ABSTRACT
One of the most persistent themes running throughout Heidegger’s philosophy, both early and late, is his idea that all thought, indeed all intentionality, rests on an ordinarily tacit understanding of what it means to be, and that metaphysical thought specifically consists in interpreting being as a kind of ‘presence’ or ‘presentness’ (Anwesen, Anwesenheit, Praesenz).1 This much is well known. What is less widely understood, or even acknowledged, is that Heidegger’s frequent references to presence as the meaning of being comprise two very different claims. At times Heidegger is describing what he takes to be the ontological conditions of our understanding of the temporal present as one of the three ‘ecstases’ that constitute time, which is in turn the most general horizon or condition for our understanding of being. At other times he is articulating and interpreting what he takes to be the central assumption underlying the metaphysical tradition itself, which he thinks has focused so narrowly on the temporal present as to obscure the very question of being, effectively removing it from the full ecstatic horizons of temporality at large.
