Volume 1, Issue Part 2, 2007
Selected Essays from Asia Part 2
Kazunori Watanabe
Pages 707-719
Der junge Heidegger und das Problem der Kategorie
In the decline of Heidegger’s life, he said that his early interest in the problem of category already suggested “the question of being (Seinsfrage)”. This paper deals with Heidegger’s interpretation about the category. I want to demonstrate two sources which permit him to accept that category in his own particular interpretation: that is to say Aristotle and Dilthey. Heidegger learned Dilthey’s “category of life (Lebenskategorie)” from which he read that category is life itself, has as its nature an articulation of its own self and a tendency toward the world. In addition, he reads about the “logos”-character of the category in Aristotle: namely, category means to speak about the world. The world is spoken, but it is our respective lives that express the world as such. In other words, the world at the same time speaks and is spoken by its self. This structure is analogical to the structure of “the question of being” because Being (Being of Dasein) is questioned and the same Being questions itself. Herein we can find a starting point of Heidegger’s thought.