by Martin Heidegger
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Last annotated on February 19, 2015
TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
Heidegger is constantly using words in ways which are by no means ordinary, and a great part of his merit lies in the freshness and penetration which his very innovations reflect. He tends to discard much of the traditional philosophical terminology, substituting an elaborate vocabulary of his own. Read more at location 145
In general we have tried to stick to the text as closely as we can without sacrificing intelligibility; but we have made numerous concessions to the reader at the expense of making Heidegger less Heideggerian. Read more at location 179
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH GERMAN EDITION
BEING AND TIME
‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being”. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.’(i) Read more at location 234
Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’?(1) Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning(2) of Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question. Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely. Our provisional aim is the Interpretation(3) of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.(4) Read more at location 236
1. ‘seiend’. Heidegger translates Plato’s present participle ὂν by this present participle of the verb ‘sein’ (‘to be’). We accordingly translate ‘seiend’ here and in a number of later passages by the present participle ‘being’; Read more at location 247
2. ‘Sinn.’ In view of the importance of the distinction between ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’ in German writers as diverse as Dilthey, Husserl, Frege and Schlick, we shall translate ‘Sinn’ by ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’, depending on the context, and keep ‘signification’ and ‘signify’ for ‘Bedeutung’ and ‘bedeuten’. Read more at location 254
well be translated as ‘interpretation’: ‘Auslegung’ and ‘Interpretation’. Though in many cases these may be regarded as synonyms, their connotations are not quite the same. ‘Auslegung’ seems to be used in a broad sense to cover any activity in which we interpret something ‘as’ something, whereas ‘Interpretation’ seems to apply to interpretations which are more theoretical or systematic, as in the exegesis of a text. Read more at location 259
4. ‘…als des möglichen Horizontes eines jeden Seinsverständnisses überhaupt…’ Throughout this work the word ‘horizon’ is used with a connotation somewhat different from that to which the English-speaking reader is likely to be accustomed. We tend to think of a horizon as something which we may widen or extend or go beyond; Heidegger, however, seems to think of it rather as something which we can neither widen nor go beyond, but which provides the limits for certain intellectual activities performed ‘within’ it. Read more at location 264
INTRODUCTION: EXPOSITION OF THE QUESTION OF THE MEANING OF BEING
I: THE NECESSITY, STRUCTURE, AND PRIORITY OF THE QUESTION OF BEING
1. The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being
It is said that ‘Being’ is the most universal and the emptiest of concepts. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and hence indefinable concept require any definition, for everyone uses it constantly and already understands what he means by it. In this way, that which the ancient philosophers found continually disturbing as something obscure and hidden has taken on a clarity and self-evidence such that if anyone continues to ask about it he is charged with an error of method. Read more at location 292
We shall therefore carry the discussion of these presuppositions only to the point at which the necessity for restating the question about the meaning of Being becomes plain. There are three such presuppositions. Read more at location 307
**** 1. First, it has been maintained that ‘Being’ is the ‘most universal’ concept:
...when Hegel at last defines ‘Being’ as the ‘indeterminate immediate’ and makes this definition basic for all the further categorial explications of his ‘logic’, he keeps looking in the same direction as ancient ontology, except that he no longer pays heed to Aristotle’s problem of the unity of Being as over against the multiplicity of ‘categories’ applicable to things. So if it is said that ‘Being’ is the most universal concept, this cannot mean that it is the one which is clearest or that it needs no further discussion. It is rather the darkest of all. Read more at location 321
2. It has been maintained secondly that the concept of ‘Being’ is indefinable. This is deduced from its supreme universality,(iv)
...‘Being’ cannot indeed be conceived as an entity;
...Thus we cannot apply to Being the concept of ‘definition’ as presented in traditional logic, which itself has its foundations in ancient ontology and which, within certain limits, provides a justifiable way of characterizing “entities”. The indefinability of Being does not eliminate the question of its meaning; it demands that we look that question in the face. Read more at location 346
3. Thirdly, it is held that ‘Being’ is of all concepts the one that is self-evident. Whenever one cognizes anything or makes an assertion, whenever one comports oneself towards entities, even towards oneself,(1) some use is made of ‘Being’; and this expression is held to be intelligible ‘without further ado’, just as everyone understands ‘The sky is blue’, ‘I am merry’, and the like.
...Within the range of basic philosophical concepts—especially when we come to the concept of ‘Being’—it is a dubious procedure to invoke self-evidence, Read more at location 357
2. The Formal Structure of the Question of Being
The question of the meaning of Being must be formulated. If it is a fundamental question, or indeed the fundamental question, it must be made transparent, and in an appropriate way.(1) Read more at location 380
Every inquiry is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Inquiry is a cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact t h a t i t i s and with regard to its Being a s i t i s.(2) Read more at location 384
we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us towards its conception. We do not know what ‘Being’ means. But even if we ask, ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact. Read more at location 412
Being, as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered. Accordingly, what is to be found out by the asking—the meaning of Being—also demands that it be conceived in a way of its own, essentially contrasting with the concepts in which entities acquire their determinate signification. Read more at location 432
**** (Note: the essence of being, dasein, Self. Very similar to Max Planck quote on consciousness) Everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything towards which we comport ourselves in any way, is being; what we are is being, and so is how we are. Being lies in the fact that something is, and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in validity; in Dasein; in the ‘there is’.(1) Read more at location 453
Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about—namely, Being. Read more at location 464
Of course ‘Being’ has been presupposed in all ontology up till now, but not as a concept at one’s disposal—not as the sort of thing we are seeking. This ‘presupposing’ of Being has rather the character of taking a look at it beforehand, so that in the light of it the entities presented to us get provisionally Articulated in their Being. Read more at location 483
1. The word ‘Dasein’ plays so important a role in this work and is already so familiar to the English-speaking reader who has read about Heidegger, that it seems simpler to leave it untranslated except in the relatively rare passages in which Heidegger himself breaks it up with a hypthen (‘Da-sein’) to show its etymological construction: literally ‘Being-there’. Though in traditional German philosophy it may be used quite generally to stand for almost any kind of Being or ‘existence’ which we can say that something has (the ‘existence’ of God, for example), in everyday usage it tends to be used more narrowly to stand for the kind of Being that belongs to persons. Heidegger follows the everyday usage in this respect, but goes somewhat further in that he often uses it to stand for any person who has such Being, and who is thus an ‘entity’ himself. Read more at location 487
In the question of the meaning of Being there is no ‘circular reasoning’ but rather a remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ which what we are asking about (Being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of an entity. Here what is asked about has an essential pertinence to the inquiry itself, and this belongs to the ownmost meaning [eigensten Sinn] of the question of Being. This only means, however, that there is a way—perhaps even a very special one—in which entities with the character of Dasein are related to the question of Being. But have we not thus demonstrated that a certain kind of entity has a priority with regard to its Being? And have we not thus presented that entity which shall serve as the primary example to be interrogated in the question of Being? So far our discussion has not demonstrated Dasein’s priority, nor has it shown decisively whether Dasein may possibly or even necessarily serve as the primary entity to be interrogated. But indeed something like a priority of Dasein has announced itself. Read more at location 506
3. The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being
Being is always the Being of an entity. The totality of entities can, in accordance with its various domains, become a field for laying bare and delimiting certain definite areas of subject-matter. These areas, on their part (for instance, history, Nature, space, life, Dasein, language, and the like), can serve as objects which corresponding scientific investigations may take as their respective themes. Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and naïvely, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of Being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined. The ‘basic concepts’ which thus arise remain our proximal clues for disclosing this area concretely for the first time. And although research may always lean towards this positive approach, its real progress comes not so much from collecting results and storing them away in ‘manuals’ as from inquiring into the ways in which each particular area is basically constituted [Grundverfassungen]—an inquiry to which we have been driven mostly by reacting against just such an increase in information. The real ‘movement’ of the sciences takes place when their basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision which is transparent to itself. The level which a science has reached is determined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. Read more at location 539
Mathematics, which is seemingly the most rigorous and most firmly constructed of the sciences, has reached a crisis in its ‘foundations’. In the controversy between the formalists and the intuitionists, the issue is one of obtaining and securing the primary way of access to what are supposedly the objects of this science. The relativity theory of physics arises from the tendency to exhibit the interconnectedness of Nature as it is ‘in itself’. As a theory of the conditions under which we have access to Nature itself, it seeks to preserve the changelessness of the laws of motion by ascertaining all relativities, and thus comes up against the question of the structure of its own given area of study—the problem of matter. In biology there is an awakening tendency to inquire beyond the definitions which mechanism and vitalism have given for “life” and “organism”, and to define anew the kind of Being which belongs to the living as such. In those humane sciences which are historiological in character,(1) the urge towards historical actuality itself has been strengthened in the course of time by tradition and by the way tradition has been presented and handed down: the history of literature is to become the history of problems. Theology is seeking a more primordial interpretation of man’s Being towards God, prescribed by the meaning of faith itself and remaining within it. It is slowly beginning to understand once more Luther’s insight that the ‘foundation’ on which its system of dogma rests has not arisen from an inquiry in which faith is primary, and that conceptually this ‘foundation’ not only is inadequate for the problematic of theology, but conceals and distorts it. Read more at location 554
the positive outcome of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason lies in what it has contributed towards the working out of what belongs to any Nature whatsoever, not in a ‘theory’ of knowledge. His transcendental logic is an a priori logic for the subject-matter of that area of Being called “Nature”. Read more at location 587
4. The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being
**** Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being—a relationship which itself is one of Being.(2) And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological.(3) Read more at location 622
**** That kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call “existence” [Existenz]. And because we cannot define Dasein’s essence by citing a “what” of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter [eines sachhaltigen Was], and because its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own,(1) we have chosen to designate this entity as “Dasein”, a term which is purely an expression of its Being [als reiner Seinsausdruck]. Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Read more at location 642
Dasein is an entity whose Being has the determinate character of existence. The second priority is an ontological one: Dasein is in itself ‘ontological’, because existence is thus determinative for it. But with equal primordiality Dasein also possesses—as constitutive for its understanding of existence—an understanding of the Being of all entities of a character other than its own. Read more at location 678
Dasein’s ontico-ontological priority was seen quite early, though Dasein itself was not grasped in its genuine ontological structure, and did not even become a problem in which this structure was sought. Aristotle says: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστιν.(vi) “Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.” The ‘soul’ which makes up the Being of man αἴσθησις and νόησις among its ways of Being, and in these it discovers all entities, both in the fact t h a t they are, and in their Being a s they are—that is, always in their Being. Aristotle’s principle, which points back to the ontological thesis of Parmenides, is one which Thomas Aquinas has taken up in a characteristic discussion. Thomas is engaged in the task of deriving the ‘transcendentia’—those characters of Being which lie beyond every possible way in which an entity may be classified as coming under some generic kind of subject-matter (every modus specialis entis), and which belong necessarily to anything, whatever it may be. Thomas has to demonstrate that the verum is such a transcendens. He does this by invoking an entity which, in accordance with its very manner of Being, is properly suited to ‘come together with’ entities of any sort whatever. This distinctive entity, the ens quod natum est convenire cum omni ente, is the soul (anima).(vii) Here the priority of ‘Dasein’ over all other entities emerges, although it has not been ontologically clarified. This priority has obviously nothing in common with a vicious subjectivizing of the totality of entities. By indicating Dasein’s ontico-ontological priority in this provisional manner, we have grounded our demonstration that the question of Being is ontico-ontologically distinctive. Read more at location 689
the ontological analytic of Dasein in general is what makes up fundamental ontology, so that Dasein functions as that entity which in principle is to be interrogated beforehand as to its Being. Read more at location 706
If to Interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself—the pre-ontological understanding of Being. Read more at location 716
II: THE TWOFOLD TASK IN WORKING OUT THE QUESTION OF BEING. METHOD AND DESIGN OF OUR INVESTIGATION
5. The Ontological Analytic of Dasein as Laying Bare the Horizon for an Interpretation of the Meaning of Being in General
We shall point to temporality(3) as the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call “Dasein”. If this is to be demonstrated, those structures of Dasein which we shall provisionally exhibit must be Interpreted over again as modes of temporality. In thus interpreting Dasein as temporality, however, we shall not give the answer to our leading question as to the meaning of Being in general. But the ground will have been prepared for obtaining such an answer. Read more at location 785
(Note: I think perhaps even non-spatial entities are temporal, in that their meaning or definition or correlations may change over time.) ‘Time’ has long functioned as an ontological—or rather an ontical—criterion for naïvely discriminating various realms of entities. A distinction has been made between ‘temporal’ entities (natural processes and historical happenings) and ‘non-temporal’ entities (spatial and numerical relationships). We are accustomed to contrasting the ‘timeless’ meaning of propositions with the ‘temporal’ course of propositional assertions. It is also held that there is a ‘cleavage’ between ‘temporal’ entities and the ‘supra-temporal’ eternal, and efforts are made to bridge this over. Here ‘temporal’ always means simply being [seiend] ‘in time’—a designation which, admittedly, is still pretty obscure. The Fact remains that time, in the sense of ‘being [sein] in time’, functions as a criterion for distinguishing realms of Being. Read more at location 816
‘Time’ has acquired this ‘self-evident’ ontological function ‘of its own accord’, so to speak; indeed it has done so within the horizon of the way it is ordinarily understood. And it has maintained itself in this function to this day. In contrast to all this, our treatment of the question of the meaning of Being must enable us to show that the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, Read more at location 824
6. The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology
In its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along ‘behind’ it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historizes’ out of its future on each occasion.(2) Read more at location 866
Dasein can discover tradition, preserve it, and study it explicitly. The discovery of tradition and the disclosure of what it ‘transmits’ and how this is transmitted, can be taken hold of as a task in its own right. In this way Dasein brings itself into the kind of Being which consists in historiological inquiry and research. But historiology—or more precisely historicity(3)—is possible as a kind of Being which the inquiring Dasein may possess, only because historicality is a determining characteristic for Dasein in the very basis of its Being. Read more at location 875
In the course of this history certain distinctive domains of Being have come into view and have served as the primary guides for subsequent problematics: the ego cogito of Descartes, the subject, the “I”, reason, spirit, person. But these all remain uninterrogated as to their Being and its structure, in accordance with the thoroughgoing way in which the question of Being has been neglected. Read more at location 941
we must in the first instance raise the question whether and to what extent the Interpretation of Being and the phenomenon of time have been brought together thematically in the course of the history of ontology, and whether the problematic of Temporality required for this has ever been worked out in principle or ever could have been. The first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the dimension of Temporality or has even let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves is Kant. Read more at location 969
we shall show why Kant could never achieve an insight into the problematic of Temporality. There were two things that stood in his way: in the first place, he altogether neglected the problem of Being; and, in connection with this, he failed to provide an ontology with Dasein as its theme or (to put this in Kantian language) to give a preliminary ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject. Instead of this, Kant took over Descartes’ position quite dogmatically, notwithstanding all the essential respect in which he had gone beyond him. Read more at location 989
the decisive connection between time and the ‘I think’ was shrouded in utter darkness; it did not even become a problem. Read more at location 995
Yet Descartes not only continued to neglect this and thus to accept a completely indefinite ontological status for the res cogitans sive mens sive animus [‘the thing which cognizes, whether it be a mind or spirit’]: he regarded this entity as a fundamentum inconcussum, and applied the medieval ontology to it in carrying through the fundamental considerations of his Meditationes. Read more at location 1011
it will be manifest that the ancient way of interpreting the Being of entities is oriented towards the ‘world’ or ‘Nature’ in the widest sense, and that it is indeed in terms of ‘time’ that its understanding of Being is obtained. Read more at location 1027
In both ordinary and philosophical usage, Dasein, man’s Being, is ‘defined’ as the ζώον λόγον έχον—as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse.(3) Read more at location 1033
(Note: interesting and good observation; traditionally, essence seen as primary with temporality seen as secondary) the Greeks have managed to interpret Being in this way without any explicit knowledge of the clues which function here, without any acquaintance with the fundamental ontological function of time or even any understanding of it, and without any insight into the reason why this function is possible. On the contrary, they take time itself as one entity among other entities, and try to grasp it in the structure of its Being, though that way of understanding Being which they have taken as their horizon is one which is itself naïvely and inexplicitly oriented towards time. Read more at location 1071
7. The Phenomenological Method of Investigation
With the question of the meaning of Being, our investigation comes up against the fundamental question of philosophy. This is one that must be treated phenomenologically. Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a ‘standpoint’ or represent any special ‘direction’; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself. The expression ‘phenomenology’ signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does not characterize the w h a t of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the how of that research. Read more at location 1125
This expression has two components: “phenomenon” and “logos”. Both of these go back to terms from the Greek: φαινόμενον and λόγος. Taken superficially, the term “phenomenology” is formed like “theology”, “biology”, “sociology”—names which may be translated as “science of God”, “science of life”, “science of society”. This would make phenomenology the science of phenomena. Read more at location 1149
A. The Concept of Phenomenon Read more at location 1156
we must keep in mind that the expression ‘phenomenon’ signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest. Read more at location 1166
If we are to have any further understanding of the concept of phenomenon, everything depends on our seeing how what is designated in the first signification of φαινόμενον (‘phenomenon’ as that which shows itself) and what is designated in the second (‘phenomenon’ as semblance) are structurally interconnected. Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself—that is, of being a phenomenon—can it show itself as something which it is not; only then can it ‘merely look like so-and-so’. Read more at location 1175
(Note: the 'is' implied by 'is not', and vise versa) what one is talking about when one speaks of the ‘symptoms of a disease’ [“Krankheitserscheinungen”]. Here one has in mind certain occurrences in the body which show themselves and which, in showing themselves a s thus showing themselves, ‘indicate’ [“indizieren”] something which does not show itself. The emergence [Auftreten] of such occurrences, their showing-themselves, goes together with the Being-present-at-hand of disturbances which do not show themselves. Thus appearance, as the appearance ‘of something’, does not mean showing-itself; it means rather the announcing-itself by [von] something which does not show itself, but which announces itself through something which does show itself. Appearing is a not-showing-itself. But the ‘not’ we find here is by no means to be confused with the privative “not” which we used in defining the structure of semblance.(1) What appears does not show itself; and anything which thus fails to show itself, is also something which can never s e e m.(2) All indications, presentations, symptoms, and symbols have this basic formal structure of appearing, even though they differ among themselves. Read more at location 1206
the expression ‘appearance’ itself can have a double signification: first, appearing, in the sense of announcing-itself, as not-showing-itself; and next, that which does the announcing [das Meldende selbst]—that which in its showing-itself indicates something which does not show itself. And finally one can use “appearing” as a term for the genuine sense of “phenomenon” as showing-itself. If one designates these three different things as ‘appearance’, bewilderment is unavoidable. But this bewilderment is essentially increased by the fact that ‘appearance’ can take on still another signification. That which does the announcing—that which, in its showing-itself, indicates something non-manifest—may be taken as that which emerges in what is itself non-manifest, and which emanates [ausstrahlt] from it in such a way indeed that the non-manifest gets thought of as something that is essentially never manifest. When that which does the announcing is taken this way, “appearance” is tantamount to a “bringing forth” or “something brought forth”, but something which does not make up the real Being of what brings it forth: here we have an appearance in the sense of ‘mere appearance’. Read more at location 1237
“Phenomenon”, the showing-itself-in-itself; signifies a distinctive way in which something can be encountered.(1) “Appearance”, on the other hand, means a reference-relationship which i s in an entity itself,(2) and which is such that what does the referring (or the announcing) can fulfil its possible function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus a ‘phenomenon’. Both appearance and semblance are founded upon the phenomenon, though in different ways. The bewildering multiplicity of ‘phenomena’ designated by the words “phenomenon”, “semblance”, “appearance”, “mere appearance”, cannot be disentangled unless the concept of the phenomenon is understood from the beginning as that which shows itself in itself. Read more at location 1258
B. The Concept of the L o g o s
