system
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human
What did Heidegger mean when he said that "Being escapes us"?

I'm reading a secondary text about Heidegger (goddamn Being and Time went over my head, planning to revisit another translation one day...) and he describes two things that went over my head: how "being escapes us", because once we focus our attention on it the thing has already changed, because we have put on it a frame of perception.

If I'm understanding correctly, Heidegger saw this as a critical problem in the analysis of Being, and his solution was "phenomenological hermeneutics", which seems eerily similar to Husserl's "epoché". 

Now, if "phenomenology" is "letting things show themselves in themselves" and we can arrive that by nullifying any preconceived ideas about what we're observing, and hermeneutics is the frame by which we interpret things, aren't these two concepts in direct contradiction? And how is this frame any better than all the other frames that came before it, the ones that have "general ontology" instead of "fundamental ontology"?
gpt
I see a few problems with your line of thinking:

For Heidegger, we can’t arrive at Being by any mode of nullifying or erasing or eradicating at all. This attempt is always already a return to the metaphysical tradition, the positing of Being as a being, in this case, equating being with the leftovers of this peculiar eradication.

Indeed, Heidegger shows time and time again in his essays that the only way to get at being is *through* our ‘average, everyday’ understanding of being, which offers a starting point of our thinking. Heidegger does not start at nothing, but rather his thinking proceeds *through* what we already believe about being in an average and vague way. If you read the opening pages of “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology” you will see how he does this in a much clearer way than in Being and Time. The phenomenological hermeneutic does not start out with nihilation as its starting point, but rather averageness.

Secondly, you should really read just the introduction of Being and Time again, in which Heidegger says that what he’a moving toward is to be in a positing of asking the *question* of Being, which has been lost in the tradition. He is not trying to “solve” Being—to say, “ah finally, we know that Being is _______” because to do that would be to revive the tradition of metaphysics. What Heidegger wants instead is to better be able to ask the proper *question* concerning being, and as such there is no nihilative move at the beginning of his phenomenology.