What is Dasein according to Martin Heidegger?

Martin Heidegger was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, especially influential in the field of metaphysics as well as in currents such as hermeneutics or post-structuralism. His philosophy has also been fruitful in fields such as psychiatry, sociology or religious studies.

Controversial because of his relationship with the National Socialist regime, his philosophy is marked by the question of being. In his first original contributions to philosophy (which revolve around his best known and most important work, Being and Time, published in 1927), this question about being is part of an existential analysis of the human being, which is the entity in which, unlike things, this question about being occurs.

Heidegger, however, conceives the human being in essential relation to things and to the world, under the name of Dasein, his best known concept, which also supposes a theory of more original knowledge alternative to that of scientific objectivity (although not in necessary conflict with it). What was Heidegger's conception of the human being, radically linked to the world and its knowledge? ç

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From Neo-Kantianism to Being and Time

Heidegger began his philosophical production in the early years of the 20th century dominated, in Germany, by neo-Kantianism and the emergence of hermeneutics. Neo-Kantianism claimed, after the metaphysical abstractions of German idealism, a return to language and Kantian problems in questions of theory of knowledge. He investigated, for example, the question of knowledge and truth, which for neo-Kantians occurred in pure, universal and objective categories, especially in the field of science.

Faced with this conception, Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), begins to elaborate his phenomenology, which tries to explain, with the will of rigorous science, how things are given to consciousness. But he does not reduce this analysis to a foundation of science, but deals with how things present themselves in everyday life.

For Husserl, things do not present as a phenomenal manifestation of a thing in itself unknowable, as in the Kantians, but are intuited by consciousness as a phenomenon that shows its own essence. Questions such as truth or knowledge no longer require as much a foundation for mathematics or natural sciences as for a rigorous analysis of consciousness. It is this perspective that Heidegger will deepen, going beyond the limits of phenomenology itself.

Heidegger observes, in his questioning of being, that the categories of knowledge, which for neo-Kantians occur in a transcendental structure, objective and pure, identical for all people, actually occur in individual, existential and temporal life, that is, in the life of the conscience. How do these two seemingly contradictory spheres converge in consciousness?

Deepening Husserl's intuition, he realizes in Being and Timean existential analysis of the human being while this asks about being. That is, an analysis of Dasein. Let's look at it in more detail.

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Dasein and world

According to Heidegger, the question of being has been given throughout the history of philosophy under the prejudice of presence. That is, from Parmenides to the 20th century philosophers, being has been understood as something that is given as present in its entirety, as objective and complete. The paradigm of this way of thinking is found in the idea of ​​God as being omnipresent. With his existential analysis of Dasein, Heidegger intends to inaugurate a new way of understanding being and metaphysics.

To begin the analysis of it, as we have seen, Heidegger stops wondering about being from the theoretical point of view of the sciences and goes on to an analysis of consciousness in his everyday life. He thus intends to analyze the question of being in the most general way possible, without privileging any specific way of facing reality.

What Heidegger now observes is that, in the face of the conception of being as an objective presence already given, approach the analysis from the general point of view that he proposes in his analysis, the being appears as possibility. Contrary to what happens with things, the human being, being a Dasein, is possibility rather than reality. It is insofar as it can be. Dasein is like that, in its most fundamental form a project.

This power to be as a project is also always given in a context of things and people. The human being does not exist in a pure and isolated way rather, from the first moment he tries to understand and determine himself, he is already in relationship.

It is here that we can clearly see the meaning of the word Dasein: to be or to be here. It is about the human being insofar as he is inserted in a context of things and people, a world, which precedes him and which conditions his existence, his transcending himself as a project.

Philosophy linked to meanings

The being of things is not thus being present, but belonging to a totality of meanings that is the world. Things mean one another and this meaning depends in turn on the projecting of Dasein. That is to say, Dasein with its project founds the world in which individual things occur in turn.

We see that Dasein is not a clean slate, but that from the first moment it is attempted understand himself in his project, he already has a pre-understanding of the world provided by his context. Is this the structure of the circle of understanding, or hermeneutical circle, according to which knowledge always starts from a budget about the things that guides your question. To know is to delve into these questions.

Therefore, the being occurs in a process of knowledge that never ends and is never fully present. This in turn is the existential structure of Dasein, of the human being as a being in the world that exists in constant transcendence of itself. Dasein, being time, is always a power being, and is never complete.

This pre-understanding is not only theoretical, but includes an affective dispositionality. Things are always accompanied by feelings such as joy or boredom, said affective dispositionalities being part of the knowledge process. We see here the consequences of the passage of objective knowledge through universal and objective structures to Heideggerian point of view that bases knowledge on the temporal, existential and daily structure of the conscience.

Cure and be for death

We are left to see two essential elements of Dasein: the cure and the possibility of death.

For Heidegger, the truth of knowledge occurs in the cure, which is taking responsibility for things. This means that in an existence carried out through a determined project, things will be presented in a more authentic way.

The German philosopher also assures that Dasein is a being for death. Death is indeed that possibility that we know for sure will be realized, but that we never experience as done. Inasmuch as such an impossibility of all possibility, it allows the possibilities to be such: if we did not die, the time, we should not choose between possibilities nor could we exist as a project, since it would be possible to carry out all possibilities.

Bibliographic references:

• Vattimo, G. (1986). Introduction to Heidegger. Gedisa: Barcelona
• Heidegger, M. (2003). Being and Time. Trotta: Madrid