(Note: interesting to mull in relation to Christian idea of jesus as logos) If we say that the basic signification of λόγος is “discourse”,(2) then this word-for-word translation will not be validated until we have determined what is meant by “discourse” itself. The real signification of “discourse”, which is obvious enough, gets constantly covered up by the later history of the word λόγος, and especially by the numerous and arbitrary Interpretations which subsequent philosophy has provided. Λόγος gets ‘translated’ (and this means that it is always getting interpreted) as “reason”, “judgment”, “concept”, “definition”, “ground”, or “relationship”.(3) But how can ‘discourse’ be so susceptible of modification that λόγος can signify all the things we have listed, and in good scholarly usage? Even if λόγος is understood in the sense of “assertion”, but of “assertion” as ‘judgment’, this seemingly legitimate translation may still miss the fundamental signification, especially if “judgment” is conceived in a sense taken over from some contemporary ‘theory of judgment’. Λόγος does not mean “judgment”, and it certainly does not mean this primarily—if one understands by ‘judgment” a way of ‘binding’ something with something else, or the ‘taking of a stand’ (whether by acceptance or by rejection). Read more at location 1294
**** (Note: **** interesting Jesus as logos) Λόγος as “discourse” means rather the same as δηλοῦν: to make manifest what one is ‘talking about’ in one’s discourse.(1) Aristotle has explicated this function of discourse more precisely as ἀποφαίνεσθαι.(iv) The λόγος lets something be seen (φαίνεσθαι), namely, what the discourse is about; and it does so either for the one who is doing the talking (the medium) or for persons who are talking with one another, as the case may be. Discourse ‘lets something be seen’ Read more at location 1311
When fully concrete, discoursing (letting something be seen) has the character of speaking [Sprechens]—vocal proclamation in words. The λόγος is φωνή, and indeed, φωνή μετὰ φαντασίας—an utterance in which something is sighted in each case. And only because the function of the λόγος as ἀποφανσις lies in letting something be seen by pointing it out, can the λόγος have the structural form of σύνθεσις. Here “synthesis” does not mean a binding and linking together of representations, a manipulation of psychical occurrences where the ‘problem’ arises of how these bindings, as something inside, agree with something physical outside. Here the σύν has a purely apophantical signification and means letting something be seen in its togetherness [Beisammen] with something—letting it be seen as something. Read more at location 1332
When something no longer takes the form of just letting something be seen, but is always harking back to something else to which it points, so that it lets something be seen as something, it thus acquires a synthesis-structure, and with this it takes over the possibility of covering up.(4) The ‘truth of judgments’, however, is merely the opposite of this covering-up, a secondary phenomenon of truth, with more than one kind of foundation.(5) Both realism and idealism have—with equal thoroughness—missed the meaning of the Greek conception of truth, in terms of which only the possibility of something like a ‘doctrine of ideas’ can be understood as philosophical knowledge. Read more at location 1367
1. The Greek words for ‘truth’ (ἡ ἀλήθεια, τὸ ἀληθές are compounded of the privative prefix ἀ- (‘not’) and the verbal stem -λαθ- (‘to escape notice’, ‘to be concealed’). The truth may thus be looked upon as that which is un-concealed, that which gets discovered or uncovered (‘entdeckt’). Read more at location 1374
C. The Preliminary Conception of Phenomenology
When we envisage concretely what we have set forth in our Interpretation of ‘phenomenon’ and ‘logos’, we are struck by an inner relationship between the things meant by these terms. The expression “phenomenology” may be formulated in Greek as λέγειν τὰ φαινόμενα, where λέγειν means ἀποφαίνεσθαι. Thus “phenomenology” means ἀποφαίνεσθαι τὰ φαινόμενα—to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. This is the formal meaning of that branch of research which calls itself “phenomenology”. But here we are expressing nothing else than the maxim formulated above: ‘To the things themselves!’ Read more at location 1419
Phenomenology is our way of access to what is to be the theme of ontology, and it is our way of giving it demonstrative precision. Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible. Read more at location 1455
Now that we have delimited our preliminary conception of phenomenology, the terms ‘phenomenal’ and ‘phenomenological’ can also be fixed in their signification. That which is given and explicable in the way the phenomenon is encountered is called ‘phenomenal’; this is what we have in mind when we talk about “phenomenal structures”. Everything which belongs to the species of exhibiting and explicating and which goes to make up the way of conceiving demanded by this research, is called ‘phenomenological’. Because phenomena, as understood phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up Being, while Being is in every case the Being of some entity, we must first bring forward the entities themselves if it is our aim that Being should be laid bare; Read more at location 1495
**** Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the t r a n s c e n d e n s pure and simple.(1) And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is v e r i t a s t r a n s c e n d e n t a l i s. Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns. Read more at location 1522
8. Design of the Treatise
The question of the meaning of Being is the most universal and the emptiest of questions, Read more at location 1558
our treatment of the question of Being branches out into two distinct tasks, and our treatise will thus have two parts: Part One: the Interpretation of Dasein in terms of temporality, and the explication of time as the transcendental horizon for the question of Being. Part Two: basic features of a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology, with the problematic of Temporality as our clue. Part One has three divisions: 1. the preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein; 2. Dasein and temporality; 3. time and Being.(1) H. 40 Part Two likewise has three divisions(1): 1. Kant’s doctrine of schematism and time, as a preliminary stage in a problematic of Temporality; 2. the ontological foundation of Descartes’ ‘cogito sum’, and how the medieval ontology has been taken over into the problematic of the ‘res cogitans’; 3. Aristotle’s essay on time, as providing a way of discriminating the phenomenal basis and the limits of ancient ontology. 1. Part Two and the third division of Part One have never appeared. Read more at location 1565
PART ONE: THE INTERPRETATION OF DASEIN IN TERMS OF TEMPORALITY, AND THE EXPLICATION OF TIME AS THE TRANSCENDENTAL HORIZON FOR THE QUESTION OF BEING
DIVISION ONE: PREPARATORY FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS OF DASEIN
I: EXPOSITION OF THE TASK OF A PREPARATORY ANALYSIS OF DASEIN
9. The Theme of the Analytic of Dasein
The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-hand of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that. Read more at location 1644
any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness.(4) But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any ‘less’ Being or any ‘lower’ degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity—when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for joyment. Read more at location 1661
Dasein should not be Interpreted with the differentiated character [Differenz] of some definite way of existing, but that it should be uncovered [aufgedeckt] in the undifferentiated character which it has proximally and for the most part. This undifferentiated character of Dasein’s everydayness is not nothing, but a positive phenomenal characteristic of this entity. Out of this kind of Being—and back into it again—is all existing, such as it is.(1) We call this everyday undifferentiated character of Dasein “averageness” [Durchschnittlichkeit]. Read more at location 1690
**** (Note: **** take consciousness for granted) because this average everydayness makes up what is ontically proximal for this entity, it has again and again been passed over in explicating Dasein. That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all; and its ontological signification is constantly overlooked. Read more at location 1696
The existential analytic of Dasein comes before any psychology or anthropology, and certainly before any biology. Read more at location 1758
10. How the Analytic of Dasein is to be Distinguished from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology
In distinguishing the existential analytic from anthropology, psychology, and biology, we shall confine ourselves to what is in principle the ontological question. Our distinctions will necessarily be inadequate from the standpoint of ‘scientific theory’ simply because the scientific structure of the above-mentioned disciplines (not, indeed, the ‘scientific attitude’ of those who work to advance them) is today thoroughly questionable and needs to be attacked in new ways which must have their source in ontological problematics. Read more at location 1770
Historiologically, the aim of the existential analytic can be made plainer by considering Descartes, who is credited with providing the point of departure for modern philosophical inquiry by his discovery of the “cogito sum”. He investigates the “cogitare” of the “ego”, at least within certain limits. On the other hand, he leaves the “sum” completely undiscussed, even though it is regarded as no less primordial that the cogito. Our analytic raises the ontological question of the Being of the “sum”. Not until the nature of this Being has been determined can we grasp the kind of Being which belongs to cogitationes. Read more at location 1775
One of our first tasks will be to prove that if we posit an “I” or subject as that which is proximally given, we shall completely miss the phenomenal content [Bestand] of Dasein. Ontologically, every idea of a ‘subject’—unless refined by a previous ontological determination of its basic character—still posits the subjectum (ὐποκείμενον) along with it, no matter how vigorous one’s ontical protestations against the ‘soul substance’ or the ‘reification of consciousness’. The Thinghood itself which such reification implies must have its ontological origin demonstrated if we are to be in a position to ask what we are to understand positively when we think of the unreified Being of the subject, the soul, the consciousness, the spirit, the person. Read more at location 1782
**** (Note: view of no self from husserl and scheler) No matter how much Husserl(ii) and Scheler may differ in their respective inquiries, in their methods of conducting them, and in their orientations towards the world as a whole, they are fully in agreement on the negative side of their Interpretations of personality. The question of ‘personal Being’ itself is one which they no longer raise. We have chosen Scheler’s Interpretation as an example, not only because it is accessible in print,(iii) but because he emphasizes personal Being explicitly as such, and tries to determine its character by defining the specific Being of acts as contrasted with anything ‘psychical’. For Scheler, the person is never to be thought of as a Thing or a substance; the person ‘is rather the unity of living-through [Er-lebens] which is immediately experienced in and with our Experiences—not a Thing merely thought of behind and outside what is immediately Experienced’.(iv) The person is no Thinglike and substantial Being. Nor can the Being of a person be entirely absorbed in being a subject of rational acts which follow certain laws. Read more at location 1806
The person is not a Thing, not a substance, not an object. Here Scheler is emphasizing what Husserl(v) suggests when he insists that the unity of the person must have a Constitution essentially different from that required for the unity of Things of Nature.(1) What Scheler says of the person, he applies to acts as well: ‘But an act is never also an object; for it is essential to the Being of acts that they are Experienced only in their performance itself and given in reflection.”(vi) Acts are something non-psychical. Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object. Any psychical Objectification of acts, and hence any way of taking them as something psychical, is tantamount to depersonalization. A person is in any case given as a performer of intentional acts which are bound together by the unity of a meaning. Thus psychical Being has nothing to do with personal Being. Acts get performed; the person is a performer of acts. Read more at location 1835
**** The two sources which are relevant for the traditional anthropology—the Greek definition and the clue which theology has provided—indicate that over and above the attempt to determine the essence of ‘man’ as an entity, the question of his Being has remained forgotten, and that this Being is rather conceived as something obvious or ‘self-evident’ in the sense of the Being-present-at-hand of other created Things. These two clues become intertwined in the anthropology of modern times, where the res cogitans, consciousness, and the interconnectedness of Experience serve as the point of departure for methodical study. But since even the cogitationes are either left ontologically undetermined, or get tacitly assumed as something ‘self-evidently’ ‘given’ whose ‘Being’ is not to be questioned, the decisive ontological foundations of anthropological problematics remain undetermined. Read more at location 1886
Life, in its own right, is a kind of Being; but essentially it is accessible only in Dasein. The ontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative Interpretation; it determines what must be the case if there can be anything like mere-aliveness [Nur-noch-leben]. Life is not a mere Being-present-at-hand, nor is it Dasein. In turn, Dasein is never to be defined ontologically by regarding it as life (in an ontologically indefinite manner) plus something else. In suggesting that anthropology, psychology, and biology all fail to give an unequivocal and ontologically adequate answer to the question about the kind of Being which belongs to those entities which we ourselves are, we are not passing judgment on the positive work of these disciplines. We must always bear in mind, however, that these ontological foundations can never be disclosed by subsequent hypotheses derived from empirical material, but that they are always ‘there’ already, even when that empirical material simply gets collected. Read more at location 1907
11. The Existential Analytic and the Interpretation of Primitive Dasein. The Difficulties of Achieving a ‘Natural Conception of the World’
This task includes a desideratum which philosophy has long found disturbing but has continually refused to achieve: to work out the idea of a ‘natural conception of the world’. The rich store of information now available as to the most exotic and manifold cultures and forms of Dasein seems favourable to our setting about this task in a fruitful way. But this is merely a semblance. At bottom this plethora of information can seduce us into failing to recognize the real problem. We shall not get a genuine knowledge of essences simply by the syncretistic activity of universal comparison and classification. Read more at location 1959
II: BEING-IN-THE-WORLD IN GENERAL AS THE BASIC STATE OF DASEIN
12. A Preliminary Sketch of Being-in-the-World, in terms of an Orientation towards Being-in as such
Dasein is an entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being. In saying this, we are calling attention to the formal concept of existence. Dasein exists. Furthermore, Dasein is an entity which in each case I myself am. Mineness belongs to any existent Dasein, and belongs to it as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible. In each case Dasein exists in one or the other of these two modes, or else it is modally undifferentiated.(1) Read more at location 1984
**** The compound expression ‘Being-in-the-world’ indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. Read more at location 1996
“Being-in” is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state. Read more at location 2039
**** (Note: "I am") Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain ‘factual Being-present-at-hand’.(ii) And yet the ‘factuality’ of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity”.(1) This is a definite way of Being [Seinsbestimmtheit], and it has a complicated structure which cannot even be grasped as a problem until Dasein’s basic existential states have been worked out. The concept of “facticity” implies that an entity ‘within-the-world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world. In the first instance it is enough to see the ontological difference between Being-in as an existentiale and the category of the ‘insideness’ which things present-at-hand can have with regard to one another. Read more at location 2110
Not until we understand Being-in-the-world as an essential structure of Dasein can we have any insight into Dasein’s existential spatiality. Such an insight will keep us from failing to see this structure or from previously cancelling it out—a procedure motivated not ontologically but rather ‘metaphysically’ by the naïve supposition that man is, in the first instance, a spiritual Thing which subsequently gets misplaced ‘into’ a space. Read more at location 2123
Here ‘concern’ means something like apprehensiveness. In contrast to these colloquial ontical significations, the expression ‘concern’ will be used in this investigation as an ontological term for an existentiale, and will designate the Being of a possible way of Being-in-the-world. This term has been chosen not because Dasein happens to be proximally and to a large extent ‘practical’ and economic, but because the Being of Dasein itself is to be made visible as care.(1) Read more at location 2160
Nowadays there is much talk about ‘man’s having an environment [Umwelt]’; but this says nothing ontologically as long as this ‘having’ is left indefinite. In its very possibility this ‘having’ is founded upon the existential state of Being-in. Because Dasein is essentially an entity with Being-in, it can explicitly discover those entities which it encounters environmentally, it can know them, it can avail itself of them, it can have the ‘world’. Read more at location 2182
Although this state of Being is one of which use has made in biology, especially since K. von Baer, one must not conclude that its philosophical use implies ‘biologism’. For the environment is a structure which even biology as a positive science can never find and can never define, but must presuppose and constantly employ. Yet, even as an a priori condition for the objects which biology takes for its theme, this structure itself can be explained philosophically only if it has been conceived beforehand as a structure of Dasein. Only in terms of an orientation towards the ontological structure thus conceived can ‘life’ as a state of Being be defined a priori, and this must be done in a privative manner.(1) Read more at location 2187
this ‘seeing in a certain way and yet for the most part wrongly explaining’ is itself based upon nothing else than this very state of Dasein’s Being, which is such that Dasein itself—and this means also its Being-in-the world—gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters ‘within’ its world, and from the Being which they possess. Read more at location 2206
Knowing the world (νοεῖν)—or rather addressing oneself to the ‘world’ and discussing it (λόγος)—thus functions as the primary mode of Being-in-the-world, even though Being-in-the-world does not as such get conceived. But because this structure of Being remains ontologically inaccessible, yet is experienced ontically as a ‘relationship’ between one entity (the world) and another (the soul), and because one proximally understands Being by taking entities as entities within-the-world for one’s ontological foothold, one tries to conceive the relationship between world and soul as grounded in these two entities themselves and in the meaning of their Being—namely, to conceive it as Being-present-at-hand. Read more at location 2213
For what is more obvious than that a ‘subject’ is related to an ‘Object’ and vice versa? This ‘subject-Object-relationship’ must be presupposed. But while this presupposition is unimpeachable in its facticity, this makes it indeed a baleful one, if its ontological necessity and especially its ontological meaning are to be left in the dark. Read more at location 2222
13. A Founded Mode in which Being-in is Exemplified. Knowing the World.
It would be unintelligible for Being-in-the-world to remain totally veiled from view, especially since Dasein has at its disposal an understanding of its own Being, no matter how indefinitely this understanding may function. But no sooner was the ‘phenomenon of knowing the world’ grasped than it got interpreted in a ‘superficial’, formal manner. The evidence for this is the procedure (still customary today) of setting up knowing as a ‘relation between subject and Object’—a procedure in which there lurks as much ‘truth’ as vacuity. But subject and Object do not coincide with Dasein and the world. Even if it were feasible to give an ontological definition of “Being-in” primarily in terms of a Being-in-the-world which knows, it would still be our first task to show that knowing has the phenomenal character of a Being which is in and towards the world. If one reflects upon this relationship of Being, an entity called “Nature” is given proximally as that which becomes known. Knowing, as such, is not to be met in this entity. If knowing ‘is’ at all, it belongs solely to those entities which know. But even in those entities, human-Things, knowing is not present-at-hand. In any case, it is not externally ascertainable as, let us say, bodily properties are.(1) Read more at location 2246
when one asks for the positive signification of this ‘inside’ of immanence in which knowing is proximally enclosed, or when one inquires how this ‘Being inside’ [“Innenseins”] which knowing possesses has its own character of Being grounded in the kind of Being which belongs to the subject, then silence reigns. And no matter how this inner sphere may get interpreted, if one does no more than ask how knowing makes its way ‘out of’ it and achieves ‘transcendence’, it becomes evident that the knowing which presents such enigmas will remain problematical unless one has previously clarified how it is and what it is. Read more at location 2264
Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned.(2) If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the present-at-hand by observing it,(3) then there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully. Read more at location 2285
**** (Note: observation involves asking discrete yes / no questions from a perspective (the observer)) This kind of Being towards the world is one which lets us encounter entities within-the-world purely in the way they look (εἶδος), just that; on the basis of this kind of Being, and as a mode of it, looking explicitly at what we encounter is possible.(4) Looking at something in this way is sometimes a definite way of taking up a direction towards something—of setting our sights towards what is present-at-hand. It takes over a ‘view-point’ in advance from the entity which it encounters.
...Perception is consummated when one addresses oneself to something as something and discusses it as such.(3) This amounts to interpretation in the broadest sense; and on the basis of such interpretation, perception becomes an act of making determinate.(4) What is thus perceived and made determinate can be expressed in propositions, and can be retained and preserved as what has thus been asserted. This perceptive retention of an assertion(5) about something is itself a way of Being-in-the-world; it is not to be Interpreted as a ‘procedure’ by which a subject provides itself with representations [Vorstellungen] of something which remain stored up ‘inside’ as having been thus appropriated, and with regard to which the question of how they ‘agree’ with actuality can occasionally arise. Read more at location 2307
(Note: both lens to perceived, and sense of perceiver) When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells alongside the entity to be known, and determines its character; but even in this ‘Being-outside’ alongside the object, Dasein is still ‘inside’, if we understand this in the correct sense; that is to say, it is itself ‘inside’ as a Being-in-the-world which knows. Read more at location 2329
the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the Dasein which knows remains outside, and it does so as Dasein. Read more at location 2333
modes of Being-in-the-world which are constitutive for knowing the world are interconnected in their foundations; this makes it plain that in knowing, Dasein achieves a new status of Being [Seinsstand] towards a world which has already been discovered in Dasein itself. This new possibility of Being can develop itself autonomously; it can become a task to be accomplished, and as scientific knowledge it can take over the guidance for Being-in-the-world. But a ‘commercium’ of the subject with a world does not get created for the first time by knowing, nor does it arise from some way in which the world acts upon a subject. Knowing is a mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-the-world. Thus Being-in-the-world, as a basic state, must be Interpreted beforehand. Read more at location 2340
III: THE WORLDHOOD OF THE WORLD
14. The Idea of the Worldhood of the World in General
(Note: translators note) the meanings which Heidegger assigns to them (H. 65) are quite different from those of their English cognates. At the risk of obscuring the etymological connection and occasionally misleading the reader, we shall translate ‘weltlich’ as ‘worldly’, ‘Weltlichkeit’ as ‘worldhood’, and ‘Weltmässigkeit’ as ‘worldly character’. The reader must bear in mind, however, that there is no suggestion here of the ‘worldliness’ of the ‘man of the world’. Read more at location 2359
BEING-IN-THE-WORLD shall first be made visible with regard to that item of its structure which is the ‘world’ itself. To accomplish this task seems easy and so trivial as to make one keep taking for granted that it may be dispensed with. What can be meant by describing ‘the world’ as a phenomenon? It means to let us see what shows itself in ‘entities’ within the world. Read more at location 2364
the entities within the world are Things—Things of Nature, and Things ‘invested with value’ [“wertbehaftete” Dinge]. Their Thinghood becomes a problem; and to the extent that the Thinghood of Things ‘invested with value’ is based upon the Thinghood of Nature, our primary theme is the Being of Things of Nature—Nature as such. That characteristic of Being which belongs to Things of Nature (substances), and upon which everything is founded, is substantiality. What is its ontological meaning? By asking this, we have given an unequivocal direction to our inquiry.
