1 Heidegger: πάθος as the thing itself Thomas Sheehan Stanford University What we do through all our waking hours (perhaps even during REM sleep) is make sense of stuff, whether of people, things, ideas, or experiences—whatever we happen to encounter. We make sense of things even when we get it wrong, or go insane, or babble incoherently on our death beds. Antoine Roquentin in Nausea was making sense of things when he watched the seat on the Bouville tram turn into an animal’s bloated and bleeding belly. Jean-Paul Sartre, his creator, was making sense of things when he saw pairs of crabs following him around Paris in the 1930s. (Sartre sought out therapy from a young Jacques Lacan, and the crabs went away when he finally got bored of them.) 1 Heidegger argues we cannot not make sense of things because sense-making—the “ἶisἵlὁsing” of things, whether correctly or not—is a fundamental element of our nature. We are the living beings who have ȜȩγȠȢ, and therefore “the very being of ex-sistence is to make sense of things,” not just occasionally or as an add-on, but necessarily. 2 The core of ώeiἶegger’s work is about how and why we cannot not make sense of things. Put otherwise, his fundamental question about der Sinn vom Sein is about how and why we must have access not just to things but above all to the meanings of things, indeed, to meaningfulness or intelligibility at all. But wait. Wasn’t ώeiἶegger’s basic question about “being” (Sein) rather than meaning or intelligibility (Bedeutsamkeit or Sinn)? No, once we take the phenomenological turn with Heidegger—the turn he took between 1915 and 1919—we see that all forms of Sein are in fact Sinngebilde, formations of sense. During a course from 1919-20 he called on his students to see that their experience has whatever it experiences in the character of meaningfulness. Even the most trivial thing is meaningful (even though it remains trivial nonetheless). Even what is most lacking in value is meaningful. 3 1 “When Sartre Talked to Crabs (It Was Mescaline),” New York Times, 14 November 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/15grist.html, based on John Gerassi, ed. and trans., Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 62-63. 2 ἕχ ἀ1μ 1η1έζμ “Weil Dasein in seinem Sein selbst beἶeutenἶ ist…έ” ἡn “having ȜȩγȠȢ”: cf. Aristotle, De anima III 9, 432a31, Nicomachean Ethics I 13, 1102b15, 1103a2; V 1, 1139a4; 1138b9; VI 1, 1139b22-23; etc. 3 GA 58: 104.19–24 (my emὂhasis)μ “…sehen den Sinn, in dem das faktische Erfahren sein Erfahrenes erneut und immer im Charakter der Bedeutsamkeit hat. Auch das Trivialste ist bedeutsam, nur eben trivial; auch das Wertloseste ist bedeutsam.” χlsὁ ἕχ θ1μ λ1έ1ζμ “erfahren in ἐeἶeutsamkeitέ”