thought

Whenever Heidegger comes to express his own thinking, his discourses are full of topological and "ecstatic-horizontal"[xxii] terms and metaphors, such as "free space", "openness", "region", "horizon", "Situation", "house", "clearing", "disclosing", "dwelling", "building", "pervaded", "standing-out", "Being-ahead-of-itself", "gathering", "the aroundness of the environment", "ready-to-hand", etc.  He almost never positively uses such terms as "subject (versus object)", "mind", "sense data", "logic", "idea", "epistemology", "ethics", and even "philosophy", whose meanings have been already packed by metaphysics.  He always tries to uncover the original meaning of a term by identifying its topological etymology, such as "standing-out" (ecstasis) for "temporality", "letting-something-be-seen" for "logos", "uncoveredness" for "truth", "circumspection" for "seeing", "ready-to-hand" for the mode of "Being-in-the-world", "projected Being of Dasein" for "understanding", etc.  Why is it so?  The basic reason is, for Heidegger, Being itself, as non-conceptual as it is, can be understood to be nothing but an ontological horizon-region that appropriates between and beyond all conceptual dichotomies.  Being itself cannot be a perceptible being, nor the form of perception;  neither is it a category or substance.  It must rather be "what" is between them and lets them belong together, so as to bring them into their own.