...Neither the ontical depiction of entities within-the-world nor the ontological Interpretation of their Being is such as to reach the phenomenon of the ‘world.’ In both of these ways of access to ‘Objective Being’, the ‘world’ has already been ‘presupposed’, and indeed in various ways. Read more at location 2387
Is it possible that ultimately we cannot address ourselves to ‘the world’ as determining the nature of the entity we have mentioned? Yet we call this entity one which is “within-the-world”. Is ‘world’ perhaps a characteristic of Dasein’s Being? And in that case, does every Dasein ‘proximally’ have its world? Does not ‘world’ thus become something ‘subjective’? How, then, can there be a ‘common’ world ‘in’ which, nevertheless, we are? And if we raise the question of the ‘world’, what world do we have in view? Neither the common world nor the subjective world, but the worldhood of the world as such. By what avenue do we meet this phenomenon? ‘Worldhood’ is an ontological concept, and stands for the structure of one of the constitutive items of Being-in-the-world. But we know Being-in-the-world as a way in which Dasein’s character is defined existentially. Thus worldhood itself is an existentiale. Read more at location 2390
**** (Note: subject and object are one. schroedinger quote) Ontologically, ‘world’ is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein essentially is not; it is rather a characteristic of Dasein itself. Read more at location 2399
1. “World” is used as an ontical concept, and signifies the totality of those entities which can be present-at-hand within the world. H. 65 2. “World” functions as an ontological term, and signifies the Being of those entities which we have just mentioned. And indeed ‘world’ can become a term for any realm which encompasses a multiplicity of entities: for instance, when one talks of the ‘world’ of a mathematician, ‘world’ signifies the realm of possible objects of mathematics. 3. “World” can be understood in another ontical sense—not, however, as those entities which Dasein essentially is not and which can be encountered within-the-world, but rather as that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’. “World” has here a pre-ontological existentiell signification. Here again there are different possibilities: “world” may stand for the ‘public’ we-world, or one’s ‘own’ closest (domestic) environment.(1)
...4. Finally, “world” designates the ontologico-existential concept of worldhood. Worldhood itself may have as its modes whatever structural wholes any special ‘worlds’ may have at the time; but it embraces in itself the a priori character of worldhood in general. We shall reserve the expression “world” as a term for our third signification. If we should sometimes use it in the first of these senses, we shall mark this with single quotation marks. Read more at location 2424
‘Nature’, as the categorial aggregate of those structures of Being which a definite entity encountered within-the-world may possess, can never make worldhood intelligible. But even the phenomenon of ‘Nature’, as it is conceived, for instance, in romanticism, can be grasped ontologically only in terms of the concept of the world—that is to say, in terms of the analytic of Dasein. Read more at location 2436
That world of everyday Dasein which is closest to it, is the environment. From this existential character of average Being-in-the-world, our investigation will take its course [Gang] towards the idea of worldhood in general. Read more at location 2454
A. Analysis of Environmentality and Worldhood in General
15. The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment
(Note: objects as patterns) In the domain of the present analysis, the entities we shall take as our preliminary theme are those which show themselves in our concern with the environment. Such entities are not thereby objects for knowing the ‘world’ theoretically; they are simply what gets used, what gets produced, and so forth. Read more at location 2488
Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to...’ [“etwas um-zu...”]. A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability. In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something.(2) Read more at location 2522
What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the ‘arrangement’ emerges, and it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered. Read more at location 2530
hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ [“Handlichkeit”] of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call “readiness-to-hand” [Zuhandenheit].(1) Only because equipment has this ‘Being-in-itself’ and does not merely occur, is it manipulable in the broadest sense and at our disposal. No matter how sharply we just look [Nur-noch-hinsehen] at the ‘outward appearance’ [“Aussehen]” of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. Read more at location 2561
in the environment certain entities become accessible which are always ready-to-hand, but which, in themselves, do not need to be produced. Hammer, tongs, and needle, refer in themselves to steel, iron, metal, mineral, wood, in that they consist of these. In equipment that is used, ‘Nature’ is discovered along with it by that use—the ‘Nature’ we find in natural products. Here, however, “Nature” is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature.
...this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. Read more at location 2619
To lay bare what is just present-at-hand and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-hand in our concern. Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially. Yet only by reason of something present-at-hand, ‘is there’ anything ready-to-hand. Read more at location 2645
16. How the Worldly Character of the Environment Announces itself in Entities Within-the-world
That the world does not ‘consist’ of the ready-to-hand shows itself in the fact (among others) that whenever the world is lit up in the modes of concern which we have been Interpreting, the ready-to-hand becomes deprived of its worldhood so that Being-just-present-at-hand comes to the fore. If, in our everyday concern with the ‘environment’, it is to be possible for equipment ready-to-hand to be encountered in its ‘Being-in-itself’ [in seinem “An-sich-sein”], then those assignments and referential totalities in which our circumspection ‘is absorbed’ cannot become a theme for that circumspection any more than they can for grasping things ‘thematically’ but non-circumspectively. If it is to be possible for the ready-to-hand not to emerge from its inconspicuousness, the world must not announce itself. And it is in this that the Being-in-itself of entities which are ready-to-hand has its phenomenal structure constituted. Read more at location 2777
17. Reference and Signs
signs, in the first instance, are themselves items of equipment whose specific character as equipment consists in showing or indicating.(1) Read more at location 2834
Every reference is a relation, but not every relation is a reference. Every ‘indication’ is a reference, but not every referring is an indicating. This implies at the same time that every ‘indication’ is a relation, but not every relation is an indicating. The formally general character of relation is thus brought to light. Read more at location 2840
the Being of what is most closely ready-to-hand within-the-world possesses the character of holding-itself-in and not emerging, which we have described above.(3) Accordingly our circumspective dealings in the environment require some equipment ready-to-hand which in its character as equipment takes over the ‘work’ of letting something ready-to-hand become conspicuous. So when such equipment (signs) gets produced, its conspicuousness must be kept in mind. Read more at location 2922
The relation between sign and reference is threefold. 1. Indicating, as a way whereby the “towards-which” of a serviceability can become concrete, is founded upon the equipment-structure as such, upon the “in-order-to” (assignment). 2. The indicating which the sign does is an equipmental character of something ready-to-hand, and as such it belongs to a totality of equipment, to a context of assignments or references. 3. The sign is not only ready-to-hand with other equipment, but in its readiness-to-hand the environment becomes in each case explicitly accessible for circumspection. Read more at location 2986
18. Involvement and Significance; the Worldhood of the World
An entity is discovered when it has been assigned or referred to something, and referred as that entity which it is. With any such entity there is an involvement which it has in something.(2) The character of Being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is just such an involvement. If something has an involvement, this implies letting it be involved in something. The relationship of the “with... in…” shall be indicated by the term “assignment” or “reference”.(3) Read more at location 3027
But the totality of involvements itself goes back ultimately to a “towards-which” in which there is no further involvement: this “towards-which” is not an entity with the kind of Being that belongs to what is ready-to-hand within a world; it is rather an entity whose Being is defined as Being-in-the-world, and to whose state of Being, worldhood itself belongs. This primary “towards-which” is not just another “towards-this” as something in which an involvement is possible. The primary ‘towards-which’ is a “for-the-sake-of-which”.(2) But the ‘for-the-sake-of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein, for which, in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue. We have thus indicated the interconnection by which the structure of an involvement leads to Dasein’s very Being as the sole authentic “for-the-sake-of-which”; for the present, however, we shall pursue this no further. Read more at location 3065
**** That wherein [Worin] Dasein understands itself beforehand in the mode of assigning itself is that for which [das Woraufhin] it has let entities be encountered beforehand. The “wherein” of an act of understanding which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements; and this “wherein” is the phenomenon of the world.(3) And the structure of that to which [woraufhin] Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldhood of the world. Read more at location 3150
That wherein Dasein already understands itself in this way is always something with which it is primordially familiar. This familiarity with the world does not necessarily require that the relations which are constitutive for the world as world should be theoretically transparent. However, the possibility of giving these relations an explicit ontologico-existential Interpretation, is grounded in this familiarity with the world; and this familiarity, in turn, is constitutive for Dasein, and goes to make up Dasein’s understanding of Being. This possibility is one which can be seized upon explicitly in so far as Dasein has set itself the task of giving a primordial Interpretation for its own Being and for the possibilities of that Being, or indeed for the meaning of Being in general. Read more at location 3164
These relationships are bound up with one another as a primordial totality; they are what they are a s this signifying [Be-deuten] in which Dasein gives itself beforehand its Being-in-the-world as something to be understood. The relational totality of this signifying we call “significance”. This is what makes up the structure of the world—the structure of that wherein Dasein as such already is. Dasein, in its familiarity with significance, is the ontical condition for the possibility of discovering entities which are encountered in a world with involvement (readiness-to-hand) as their kind of Being, and which can thus make themselves known as they are in themselves [in seinem An-sich]. Read more at location 3182
Within our present field of investigation the following structures and dimensions of ontological problematics, as we have repeatedly emphasized, must be kept in principle distinct: 1. the Being of those entities within-the-world which we proximally encounter—readiness-to-hand; 2. the Being of those entities which we can come across and whose nature we can determine if we discover them in their own right by going through the entities proximally encountered—presence-at-hand; 3. the Being of that ontical condition which makes it possible for entities within-the-world to be discovered at all—the worldhood of the world. This third kind of Being gives us an existential way of determining the nature of Being-in-the-world, that is, of Dasein. The other two concepts of Being are categories, and pertain to entities whose Being is not of the kind which Dasein possesses. The context of assignments or references, which, as significance, is constitutive for worldhood, can be taken formally in the sense of a system of Relations. Read more at location 3221
B. A Contrast between our Analysis of Worldhood and Descartes’ Interpretation of the World
the Cartesian ontology of the ‘world’ will provide us likewise with a negative support for a positive explication of the spatiality of the environment and of Dasein itself. With regard to Descartes’ ontology there are three topics which we shall treat: 1. the definition of the ‘world’ as res extensa (Section 19); 2. the foundations of this ontological definition (Section 20); 3. a hermeneutical discussion of the Cartesian ontology of the ‘world’ Read more at location 3255
19. The Definition of the ‘World’ as r e s e x t e n s a.
Descartes distinguishes the ‘ego cogito’ from the ‘res corporea’. This distinction will thereafter be determinative ontologically for the distinction between ‘Nature’ and ‘spirit’. No matter with how many variations of content the opposition between ‘Nature’ and ‘spirit’ may get set up ontically, its ontological foundations, and indeed the very poles of this opposition, remain unclarified; this unclarity has its proximate [nächste] roots in Descartes’ distinction. What kind of understanding of Being does he have when he defines the Being of these entities? Read more at location 3267
Extension—namely, in length, breadth, and thickness—makes up the real Being of that corporeal substance which we call the ‘world’. Read more at location 3282
what makes up the Being of the res corporea is the extensio: that which is omnimodo divisibile, figurabile et mobile (that which can change itself by being divided, shaped, or moved in any way), that which is capax mutationum—that which maintains itself (remanet) through all these changes. In any corporeal Thing the real entity is what is suited for thus remaining constant [ständigen Verbleib], so much so, indeed that this is how the substantiality of such a substance gets characterized. Read more at location 3326
20. Foundations of the Ontological Definition of the ‘World’
The Being of a ‘substance’ is characterized by not needing anything. That whose Being is such that it has no need at all for any other entity satisfies the idea of substance in the authentic sense; this entity is the ens perfectissimum. “…substantia quae nulla plane re indigeat, unica tantum potest intelligi, nempe Deus.”(xi) Here ‘God’ is a purely ontological term, if it is to be understood as ens perfectissimum. At the same time, the ‘self-evident’ connotation of the concept of God is such as to permit an ontological interpretation for the characteristic of not needing anything—a constitutive item in substantiality. “Alias vero omnes <res>, non nisi ope concursus Dei existere posse percipimus.”(xii) All entities other than God need to be “produced” in the widest sense and also to be sustained. Read more at location 3349
We are thus using “Being” in so wide a sense that its meaning embraces an ‘infinite’ difference. So even created entities can be called “substance” with some right. Relative to God, of course, these entities need to be produced and sustained; but within the realm of created entities—the ‘world’ in the sense of ens creatum—there are things which ‘are in need of no other entity’ relatively to the creaturely production and sustentation that we find, for instance, in man. Of these substances there are two kinds: the res cogitans and the res extensa. Read more at location 3357
**** ‘Being’ itself does not ‘affect’ us, and therefore cannot be perceived. ‘Being is not a Real predicate,’ says Kant,(1) who is merely repeating Descartes’ principle. Thus the possibility of a pure problematic of Being gets renounced in principle, and a way is sought for arriving at those definite characteristics of substance which we have designated above. Because ‘Being’ is not in fact accessible as an entity, it is expressed through attributes—definite characteristics of the entities under consideration, characteristics which themselves a r e.(2) Being is not expressed through just a n y such characteristics, but rather through those satisfying in the purest manner that meaning of “Being” and “substantiality”, which has still been tacitly presupposed. Read more at location 3403
Thus the ontological grounds for defining the ‘world’ as res extensa have been made plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains unclarified in the meaning of its Being, but gets passed off as something incapable of clarification, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance. Moreover, in this way of defining “substance” through some substantial entity, lies the reason why the term “substance” is used in two ways. What is here intended is substantiality; and it gets understood in terms of a characteristic of substance—a characteristic which is itself an entity.(3) Read more at location 3413
21. Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the ‘World’
The critical question now arises: does this ontology of the ‘world’ seek the phenomenon of the world at all, and if not, does it at least define some entity within-the-world fully enough so that the worldly character of this entity can be made visible in it? To both questions we must answer “No”. The entity which Descartes is trying to grasp ontologically and in principle with his “extensio”, is rather such as to become discoverable first of all by going through an entity within-the-world which is proximally ready-to-hand—Nature. Though this is the case, and though any ontological characterization of this latter entity within-the-world may lead us into obscurity, even if we consider both the idea of substantiality and the meaning of the “existit” and “ad existendum” which have been brought into the definition of that idea, it still remains possible that through an ontology based upon a radical separation of God, the “I”, and the ‘world’, the ontological problem of the world will in some sense get formulated and further advanced. Read more at location 3438
So in criticizing the Cartesian point of departure, we must ask which kind of Being that belongs to Dasein we should fix upon as giving us an appropriate way of access to those entities with whose Being as extensio Descartes equates the Being of the ‘world’. The only genuine access to them lies in knowing [Erkennen], intellectio, in the sense of the kind of knowledge [Erkenntnis] we get in mathematics and physics. Mathematical knowledge is regarded by Descartes as the one manner of apprehending entities which can always give assurance that their Being has been securely grasped. If anything measures up in its own kind of Being to the Being that is accessible in mathematical knowledge, then it is in the authentic sense. Such entities are those which always are what they are. Read more at location 3450
Descartes not only wants to formulate the problem of ‘the “I” and the world’; he claims to have solved it in a radical manner. His Meditations make this plain. (See especially Meditations I and VI.) By taking his basic ontological orientation from traditional sources and not subjecting it to positive criticism, he has made it impossible to lay bare any primordial ontological problematic of Dasein; this has inevitably obstructed his view of the phenomenon of the world, and has made it possible for the ontology of the ‘world’ to be compressed into that of certain entities within-the-world. Read more at location 3541
One might retort, however, that even if in point of fact both the problem of the world and the Being of the entities encountered environmentally as closest to us remain concealed, Descartes has still laid the basis for characterizing ontologically that entity within-the-world upon which, in its very Being, every other entity is founded—material Nature. This would be the fundamental stratum upon which all the other strata of actuality within-the-world are built up. Read more at location 3547
by taking extensio as a proprietas, Descartes can hardly reach the Being of substance; and by taking refuge in ‘value’-characteristics [“wertlichen” Beschaffenheiten] we are just as far from even catching a glimpse of Being as readiness-to-hand, let alone permitting it to become an ontological theme. Read more at location 3576
The fact that language now becomes our theme for the first time will indicate that this phenomenon has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein’s disclosedness. The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk.(1) Read more at location 5604
**** (Note: discourse as Logos, articulation (of the inexpressible)) Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with state-of-mind and understanding. The intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility. Therefore it underlies both interpretation and assertion. That which can be Articulated in interpretation, and thus even more primordially in discourse, is what we have called “meaning”. Read more at location 5615
Discoursing or talking is the way in which we articulate ‘significantly’ the intelligibility of Being-in-the-world. Being-with belongs to Being-in-the-world, which in every case maintains itself in some definite way of concernful Being-with-one-another. Such Being-with-one-another is discursive as assenting or refusing, as demanding or warning, as pronouncing, consulting, or interceding, as ‘making assertions’, and as talking in the way of ‘giving a talk’.(2) Read more at location 5636
(Note: attachment of meaning to sensation from the first apprehension) Hearkening is phenomenally still more primordial than what is defined ‘in the first instance’ as “hearing” in psychology—the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hearkening too has the kind of Being of the hearing which understands. What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling. Read more at location 5704
It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide the springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood. Read more at location 5709
**** Only he who already understands can listen Read more at location 5727
Speaking at length [Viel-sprechen] about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity—the unintelligibility of the trivial. Read more at location 5738
Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. Read more at location 5743
Man shows himself as the entity which talks. This does not signify that the possibility of vocal utterance is peculiar to him, but rather that he is the entity which is such as to discover the world and Dasein itself. The Greeks had no word for “language”; they understood this phenomenon ‘in the first instance’ as discourse. But because the λόγος came into their philosophical ken primarily as assertion, this was the kind of logos which they took as their clue for working out the basic structures of the forms of discourse and its components. Grammar sought its foundations in the ‘logic’ of this logos. But this logic was based upon the ontology of the present-at-hand. Read more at location 5753
The task of liberating grammar from logic requires beforehand a positive understanding of the basic a priori structure of discourse in general as an existentiale. Read more at location 5762
B. The Everyday Being of the “There”, and the Falling of Dasein
**** (Note: unenlightened Dasein, though Heidegger notes his assertion is purely ontological and he is not "moralizing.") proximally and for the most part Dasein is absorbed in the “they” and is mastered by it. Read more at location 5798
35. Idle Talk
Discourse which expresses itself is communication. Its tendency of Being is aimed at bringing the hearer to participate in disclosed Being towards what is talked about in the discourse. Read more at location 5839
What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superficially. We have the same thing in view, because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said. Read more at location 5845
The Being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement [Ausspruch]—all these now stand surety for the genuineness of the discourse and of the understanding which belongs to it, and for its appropriateness to the facts. And because this discoursing has lost its primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about, or else has never achieved such a relationship, it does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner, but communicates rather by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along.(3) What is said-in-the-talk as such, spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along—a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on [Bodenständigkeit] becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit]. And indeed this idle talk is not confined to vocal gossip, but even spreads to what we write, Read more at location 5850
**** (Note: how Self understands the world) The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much is just gossip. The average understanding, moreover, will not want any such distinction, and does not need it, because, of course, it understands everything. Read more at location 5859
(Note: Discourse as Logos. If the 'average' understanding (logos) is treated as actual or insightful understanding, the possibility of genuine understanding (logos) is lost) Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s Being and has a share in constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk. And when it does so, it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the entities within-the-world. Read more at location 5873
(Note: idle talk is discourse without acknowledgment of limitation or lack of genuine understanding) what is said is always understood proximally as ‘saying’ something—that is, an uncovering something. Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it leaves undone. This closing-off is aggravated afresh by the fact that an understanding of what is talked about is supposedly reached in idle talk. Because of this, idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back. Read more at location 5878
**** This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extrication. In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed. Read more at location 5886
36. Curiosity
The basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency-of-Being which belongs to everydayness—the tendency towards ‘seeing’. We designate this tendency by the term “curiosity” [Neugier], which characteristically is not confined to seeing, but expresses the tendency towards a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception. Read more at location 5921
Even at an early date (and in Greek philosophy this was no accident) cognition was conceived in terms of the ‘desire to see’.(1) The treatise which stands first in the collection of Aristotle’s treatises on ontology begins with the sentence: πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.(xi) The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being.(2) This remark introduces an investigation in which Aristotle seeks to uncover the source of all learned exploration of entities and their Being, by deriving it from that species of Dasein’s Being which we have just mentioned. This Greek Interpretation of the existential genesis of science is not accidental. It brings to explicit understanding what has already been sketched out beforehand in the principle of Parmenides: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.(3) Being is that which shows itself in the pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does Being get discovered. Primordial and genuine truth lies in pure beholding. This thesis has remained the foundation of western philosophy ever since. Read more at location 5924
The remarkable priority of ‘seeing’ was noticed particularly by Augustine, in connection with his Interpretation of concupiscentia.(xii) “Ad oculos enim videre proprie pertinet.” (“Seeing belongs properly to the eyes.”) “Utimur autem hoc verbo etiam in ceteris sensibus cum eos ad cognoscendum intendimus.” (“But we even use this word ‘seeing’ for the other senses when we devote them to cognizing.”) “Neque enim dicimus: audi quid rutilet; aut, olfac quam niteat; aut, gusta quam splendeat; aut, palpa quam fulgeat: videri enim dicuntur haec omnia.” (“For we do not say ‘Hear how it glows’, or ‘Smell how it glistens’, or ‘Taste how it shines’, or ‘Feel how it flashes’; but we say of each, ‘See’; we say that all this is seen.”) Read more at location 5948
**** When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen (that is, to come into a Being towards it) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing, that which is an issue for care does not lie in grasping something and being knowingly in the truth; it lies rather in its possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Therefore curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest. Read more at location 5979
Curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and marvelling at them—θαυμάζειν. To be amazed to the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known. Read more at location 5984
**** (Note: Self, Dasein unattached) Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere. This mode of Being-in-the-world reveals a new kind of Being of everyday Dasein—a kind in which Dasein is constantly uprooting itself. Read more at location 5989
Idle talk controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one “must” have read and seen. In being everywhere and nowhere, curiosity is delivered over to idle talk. Read more at location 5992
37. Ambiguity
(Note: parable of good seed (word = logos)) When, in our everyday Being-with-one-another, we encounter the sort of thing which is accessible to everyone, and about which anyone can say anything, it soon becomes impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not. This ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit] extends not only to the world, but just as much to Being-with-one-another as such, and even to Dasein’s Being towards itself. Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genuinely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though at bottom it is not; or else it does not look so, and yet at bottom it is.
