The major obstacle in interpreting Heidegger today is the continued use of the ontological language of “being” and “beings.” If Heidegger's work is to have the philosophical impact it deserves, scholars must realize that throughout his texts the term “being” was only a provisional and ultimately misleading way of saying “meaning,” just as “time” was a first and inadequate attempt to name “the disclosure of meaning to understanding.”

This essay argues that throughout his writings Heidegger presupposed a phenomenological reduction of being to meaning. It then tests that thesis by re-interpreting two crucial terms in Heidegger's philosophy: Ereignis in the later period and facticity in the earlier, both of which come down to the same thing: the a priori appropriation of man to the meaning-process.

Some conventions in this essay: I use “man” and “human being” as gender-neutral and as the most formal of indications of what Heidegger means by Dasein. Both English terms translate the Greek ἄνθρωπος, understood by Heidegger as Dasein, the only place where meaning shows up. Secondly, after a few introductory paragraphs, I will translate Sein as meaning or meaning-giving; and in this essay I will not distinguish between sense and meaning. Thirdly, I will translate Erschließung, Erschlossenheit, Unverborgenheit, and Wahrheit as “disclosure [of meaning] to understanding,” lest the correlation of disclosure and understanding be overlooked.