaning of being and his claim that meaning is an existentiale (SZ151), such that
only Dasein has meaning (SZ152).
Heidegger does acknowledge that ‘[i]f we say that entities “having meaning,”
this signifies that they have become accessible in their being’ (SZ324), although he
does not explain why the two are connected. But the primary evidence that being
is meaning, or something like it, is Heidegger’s formal indication of being as ‘that
on the basis of which [woraufhin] entities are already understood’ (SZ6). Is not this
basis the upon-which, and so meaning? Heidegger identifies each of the following
as a Woraufhin: being (SZ6), world (SZ86), significance (SZ143), meaning (SZ151,
324), and possibilities (SZ45).12 If possibilities, meaning, significance, and world
all plausibly refer to the same thing, why not being also?
That Heidegger identifies being as a Woraufhin is the biggest challenge for my
argument. It is natural to read this formal indication of being as pointing to some
norm, standard, meaning, or possibility onto which we project entities, and so on
the basis of which or in terms of which entities are understood. But the basis or
upon which at issue here could also be our very projecting: our making-sense-in-
terms-of, or understanding. That is, projecting entities onto a Woraufhin is plausibly
itself the Woraufhin of the already-understoodness of entities. The formal indication
would then tell us not that entities are intelligible to us on the basis of their being
qua meaning but that entities are intelligible to us because we project them onto
meaning. Put differently: in the understanding of being, being is not that which
is understood (objective genitive). Being or is-ing is the very act of understanding
(subjective genitive).
The not insignificant cost of this interpretation is that it means that Heidegger
here uses ‘woraufhin’ in a way that is quite different from other—and otherwise
seemingly consistent—uses of the term in SZ. But I am forced to this interpretation

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nonetheless, since it reflects precisely what ‘being’ ought to indicate formally: not
the meanings in terms of which entities make sense, not their meaningfulness,
but our projecting entities onto meaning. Projecting entities onto meaning is the
is-ing of entities.
It follows that the argument I reconstructed for Haugeland to show that
understanding entities in their being is projecting entities onto their possibilities fails.
This argument took as central premises that the formal indication of being as a
Woraufhin meant that ‘being’ refers to meaning and that the possibilities in terms
of which we discover entities are the being of those entities. If my argument from
the grammar of the word ‘being’ is correct, then the being of entities is not the
meaning or possibilities in terms of which entities make sense but instead entities’
very making sense in those terms. In the next section, I translate this insight into
the language of normativity and use Heidegger’s Plato to explore and further
refine it.

6. Normativity Without Norms

I have offered a grammatical argument to the effect that being is not the sense of
entities but their making sense, not their intelligibility but their be-ing intelligible.
Being is not the meaning onto which entities are projected or on the basis of which
they are understood but the very projecting of entities onto meaning. In the
language of normativity: being is not the norms in light of which entities show
up as that and what they are but rather their showing up in light of, or being held
up to, those norms. What does this involve? Talk of ‘light’ and ‘holding’ is of course
metaphorical and needs to be unpacked. In lieu of embarking upon such an
ambitious project, however, I return to Plato’s cave allegory, which is a possible
historical source for the metaphor.13 Heidegger’s interpretation of the allegory
brings out a crucial feature of our grasping things in light of norms that Haugeland’s
approach via scientific explanation obscures.
In the cave allegory, Plato posits the highest idea, the form of the good, as the
sun. The sun ‘not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also
with coming to be, growth, and nourishment’ (Plato 1997b:509b). As with the
sun, so too for the good: ‘not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being
known to the good, but their being is also due to it’ (Plato 1997b:509b). The sun,
or the form of the good, is that on the basis of which or in light of which the forms
—and so, through them, the puppets and the shadows in the cave—both are what
they are and are intelligible as such. In order to make things (intelligible as) that
and what they are, the sun’s light must be seen. According to Heidegger, it must
be seen ‘first’, before the forms or shadows can be sighted, but it can never been
seen as such (ET40). Light allows us to see forms and shadows because brightness
has the penetrative character of ‘going-through’: ‘Light is the transparent that
spreads out, opens, lets-through’ (ET41). Light lets us through to the forms, thus
enabling recollection, and it also lets the entity through to the forms, enabling
participation (ET41). This dual letting is ‘the opening and spreading out of the