...Even supposing that what “they” have surmised and scented out should some day be actually translated into deeds, ambiguity has already taken care that interest in what has been Realised will promptly die away. Read more at location 6020
**** (Note: awesome description of everyday living) Dasein is always ambiguously ‘there’—that is to say, in that public disclosedness of Being-with-one-another where the loudest idle talk and the most ingenious curiosity keep ‘things moving’, where, in an everyday manner, everything (and at bottom nothing) is happening. This ambiguity is always tossing to curiosity that which it seeks; and it gives idle talk the semblance of having everything decided in it. Read more at location 6044
Being-with-one-another in the “they” is by no means an indifferent side-by-side-ness in which everything has been settled, but rather an intent, ambiguous watching of one another, a secret and reciprocal listening-in. Under the mask of “for-one-another”, an “against-one-another” is in play. Read more at location 6052
38. Falling and Thrownness
(Note: apt, given it is akin to how I interpret "fall of man" in Genesis as referring to a covering up of Dasein) Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its ‘there’—the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world. As definite existential characteristics, these are not present-at-hand in Dasein, but help to make up its Being. In these, and in the way they are interconnected in their Being, there is revealed a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the “falling”(1) of Dasein. Read more at location 6068
This “absorption in...” [Aufgehen bei...] has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of the “they”. Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’.(1) “Fallenness” into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Read more at location 6077
if Dasein itself, in idle talk and in the way things have been publicly interpreted, presents to itself the possibility of losing itself in the “they” and falling into groundlessness, this tells us that Dasein prepares for itself a constant temptation towards falling. Being-in-the-world is in itself tempting Read more at location 6128
(Note: fascinating, almost a reinterpretation of Christianity... similar to my views) The supposition of the “they” that one is leading and sustaining a full and genuine ‘life’, brings Dasein a tranquillity, for which everything is ‘in the best of order’ and all doors are open. Falling Being-in-the-world, which tempts itself, is at the same time tranquillizing [beruhigend]. H. 178 However, this tranquillity in inauthentic Being does not seduce one into stagnation and inactivity, but drives one into uninhibited ‘hustle’ [“Betriebs”]. Being-fallen into the ‘world’ does not now somehow come to rest. The tempting tranquillization aggravates the falling. Read more at location 6136
**** (Note: akin to Wittgenstein) at bottom it remains indefinite what is really to be understood, and the question has not even been asked. Nor has it been understood that understanding itself is a potentiality-for-Being which must be made free in one’s ownmost Dasein alone. Read more at location 6144
(Note: god shaped hole in heart of Self) When Dasein, tranquillized, and ‘understanding’ everything, thus compares itself with everything, it drifts along towards an alienation [Entfremdung] in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquillizing; it is at the same time alienating. Read more at location 6146
**** The phenomena we have pointed out—temptation, tranquillizing, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement)—characterize the specific kind of Being which belongs to falling. This ‘movement’ of Dasein in its own Being, we call its “downward plunge” [Absturz]. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness. But this plunge remains hidden from Dasein by the way things have been publicly interpreted, so much so, indeed, that it gets interpreted as a way of ‘ascending’ and ‘living concretely’. Read more at location 6161
our existential-ontological Interpretation makes no ontical assertion about the ‘corruption of human Nature’, not because the necessary evidence is lacking, but because the problematic of this Interpretation is prior to any assertion about corruption or incorruption. Falling is conceived ontologically as a kind of motion. Ontically, we have not decided whether man is ‘drunk with sin’ and in the status corruptionis, Read more at location 6197
VI: CARE AS THE BEING OF DASEIN
39. The Question of the Primordial Totality of Dasein’s Structural Whole
**** (Note: nondualism) BEING-IN-THE-WORLD is a structure which is primordially and constantly whole. Read more at location 6220
the constitution of the structural whole and its everyday kind of Being, is phenomenally so manifold that it can easily obstruct our looking at the whole as such phenomenologically in a way which is unified. Read more at location 6223
**** The Self, however, is proximally and for the most part inauthentic, the they-self. Being-in-the-world is always fallen. Accordingly Dasein’s “average everydayness” can be defines as “Being-in-the-world which is falling and disclosed, thrown and projecting, and for which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is an issue, both in its Being alongside the ‘world’ and in its Being-with Others”. Read more at location 6236
Our everyday environmental experiencing [Erfahren], which remains directed both ontically and ontologically towards entities within-the-world, is not the sort of thing which can present Dasein in an ontically primordial manner for ontological analysis. Similarly our immanent perception of Experiences [Erlebnissen] fails to provide a clue which is ontologically adequate. On the other hand, Dasein’s Being is not be to deduced from an idea of man. Read more at location 6250
**** Dasein’s Being reveals itself as care. If we are to work out this basic existential phenomenon, we must distinguish it from phenomena which might be proximally identified with care, such as will, wish, addiction, and urge.(2) Care cannot be derived from these, since they themselves are founded upon it. Read more at location 6269
our existential Interpretation of Dasein as care requires pre-ontological confirmation. This lies in demonstrating that no sooner has Dasein expressed anything about itself to itself, than it has already interpreted itself as care (cura), even though it has done so only pre-ontologically. The analytic of Dasein, which is proceeding towards the phenomenon of care, is to prepare the way for the problematic of fundamental ontology—the question of the meaning of Being in general. Read more at location 6284
(Note: Being as Truth; both as God) Being ‘is’ only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs. Hence Being can be something unconceptualized, but it never completely fails to be understood. In ontological problematics Being and truth have, from time immemorial, been brought together if not entirely identified. This is evidence that there is a necessary connection between Being and understanding, even if it may perhaps be hidden in its primordial grounds. If we are to give an adequate preparation for the question of Being, the phenomenon of truth must be ontologically clarified. Read more at location 6299
40. The Basic State-of-mind of Anxiety as a Distinctive Way in which Dasein is Disclosed
From an existentiell point of view, the authenticity of Being-one’s-Self has of course been closed off and thrust aside in falling; but to be thus closed off is merely the privation of a disclosedness which manifests itself phenomenally in the fact that Dasein’s fleeing is a fleeing in the face of itself. That in the face of which Dasein flees, is precisely what Dasein comes up ‘behind’.(2) Read more at location 6329
the turning-away of falling is not a fleeing that is founded upon a fear of entities within-the-world. Fleeing that is so grounded is still less a character of this turning-away, when what this turning-away does is precisely to turn thither towards entities within-the-world by absorbing itself in them. The turning-away of falling is grounded rather in anxiety, which in turn is what first makes fear possible. Read more at location 6368
That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. Not only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand discovered within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance. Read more at location 6377
(Note: anxiety as attachment of meaning to appearance of potential meaning) What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself. When anxiety has subsided, then in our everyday way of talking we are accustomed to say that ‘it was really nothing’. Read more at location 6394
(Note: "being-anxious" as subset of "care") The “nothing” of readiness-to-hand is grounded in the most primordial ‘something’—in the world. Ontologically, however, the world belongs essentially to Dasein’s Being as Being-in-the-world. So if the “nothing”—that is, the world as such—exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Being-anxious discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world. Read more at location 6399
**** (Note: Self as "anxiety", or I might say attachment) Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities. Therefore, with that which it is anxious about, anxiety discloses Dasein as Being-possible, and indeed as the only kind of thing which it can be of its own accord as something individualized in individualization [vereinzeltes in der Vereinzelung]. Read more at location 6414
it is essential to every state-of-mind that in each case Being-in-the-world should be fully disclosed in all those items which are constitutive for it—world, Being-in, Self. But in anxiety there lies the possibility of a disclosure which is quite distinctive; for anxiety individualizes. This individualization brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being. Read more at location 6509
41. Dasein’s Being as Care
The abandonment of Dasein to itself is shown with primordial concreteness in anxiety. “Being-ahead-of-itself” means, if we grasp it more fully, “ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world”. As soon as this essentially unitary structure is seen as a phenomenon, what we have set forth earlier in our analysis of worldhood also becomes plain. Read more at location 6542
existing is always factical. Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity. Furthermore, Dasein’s factical existing is not only generally and without further differentiation a thrown potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world; it is always also absorbed in the world of its concern. Read more at location 6549
The formally existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This Being fills in the signification of the term “care” [Sorge], which is used in a purely ontologico-existential manner. From this signification every tendency of Being which one might have in mind ontically, such as worry [Besorgnis] or carefreeness [Sorglosigkeit], is ruled out. Read more at location 6556
(Note: care of Self is tautology since Dasein is posited by existence and Self (as expression of Dasein) is inherently engaged in care?) neither does “care” stand primarily and exclusively for an isolated attitude of the “I” towards itself. If one were to construct the expression ‘care for oneself’ [“Selbst-sorge”], following the analogy of “concern” [Besorgen] and “solicitude” [Fürsorge], this would be a tautology. “Care” cannot stand for some special attitude towards the Self; for the Self has already been characterized ontologically by “Being-ahead-of-itself”, a characteristic in which the other two items in the structure of care—Being-already-in… and Being-alongside…—have been posited as well [mitgesetzt]. Read more at location 6566
**** Care, as a primordial structural totality, lies ‘before’ [“vor”] every factical ‘attitude’ and ‘situation’ of Dasein, and it does so existentially a priori; this means that it always lies in them. So this phenomenon by no means expresses a priority of the ‘practical’ attitude over the theoretical. When we ascertain something present-at-hand by merely beholding it, this activity has the character of care just as much as does a ‘political action’ or taking a rest and enjoying oneself. ‘Theory’ and ‘practice’ are possibilities of Being for an entity whose Being must be defined as “care”. Read more at location 6583
to any willing there belongs something willed, which has already made itself definite in terms of a “for-the-sake-of-which”. If willing is to be possible ontologically, the following items are constitutive for it: (1) the prior disclosedness of the “for-the-sake-of-which” in general (Being-ahead-of-itself); (2) the disclosedness of something with which one can concern oneself (the world as the “wherein” of Being-already);(1) (3) Dasein’s projection of itself understandingly upon a potentiality-for-Being towards a possibility of the entity ‘willed’. In the phenomenon of willing, the underlying totality of care shows through. Read more at location 6608
What one is addicted ‘towards’ [Das “Hin-zu” des Hanges) is to let oneself be drawn by the sort of thing for which the addiction hankers. If Dasein, as it were, sinks into an addiction then there is not merely an addiction present-at-hand, but the entire structure of care has been modified. Dasein has become blind, and puts all possibilities into the service of the addiction. Read more at location 6638
(Note: survival of fittest, self) the urge ‘to live’ is something ‘towards’ which one is impelled, and it brings the impulsion along with it of its own accord.(3) It is ‘towards this at any price’. The urge seeks to crowd out [verdrängen] other possibilities. Here too the Being-ahead-of-oneself is one that is inauthentic, Read more at location 6643
42. Confirmation of the Existential Interpretation of Dasein as Care in terms of Dasein’s Pre-ontological Way of Interpreting Itself
That understanding of Being which lies in Dasein itself, expresses itself pre-ontologically. The document which we are about to cite should make plain that our existential Interpretation is not a mere fabrication, but that as an ontological ‘construction’ it is well grounded and has been sketched out beforehand in elemental ways. There is an ancient fable in which Dasein’s interpretation of itself as ‘care’ has been embedded:(v) ...Burdach has shown that the fable of Cura (which has come down to us as No. 220 of the Fables of Hyginus) was taken over from Herder by Goethe and worked up for the second part of his Faust.
...‘Once when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. ‘Care’ asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While ‘Care’ and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo’, for it is made out of humus (earth).’(1) Read more at location 6725
Seneca writes in his last epistle (Ep. 124): ‘Among the four existent Natures (trees, beasts, man, and God), the latter two, which alone are endowed with reason, are distinguished in that God is immortal while man is mortal. Now when it comes to these, the good of the one, namely God, is fulfilled by his Nature; but that of the other, man, is fulfilled by care (cura): Read more at location 6756
43. Dasein, Worldhood, and Reality
The question of the meaning of Being becomes possible at all only if there is something like an understanding of Being. Understanding of Being belongs to the kind of Being which the entity called “Dasein” possesses. Read more at location 6797
the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of entities within-the-world. Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are present-at-hand. “Being” acquires the meaning of “Reality”.(viii) Substantiality becomes the basic characteristic of Being. Corresponding to this way in which the understanding of Being has been diverted, even the ontological understanding of Dasein moves into the horizon of this conception of Being. Like any other entity, Dasein too is present-at-hand as Real. In this way “Being in general” acquires the meaning of “Reality”. Read more at location 6811
(a) Reality as a problem of Being, and whether the ‘External World’ can be Proved Read more at location 6836
In so far as Reality has the character of something independent and “in itself”, the question of the meaning of “Reality” becomes linked with that of whether the Real can be independent ‘of consciousness’ or whether there can be a transcendence of consciousness into the ‘sphere’ of the Real. Read more at location 6843
the world is disclosed essentially along with the Being of Dasein; with the disclosedness of the world, the ‘world’ has in each case been discovered too. Of course entities within-the-world in the sense of the Real as merely present-at-hand, are the very things that can remain concealed. But even the Real can be discovered only on the basis of a world which has already been disclosed. And only on this basis can anything Real still remain hidden. The question of the ‘Reality’ of the ‘external world’ gets raised without any previous clarification of the phenomenon of the world as such. Factically, the ‘problem of the external world’ is constantly oriented with regard to entities within-the-world (Things and Objects). So these discussions drift along into a problematic which it is almost impossible to disentangle ontologically. Read more at location 6862
We must in the first instance note explicitly that Kant uses the term ‘Dasein’ to designate that kind of Being which in the present investigation we have called ‘presence-at-hand’. ‘Consciousness of my Dasein’ means for Kant a consciousness of my Being-present-at-hand in the sense of Descartes. When Kant uses the term ‘Dasein’ he has in mind the Being-present-at-hand of consciousness just as much as the Being-present-at-hand of Things. Read more at location 6875
The proof for the ‘Dasein of Things outside of me’ is supported by the fact that both change and performance belong, with equal primordiality, to the essence of time. My own Being-present-at-hand—that is, the Being-present-at-hand of a multiplicity of representations, which has been given in the inner sense—is a process of change which is present-at-hand. To have a determinate temporal character [Zeitbestimmtheit], however, presupposes something present-at-hand which is permanent. But this cannot be ‘in us’, ‘for only through what is thus permanent can my Dasein in time be determined’.(xii) Thus if changes which are present-at-hand have been posited empirically ‘in me’, it is necessary that along with these something permanent which is present-at-hand should be posited empirically ‘outside of me’. What is thus permanent is the condition which makes it possible for the changes ‘in me’ to be present-at-hand. The experience of the Being-in-time of representations posits something changing ‘in me’ and something permanent ‘outside of me’, and it posits both with equal primordiality. Read more at location 6886
It seems at first as if Kant has given up the Cartesian approach of positing a subject one can come across in isolation. But only in semblance. That Kant demands any proof at all for the ‘Dasein of Things outside of me’ shows already that he takes the subject—the ‘in me’—as the starting-point for this problematic. Moreover, his proof itself is then carried through by starting with the empirically given changes ‘in me’. For only ‘in me’ is ‘time’ experienced, and time carries the burden of the proof. Time provides the basis for leaping off into what is ‘outside of me’ in the course of the proof. Read more at location 6896
The Being-Present-at-hand-together of the physical and the psychical is completely different ontically and ontologically from the phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. Read more at location 6908
**** demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and ‘outside’ of it a ‘world’ is to be proved as present-at-hand. It is not that the proofs are inadequate, but that the kind of Being of the entity which does the proving and makes requests for proofs has not been made definite enough. This is why a demonstration that two things which are present-at-hand are necessarily present-at-hand together, can give rise to the illusion that something has been proved, or even can be proved, about Dasein as Being-in-the-world. If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it. Read more at location 6924
(Note: schroedinger: subject and object are only one) Even if one should invoke the doctrine that the subject must presuppose and indeed always does unconsciously presuppose the presence-at-hand of the ‘external world’, one would still be starting with the construct of an isolated subject. The phenomenon of Being-in-the-world is something that one would no more meet in this way than one would by demonstrating that the physical and the psychical are present-at-hand together. With such presuppositions, Dasein always comes ‘too late’; for in so far as it does this presupposing as an entity (and otherwise this would be impossible), it is, as an entity, already in a world. ‘Earlier’ than any presupposition which Dasein makes, or any of its ways of behaving, is the ‘a priori’ character of its state of Being as one whose kind of Being is care. Read more at location 6944
(Note: subject and object unity. "falling" as discrimination; theological, genesis) The ‘problem of Reality’ in the sense of the question whether an external world is present-at-hand and whether such a world can be proved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences lead to inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question. Our task is not to prove that an ‘external world’ is present-at-hand or to show how it is present-at-hand, but to point out why Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, has the tendency to bury the ‘external world’ in nullity ‘epistemologically’ before going on to prove it.(1) The reason for this lies in Dasein’s falling and in the way in which the primary understanding of Being has been diverted to Being as presence-at-hand—a diversion which is motivated by that falling itself. Read more at location 6957
realism holds that the Reality of the ‘world’ not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof. In the existential assertion both of these positions are directly negated. But what distinguishes this assertion from realism altogether, is the fact that in realism there is a lack of ontological understanding. Indeed realism tries to explain Reality ontically by Real connections of interaction between things that are Real. As compared with realism, idealism, no matter how contrary and untenable it may be in its results, has an advantage in principle, provided that it does not misunderstand itself as ‘psychological’ idealism. If idealism emphasizes that Being and Reality are only ‘in the consciousness’, this expresses an understanding of the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities. But as long as idealism fails to clarify what this very understanding of Being means ontologically, or how this understanding is possible, or that it belongs to Dasein’s state of Being, the Interpretation of Reality which idealism constructs is an empty one. Yet the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities and that Reality is possible only in the understanding of Being, does not absolve us from inquiring into the Being of consciousness, of the res cogitans itself.
