Reaffirming “The Truth of Being”

This essay, drawn from the book Heidegger's Way of Being, brings back into view the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought: Being as the temporal emerging, showing, shining-forth, manifestation of all beings and things. Highlighted is the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation—"the truth of Being"—and how Heidegger also named and elucidated this Ur-phenomenon as aletheia, Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. The essay is part of a larger project that aims to recall and restate the originality and distinctiveness of Heidegger's thought and to offer a rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and especially those that propose a reduction of Being to "sense" or "meaning" and maintain that the core matter is human "meaning-making."