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open’ (ET41)—Dasein’s disclosing, unconcealing, clearing, or understanding of

being. If we want to understand the be-ing of entities qua their being held up to
or grasped in light of the forms, then what we need to understand is this
illuminating. The part of the cave allegory that most properly corresponds to Being
is not the realm of the forms but instead the light that illuminates them.
For Heidegger’s Plato, however, things are not quite so simple. Heidegger goes
on to identify the forms or ideas—the what-being and how-being of entities, the
most beingful of entities—with the light: ‘Being, the idea, is what lets-through:
the light’ (ET43); ‘[w]hat emerged as the essence of light and brightness, namely
letting-through for seeing, is precisely the basic accomplishment of the idea’
(ET42). That the light of the sun is an aspect of the forms that it illuminates
complicates the story considerably. It forces us to return to an insight abandoned
earlier: even if the forms are entities, they do give the what-being of entities and
so must have some place in our account of being. Being may be the lighting that
lights up the forms, but if the forms are the light, then the forms are in some sense
being, too.
Heidegger’s interpretive move of identifying the forms with the illuminating of
the sun may not make much sense within the allegory, or within Plato’s
philosophy, but it resonates with our talk of seeing things in light of norms. It is also
the right move for Heidegger to make: it fixes Plato’s mistake and returns the
dynamic character of phusis to the interpretation of being. Being now has two
moments: the dynamic emerging of entities (i.e. the illuminating of the light) and
the abiding what-being of entities (i.e. the forms). The two happen together as
the emerging, abiding sway: an is-ing that determines entities as that and what
they are by bringing them into the stability of their what-being. So, while it is a
crucial insight, that being is the holding up to or illuminating rather than the norm
or form is a partial account. Being must also (subsequently) encompass the norm
or form.
But the norm or form is an aspect of being in a distinctive way. Consider how
the forms illuminate. Forms or ideas cannot illuminate entities as that and what
they are all by themselves. They must be seen or sighted, since sight is always
correlate to and necessary for any illumination: ‘[W]e cannot speak of the ideas
by themselves. It lies in the essence of the idea that it is always related to a seeing
[…;] to be seen belongs to the idea. (What is seen is always in relation to a seeing.
Idea is always seen)’ (Heidegger 2010:133). ‘“Being sighted” is not something else
in addition, an additional predicate, something which occasionally happens to the
ideas. Instead, it is what characterizes them as such’ (ET52). It follows that the
forms or ideas ‘are nothing “in themselves,” they are never objects. The ideas, as
what is sighted, are (if we can speak in this way at all) only in this perceiving
seeing’ (ET53; cf. 75).
So the cave allegory is misleading insofar as it suggests that the forms are like
objects that are independent of the good’s illuminating and the seeing of them.
First, the forms themselves perform the illuminating, and second, the forms—
including their illuminating—are nothing independent of their being sighted.
There ‘is’ nothing but a happening here: the sighting (perceiving and looking).

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So, while we were right to refine our claim that being is being seen in light of norms
to include the fact that those norms in some sense count as being too, we can do so
only if we acknowledge that these norms are nothing independent of a seeing in
light of that constitutes or forms them. ‘[T]he ideas are not values present at hand
somewhere, not a set of rules posted somewhere; instead, they are, and are
encountered, in the comportment of human beings as they catch sight of things’
(Heidegger 2010:133). This means that the entity’s what-being and how-being, in
light of which the entity is grasped, are constituted in that grasp and ‘are’ nothing
other than what is grasped by it. The same applies to the world. There ‘is’ no
contexture of constitutive standards, such as equipmental references, in terms of
which entities make sense as that and what they are. There ‘is’ no world; there
‘is’ only worlding: things showing up in the light of such standards. There are
no norms, only deployment of them in normative practice.14
If this is right, then subsumption under laws of the sort that we find in scientific
explanation—to which Haugeland appeals—is precisely the wrong model for
understanding the being of entities. It is perhaps the very worst model for this
phenomenon, insofar as it involves a pre-given law under which we proceed to
locate a particular case. Similarly for the game of chess, to which Haugeland also
frequently appealed to illuminate the understanding of being. Haugeland took
the rules of chess to be the laws, standards, or norms giving the what-being,
that-being, and how-being of chess phenomena (e.g. Haugeland 2013:60–61). Like
the laws of nature invoked in scientific explanation, the rules of chess precede any
instance of gameplay. This gives them a certain independence with respect to the
playing of the game: They are independently of any particular game (although
not from the playing of chess in general). But if my interpretation is correct,
Heidegger thinks that the being of entities is unlike the rules of chess and the laws
of nature in precisely this important respect.
Of course, it may be that a sufficiently nuanced understanding of scientific
explanation can show how laws are nothing apart from explanatory practice and
that a sophisticated account of games will show how the rules belong entirely to
the gameplay.15 That is, the problem may not be with the models so much as with
how we understand them. Nonetheless, on the standard interpretations of
scientific explanation and game playing, these are misleading because they
obscure the way in which laws, rules, or norms are nothing other than a dimension
of our activity of explaining, playing, or sense-making.