...If what the term “idealism” says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. Read more at location 6997
(b) Reality as an Ontological Problem
The experiencing of resistance—that is, the discovery of what is resistant to one’s endeavours—is possible ontologically only by reason of the disclosedness of the world. The character of resisting is one that belongs to entities with-the-world. Read more at location 7067
“Reality” gets defined as “the character of resisting”, we must notice two things: first, that this is only one character of Reality among others; second, that the character of resisting presupposes necessarily a world which has already been disclosed. Resistance characterizes the ‘external world’ in the sense of entities within-the-world, but never in the sense of the world itself. ‘Consciousness of Reality’ is itself a way of Being-in-the-world. Every ‘problematic of the external world’ comes back necessarily to this basic existential phenomenon. Read more at location 7082
(c) Reality and Care
The ‘Nature’ by which we are ‘surrounded’ is, of course, an entity within-the-world; but the kind of Being which it shows belongs neither to the ready-to-hand nor to what is present-at-hand as ‘Things of Nature’. No matter how this Being of ‘Nature’ may be Interpreted, all the modes of Being of entities within-the-world are founded ontologically upon the worldhood of the world, and accordingly upon the phenomenon of Being-in-the world. From this there arises the insight that among the modes of Being of entities within-the-world, Reality has no priority, and that Reality is a kind of Being which cannot even characterize anything like the world or Dasein in a way which is ontologically appropriate. Read more at location 7099
**** (Note: i.e. a "sound" requires a hearer, and "the world" requires Being to be experienced (though it may also be said that it IS that experience)) the fact that Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is. Of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible), ‘is there’ Being.(1) When Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself’. In such a case this sort of thing can be neither understood nor not understood. In such a case even entities within-the-world can neither be discovered nor lie hidden. In such a case it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not. Read more at location 7107
********* the substance of man is existence. Read more at location 7129
44. Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth
From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being. Parmenides was the first to discover the Being of entities, and he ‘identified’ Being with the perceptive understanding of Being: Read more at location 7139
(a) The Traditional Conception of Truth, and its Ontological Foundations
There are three theses which characterize the way in which the essence of truth has been traditionally taken and the way it is supposed to have been first defined: (1) that the ‘locus’ of truth is assertion (judgment); (2) that the essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgment with its object; (3) that Aristotle, the father of logic, not only has assigned truth to the judgment as its primordial locus but has set going the definition of “truth” as ‘agreement’.(1) Read more at location 7198
‘If truth consists in the agreement of knowledge with its object, then this object must thus be distinguished from others; for knowledge is false if it does not agree with the object to which it is related, even if it should contain something which might well be valid for other objects.’(xxxii) And in the introduction to the “Transcendental Dialectic” Kant states: ‘Truth and illusion are not in the object so far as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it so far as it is thought.’(xxxiii) Of course this characterization of truth as ‘agreement’, adaequatio, ὁμοίωσις, is very general and empty. Read more at location 7232
According to the general opinion, what is true is knowledge. But knowledge is judging. In judgment one must distinguish between the judging as a Real psychical process, and that which is judged, as an ideal content. Read more at location 7268
The entity itself which one has in mind shows itself just as it is in itself; that is to say, it shows that it, in its selfsameness, is just as it gets pointed out in the assertion as being—just as it gets uncovered as being. Representations do not get compared, either among themselves or in relation to the Real Thing. What is to be demonstrated is not an agreement of knowing with its object, still less of the psychical with the physical; but neither is it an agreement between ‘contents of consciousness’ among themselves. What is to be demonstrated is solely the Being-uncovered [Entdeckt-sein] of the entity itself—that entity in the “how” of its uncoveredness. This uncoveredness is confirmed when that which is put forward in the assertion (namely the entity itself) shows itself as that very same thing. “Confirmation” signifies the entity’s showing itself in its selfsameness.(xxxiv) The confirmation is accomplished on the basis of the entity’s showing itself. This is possible only in such a way that the knowing which asserts and which gets confirmed is, in its ontological meaning, itself a Being towards Real entities, and a Being that uncovers. Read more at location 7319
To say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ (ἀπόφανσις) in its uncoveredness. The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering*. Thus truth has by no means the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the Object). Being-true as Being-uncovering*, is in turn ontologically possible only on the basis of Being-in-the-world. This latter phenomenon, which we have known as a basic state of Dasein, is the foundation for the primordial phenomenon of truth. Read more at location 7346
(b) The Primordial Phenomenon of Truth and the Derivative Character of the Traditional Conception of Truth
(Note: Logos) And is it accidental that in one of the fragments of Heracleitus(xxxv)—the oldest fragments of philosophical doctrine in which the λόγος is explicitly handled—the phenomenon of truth in the sense of uncoveredness (unhiddenness) as we have set it forth, shows through? Those who are lacking in understanding are contrasted with the λόγος, and also with him who speaks that λόγος, and understands it. The λόγος is φράζων όπως ἔχει: it tells bow entities comport themselves. But to those who are lacking in understanding, what they do remains hidden—λανθάνει. They forget it (ἐπιλανθάνονται); that is, for them it sinks back into hiddenness. Thus to the λόγος belongs unhiddennes—ἀ-λήθεια. To translate this word as ‘truth’, and, above all, to define this expression conceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover up the meaning of what the Greeks made ‘self-evidently’ basic for the terminological use of ἀλήθεια as a pre-philosophical way of understanding it. Read more at location 7367
(Note: wants to avoid mysticism and remain concrete; ironic that Wittgenstein is both more logically concrete and far more mystical about the indefinable) In citing such evidence we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism. Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems. Read more at location 7383
the ‘definition’ of “truth” as “uncoveredness” and as “Being-uncovering”, it not a mere explanation of a word. Among those ways in which Dasein comports itself there are some which we are accustomed in the first instance to call ‘true’; from the analysis of these our definition emerges. Being-true as Being-uncovering*, is a way of Being for Dasein. What makes this very uncovering possible must necessarily be called ‘true’ in a still more primordial sense. The most primordial phenomenon of truth is first shown by the existential-ontological foundations of uncovering. Uncovering is a way of Being for Being-in-the-world. Read more at location 7392
disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its “there”. Disclosedness is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, and discourse, and pertains equiprimordially to the world, to Being-in, and to the Self. Read more at location 7407
If we accept the results we have obtained earlier, the full existential meaning of the principle that ‘Dasein is in the truth’ can be restored by the following considerations:
(1) To Dasein’s state of Being, disclosedness in general essentially belongs. It embraces the whole of that structure-of-Being which has become explicit through the phenomenon of care. To care belongs not only Being-in-the-world but also Being alongside entities within-the-world. The uncoveredness of such entities is equiprimordial with the Being of Dasein and its disclosedness.
(2) To Dasein’s state of Being belongs thrownness; indeed it is constitutive for Dasein’s disclosedness. In thrownness is revealed that in each case Dasein, as m y Dasein and t h i s Dasein, is already in a definite world and alongside a definite range of definite entities within-the-world.(1) Disclosedness is essentially factical.
(3) To Dasein’s state of Being belongs projection—disclosive Being towards its potentiality-for-Being. As something that understands, Dasein can understand itself in terms of the ‘world’ and Others or in terms of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.(2) The possibility just mentioned means that Dasein discloses itself to itself in and as its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This authentic disclosedness shows the phenomenon of the most primordial truth in the mode of authenticity. The most primordial, and indeed the most authentic, disclosedness in which Dasein, as a potentiality-for-Being, can be, is the truth of existence.
(4) To Dasein’s state of Being belongs falling. Proximally and for the most part Dasein is lost in its ‘world’. Its understanding, as a projection upon possibilities of Being, has diverted itself thither. Its absorption in the “they” signifies that it is dominated by the way things are publicly interpreted. That which has been uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.
...Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of Being is such that it is in ‘untruth’. This term, like the expression ‘falling’, is here used ontologically. If we are to use it in existential analysis, we must avoid giving it any ontically negative ‘evaluation’. Read more at location 7456
The upshot of our existential-ontological Interpretation of the phenomenon of truth is
(1) that truth, in the most primordial sense, is Dasein’s disclosedness, to which the uncoveredness of entities within-the-world belongs; and
(2) that Dasein is equiprimordially both in the truth and in untruth. Read more at location 7485
Though it is founded upon Dasein’s disclosedness, the existential phenomenon of uncoveredness becomes a property which is present-at-hand but in which there still lurks a relational character; and as such a property, it gets broken asunder into a relationship which is present-at-hand. Truth as disclosedness and as a Being-towards uncovered entities—a Being which itself uncovers—has become truth as agreement between things which are present-at-hand within-the-world. And thus we have pointed out the ontologically derivative character of the traditional conception of truth. Read more at location 7548
(Note: resembles Wittgenstein in that LW says "facts" may be true or false; Here Heidegger says assertion requires something be either true of false) Not only is it wrong to invoke Aristotle for the thesis that the genuine ‘locus’ of truth lies in the judgment; even in its content this thesis fails to recognize the structure of truth. Assertion is not the primary ‘locus’ of truth. On the contrary, whether as a mode in which uncoveredness is appropriated or as a way of Being-in-the-world, assertion is grounded in Dasein’s uncovering, or rather in its disclosedness. The most primordial ‘truth’ is the ‘locus’ of assertion; it is the ontological condition for the possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up. Read more at location 7586
(c) The Kind of Being which Truth Possesses, and the Presupposition of Truth
**** (Note: akin to observer effect; true and untrue have no meaning without Dasein) ‘There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein i s and so long as Dasein i s. Entities are uncovered only when Dasein is; and only as long as Dasein is, are they disclosed. Newton’s laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth whatever—these are true only as long as Dasein is. Before there was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more. For in such a case truth as disclosedness, uncovering, and uncoveredness, cannot be. Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’; it does not follow that they were false, or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness were any longer possible. Read more at location 7600
**** (Note: Dasein akin to God) That there are ‘eternal truths’ will not be adequately proved until someone has succeeded in demonstrating that Dasein has been and will be for all eternity. As long as such a proof is still outstanding, this principle remains a fanciful contention which does not gain in legitimacy from having philosophers commonly ‘believe’ it. Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s Being. Read more at location 7611
(Note: he seems to leaves room for 'direct' uncovering, seeing 'thing-in-itself'...) If one Interprets ‘subjective’ as ‘left to the subject’s discretion’, then it certainly does not. For uncovering, in the sense which is most its own, takes asserting out of the province of ‘subjective’ discretion, and brings the uncovering Dasein face to face with the entities themselves. And only because ‘truth’, as uncovering, is a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein, can it be taken out of the province of Dasein’s discretion. Even the ‘universal validity’ of truth is rooted solely in the fact that Dasein can uncover entities in themselves and free them. Read more at location 7617
**** ‘We’ presuppose truth because ‘we’, being in the kind of Being which Dasein possesses, are ‘in the truth’. We do not presuppose it as something ‘outside’ us and ‘above’ us, towards which, along with other ‘values’, we comport ourselves. It is not we who presuppose ‘truth’; but it is ‘truth’ that makes it at all possible ontologically for us to be able to be such that we ‘presuppose’ anything at all. Truth is what first makes possible anything like presupposing. Read more at location 7631
We must presuppose truth. Dasein itself, as in each case m y Dasein and t h i s Dasein, must be; and in the same way the truth, as Daseins disclosedness, must be. This belongs to Dasein’s essential thrownness into the world. Has Dasein as itself ever decided freely whether it wants to come into ‘Dasein’ or not, and will it ever be able to make such a decision? ‘In itself’ it is quite incomprehensible why entities are to be uncovered, why truth and Dasein must be. The usual refutation of that scepticism which denies either the Being of ‘truth’ or its cognizability, stops half way. What it shows, as a formal argument, is simply that if anything gets judged, truth has been presupposed. Read more at location 7648
The ideas of a ‘pure “I” ’and of a ‘consciousness in general’ are so far from including the a priori character of ‘actual’ subjectivity that the ontological characters of Dasein’s facticity and its state of Being are either passed over or not seen at all. Rejection of a ‘consciousness in general’ does not signify that the a priori is negated, any more than the positing of an idealized subject guarantees that Dasein has an a priori character grounded upon fact. Both the contention that there are ‘eternal truths’ and the jumbling together of Dasein’s phenomenally grounded ‘ideality’ with an idealized absolute subject, belong to those residues of Christian theology within philosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded. Read more at location 7681
**** The Being of truth is connected primordially with Dasein. And only because Dasein i s as constituted by disclosedness (that is, by understanding), can anything like Being be understood; only so is it possible to understand Being. Being (not entities) is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is. Being and truth ‘are’ equiprimordially. Read more at location 7689
DIVISION TWO: DASEIN AND TEMPORALITY
45. The Outcome of the Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein, and the Task of a Primordial Existential Interpretation of this Entity
The ‘end’ of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, to existence—limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. Read more at location 7798
conscience, as a phenomenon of Dasein, demands, like death, a genuinely existential Interpretation. Such an Interpretation leads to the insight that Dasein has an authentic potentiality-for-Being in that it wants to have a conscience. But this is an existential possibility which tends, from the very meaning of its Being, to be made definite in an existential way by Being-towards-death. Read more at location 7808
But the primordial ontological basis for’ Dasein’s existentiality is temporality. In terms of temporality, the articulated structural totality of Dasein’s Being as care first becomes existentially intelligible.
...In terms of temporality, it then becomes intelligible why Dasein is, and can be, historical in the basis of its Being, and why, as historical, it can develop historiology. Read more at location 7825
**** Within the horizon of time the projection of a meaning of Being in general can be accomplished. Read more at location 7835
I: DASEIN’S POSSIBILITY OF BEING-A-WHOLE, AND BEING-TOWARDS-DEATH
46. The Seeming Impossibility of Getting Dasein’s Being-a-whole into our Grasp Ontologically and Determining its Character Read more at location 7859
**** care is that which forms the totality of Dasein’s structural whole. Yet the primary item in care is the ‘ahead-of-itself’, and this means that in every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself. ‘As long as it is’, right to its end, it comports itself towards its potentiality-for-Being. Read more at location 7868
The ‘ahead-of-itself’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding,(1) which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’. It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled Read more at location 7873
(Note: it IS the picture and cannot then be a part of it) The reason for the impossibility of experiencing Dasein ontically as a whole which i s [als seiendes Gauzes], and therefore of determining its character ontologically in its Being-a-whole, does not lie in any imperfection of our cognitive powers. The hindrance lies rather in the Being of this entity. That which cannot ever be such as any experience which pretends to get Dasein in its grasp would claim, eludes in principle any possibility of getting experienced at all.(2) Read more at location 7887
47. The Possibility of Experiencing the Death of Others, and the Possibility of Getting a Whole Dasein into our Grasp
**** When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its “there”. By its transition to no-longer-Dasein [Nichtmehr-dasein], it gets lifted right out of the possibility of experiencing this transition and of understanding it as something experienced. Surely this sort of thing is denied to any particular Dasein in relation to itself. But this makes the death of Others more impressive. In this way a termination [Beendigung] of Dasein becomes ‘Objectively’ accessible. Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others. In that case, the fact that death has been thus ‘Objectively’ given must make possible an ontological delimitation of Dasein’s totality. Read more at location 7923
***** Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this loss, however, we have no way of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man ‘suffers’. The dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just ‘there alongside’.(2) Read more at location 7959
**** (Note: Self as Other and vice versa) The great multiplicity of ways of Being-in-the-world in which one person can be represented by another, not only extends to the more refined modes of publicly being with one another, but is likewise germane to those possibilities of concern which are restricted within definite ranges, and which are cut to the measure of one’s occupation, one’s social status, or one’s age. But the very meaning of such representation is such that it is always a representation ‘in’ [“in” und “bei”] something—that is to say, in concerning oneself with something. But proximally and for the most part everyday Dasein understands itself in terms of that with which it is customarily concerned. ‘One is’ what one does. In relation to this sort of Being (the everyday manner in which we join with one another in absorption in the ‘world’ of our concern) representability is not only quite possible but is even constitutive for our being with one another. Here one Dasein can and must, within certain limits, ‘be’ another Dasein. Read more at location 7983
48. That which is Still Outstanding; the End; Totality
When, for instance, a fruit is unripe, it “goes towards” its ripeness. In this process of ripening, that which the fruit is not yet, is by no means pieced on as something not yet present-at-hand. The fruit brings itself to ripeness, and such a bringing of itself is a characteristic of its Being as a fruit. Nothing imaginable which one might contribute to it, would eliminate the unripeness of the fruit, if this entity did not come to ripeness of its own accord. When we speak of the “not-yet” of the unripeness, we do not have in view something else which stands outside [aussenstehendes], and which—with utter indifference to the fruit—might be present-at-hand in it and with it. What we have in view is the fruit itself in its specific kind of Being.
...Correspondingly, as long as any Dasein is, it too is already its “not-yet”.(iii) That which makes up the ‘lack of totality’ in Dasein, the constant “ahead-of-itself”, is neither something still outstanding in a summative togetherness, nor something which has not yet become accessible. It is a “not-yet” which any Dasein, as the entity which it is, has to be.
...With ripeness, the fruit fulfils itself.(2) But is the death at which Dasein arrives, a fulfilment in this sense? With its death, Dasein has indeed ‘fulfilled its course’. But in doing so, has it necessarily exhausted its specific possibilities? Rather, are not these precisely what gets taken away from Dasein? Even ‘unfulfilled’ Dasein ends. On the other hand, so little is it the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein may well have passed its ripeness before the end.(3) For the most part, Dasein ends in unfulfilment, or else by having disintegrated and been used up. Read more at location 8126
49. How the Existential Analysis of Death is Distinguished from Other Possible Interpretations of this Phenomenon
***** Death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life.
...Within the ontology of Dasein, which is superordinate to an ontology of life, the existential analysis of death is, in turn, subordinate to a characterization of Dasein’s basic state. The ending of that which lives we have called ‘perishing’. Dasein too ‘has’ its death, of the kind appropriate to anything that lives; and it has it, not in ontical isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being. In so far as this is the case, Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish. We designate this intermediate phenomenon as its “demise”.(1) Let the term “dying” stand for that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death.(2) Accordingly we must say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein, however, can demise only as long as it is dying. Read more at location 8220
If “death” is defined as the ‘end’ of Dasein—that is to say, of Being-in-the-world—this does not imply any ontical decision whether ‘after death’ still another Being is possible, either higher or lower, or whether Dasein ‘lives on’ or even ‘outlasts’ itself and is ‘immortal’. Nor is anything decided ontically about the ‘other-worldly’ and its possibility, Read more at location 8247
50. Preliminary Sketch of the Existential-ontological Structure of Death
Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of no-longer being-able-to-be-there.(2) If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone.(3) This ownmost non-relational(4) possibility is at the same time the uttermost one. Read more at location 8326
**** As potentiality-for-Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unüberholbare]. As such, death is something distinctively impending. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is essentially disclosed to itself, and disclosed, indeed, as ahead-of-itself. Read more at location 8346
51. Being-towards-death and the Everydayness of Dasein
In setting forth average everyday Being-towards-death, we must take our orientation from those structures of everydayness at which we have earlier arrived. In Being-towards-death, Dasein comports itself towards itself as a distinctive potentiality-for-Being. But the Self of everydayness is the “they”.(ix) The “they” is constituted by the way things have been publicly interpreted, which expresses itself in idle talk.(2) Read more at location 8391
**** (Note: Dasein never sees its own death) People who are no acquaintances of ours are ‘dying’ daily and hourly. ‘Death’ is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the inconspicuousness(x) characteristic of what is encountered in an everyday fashion. The “they” has already stowed away [gesichert] an interpretation for this event. It talks of it in a ‘fugitive’ manner, either expressly or else in a way which is mostly inhibited, as if to say, “One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us.”(1) The analysis of the phrase ‘one dies’ reveals unambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to everyday Being-towards-death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for oneself and is therefore no threat. The expression ‘one dies’ spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the “they”. In Dasein’s public way of interpreting, it is said that ‘one dies’, because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that “in no case is it I myself”, for this “one” is the “nobody”.(2) ‘Dying’ is levelled off to an occurrence which reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular. Read more at location 8413
Dasein puts itself in the position of losing itself in the “they” as regards a distinctive potentiality-for-Being which belongs to Dasein’s ownmost Self. The “they” gives its approval, and aggravates the temptation to cover up from oneself one’s ownmost Being-towards-death.(xi) This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that, in Being with one another, the ‘neighbours’ often still keep talking the ‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern. Such ‘solicitude’ is meant to ‘console’ him. Read more at location 8427
It is already a matter of public acceptance that ‘thinking about death’ is a cowardly fear, a sign of insecurity on the part of Dasein, and a sombre way of fleeing from the world. The “they” does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death. The dominance of the manner in which things have been publicly interpreted by the “they”, has already decided what state-of-mind is to determine our attitude towards death. In anxiety in the face of death, Dasein is brought face to face with itself as delivered over to that possibility which is not to be outstripped. The “they” concerns itself with transforming this anxiety into fear in the face of an oncoming event. Read more at location 8457
What is ‘fitting’ [Was sich... “gehört”] according to the unuttered decree of the “they”, is indifferent tranquillity as to the ‘fact’ that one dies. The cultivation of such a ‘superior’ indifference alienates Dasein from its ownmost non-relational potentiality-for-Being. Read more at location 8462
in the face of death, Dasein’s everydayness attests that the very “they” itself already has the definite character of Being-towards-death, even when it is not explicitly engaged in ‘thinking about death’. Even in average everydayness, this ownmost potentiality-for-Being, which is non-relational and not to be outstripped, is constantly an issue for Dasein. This is the case when its concern is merely in the mode of an untroubled indifference towards the uttermost possibility of existence.(1) Read more at location 8471
52. Everyday Being-towards-the-end, and the Full Existential Conception of Death
in the publicness of the “they”, Dasein seems to ‘talk’ only of this ‘empirical’ certainty of death, nevertheless at bottom Dasein does not exclusively or primarily stick to those cases of death which merely occur. In evading its death, even everyday Being-towards-the-end is indeed certain of its death in another way than it might itself like to have true on purely theoretical considerations. This ‘other way’ is what everydayness for the most part veils from itself: Everydayness does not dare to let itself become transparent in such a manner. We have already characterized the every-day state-of-mind which consists in an air of superiority with regard to the certain ‘fact’ of death—a superiority which is ‘anxiously’ concerned while seemingly free from anxiety. In this state-of-mind, everydayness acknowledges a ‘higher’ certainty than one which is only empirical. One knows about the certainty of death, and yet ‘is’ not authentically certain of one’s own. The falling everydayness of Dasein is acquainted with death’s certainty, and yet evades Being-certain. But in the light of what it evades, this very evasion attests phenomenally that death must be conceived as one’s ownmost possibility, non-relational, not to be outstripped, and—above all—certain. Read more at location 8568
The full existential-ontological conception of death may now be defined as follows: death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility—non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of this entity towards its end. Read more at location 8592
Defining the existential structure of Being-towards-the-end helps us to work out a kind of Being of Dasein in which Dasein, as Dasein, can be a whole. The fact that even everyday Dasein already is towards its end—that is to say, is constantly coming to grips with its death, though in a ‘fugitive’ manner—shows that this end, conclusive [abschliessende] and determinative for Being-a-whole, is not something to which Dasein ultimately comes only in its demise. In Dasein, as being towards its death, its own uttermost “not-yet” has already been included—that “not-yet” which all others lie ahead of.(1) Read more at location 8596
53. Existential Projection of an Authentic Being-towards-death
**** The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual. The more unveiledly this possibility gets understood, the more purely does the understanding penetrate into it as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing. Read more at location 8697
The non-relational character of death, as understood in anticipation, individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It makes manifest that all Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-Being is the issue. Dasein can be authentically itself only if it makes this possible for itself of its own accord. Read more at location 8742
Anticipation utterly individualizes Dasein, and allows it, in this individualization of itself, to become certain of the totality of its potentiality-for-Being. For this reason, anxiety as a basic state-of-mind belongs to such a self-understanding of Dasein on the basis of Dasein itself.(2) Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety. This is attested unmistakably, though ‘only’ indirectly, by Being-towards-death as we have described it, when it perverts anxiety into cowardly fear and, in surmounting this fear, only makes known its own cowardliness in the face of anxiety. Read more at location 8815
We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious. Read more at location 8830
