The central premises that determine Heidegger’s conception of language follow from the crucial change that Heidegger introduces in Being and Time in his confrontation with transcendental philosophy. In order to bring about a hermeneutic transformation of philosophy, Heidegger substitutes the ontological difference for the empirical/transcendental distinction. The ontological difference (the distinction between being and beings) is established by Heidegger in such a way that it follows that there can be no access to entities without a prior understanding of their being. It is for this reason that entities appear to us as always already understood in one way or another, or, as Heidegger puts it, this is why ‘we always already move about in an understanding of being’. This is the fact from which Being and Time starts, and which lies at the basis of Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole.

However, remaining under the influence of the empirical/transcendental distinction, Heidegger invests this fact with a normative significance: given that our understanding of the being of entities is constitutive for what these entities are for us, it determines how we understand, perceive, and experience the world. It provides the ontological framework for everything that ‘can appear within the world’. Such an understanding of being or world-disclosure has, therefore, a quasi-transcendental status. On the one hand, it is valid a priori, although only in the sense that it cannot be called into question from within, i.e. by those who share it. There is no way to step outside of our understanding of being in order to check its validity, to test whether our understanding of being coincides with the being of the things themselves. For there is no being without an understanding of being. But on the other hand, it is not the (eternal) endowment of a transcendental ego (which would guarantee the objectivity of experience, and thereby the possibility of valid knowledge for all human beings), but it is merely contingent, changes historically and cannot be put under control at will. It is a fate into which human beings are thrown. The crucial challenge to transcendental philosophy in Being and Time, therefore, is to be found in Heidegger’s thesis that ‘disclosedness is essentially factical’.

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