7. Conclusion: The Tasks of Ontology

I have argued that the being of entities is their is-ing, worlding, or emerging-
abiding, in which entities come into and abide in their looks. These looks or
what-beings are nothing other than that into which entities thus come and abide.
Accordingly, entities’ coming into their looks—that is, our holding entities up to,
or grasping them in light of, norms—is the proper object of fundamental ontology.

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Fundamental ontology is thus a metaphysics not of norms but of normative

practice.
Still, the metaphysics of norms will be an area of secondary study for
fundamental ontology, since this region of being has a distinctive and important
relationship to the problematic of fundamental ontology. Norms are entities that
in some sense ‘emerge’ from our normative practice of sense-making. Heidegger
calls this ‘world-forming’:

[I]n the essence of its being it [sc. Dasein] is world-forming, ‘forming’ in the
multiple sense that it lets world occur, and through the world gives itself
an original view (form) that is not explicitly grasped, yet functions
precisely as a paradigmatic form for all manifest entities, among which
each respective Dasein itself belongs. (Heidegger 1998:123)
The Dasein in man forms world: [1.] it brings it forth; [2.] it gives an image
or view of the world, it sets its forth; [3.] it constitutes the world, contains
and embraces it. (Heidegger 1995:285)
World is formed in Dasein’s understanding of being. It is not a pre-existing
framework within which Dasein operates. The world emerges out of the activity
of world-forming, and norms emerge out of normative practice.
The Platonic mistake takes these emergent entities to be the being of entities. It
confuses the norms to which we hold entities (i.e. their what-being) with the norms
that emerge from such holding (which are entities). This is why, on Heidegger’s
interpretation, Plato’s ontological investigation found itself pursuing an entity
and making claims that violate the ontological difference—just as we found
Heidegger doing when he held that world is both being (i.e. worlding) and an
entity (i.e. world).
To fully grasp and avoid the Platonic mistake, we must understand how norms
emerge out of normative practice. On the one hand, Heidegger describes Dasein’s
sense-making as creative: ‘The ideas are at all only in and through a beholding that
first creates what can be beheld, a special sort of creative seeing’ (Heidegger
2010:133). This makes the sighting of the forms a ‘perceiving [Er-blickens]’, which
‘means first forming what is looked at through the looking and in the looking, i.e.,
forming in advance, modelling’ (ET52). On the other hand, we do not simply create
norms but also respond to them; the world is not only formed but also disclosed.
Thus Heidegger describes the understanding of being as ‘a happening of the creative
catching sight of things’ (Heidegger 2010:135). This suggests that there is something
to be ‘caught’ in the creation and so something to which it is responsive. In what
sense is the entity’s look, what-being, or the norm in terms of which it is
intelligible, something ‘caught sight of’ if it first arises only in the looking? Further,
the world is in fact already there for us: we are thrown into it (SZ228,348,413), and
it is articulated not by us but by das Man (SZ129). In what sense does world
precede our own projecting? Do norms emerge out of every instance of normative
engaging or out of our normative practice collectively? Are there in fact discrete
instances of normative engaging or projecting entities onto their being? How are

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they individuated? Are they events in time? And how do they together constitute
our normative practice as such?
These are important questions for a regional ontology of norms. But the proper
question of fundamental ontology is what makes normative practice possible,
where for Heidegger this means: In terms of what does our holding things up to
norms make sense? Asking this is asking the question of the meaning of being.
As Heidegger frequently reminds us, before we can answer the question of the
meaning of being, we shall have to reawaken our sense for the questionability of
being: What do we mean when we speak of the is-ing of entities, the worlding of
the world, projecting entities onto possibilities, recollecting, participating, or seeing
things in light of norms? That our normative talk is saturated in metaphor, and that
Plato himself did not pursue recollecting and participating, suggests that we do
not even have a feel for how to start confronting this question. But at least we
now know what we are asking about when we ask about being: the metaphysics
of normative practice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, or portions of it, I thank audiences
at The Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy (in 2015, at Northern Arizona
University), Wake Forest Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Maryland
Department of Philosophy, and the International Society for Phenomenological Studies
annual meeting (in 2016). Special thanks to Joe Rouse and Patrick Hughes for their especially
helpful feedback (to which I probably did not do justice). As ever, I remain indebted to the
late John Haugeland, who will always be my teacher.

