Heidegger denies that being is a being; Heidegger denies that ways of being are beings. Yet Heidegger sincerely and emphatically utters a lot of sentences about Being and its modes. Heidegger also says puzzling things like Being “is” only if there are Daseins, although beings could exist without any Dasein existing. (He uses something like scare-quotes when he says this too.) These statements typically appear in a larger context in which he is talking about the connections between being and truth. The analogies between how beings of reason were thought of and how Heidegger here speaks of being and its modes are striking.

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