II: DASEIN’S ATTESTATION OF AN AUTHENTIC POTENTIALITY-FOR-BEING, AND RESOLUTENESS
54. The Problem of How an Authentic Existentiell Possibility is Attested.
because Dasein is lost in the “they”, it must first find itself. In order to find itself at all, it must be ‘shown’ to itself in its possible authenticity. In terms of its possibility, Dasein is already a potentiality-for-Being-its-Self, but it needs to have this potentiality attested. In the following Interpretation we shall claim that this potentiality is attested by that which, in Dasein’s everyday interpretation of itself, is familiar to us as the “voice of conscience” [Stimme Read more at location 8892
The ontological analysis of conscience on which we are thus embarking, is prior to any description and classification of Experiences of conscience, and likewise lies outside of any biological ‘explanation’ of this phenomenon (which would mean its dissolution). But it is no less distant from a theological exegesis of conscience or any employment of this phenomenon for proofs of God or for establishing an ‘immediate’ consciousness of God. Read more at location 8909
**** Conscience gives us ‘something’ to understand; it discloses. By characterizing this phenomenon formally in this way, we find ourselves enjoined to take it back into the disclosedness of Dasein. This disclosedness, as a basic state of that entity which we ourselves are, is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, falling, and discourse. If we analyse conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call [Ruf]. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-guilty.(1) Read more at location 8922
55. The Existential-ontological Foundations of Conscience
56. The Character of Conscience as a Call
When the they-self is appealed to, it gets called to the Self.(1) But it does not get called to that Self which can become for itself an ‘object’ on which to pass judgment, nor to that Self which inertly dissects its ‘inner life’ with fussy curiosity, nor to that Self which one has in mind when one gazes ‘analytically’ at psychical conditions and what lies behind them. The appeal to the Self in the they-self does not force it inwards upon itself, so that it can close itself off from the ‘external world’. The call passes over everything like this and disperses it, so as to appeal solely to that Self which, notwithstanding, is in no other way than Being-in-the-world. Read more at location 9058
57. Conscience as the Call of Care
In conscience Dasein calls itself. This understanding of the caller may be more or less awake in the factical hearing of the call. Ontologically, however, it is not enough to answer that Dasein is at the same time both the caller and the one to whom the appeal is made. Read more at location 9120
the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me.(2) These phenomenal findings are not to be explained away. After all, they have been taken as a starting-point for explaining the voice of conscience as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated. If the interpretation continues in this direction, one supplies a possessor for the power thus posited,(3) or one takes the power itself as a person who makes himself known—namely God. On the other hand one may try to reject this explanation in which the caller is taken as an alien manifestation of such a power, and to explain away the conscience ‘biologically’ at the same time. Read more at location 9126
In its “who”, the caller is definable in a ‘worldly’ way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the “not-at-home”—the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the “they”, lost in the manifold ‘world’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the “nothing”? ‘It’ calls, even though it gives the concernfully curious ear nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling and talked about in public. Read more at location 9176
**** Conscience manifests itself as the call of care: the caller is Dasein, which, in its thrownness (in its Being-already-in), is anxious(1) about its potentiality-for-Being. The one to whom the appeal is made is this very same Dasein, summoned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being (ahead of itself...). Dasein is falling into the “they” (in Being-already-alongside the world of its concern), and it is summoned out of this falling by the appeal. The call of conscience—that is, conscience itself—has its ontological possibility in the fact that Dasein, in the very basis of its Being, is care. Read more at location 9202
the ‘universal’ conscience becomes exalted to a ‘world-conscience’, which still has the phenomenal character of an ‘it’ and ‘nobody’, yet which speaks—there in the individual ‘subject’—as this indefinite something. Read more at location 9222
58. Understanding the Appeal, and Guilt
ordinary significations of “Being-guilty” as ‘having debts to someone’ and ‘having responsibility for something’ can go together and define a kind of behaviour which we call ‘making oneself responsible’; that is, by having the responsibility for having a debt, one may break a law and make oneself punishable.(3) Read more at location 9330
Dasein’s Being is care. It comprises in itself facticity (thrownness), existence (projection), and falling. As being, Dasein is something that has been thrown; it has been brought into its “there”, but not of its own accord. As being, it has taken the definite form of a potentiality-for-Being which has heard itself and has devoted itself to itself, but not as itself.(1) As existent, it never comes back behind its thrownness in such a way that it might first release this ‘that-it-is-and-has-to-be’ from its Being-its-Self and lead it into the “there”. Thrownness, however, does not lie behind it as some event which has happened to Dasein, which has factually befallen and fallen loose from Dasein again;(2) on the contrary, as long as Dasein is, Dasein, as care, is constantly its ‘that-it-is’. To this entity it has been delivered over, and as such it can exist solely as the entity which it is; and as this entity to which it has been thus delivered over, it is, in its existing, the basis of its potentiality-for-Being. Although it has not laid that basis itself, it reposes in the weight of it, which is made manifest to it as a burden by Dasein’s mood. And how is Dasein this thrown basis? Only in that it projects itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown. The Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over Being-a-basis. To be its own thrown basis is that potentiality-for-Being which is the issue for care. Read more at location 9403
Not only is the projection, as one that has been thrown, determined by the nullity of Being-a-basis; as projection it is itself essentially null. This does not mean that it has the ontical property of ‘inconsequentiality’ or ‘worthlessness’; what we have here is rather something existentially constitutive for the structure of the Being of projection. The nullity we have in mind belongs to Dasein’s Being-free for its existentiell possibilities. Freedom, however, is only in the choice of o n e possibility—that is, in tolerating one’s not having chosen the others and one’s not being able to choose them. Read more at location 9445
**** (Note: all is vanity. existence itself as meaning.) Existential nullity has by no means the character of a privation, where something is lacking in comparison with an ideal which has been set up but does not get attained in Dasein; rather, the Being of this entity is already null as projection; and it is null in advance of [vor] any of the things which it can project and which it mostly attains.(1) Read more at location 9456
Wanting to have a conscience is rather the most primordial existentiell presupposition for the possibility of factically coming to owe something. In understanding the call, Dasein lets its ownmost Self take action in itself [in sich handeln] in terms of that potentiality-for-Being which it has chosen. Only so can it be answerable [verantwortlich]. Read more at location 9549
59. The Existential Interpretation of the Conscience, and the Way Conscience is Ordinarily Interpreted
In so far as talk about a ‘good’ conscience arises from everyday Dasein’s way of experiencing the conscience, everyday Dasein merely betrays thereby that even when it speaks of the ‘bad’ conscience it basically fails to reach the phenomenon. For the idea of the ‘bad’ conscience is oriented factically by that of the ‘good’ conscience. The everyday interpretation keeps within the dimension of concernfully reckoning up ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ [“Unschuld”] and balancing them off. This, then, is the horizon within which the voice of conscience gets ‘Experienced’. Read more at location 9663
60. The Existential Structure of the Authentic Potentiality-for-Being which is Attested in the Conscience
In the call one’s constant Being-guilty is represented, and in this way the Self is brought back from the loud idle talk which goes with the common sense of the “they”. Thus the mode of Articulative discourse which belongs to wanting to have a conscience, is one of reticence. Keeping silent has been characterized as an essential possibility of discourse.(ix) Anyone who keeps silent when he wants to give us to understand something, must ‘have something to say’. In the appeal Dasein gives itself to understand its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This calling is therefore a keeping-silent. The discourse of the conscience never comes to utterance. Only in keeping silent does the conscience call; Read more at location 9770
The fact that “they”, who hear and understand nothing but loud idle talk, cannot ‘report’ any call, is held against the conscience on the subterfuge that it is ‘dumb’ and manifestly not present-at-hand. With this kind of interpretation the “they” merely covers up its own failure to hear the call and the fact that its ‘hearing’ does not reach very far. Read more at location 9780
This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience—this reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety—we call “resoluteness”. Read more at location 9788
**** Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating “I”. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self right into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others. Read more at location 9831
Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let the Others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates. When Dasein is resolute, it can become the ‘conscience’ of Others. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another—not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the “they” and in what “they” want to undertake. Read more at location 9836
The term “irresoluteness’ merely expresses that phenomenon which we have Interpreted as a Being-surrendered to the way in which things have been prevalently interpreted by the “they”. Dasein, as a they-self, gets ‘lived’ by the common-sense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon anything but which has always made its decision.(2) “Resoluteness” signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the “they”. The irresoluteness of the “they” remains dominant notwithstanding, but it cannot impugn resolute existence. Read more at location 9855
III: DASEIN’S AUTHENTIC POTENTIALITY-FOR-BEING-A-WHOLE, AND TEMPORALITY AS THE ONTOLOGICAL MEANING OF CARE
61. A Preliminary Sketch of the Methodological Step from the Definition of Dasein’s Authentic Being-a-whole to the Laying-bare of Temporality as a Phenomenon
Ontologically, Dasein is in principle different from everything that is present-at-hand or Real. Its ‘subsistence’ is not based on the substantiality of a substance but on the ‘Self-subsistence’ of the existing Self, whose Being has been conceived as care.(1) The phenomenon of the Self—a phenomenon which is included in care—needs to be defined existentially in a way which is primordial and authentic, in contrast to our preparatory exhibition of the inauthentic they-self. Along with this, we must establish what possible ontological questions are to be directed towards the ‘Self’, if indeed it is neither substance nor subject. Read more at location 10025
Temporality gets experienced in a phenomenally primordial way in Dasein’s authentic Being-a-whole, in the phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness. If temporality makes itself known primordially in this, then we may suppose that the temporality of anticipatory resoluteness is a distinctive mode of temporality. Temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself.(2) The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality. Read more at location 10034
62. Anticipatory Resoluteness as the Way in which Dasein’s Potentiality-for-Being-a-whole has Existentiell Authenticity
We have conceived death existentially as what we have characterized as the possibility of the impossibility of existence—that is to say, as the utter nullity of Dasein. Death is not “added on” to Dasein at its ‘end’; but Dasein, as care, is the thrown (that is, null) basis for its death. The nullity by which Dasein’s Being is dominated primordially through and through, is revealed to Dasein itself in authentic Being-towards-death. Read more at location 10123
**** When the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the “they” is revealed. Resoluteness brings Dasein back to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self. When one has an understanding Being-towards-death—towards death as one’s ownmost possibility—one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent. Read more at location 10139
63. The Hermeneutical Situation at which we have Arrived for Interpreting the Meaning of the Being of Care; and the Methodological Character of the Existential Analytic in General
The way which we have so far pursued in the analytic of Dasein has led us to a concrete demonstration of the thesis(v) which was put forward just casually at the beginning—that the entity which in every case we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is farthest. The reason for this lies in care itself. Our Being alongside the things with which we concern ourselves most closely in the ‘world’—a Being which is falling—guides the everyday way in which Dasein is interpreted, and covers up ontically Dasein’s authentic Being, so that the ontology which is directed towards this entity is denied an appropriate basis. Read more at location 10264
Dasein always understands itself factically in definite existentiell possibilities, even if its projects stem only from the common sense of the “they”. Whether explicitly or not, whether appropriately or not, existence is somehow understood too. There are some things which every ontical understanding ‘includes’, even if these are only pre-ontological—that is to say, not conceived theoretically or thematically. Every ontologically explicit question about Dasein’s Being has had the way already prepared for it by the kind of Being which Dasein has. Read more at location 10294
**** (Note: fundamental nature of self is to exist, like yhvh) the preparatory analysis of the everydayness that lies closest to us has been carried out as far as the first conceptual definition of “care”. This latter phenomenon has enabled us to get a more precise grasp of existence and of its relations to facticity and falling. And defining the structure of care has given us a basis on which to distinguish ontologically between existence and Reality for the first time.(vi) This has led us to the thesis that the substance of man is existence.(vii) Read more at location 10343
there already lurks a definite though unpretentious ontological ‘content’, which—like the idea of Reality, which has been distinguished from this—‘presupposes’ an idea of Being in general. Only within the horizon of this idea of Being can the distinction between existence and Reality be accomplished. Surely, in both of them what we have in view is Being. Read more at location 10348
**** (Note: proof of existence is circular) does this pre-supposing have the character of an understanding projection, in such a manner indeed that the Interpretation by which such an understanding gets developed, will let that which is to be interpreted put itself into words for the very first time, so that it may decide of its own accord whether, as the entity which it is, it has that state of Being for which it has been disclosed in the projection with regard to its formal aspects?(1) Is there any other way at all by which an entity can put itself into words with regard to its Being? We cannot ever ‘avoid’ a ‘circular’ proof in the existential analytic, because such an analytic does not do any proving at all by the rules of the ‘logic of consistency’. What common sense wishes to eliminate in avoiding the ‘circle’, on the supposition that it is measuring up to the loftiest rigour of scientific investigation, is nothing less than the basic structure of care. Because it is primordially constituted by care, any Dasein is already ahead of itself. Read more at location 10367
**** (Note: schroedinger) Like all research, the research which wants to develop and conceptualize that kind of Being which belongs to existence, is itself a kind of Being which disclosive Dasein possesses; Read more at location 10376
Yet the ‘charge of circularity’ itself comes from a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein. Something like a projection, even an ontological one, still remains for the common sense of our concernful absorption in the “they”; but it necessarily seems strange to us, because common sense barricades itself against it ‘on principle’. Common sense concerns itself, whether ‘theoretically’ or ‘practically’, Read more at location 10388
**** (Note: into mysticism, akin to Wittgenstein. consciousness is focused on fallenness and misses the splendor of existence itself) Being is already understood, even if it has not been conceptualized. Common sense misunderstands understanding. And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as ‘violent’ anything that lies beyond the reach of its understanding, or any attempt to go out so far. Read more at location 10393
**** (Note: excellent on self re: world) When one talks of the ‘circle’ in understanding, one expresses a failure to recognize two things: (1) that understanding as such makes up a basic kind of Dasein’s Being, and (2) that this Being is constituted as care. To deny the circle, to make a secret of it, or even to want to overcome it, means finally to reinforce this failure. We must rather endeavour to leap into the ‘circle’, primordially and wholly, so that even at the start of the analysis of Dasein we make sure that we have a full view of Dasein’s circular Being. If, in the ontology of Dasein, we ‘take our departure’ from a worldless “I” in order to provide this “I” with an Object and an ontologically baseless relation to that Object, then we have ‘presupposed’ not too much, but too little. If we make a problem of ‘life’, and then just occasionally have regard for death too, our view is too short-sighted. The object we have taken as our theme is artificially and dogmatically curtailed if ‘in the first instance’ we restrict ourselves to a ‘theoretical subject’, in order that we may then round it out ‘on the practical side’ by tacking on an ‘ethic’. Read more at location 10396
understanding-of-Being which prevails proximally and for the most part, conceives Being in the sense of presence-at-hand, and so covers up the primordial phenomenon of truth.(ix) If, however, ‘there is’ Being only in so far as truth ‘is’, and if the understanding of Being varies according to the kind of truth, then truth which is primordial and authentic must guarantee the understanding of the Being of Dasein and of Being in general. The ontological ‘truth’ of the existential analysis is developed on the ground of the primordial existentiell truth. However, the latter does not necessarily need the former. The most primordial and basic existential truth, for which the problematic of fundamental ontology strives in preparing for the question of Being in general, is the disclosedness of the meaning of the Being of care. Read more at location 10411
64. Care and Selfhood
The structure of care, however, seems to be precisely where the attempt to grasp the whole of Dasein as a phenomenon has foundered. The “ahead-of-itself” presented itself as a “not-yet”. But when the “ahead-of-itself” which had been characterized as something still outstanding, was considered in genuinely existential manner, it revealed itself as Being-towards-the-end—something which, in the depths of its Being, every Dasein is. Read more at location 10430
How can Dasein exist as a unity in the ways and possibilities of its Being which we have mentioned? Manifestly, it can so exist only in such a way that it is itself this Being in its essential possibilities—that in each case I am this entity. The ‘I’ seems to ‘hold together’ the totality of the structural whole. In the ‘ontology’ of this entity, the ‘I’ and the ‘Self’ have been conceived from the earliest times as the supporting ground (as substance or subject). Even in its preparatory characterization of everydayness, our analytic has already come up against the question of Dasein’s “who”. It has been shown that proximally and for the most part Dasein is not itself but is lost in the they-self which is an existentiell modification of the authentic Self. Read more at location 10452
To clarify the existentiality of the Self, we take as our ‘natural’ point of departure Dasein’s everyday interpretation of the Self. In saying “I”, Dasein expresses itself about ‘itself’. Read more at location 10467
The content of this expression is regarded as something utterly simple. In each case, it just stands for me and nothing further. Also, this ‘I’, as something simple, is not an attribute of other Things; it is not itself a predicate, but the absolute ‘subject’. What is expressed and what is addressed in saying “I”, is always met as the same persisting something. Read more at location 10469
The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts. In the ‘I’, ‘nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts’. ‘Consciousness in itself (is) not so much a representation... as it is a form of representation in general.’(xvii) The ‘I think’ is ‘the form of apperception, which clings to every experience and precedes it’.(xviii) Read more at location 10491
**** The “I” is rather the subject of logical behaviour, of binding together. ‘I think’ means ‘I bind together’. All binding together is an ‘I bind together’. In any taking-together or relating, the “I” always underlies—the ὑποκείμενον. The subjectum is therefore ‘consciousness in itself’, not a representation but rather the ‘form’ of representation. That is to say, the “I think” is not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented. Read more at location 10498
Kant’s analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the “I” to a substance; for another thing, he holds fast to the “I” as ‘I think’. Nevertheless, he takes this “I” as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject characterizes not the Selfhood of the “I” q u a Self, but the selfsameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand. To define the “I” ontologically as “subject” means to regard it as something always present-at-hand. The Being of the “I” is understood as the Reality of the res cogitans.(xix) Read more at location 10515
In saying “I”, Dasein expresses itself as Being-in-the-world. But does saying “I” in the everyday manner have itself in view as being-in-the-world [in-der-Welt-seiend]? Here we must make a distinction. When saying “I”, Dasein surely has in view the entity which, in every case, it is itself. The everyday interpretation of the Self, however, has a tendency to understand itself in terms of the ‘world’ with which it is concerned. When Dasein has itself in view ontically, it fails to see itself in relation to the kind of Being of that entity which it is itself. And this holds especially for the basic state of Dasein, Being-in-the-world.(xxi) Read more at location 10566
**** It is motivated by Dasein’s falling; for as falling, it flees in the face of itself into the “they”.(1) When the “I” talks in the ‘natural’ manner, this is performed by the they-self.(2) What expresses itself in the ‘I’ is that Self which, proximally and for the most part, I am not authentically. When one is absorbed in the everyday multiplicity and the rapid succession [Sich-jagen] of that with which one is concerned, the Self of the self-forgetful Read more at location 10578
The they-self keeps on saying “I” most loudly and most frequently because at bottom it is not authentically itself and evades its authentic potentiality-for-Being. If the ontological constitution of the Self is not to be traced back either to an “I”-substance or to a ‘subject’, but if, on the contrary, the everyday fugitive way in which we keep on saying “I” must be understood in terms of our authentic potentiality-for-Being, then the proposition that the Self is the basis of care and constantly present-at-hand, is one that still does not follow. Read more at location 10598
The constancy of the Self, in the double sense of steadiness and steadfastness, is the authentic counter-possibility to the non-Self-constancy which is characteristic of irresolute falling.(2) Existentially, “Self-constancy” signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness. The ontological structure of such resoluteness reveals the existentiality of the Self’s Selfhood. Read more at location 10605
Care does not need to be founded in a Self. But existentiality, as constitutive for care, provides the ontological constitution of Dasein’s Self-constancy, to which there belongs, in accordance with the full structural content of care, its Being-fallen factically into non-Self-constancy. When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. This phenomenon is clarified by Interpreting the meaning of care; and it is as care that Dasein’s totality of Being has been defined. Read more at location 10631
65. Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care
Dasein is either authentically or inauthentically disclosed to itself as regards its existence. In existing, Dasein understands itself; and in such a way, indeed, that this understanding does not merely get something in its grasp, but makes up the existentiell Being of its factical potentiality-for-Being. The Being which is disclosed is that of an entity for which this Being is an issue. The meaning of this Being—that is, of care—is what makes care possible in its Constitution; and it is what makes up primordially the Being of this potentiality-for-Being. The meaning of Dasein’s Being is not something free-floating which is other than and ‘outside of’ itself, but is the self-understanding Dasein itself. Read more at location 10688
we must hold ourselves aloof from all those significations of ‘future’, ‘past’, and ‘Present’ which thrust themselves upon us from the ordinary conception of time. This holds also for conceptions of a ‘time’ which is ‘subjective’ or ‘Objective’, ‘immanent’ or ‘transcendent’. Inasmuch as Dasein understands itself in a way which, proximally and for the most part, is inauthentic, we may suppose that ‘time’ as ordinarily understood does indeed represent a genuine phenomenon, but one which is derivative [ein abkünftiges]. It arises from inauthentic temporality, which has a source of its own. The conceptions of ‘future’, ‘past’ and ‘Present’ have first arisen in terms of the inauthentic way of understanding time. Read more at location 10767
Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling, and in this way constitutes primordially the totality of the structure of care. The items of care have not been pieced together cumulatively any more than temporality itself has been put together ‘in the course of time’ [“mit der Zeit”] out of the future, the having been, and the Present. Temporality ‘is’ not an entity at all. It is not, but it temporalizes itself. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid saying, ‘Temporality “is”... the meaning of care’, Read more at location 10832
Temporality is the primordial ‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself. We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the Present, the “ecstases” of temporality.(2) Temporality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from itself; its essence is a process of temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases. What is characteristic of the ‘time’ which is accessible to the ordinary understanding, consists, among other things, precisely in the fact that it is a pure sequence of “nows”, Read more at location 10843
Only because primordial time is finite can the ‘derived’ time temporalize itself as infinite. In the order in which we get things into our grasp through the understanding, the finitude of time does not become fully visible until we have exhibited ‘endless time’ so that these may be contrasted. Read more at location 10920
66. Dasein’s Temporality and the Tasks Arising Therefrom of Repeating the Existential Analysis in a more Primordial Manner Read more at location 10941
entities within-the-world become accessible as ‘being in time’. We call the temporal attribute of entities within-the-world “within-time-ness” [die Inner zeitkeit]. The kind of ‘time’ which is first found ontically in within-time-ness, becomes the basis on which the ordinary traditional conception of time takes form. But time, as within-time-ness, arises from an essential kind of temporalizing of primordial temporality. The fact that this is its source, tells us that the time ‘in which’ what is present-at-hand arises and passes away, is a genuine phenomenon of time; it is not an externalization of a ‘qualitative time’ into space, as Bergson’s Interpretation of time—which is ontologically quite indefinite and inadequate—would have us believe. Read more at location 10986