Katherine Withy
Georgetown University
3700 O St. NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA
kate.withy@georgetown.edu
ENDNOTES

1
All references to Heidegger: 1962 will be given in the body of the text in the form
(SZxx). Page references are to the marginal pagination in the English translation, which
reflects the pagination of the eighth German edition. I have altered this and every other
translation of Heidegger’s work from which I quote to read ‘being’ for ‘Being’ (das Sein)
and ‘entities’ for ‘beings’ (das Seiendes).
2
While Heidegger’s own examples might suggest that the possibility space is
populated only by possibilities of practical significance, such as usability, it is implausible to
exclude other sorts of possibilities, such as possibilities of perceptual access like tangibility.
Matthew Ratcliffe (2015) has begun to explore the makeup of a fully fleshed out possibility
space, arguing that possibilities can vary with regard to perceptual modality, content, mode
of anticipation, relationship to agency, significance, and interpersonal accessibility. He claims
that ‘[t]hese variables combine to yield many different kinds of possibility. For instance,
something could appear “enticing but difficult to achieve,” “practically significant and yet
impossible to achieve,” or “threatening, imminent, and inchoate”’ (Ratcliffe 2015:52–53).

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482 Katherine Withy
3
As Joseph Rouse points out, such laws are not only shorthands but also partial:
‘Explicitly articulated laws are partial expressions of those possibilities and impossibilities
[in terms of which entities make sense], and genuine domains are those ‘totalities’ of entities
that are rendered intelligible by such interlocking possibilities. Even in those scientific fields
in which the explicit articulation of laws has been of central concern, there is arguably no
example of an extensionally complete set of laws for a domain. Any understanding of
entities in their possibilities thus commits us to more than we can express explicitly as laws
since the laws would acquire necessity only as part of a complete and mutually
interdependent set’ (in Haugeland 2013:xv).
4
All references to Heidegger: 2002 will be given in the body of the text in the form
(ETxx). When I quote from this text or any other text that includes Greek characters, I
transliterate the Greek.
5
Heidegger also connects this talk of the ‘look’ to the Greeks’ production-based
metaphysics: ‘The potter forms a vase out of clay. All forming of shaped products is effected
by using an image, in the sense of a model, as guide and standard. The thing is produced by
looking to the anticipated look of what is to be produced by shaping, forming. It is this
anticipated look of the thing, sighted beforehand, that the Greeks mean ontologically by
eidos, idea. The shaped product, which is shaped in conformity with the model, is as such
the exact likeness of the model’ (Heidegger 1982:106).
6
Compare Joseph Rouse’s rejection of a view of scientific understanding that
‘appeal[s] to the determinate structure of a language in place of the dynamic configuration
of a space of reasons’, on the grounds (among others) that ‘appeals to language as the
horizon within which beliefs acquire content inappropriately reify a structure abstracted
from the dynamics of ongoing discursive interaction’ (Rouse 2015a:18).
7
See R. Matthew Shockey’s contribution to this issue for another potential mistake in
this identification.
8
While Heidegger does claim that Plato’s ‘doctrine of ideas could not attain the
concept of world’, the reason is that ‘the ideas themselves and the relationship to them
consisted solely in an intensification of one particular grasp of entities—and this grasp is
intuition’ (Heidegger 1984:182). So, Plato’s focus on looks and looking is too narrow (except,
perhaps, as a metaphor), but this means only that the concept of the forms is an inadequate
way of grasping the world, not that it is grasping something else.
9
‘The manifestness of entities as such, of entities as entities, belongs to world’
(Heidegger 1995:274); ‘manifestness is characteristic of world’ (Heidegger 1995:280).
10
Heidegger will sometimes ‘attempt to think being without regard to its being
grounded in terms of entities’, (Heidegger 1972:2), but this does not change the fact that it
is so grounded. Sheehan plausibly interprets the attempt to think being apart from entities
as the attempt to discover what makes Being or be-ing possible (Sheehan 2015:18).
11
Note that Sheehan describes this gloss as ‘correct, as far as it goes’ (Sheehan
2015:9).
12
On the topic of the Woraufhin, I am indebted to Gin, forthcoming.
13
I am not aware of the metaphor in Kant, who introduces the idea in the Groundwork
by speaking of the rational agent as able to act not merely in accordance with laws but
‘according to his conception of laws, i.e., according to principles’ (Kant 1993:23). The OED
finds the earliest instance of this sort of metaphorical use of ‘light’ in English in 1690 (‘light,
n.1’. OED Online. March 2016. Oxford University Press. (Accessed 8 May 2016)).
14
Compare Heidegger’s claim that ‘[t]emporality is not, prior to [the standings-out of
the ecstases], an entity which first emerges from itself; its essence is a process of
temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases’ (SZ329).

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15
Rouse develops such an account of scientific practice in Rouse 2015a; see especially
Chapter 8. As for games, Heidegger himself both (i) takes the rules of a game to emerge from
the play and (ii) describes Dasein’s world disclosing as a type of play (Heidegger 1996:312)
(thanks to Andrew Blitzer for pointing me to this discussion).

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© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd