Dasein

Dasein, in the ontology and metaphysics of the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the form of Being or existence of the human individual. Heidegger’s early masterpiece Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time), which addresses the question of the fundamental nature of Being (the Seinsfrage), begins with a lengthy phenomenological analysis of Dasein—an investigation that Heidegger considered necessary in order to answer the Seinsfrage properly.

From at least the time of René Descartes (1596–1650), a prominent philosophical conception of human nature has been that the human individual is a mere thinking subject (a mind, spirit, or soul) and is radically distinct from the material world and therefore cognitively isolated from it. Heidegger, in contrast, conceived the human individual in an altogether new way, as “being-in-the-world.” Because this notion represented the very opposite of the Cartesian subject, the corresponding idea of consciousness as representing the individual’s internal awareness had to be dropped. With it also went the assumption that specific mental states were needed to mediate the relation of the individual to the external world. The individual was not merely a mind that was capable only of representing the world to itself and whose linkage with a body was merely a contingent one. According to Heidegger, a human individual should instead be conceived as Dasein, or “being there.” By using Dasein as a replacement for “consciousness” and “mind,” Heidegger intended to suggest that an individual is in the world in the mode of “uncovering” and is thus disclosing other entities as well as itself. In other words, Dasein is the “there”—or the locus—of Being and thus the metaphorical place where entities “show themselves” as what they are. Instead of being sealed off within a specially designed compartment within a human being, the functions that have been misdescribed as “mental” now become the defining characteristics of human existence.

In Being and Time, Heidegger interpreted the disclosive function of Dasein as being closely bound up with its own active character and with the anticipatory temporality—its being referentially always “out ahead of itself”—that differs so significantly from the sequential character of world-time. This strongly pragmatic strain later yielded to a conception of the access to Being as a kind of gift that humans are privileged to receive. There are also strong suggestions in Heidegger’s later writings that his earlier view had been contaminated by a certain subjectivist tendency—the idea that humanity is quite literally the “measure of all things” and, as such, the designer and author of Being itself rather than its humble recipient.

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Philosophical anthropology: The concept of Dasein

What is perhaps most interesting about Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is that it is a concept of a human individual as a whole rather than of a mind or of a compound of mind and body. The primary significance of this unitary treatment is that it does not sequester the principal functions of a human being in a rather mysteriously conceived part thereof. This represents a genuine alternative to both the body-cum-soul conception of human being and the straightforward identification of human beings with their bodies, which is the approach taken by most contemporary philosophers.