IV: TEMPORALITY AND EVERYDAYNESS
67. The Basic Content of Dasein’s Existential Constitution, and a Preliminary Sketch of the Temporal Interpretation of it
**** (Note: toward mysticism) The ontological source of Dasein’s Being is not ‘inferior’ to what springs from it, but towers above it in power from the outset; in the field of ontology, any ‘springing-from’ is degeneration. If we penetrate to the ‘source’ ontologically, we do not come to things which are ontically obvious for the ‘common understanding’; but the questionable character of everything obvious opens up for us. Read more at location 11026
68. The Temporality of Disclosedness in General
Care has been characterized with regard to its temporal meaning, but only in its basic features. To exhibit its concrete temporal Constitution, means to give a temporal Interpretation of the items of its structure, taking them each singly: understanding, state-of-mind, falling, and discourse. Every understanding has its mood. Every state-of-mind is one in which one understands. The understanding which one has in such a state-of-mind has the character of falling. The understanding which has its mood attuned in falling, Articulates itself with relation to its intelligibility in discourse. Read more at location 11065
(a) The Temporality of Understanding
If the term “understanding” is taken in a way which is primordially existential, it means to be projecting(2) towards a potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which any Dasein exists. Read more at location 11083
(Note: care has temporality (and death) included in its premises) As care, Dasein is essentially ahead of itself. Proximally and for the most part, concernful Being-in-the-world understands itself in terms of that with which it is concerned. Inauthentic understanding(2) projects itself upon that with which one can concern oneself; or upon what is feasible, urgent, or indispensable in our everyday business. Read more at location 11114
This way of Being-alongside is the Present—the “waiting-towards”;(1) this ecstatical mode reveals itself if we adduce for comparison this very same ecstasis, but in the mode of authentic temporality. To the anticipation which goes with resoluteness, there belongs a Present in accordance with which a resolution discloses the Situation. In resoluteness, the Present is not only brought back from distraction with the objects of one’s closest concern, but it gets held in the future and in having been. That Present which is held in authentic temporality and which thus is authentic itself, we call the “moment of vision”.(2) This term must be understood in the active sense as an ecstasis. It means the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern, but a rapture which is held in resoluteness.(3) The moment of vision is a phenomenon which in principle can not be clarified in terms of the “now” [dem Zetzt]. The “now” is a temporal phenomenon which belongs to time as within-time-ness: the “now” ‘in which’ something arises, passes away, or is present-at-hand. ‘In the moment of vision’ nothing can occur; but as an authentic Present or waiting-towards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.(iii) Read more at location 11142
(Note: note. ha) S. Kierkegaard is probably the one who has seen the existentiell phenomenon of the moment of vision with the most penetration; but this does not signify that he has been correspondingly successful in Interpreting it existentially. He clings to the ordinary conception of time, and defines the “moment of vision” with the help of “now” and “eternity”. Read more at location 11155
Just as expecting is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not v i c e v e r s a; for in the mode of having-forgotten, one’s having been ‘discloses’ primarily the horizon into which a Dasein lost in the ‘superficiality’ of its object of concern, can bring itself by remembering.(2) The awaiting which forgets and makes present is an ecstatical unity in its own right, in accordance with which inauthentic understanding temporalizes itself with regard to its temporality. Read more at location 11203
(b) The Temporality of State-of-mind
Understanding is grounded primarily in the future; one’s state-of-mind, however, temporalizes itself primarily in having been.(2) Moods temporalize themselves—that is, their specific ecstasis belongs to a future and a Present in such a way, indeed, that these equiprimordial ecstases are modified by having been. Read more at location 11239
Experiences which ‘colour’ one’s whole ‘psychical condition’. Anything which is observed to have the character of turning up and disappearing in a fleeting manner, belongs to the primordial constancy of existence. But all the same, what should moods have in common with ‘time’? That these ‘Experiences’ come and go, that they run their course ‘in time’, is a trivial thing to establish. Read more at location 11244
All we have to do is to demonstrate that except on the basis of temporality, moods are not possible in what they ‘signify’ in an existentiell way or in how they ‘signify’ it. Our temporal Interpretation will restrict itself to the phenomena of fear and anxiety, which we have already analysed in a preparatory manner. Read more at location 11252
Fear is a fearing in the face of something threatening—of something which is detrimental to Dasein’s factical potentiality-for-Being, Read more at location 11267
The character of having been is constitutive for the state-of-mind of anxiety; and bringing one face to face with repeatability is the specific ecstatical mode of this character. Read more at location 11348
Yet neither of these moods, fear and anxiety, ever ‘occurs’ just isolated in the ‘stream of Experiences’; each of them determines an understanding or determines itself in terms of one.(1) Read more at location 11376
Hope has sometimes been characterized as the expectation of a bonum futurum, to distinguish it from fear, which relates itself to a malum futurum. But what is decisive for the structure of hope as a phenomenon, is not so much the ‘futural’ character of that to which it relates itself but rather the existential meaning of hoping itself. Even here its character as a mood lies primarily in hoping as hoping for something for oneself [Für-sich-erhoffen]. Read more at location 11402
(c) The Temporality of Falling
Like the concept of sight, ‘seeing’ will not be restricted to awareness through ‘the eyes of the body’. Awareness in the broader sense lets what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand be encountered ‘bodily’ in themselves with regard to the way they look. Letting them be thus encountered is grounded in a Present. This Present gives us in general the ecstatical horizon within which entities can have bodily presence. Curiosity, however, does not make present the present-at-hand in order to tarry alongside it and understand it; it seeks to see only in order to see and to have seen. As this making-present which gets entangled in itself, curiosity has an ecstatical unity with a corresponding future and a corresponding having been. Read more at location 11443
(d) The Temporality of Discourse
Tenses, like the other temporal phenomena of language—‘aspects’ and ‘temporal stages’ [“Zeitstufen”]—do not spring from the fact that discourse expresses itself ‘also’ about ‘temporal’ processes, processes encountered ‘in time’. Nor does their basis lie in the fact that speaking runs its course ‘in a psychical time’. Discourse in itself is temporal, since all talking about…, of..., or to..., is grounded in the ecstatical unity of temporality. Aspects have their roots in the primordial temporality of concern, whether or not this concern relates itself to that which is within time. The problem of their existential-temporal structure cannot even be formulated with the help of the ordinary traditional conception of time, to which the science of language needs must have recourse.(xii) Read more at location 11546
Understanding is grounded primarily in the future (whether in anticipation or in awaiting). States-of-mind temporalize themselves primarily in having been (whether in repetition or in having forgotten). Falling has its temporal roots primarily in the Present (whether in making-present or in the moment of vision). All the same, understanding is in every case a Present which ‘is in the process of having been’. All the same, one’s state-of-mind temporalizes itself as a future which is ‘making present’. And all the same, the Present ‘leaps away’ from a future that is in the process of having been, or else it is held on to by such a future. Read more at location 11565
**** (Note: nature of time as unitary) in every ecstasis, temporality temporalizes itself as a whole; and this means that in the ecstatical unity with which temporality has fully temporalized itself currently, is grounded the totality of the structural whole of existence, facticity, and falling—that is, the unity of the care-structure. Read more at location 11570
Temporalizing does not signify that ecstases come in a ‘succession’. The future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the Present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been. Read more at location 11573
69. The Temporality of Being-in-the-world and the Problem of the Transcendence of the World
In care is grounded the full disclosedness of the “there”. Only by this clearedness is any illuminating or illumining, any awareness, ‘seeing’, or having of something, made possible. We understand the light of this clearedness only if we are not seeking some power implanted in us and present-at-hand, but are interrogating the whole constitution of Dasein’s-Being—namely, care—and are interrogating it as to the unitary basis for its existential possibility. Ecstatical temporality clears the “there” primordially. It is what primarily regulates the possible unity of all Dasein’s existential structures. Read more at location 11589
**** (Note: temporality is fundamental to Being) Our Interpretation of the temporality of Being alongside what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand within-the-world—Being alongside circumspectively as well as with theoretical concern—shows us at the same time how this temporality is already the advance condition for that possibility of Being-in-the-world in which Being alongside entities within-the-world is grounded. Read more at location 11610
(a) The Temporality of Circumspective Concern
Letting things be involved makes up the existential structure of concern. But concern, as Being alongside something, belongs to the essential constitution of care; and care, in turn, is grounded in temporality. If all this is so, then the existential condition of the possibility of letting things be involved must be sought in a mode of the temporalizing of temporality. Read more at location 11657
The awaiting of the “towards-which” is neither a considering of the ‘goal’ nor an expectation of the impendent finishing of the work to be produced. Read more at location 11675
when one is making present something ready-to-hand by awaiting, the possibility of one’s getting surprised by something is based upon one’s not awaiting something else which stands in a possible context of involvement with what one awaits. Read more at location 11733
(b) The Temporal Meaning of the Way in which Circumspective Concern becomes Modified into the Theoretical Discovery of the Present-at-hand Within-the-world
When in the course of existential ontological analysis we ask how theoretical discovery ‘arises’ out of circumspective concern, this implies already that we are not making a problem of the ontical history and development of science, or of the factical occasions for it, or of its proximate goals. In seeking the ontological genesis of the theoretical attitude, we are asking which of those conditions implied in Dasein’s state of Being are existentially necessary for the possibility of Dasein’s existing in the way of scientific research. This formulation of the question is aimed at an existential conception of science. This must be distinguished from the ‘logical’ conception which understands science with regard to its results and defines it as ‘something established on an interconnection of true propositions—that is, propositions counted as valid’. The existential conception understands science as a way of existence and thus as a mode of Being-in-the-world, which discovers or discloses either entities or Being. Yet a fully adequate existential Interpretation of science cannot be carried out until the meaning of Being and the ‘connection’ between Being and truth(xix) have been clarified in terms of the temporality of existence.(1) Read more at location 11771
Someone will hold that all manipulation in the sciences is merely in the service of pure observation—the investigative discovery and disclosure of the ‘things themselves’. ‘Seeing’, taken in the widest sense, regulates all ‘procedures’ and retains its priority. ‘To whatever kind of objects one’s knowledge may relate itself, and by whatever means it may do so, still that through which it relates itself to them immediately, and which all thinking as a means has as its goal (author’s italics) is intuition.(xxi) The idea of the intuitus has guided all Interpretation of knowledge from the beginnings of Greek ontology until today, whether or not that intuitus can be factically reached. Read more at location 11814
**** (Note: tautology of getting answers that justify question asked. nature of math, science, Wittgenstein) The classical example for the historical development of a science and even for its ontological genesis, is the rise of mathematical physics. What is decisive for its development does not lie in its rather high esteem for the observation of ‘facts’, nor in its ‘application’ of mathematics in determining the character of natural processes; it lies rather in the way in which Nature herself is mathematically projected. In this projection something constantly present-at-hand (matter) is uncovered beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may be guided by looking at those constitutive items in it which are quantitatively determinable (motion, force, location, and time). Only ‘in the light’ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection. The ‘grounding’ of ‘factual science’ was possible only because the researchers understood that in principle there are no ‘bare facts’. In the mathematical projection of Nature, moreover, what is decisive is not primarily the mathematical as such; what is decisive is that this projection discloses something that is a p r i o r i. Thus the paradigmatic character of mathematical natural science does not lie in its exactitude or in the fact that it is binding for ‘Every-man’; it consists rather in the fact that the entities which it takes as its theme are discovered in it in the only way in which entities can be discovered—by the prior projection of their state of Being. Read more at location 11923
The Articulation of the understanding of Being, the delimitation of an area of subject-matter (a delimitation guided by this understanding), and the sketching-out of the way of conceiving which is appropriate to such entities—all these belong to the totality of this projecting; and this totality is what we call “thematizing”. Its aim is to free the entities we encounter within-the-world, and to free them in such a way that they can ‘throw themselves against’(1) a pure discovering—that is, that they can become “Objects”. Thematizing Objectifies. It does not first ‘posit’ the entities, but frees them so that one can interrogate them and determine their character ‘Objectively’. Read more at location 11941
(c) The Temporal Problem of the Transcendence of the World
We have defined Dasein’s Being as “care”. The ontological meaning of “care” is temporality. We have shown that temporality constitutes the disclosedness of the “there”, and we have shown how it does so. In the disclosedness of the “there” the world is disclosed along with it. The unity of significance—that is, the ontological constitution of the world—must then likewise be grounded in temporality. The existential-temporal condition for the possibility of the world lies in the fact that temporality, as an ecstatical unity, has something like a horizon. Read more at location 11998
The world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality. It ‘is’, with the “outside-of-itself” of the ecstases, ‘there’. Read more at location 12024
**** (Note: if a tree falls in a forest...) If no Dasein exists, no world is ‘there’ either. Read more at location 12025
If the ‘subject’ gets conceived ontologically as an existing Dasein whose Being is grounded in temporality, then one must say that the world is ‘subjective’. But in that case, this ‘subjective’ world, as one that is temporally transcendent, is ‘more Objective’ than any possible ‘Object’. Read more at location 12049
70. The Temporality of the Spatiality that is Characteristic of Dasein
(Note: this must be crossed with relativity and quantum entanglement for development) Dasein’s specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality. On the other hand, the demonstration that this spatiality is existentially possible only through temporality, cannot aim either at deducing space from time or at dissolving it into pure time. If Dasein’s spatiality is ‘embraced’ by temporality in the sense of being existentially founded upon it, then this connection between them (which is to be clarified in what follows) is also different from the priority of time over space in Kant’s sense. Read more at location 12070
(Note: dasein as spirit. dualism) Dasein does not fill up a bit of space as a Real Thing or item of equipment would, so that the boundaries dividing it from the surrounding space would themselves just define that space spatially. Dasein takes space in; this is to be understood literally.(1) It is by no means just present-at-hand in a bit of space which its body fills up. In existing, it has already made room for its own leeway. It determines its own location in such a manner that it comes back from the space it has made room for to the ‘place’ which it has reserved.(2) To be able to say that Dasein is present-at-hand at a position in space, we must first take [auffassen] this entity in a way which is ontologically inappropriate. Nor does the distinction between the ‘spatiality’ of an extended Thing and that of Dasein lie in the fact that Dasein knows about space; for taking space in [das Raum-einnehmen] is so far from identical with a ‘representing’ of the spatial, that it is presupposed by it instead. Neither may Dasein’s spatiality be interpreted as an imperfection which adheres to existence by reason of the fatal ‘linkage of the spirit to a body’. On the contrary, because Dasein is ‘spiritual’, and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal Thing. Read more at location 12084
71. The Temporal Meaning of Dasein’s Everydayness
V: TEMPORALITY AND HISTORICALITY
72. Existential-ontological Exposition of the Problem of History
ALL our efforts in the existential analytic serve the one aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being(1) in general. Read more at location 12216
Even though many structures of Dasein when taken singly are still obscure, it seems that by casting light upon temporality as the primordial condition for the possibility of care, we have reached the primordial Interpretation of Dasein which we require. We have exhibited temporality with a view to Dasein’s authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole. We have then confirmed the temporal Interpretation of care by demonstrating the temporality of concernful Being-in-the-world. Our analysis of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole has revealed that in care is rooted an equiprimordial connectedness of death, guilt, and conscience. Read more at location 12226
It consists of a sequence of Experiences ‘in time’. But if one makes a more penetrating study of this way of characterizing the ‘connectedness’ in question, and especially of the ontological assumptions behind it, the remarkable upshot is that, in this sequence of Experiences, what is ‘really’ ‘actual’ is, in each case, just that Experience which is present-at-hand ‘in the current “now” ’, while those Experiences which have passed away or are only coming along, either are no longer or are not yet ‘actual’. Dasein traverses the span of time granted to it between the two boundaries, and it does so in such a way that, in each case, it is ‘actual’ only in the “now”, and hops, as it were, through the sequence of “flows” of its own ‘time’. Thus it is said that Dasein is ‘temporal’. In spite of the constant changing of these Experiences, the Self maintains itself throughout with a certain selfsameness. Opinions diverge as to how that which thus persists is to be defined, and how one is to determine what relation it may possibly have to the changing Experiences. The Being of this perseveringly changing connectedness of Experiences remains indefinite. But at bottom, whether one likes it or not, in this way of characterizing the connectedness of life, one has posited something present-at-hand ‘in time’, though something that is obviously ‘un-Thinglike’. Read more at location 12251
Dasein does not exist as the sum of the momentary actualities of Experiences which come along successively and disappear. Nor is there a sort of framework which this succession gradually fills up. For how is such a framework to be present-at-hand, where, in each case, only the Experience one is having ‘right now’ is ‘actual’,(1) and the boundaries of the framework—the birth which is past and the death which is only oncoming—lack actuality? At bottom, even in the ordinary way of taking the ‘connectedness of life’, one does not think of this as a framework drawn tense ‘outside’ of Dasein and spanning it round, but one rightly seeks this connectedness in Dasein itself. Read more at location 12266
Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch ‘of life’—one which is somehow present-at-hand—with the phases of its momentary actualities. It stretches itself along in such a way that its own Being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along. The ‘between’ which relates to birth and death already lies in the Being of Dasein. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein ‘is’ actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is ‘surrounded’ by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; Read more at location 12276
In temporality, however, the constitutive totality of care has a possible basis for its unity. Accordingly it is within the horizon of Dasein’s temporal constitution that we must approach the ontological clarification of the ‘connectedness of life’—that is to say, the stretching-along, the movement, and the persistence which are specific for Dasein. Read more at location 12287
the constancy of the Self, which we defined as the “who” of Dasein.(i) Self-constancy(3) is a way of Being of Dasein, and is therefore grounded in a specific temporalizing of temporality. Read more at location 12296
In analysing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not ‘temporal’ because it ‘stands in history’, but that, on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being. Read more at location 12340
73. The Ordinary Understanding of History, and Dasein’s Historizing
the historical as that which is past has also the opposite signification, when we say, “One cannot get away from history.” Here, by “history”, we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still having effects. Howsoever, the historical, as that which is past, is understood to be related to the ‘Present’ in the sense of what is actual ‘now’ and ‘today’, and to be related to it, either positively or privatively, in such a way as to have effects upon it. Thus ‘the past’ has a remarkable double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and in spite of that, it can still be present-at-hand ‘now’—for instance, the remains of a Greek temple. With the temple, a ‘bit of the past’ is still ‘in the present’. Read more at location 12386
Manifestly these ‘Things’ have altered. The gear has become fragile or worm-eaten ‘in the course of time’. But that specific character of the past which makes it something historical, does not lie in this transience,(1) which continues even during the Being-present-at-hand of the equipment in the museum. What, then, is past in this equipment? What were these ‘Things’ which today they are no longer? They are still definite items of equipment for use; but they are out of use. Read more at location 12427
Thus the historical character of the antiquities that are still preserved is grounded in the ‘past’ of that Dasein to whose world they belonged. But according to this, only ‘past’ Dasein would be historical, not Dasein ‘in the present’. Read more at location 12443
Dasein can never be past, not because Dasein is non-transient, but because it essentially can never be present-at-hand. Rather, if it is, it exists. A Dasein which no longer exists, however, is not past, in the ontologically strict sense; it is rather “having-been-there” [da-gewesen]. Read more at location 12446
74. The Basic Constitution of Historicality
The Being of Dasein has been defined as care. Care is grounded in temporality. Within the range of temporality, therefore, the kind of historizing which gives existence its definitely historical character, must be sought. Thus the Interpretation of Dasein’s historicality will prove to be, at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality. Read more at location 12488
Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and ‘provisional’ possibility driven out. Only Being-free for death, gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude. Once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one—those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly—and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate [Schicksals]. This is how we designate Dasein’s primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen. Read more at location 12530
**** (Note: values idea of fate) if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects.(vii) Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’(viii) goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein. Read more at location 12551
Only if death, guilt, conscience, freedom, and finitude reside together equiprimordially in the Being of an entity as they do in care, can that entity exist in the mode of fate; that is to say, only then can it be historical in the very depths of its existence. Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical “there” by shattering itself against death—that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision for ‘its time’. Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say, authentic historicality. Read more at location 12579
Authentic Being-towards-death—that is to say, the finitude of temporality—is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality. Read more at location 12632
From the phenomena of handing down and repeating, which are rooted in the future, it has become plain why the historizing of authentic history lies preponderantly in having been. But it remains all the more enigmatic in what way this historizing, as fate, is to constitute the whole ‘connectedness’ of Dasein from its birth to its death. Read more at location 12643
75. Dasein’s Historicality, and World-history
Proximally and for the most part, Dasein understands itself in terms of that which it encounters in the environment and that with which it is circumspectively concerned. This understanding is not just a bare taking cognizance of itself, such as accompanies all Dasein’s ways of behaving. Understanding signifies one’s projecting oneself upon one’s current possibility of Being-in-the-world; that is to say, it signifies existing as this possibility. Thus understanding, as common sense, constitutes even the inauthentic existence of the “they”. When we are with one another in public, our everyday concern does not encounter just equipment and work; it likewise encounters what is ‘given’ along with these: ‘affairs’, undertakings, incidents, mishaps. The ‘world’ belongs to everyday trade and traffic as the soil from which they grow and the arena where they are displayed. When we are with one another in public, the Others are encountered in activity of such a kind that one is ‘in the swim’ with it ‘oneself’. One is acquainted with it, discusses it, encourages it, combats it, retains it, and forgets it, but one always does so primarily with regard to what is getting done and what is ‘going to come of it’ [was... “herausspringt”]. We compute the progress which the individual Dasein has made—his stoppages, readjustments, and ‘output’; and we do so proximally in terms of that with which he is concerned—its course, its status, its changes, its availability. No matter how trivial it may be to allude to the way in which Dasein is understood in everyday common sense, ontologically this understanding is by no means transparent. Read more at location 12662
Indeed history is neither the connectedness of motions in the alterations of Objects, nor a free-floating sequence of Experiences which ‘subjects’ have had. Read more at location 12677
The historizing of history is the historizing of Being-in-the-world. Read more at location 12681
With the existence of historical Being-in-the-world, what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand have already, in every case, been incorporated into the history of the world. Read more at location 12684
Resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own Self. As resoluteness which is ready for anxiety, this loyalty is at the same time a possible way of revering the sole authority which a free existing can have—of revering the repeatable possibilities of existence. Read more at location 12765
