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Dasein (pronounced DOT sayn) is Heidegger’s technical term for us. Our being. In ordinary German the word means “existence” but Heidegger prefers the literal meaning of “being-there.” For Heidegger, there isn’t an essence separate from our existence as in the tradition. Our essence – the who of Dasein – “lies in its existence” [Existenz] which means who Dasein is consists of the “possible ways for it to be” (42). Our existence over our lifetime defines who we are, and this is our essence.
Already you can see in Heidegger’s statement the idea that time has a role to play in our being. If you are your possible ways to be, then necessarily you have a past where you made choices. In the present, you see possibilities before you. And you face a future in which you can choose to be what you become. This is why Heidegger rejects the tradition’s view of being as substance. It is too limiting. Too static. What we are is something in flux formed over time.
“The characteristics to be found in this being are thus not present ‘attributes’ of an objectively present being… but rather possible ways for it to be, and only this” (41).
We’re used to thinking of ourselves as embodied beings, an ontic understanding of ourselves as “an objectively present being.” Heidegger is not denying that we have a body or anything like that. He’s just saying that our existence – the ontological understanding of the “who” of our being – is in the possible ways we can be rather than in any physical characteristics of our body or mind. We have freedom to choose from among our possibilities. If we choose for ourselves this is what Heidegger calls authentic being. On the other hand, it’s common for us to lose our being and become entangled in the world. This Heidegger calls inauthentic being.
What does it mean to lose ourselves and be inauthentic? I’ll get into it in detail later when I discuss “the others.” But Heidegger previews it for us in one of his early lectures. He describes inauthentic being as Dasein’s tendency to “live away from itself” (HCT, p. 156). For the most part we are “indifferent” to our possibilities of being. Our ontic selves–that person that stares back from the mirror–is what we believe ourselves to be. Heidegger calls this usual way of being our average everydayness. This doesn’t mean something lower, or in Heidegger’s words, something primitive. It’s just our “default setting” in the world while our ontological selves are covered over and remain hidden because we’re not used to looking:
“What is ontically nearest and familiar is ontologically the farthest, unrecognized and constantly overlooked in its ontological significance” (43).
What about this “there” [Da] of Dasein? What does it mean to say that I am “there” and not here? Basically being-there relates to the feeling we have that we are “thrown” [Geworfen] into and entangled with the world. In much of the secondary literature “thrownness” [Geworfenheit] is portrayed as being born into a caste, a family, a culture, a country, a people, a time and place, and so on. And that’s certainly true. But that’s just one part of it. Heidegger emphasizes thrownness as a disorienting condition in which the future is upon us in the present moment as we negotiate our way forward within a world.
“We shall call this character of being of Dasein which is veiled in its whence and whither, but in itself all the more openly disclosed, this ‘that it is’ the thrownness of this being into its there; it is thrown in such a way that it is the there as being-in-the-world” (135).
I’ll discuss being-in-the-world in the next post. Heidegger’s idea here is that for the most part we are unaware of our own existential (ontological) being. We can feel as if our life is not our own but is surrendered or “delivered over” [Überantwortung] to the world in which we have been thrown. This is a perfect segue to look next at how we are in the world.
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