In Parmenides, Heidegger muses on the ancient Greek experience of daimonion as the pointing to by the uncanny to that region of being that escapes the ordinary – in the language of fundamental ontology of Being and time, it is the authenticity of being that escapes the everyday, the “they” as the one and the everyone, the idle gossip: the fallenness of inattentive being in its forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit). 

In my PhD thesis, The fourfold of the “godding”, I argue that hermeneutics, if we are to respect the authenticity of the original Greek understanding of being, is none other than daimonion itself. As daimonion, hermeneutics takes us beyond the signification of the ordinary to a whole new level of understanding, hence of saying and experiencing, that illuminates our mind: indeed Heidegger, in Parmenides, mentions, but with a curious restraint, as if mindful of a dangerous slippage in philosophical language, that the Greeks experienced daimonion as shining. Through shining, being is illuminated; only then is there a true understanding of being, because ontological difference between being and beings has already taught us that being cannot be grasped merely as this or that being. Socrates famously confessed that he could not do philosophy without daimonion, despite the fact that it is not founded upon reason, when philosophy itself is built upon reasoning. In other words, philosophy is primordial to something other than itself. 

By bringing hermeneutics into the rational (academic) program of qualitative studies in nursing, which in essence surpasses the rationalism of metaphysics by taking as its subject matter the lived experience of Dasein, what is being pointed to?