76. The Existential Source of Historiology in Dasein’s Historicality.
the Objectivity of a science is regulated primarily in terms of whether that science can confront us with the entity which belongs to it as its theme, and can bring it, uncovered in the primordiality of its Being, to our understanding. In no science are the ‘universal validity’ of standards and the claims to ‘universality’ which the “they” and its common sense demand, less possible as criteria of ‘truth’ than in authentic historiology. Read more at location 12885
Accordingly this research as factical has many branches and takes for its object the history of equipment, of work, of culture, of the spirit, and of ideas. As handing itself down, history is, in itself, at the same time and in each case always in an interpretedness which belongs to it, and which has a history of its own; so for the most part it is only through traditional history that historiology penetrates to what has-been-there itself. Read more at location 12891
Thus the very prevalence of a differentiated interest even in the most remote and primitive cultures, is in itself no proof of the authentic historicality of a ‘time’. Read more at location 12899
Nietzsche recognized what was essential as to the ‘use and abuse of historiology for life’ in the second of his studies “out of season” (1874), and said it unequivocally and penetratingly. He distinguished three kinds of historiology—the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical—without explicitly pointing out the necessity of this triad or the ground of its unity. The threefold character of historiology is adumbrated in the historicality of Dasein. At the same time, this historicality enables us to understand to what extent these three possibilities must be united factically and concretely in any historiology which is authentic. Nietzsche’s division is not accidental. The beginning of his ‘study’ allows us to suppose that he understood more than he has made known to Read more at location 12906
**** (Note: neitzsche-esque) Dasein exists authentically as futural in resolutely disclosing a possibility which it has chosen. Coming back resolutely to itself it is, by repetition, open for the ‘monumental’ possibilities of human existence. Read more at location 12914
77. The Connection of the Foregoing Exposition of the Problem of Historicality with the Researches of Wilhelm Dilthey and the Ideas of Count Yorck
Everything centres in psychology, in which ‘life’ is to be understood in the historical context of its development and its effects, and understood as the way in which man, as the possible object of the humane sciences, and especially as the root of these sciences, is. Hermeneutics is the way this understanding enlightens itself; it is also the methodology of historiology, though only in a derivative form. Read more at location 12961
If one has an interest in understanding historicality, one is brought to the task of working out a ‘generic differentiation between the ontical and the Historical’. The fundamental aim of the ‘philosophy of life’(1) is tied up with this. Nevertheless, the formulation of the question needs to be radicalized in principle. How are we to get historicality into our grasp philosophically as distinguished from the ontical, and conceive it ‘categorially’, except by bringing both the ‘ontical’ and the ‘Historical’ into a more primordial unity, so that they can be compared and distinguished? Read more at location 13089
VI: TEMPORALITY AND WITHIN-TIME-NESS AS THE SOURCE OF THE ORDINARY CONCEPTION OF TIME
78. The Incompleteness of the Foregoing Temporal Analysis of Dasein
To demonstrate that temporality is constitutive for Dasein’s Being and how it is thus constitutive, we have shown that historicality, as a state-of-Being which belongs to existence, is ‘at bottom’ temporality. Read more at location 13120
(Note: logos as the reason of nature also seems to fit in here) In the development of this ordinary conception, there is a remarkable vacillation as to whether the character to be attributed to time is ‘subjective’ or ‘Objective’. Where time is taken as being in itself, it gets allotted pre-eminently to the ‘soul’ notwithstanding. And where it has the kind of character which belongs to ‘consciousness’, it still functions ‘Objectively’. In Hegel’s Interpretation of time both possibilities are brought to the point where, in a certain manner, they cancel each other out. Hegel tries to define the connection between ‘time’ and ‘spirit’ in such a manner as to make intelligible why the spirit, as history, ‘falls into time’. We seem to be in accord with Hegel in the results of the Interpretation we have given for Dasein’s temporality and for the way world-time belongs to it. Read more at location 13151
79. Dasein’s Temporality, and our Concern with Time
Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue. Essentially ahead of itself, it has projected itself upon its potentiality-for-Being before going on to any mere consideration of itself. In its projection it reveals itself as something which has been thrown. It has been thrownly abandoned to the ‘world’, and falls into it concernfully.(1) As care—that is, as existing in the unity of the projection which has been fallingly thrown—this entity has been disclosed as a “there”. As being with Others, it maintains itself in an average way of interpreting—a way which has been Articulated in discourse and expressed in language. Being-in-the-world has always expressed itself, and as Being alongside entities encountered within-the-world, it constantly expresses itself in addressing itself to the very object of its concern and discussing it. Read more at location 13172
The horizons which belong to the ‘now’, the ‘then’, and the ‘on that former occasion’, all have their source in ecstatical temporality; by reason of this, these horizons too have the character of datability as ‘today, when...’, ‘later on, when...’, and ‘earlier, when…’(4) Read more at location 13259
The manner in which the time we have ‘allowed’ ‘runs its course’, and the way in which concern more or less explicitly assigns itself that time, can be properly explained as phenomena only if, on the one hand, we avoid the theoretical ‘representation’ of a Continuous stream of “nows”, and if, on the other hand, the possible ways in which Dasein assigns itself time and allows itself time are to be conceived of as determined primarily in terms of how Dasein, in a manner corresponding to its current existence, ‘has’ its time. Read more at location 13306
The “there” is disclosed in a way which is grounded in Dasein’s own temporality as ecstatically stretched along, and with this disclosure a ‘time’ is allotted to Dasein; only because of this can Dasein, as factically thrown, ‘take’ its time and lose it. Read more at location 13324
80. The Time with which we Concern Ourselves, and Within-time-ness
public dating, in which everyone assigns himself his time, is one which everyone can ‘reckon’ on simultaneously; it uses a publicly available measure. This dating reckons with time in the sense of a measuring of time; and such measuring requires something by which time is to be measured—namely, a clock. This implies that along with the temporality of Dasein as thrown, abandoned to the ‘world’, and giving itself time, something like a ‘clock’ is also discovered—that is, something ready-to-hand which in its regular recurrence has become accessible in one’s making present awaitingly. The Being which has been thrown and is alongside the ready-to-hand is grounded in temporality. Temporality is the reason for the clock. Read more at location 13403
there must arise a more primordial understanding of the fact that the measurement of time—and this means also the explicit making-public of time as an object of concern—is grounded in the temporality of Dasein, and indeed in a quite definite temporalizing of that temporality. Comparison shows that for the ‘advanced’ Dasein the day and the presence of sunlight no longer have such a special function as they have for the ‘primitive’ Dasein on which our analysis of ‘natural’ time-reckoning has been based; for the ‘advanced’ Dasein has the ‘advantage’ of even being able to turn night into day. Similarly we no longer need to glance explicitly and immediately at the sun and its position to ascertain the time. The manufacture and use of measuring-equipment of one’s own permits one to read off the time directly by a clock produced especially for this purpose. Read more at location 13458
World-time, moreover, is also ‘more subjective’ than any possible subject; for it is what first makes possible the Being of the factically existing Self—that Being which, as is now well understood, is the meaning of care. ‘Time’ is present-at-hand neither in the ‘subject’ nor in the ‘Object’, neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’; and it ‘is’ ‘earlier’ than any subjectivity or Objectivity, because it presents the condition for the very possibility of this ‘earlier’. Has it then any ‘Being’? And if not, is it then a mere phantom, or is it something that has ‘more Being’ [“seiender”] than any possible entity? Read more at location 13571
81. Within-time-ness and the Genesis of the Ordinary Conception of Time
“For this is time: that which is counted in the movement which we encounter within the horizon of the earlier and later.”(vii) This definition may seem strange at first glance; but if one defines the existential-ontological horizon from which Aristotle has taken it, one sees that it is as ‘obvious’ as it at first seems strange, and has been genuinely derived. The source of the time which is thus manifest does not become a problem for Aristotle. His Interpretation of time moves rather in the direction of the ‘natural’ way of understanding Being. Read more at location 13614
The sequence of “nows” is taken as something that is somehow present-at-hand, for it even moves ‘i n t o time’.(1) We say: ‘In every “now” is now; in every “now” it is already vanishing.’ In every “now” the “now” is now and therefore it constantly has presence as something selfsame, even though in every “now” another may be vanishing as it comes along.(2) Yet as this thing which changes, it simultaneously shows its own constant presence. Thus even Plato, who directed his glance in this manner at time as a sequence of “flows” arising and passing away, had to call time “the image of eternity”: Read more at location 13669
The sequence of “nows” is uninterrupted and has no gaps. No matter how ‘far’ we proceed in ‘dividing up’ the “now”, it is always now. The continuity(3) of time is seen within the horizon of something which is indissolubly present-at-hand. Read more at location 13681
Dasein knows fugitive time in terms of its ‘fugitive’ knowledge about its death. In the kind of talk which emphasizes time’s passing away, the finite futurity of Dasein’s temporality is publicly reflected. And because even in talk about time’s passing away, death can remain covered up, time shows itself as a passing-away ‘in itself’. Read more at location 13765
The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of “nows” which passes away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein. The ordinary representation of time has its natural justification. It belongs to Dasein’s average kind of Being, and to that understanding of Being which proximally prevails. Thus proximally and for the most part, even history gets understood publicly as happening within-time.(1) Read more at location 13775
xv. Augustine, Confessiones XI, 26. [‘Hence it seemed to me that time is nothing else than an extendedness; but of what sort of thing it is an extendedness, I do not know; and it would be surprising if it were not an extendedness of the soul itself.’—Tr.) Read more at location 13830
82. A Comparison of the Existential-ontological Connection of Temporality, Dasein, and World-time, with Hegel’s Way of Taking the Relation between Time and Spirit
History, which is essentially the history of spirit, runs its course ‘in time’. Thus ‘the development of history falls into time’.(xvii)(1) Hegel is not satisfied, however, with averring that the within-time-ness of spirit is a Fact, but seeks to understand how it is possible for spirit to fall into time, which is ‘the non-sensuous sensuous’.(xviii) Read more at location 13840
(a) Hegel’s Conception of Time
Though Hegel puts space and time together, this does not happen simply because he has arranged them superficially one after the other: space, ‘and time also’. ‘Philosophy combats such an “also”.’ The transition from space to time does not signify that these are treated in adjoining paragraphs; rather ‘it is space itself that makes the transition’.(1) Space ‘is’ time; that is, time is the ‘truth’ of space.(xx) If space is thought dialectically in that which it is, then according to Hegel this Being of space unveils itself as time. How must space be thought? Space is ‘the unmediated indifference of Nature’s Being-outside-of-itself’.(xxi) This is a way of saying that space is the abstract multiplicity [Vielheit] of the points which are differentiable in it.(2) Space is not interrupted by these; but neither does it arise from them by way of joining them together. Read more at location 13872
even when he characterizes time as “becoming”, Hegel understands this “becoming” in an ‘abstract’ sense, which goes well beyond the representation of the ‘stream’ of time. Thus the most appropriate expression which the Hegelian treatment of time receives, lies in his defining it as “the negation of a negation” (that is, of punctuality). Here the sequence of “nows” has been formalized in the most extreme sense and levelled off in such a way that one can hardly go any farther.(xxx) Read more at location 13975
(b) Hegel’s Interpretation of the Connection between Time and Spirit
If Hegel can say that when spirit gets actualized, it accords with it to fall into time, with “time” defined as a negation of a negation, how has spirit itself been understood? The essence of spirit is the concept. By this Hegel understands not the universal which is intuited in a genus as the form of something thought, but rather the form of the very thinking which thinks itself: the conceiving of oneself—as the grasping of the not-I. Inasmuch as the grasping of the not-I presents a differentiation, there lies in the pure concept, as the grasping of this differentiation, a differentiation of the difference. Thus Hegel can define the essence of the spirit formally and apophantically as the negation of a negation. This ‘absolute negativity’ gives a logically formalized Interpretation of Descartes’ “cogito me cogitare rem”, wherein he sees the essence of the conscientia. The concept is accordingly a self-conceiving way in which the Self has been conceived; as thus conceived, the Self is authentically as it can be—that is free.(1) ‘The “I” is the pure concept itself, which as concept has come into Dasein.(xxxi) Read more at location 14028
****** (Note: nature of self) Thus the “I” is ‘universality’, but it is ‘individuality’(2) just as immediately. Read more at location 14039
The ‘progression’ of the spirit which actualizes itself in history, carries with it ‘a principle of exclusion’.(xxxiii) In this exclusion, however, that which is excluded does not get detached from the spirit; it gets surmounted. The kind of making-itself-free which overcomes and at the same time tolerates, is characteristic of the freedom of the spirit. Thus ‘progress’ never signifies a merely quantitative “more”, but is essentially qualitative and indeed has the quality of spirit. Read more at location 14056
Time is the pure Self-external, intuited, not grasped by the Self—the concept which is merely intuited.’(xxxvii) Thus by its very essence spirit necessarily appears in time. ‘World-history is therefore, above all, the interpretation of spirit in time, just as in space the idea interprets itself as Nature.’(xxxviii) The ‘exclusion’ which belongs to the movement of development harbours in itself a relationship to not-Being. This is time, understood in terms of the “now” which gives itself airs. Read more at location 14067
Hegel’s ‘construction’ was prompted by his arduous struggle to conceive the ‘concretion’ of the spirit. He makes this known in the following sentence from the concluding chapter of his Phenomenology of the Spirit: ‘Thus time appears as the very fate and necessity which spirit has when it is not in itself complete: the necessity of its giving self-consciousness a richer share in consciousness, of its setting in motion the immediacy of the “in-itself” (the form in which substance is in consciousness), or, conversely, of its realizing and making manifest the “in-itself” taken as the inward (and this is what first is inward)—that is, of vindicating it for its certainty of itself.’(xl) Read more at location 14099
‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality. Temporality temporalizes world-time, within the horizon of which ‘history’ can ‘appear’ as historizing within-time. Read more at location 14112
83. The Existential-temporal Analytic of Dasein, and the Question of Fundamental Ontology as to the Meaning of Being in General
In our considerations hitherto, our task has been to Interpret the primordial whole of factical Dasein with regard to its possibilities of authentic and inauthentic existing, and to do so in an existential-ontological manner in terms of its very basis. Temporality has manifested itself as this basis and accordingly as the meaning of the Being of care. Read more at location 14124
The distinction between the Being of existing Dasein and the Being of entities, such as Reality, which do not have the character of Dasein, may appear very illuminating; but it is still only the point of departure for the ontological problematic; it is nothing with which philosophy may tranquillize itself. It has long been known that ancient ontology works with ‘Thing-concepts’ and that there is a danger of ‘reifying consciousness’. But what does this “reifying” signify? Where does it arise? Read more at location 14143
How is this disclosive understanding of Being at all possible for Dasein? Can this question be answered by going back to the primordial constitution-of-Being of that Dasein by which Being is understood? The existential-ontological constitution of Dasein’s totality is grounded in temporality. Hence the ecstatical projection of Being must be made possible by some primordial way in which ecstatical temporality temporalizes. How is this mode of the temporalizing of temporality to be Interpreted? Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of Being? Read more at location 14163
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the “question of Being”. Read more at location 14174
Heidegger maintained that our way of questioning defines our nature. But philosophy, Western Civilization’s chief way of questioning, had in the process of philosophizing lost sight of the being it sought. Finding ourselves “always already” fallen in a world of presuppositions, we lose touch with what being was before its truth became “muddled”. Read more at location 14177