But Heidegger’s metaphysics focuses on a special kind of being, that characteristic of the human subject. His approach to philosophy forms part of what has come to be known as existentialism – an approach which starts not from the objective definitions or essences of things, but from the immediate predicament of the existing human being as he or she confronts the world (on this conception, as the famous slogan has it, ‘existence is prior to essence’1). Heidegger’s ontology thus gives pride of place to our own understanding of ourselves as existing beings in the world, ‘the understanding of oneself which we call existentiell’. Heidegger’s special (and untranslatable) name for the existing human subject is Dasein (literally ‘There-being’). We are, prior to all neat objective classifications and comfortable explanations, simply there; we find ourselves thrown into the world (Geworfenheit or ‘thrownness’ is, as Heidegger puts it, the ‘characteristic of Dasein’s being’).
This characterization of the human predicament is far from a comfortable one. In common with other existentialist philosophers, Heidegger traces the vulnerability and alienation, a kind of vertigo,2 that arises from the awareness of our raw existence in the world. But he also offers an account of our relationship to the world that is in a certain sense less alienating than seeing the world around us in terms of the abstract mathematical category of ‘extended substance’ (see above, extract 3). For Heidegger, the world is encountered in fundamentally human terms. In our dealings with the world we come across ‘gear’ or ‘tackle’ (Zeug): ‘equipment for writing, sewing, transport, measurement …’ We encounter a room ‘not as something between four walls (in the geometrical, spatial sense) but as equipment for residing’. The being of objects is thus a function of what Heidegger calls their ‘readiness-to-hand’ (e.g. a hammer exists not as an object with abstract physical properties, but in the context of its use and function, in terms of our human concerns). This practical slant to Heidegger’s ontology makes it importantly different from those rather austere earlier metaphysical systems which had aimed to delineate the objective essences of things in abstraction from the human perspective (compare extracts 3 and 4 above). To exist as a human being is, for Heidegger, already to be involved in specific projects and concerns; Heideggerian metaphysics thus turns out in the end to be not an abstract study of being, but rather an enterprise where understanding and valuing are inextricably intertwined. In coming to terms with the world we are drawn into a practical community of other involved agents, and thus into ‘solicitous concern for others’ – what Heidegger calls Sorge, or ‘Caring’.
The question of Being has today been forgotten. Even though in our time we deem it progressive to give our approval to ‘metaphysics’ again, it is here that we have been exempted from the exertions of a newly rekindled ‘battle of the giants concerning being’. Yet the question we are touching upon is not just any question. It is one which provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from then on as a theme for actual investigation …
Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way… 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 …
… 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’.
But such an inquiry itself – ontology taken in the widest sense without favouring any particular ontological directions or tendencies – requires a further clue. Ontological inquiry is indeed more primordial, as over against the ontical inquiry of the positive sciences. But it remains itself naïve and opaque if in its researches into the Being of entities it fails to discuss the different possible ways of Being in general. And the ontological task of the genealogy of the different possible ways of Being (which is not to be constructed deductively) is precisely of such a sort as to require that we first come to an understanding of ‘what we mean by this expression “Being”’.
The question of Being aims, therefore, at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences, and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its utmost aim if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task …
Science in general may be defined as the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions. This definition is not complete, nor does it reach the meaning of science. As ways in which man behaves, sciences have the manner of Being which this entity – man himself – possesses. This entity we denote by the term Dasein. Scientific research is not the only manner of Being which this entity can have, nor is it the one which lies closest. Moreover, Dasein itself has a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities, and it is worth our while to bring this to view in a provisional way…
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. 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 it 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 …
That kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call existence. And because we cannot define Dasein’s essence by citing a ‘what’ of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter, 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, we have chosen to designate this entity as ‘Dasein’, a term which is purely an expression of its Being.
Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting. The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself. The understanding of oneself which leads along this way we call existentiell. The question of existence is one of Dasein’s ontical ‘affairs’…
Sciences are ways of Being in which Dasein comports itself towards