Summary: Being and Time (page 12)

First Part: Interpreting Dasein in Relation to Temporality and Explaining Time as the Transcendental Horizon of the Question of Being

First Division: The Preliminary Fundamental Analysis of Dasein

Chapter 1 – Setting Out the Task of a Preparatory Analysis of Dasein

What is existence? This is precisely the question the existential analytic sets out to answer.

After reading the introduction, we already know some of its features, which Heidegger recalls here: mineness, or the primacy of existence over essence.

This is a specific mode of being of Dasein. Other beings—trees, things, animals, and so on—have a completely different mode of being, which Heidegger calls 'presence-at-hand': This being [Dasein] does not have, and never has, the mode of being of a being that is merely present-at-hand within-the-world. ¹

To bring out the specificity of Dasein more clearly, Heidegger turns to the ancient Aristotelian notion of 'category': whereas the 'determinations of being' proper to other beings are categories, the 'characteristics of being' of Dasein are existentials.

What, then, should be the starting point of this existential analytic? The answer was already given in the introduction: we must begin by examining Dasein as it is initially and for the most part—that is to say, in its everydayness. Heidegger calls this everyday indifference of Dasein its 'mediocrity'. We should not neglect or despise it: even in this mediocrity we can still uncover the structure of existentiality, and its examination is therefore essential.

Finally, we already know that this existential analytic differs fundamentally from the other disciplines that take the human being as their object: anthropology, psychology, and biology. And Dasein has nothing to do with the Cartesian 'subject', with the 'person' as defined by Dilthey or Scheler, or with the 'rational animal' around which traditional anthropology was built—notions to which Heidegger devotes several clarificatory pages.

Such clarificatory work is necessary if we are to avoid the confusions that can attach themselves to the project of an existential analytic in Heidegger's sense.

Chapter 2 – Being-in-the-World in General as the Fundamental Constitution of Dasein

Dasein exists in the mode of 'being-in-the-world'. What does this mean?

We have to clarify the meaning of the different terms that make up this expression—an examination that unfolds over several chapters:
- the world: what is the ontological structure of the world?
- the being that has such a mode of being: Dasein in its average everydayness;
- and 'being-in' as such.

This last term might seem to have no particular philosophical interest—yet it is a crucial point. Dasein is not 'in' the world in the way water is in a glass or a coat is in a wardrobe.

'Being-in' is a spatial term: it indicates that a present-at-hand entity occupies a determinate place; it is a simple category.

'Being-in' (being-at, being-alongside) in Heidegger's sense, by contrast, designates a constitution of Dasein's being; it is an existential.

Dasein is not 'in' the world in that sense; more precisely, we should say that it 'dwells', that it 'abides with' the world as it is familiar to it—as Heidegger deduces from an etymological analysis of the expression Ich bin ('I am'). This is a wholly different relation to the world.

In the same way, two present-at-hand entities cannot properly touch or 'encounter' one another. Only Dasein can come across something—can have something 'turn up' for it.

Let us recap. Heidegger here proposes a fundamental opposition between 'being-in-the-world'—the specific mode of being of Dasein—and 'presence-at-hand', which characterises other beings that are simply 'in' the world.

Of course, this does not mean that all forms of spatiality are denied to Dasein; it is simply that its 'being-in-space' must be thought on the basis of being-in-the-world.

What is 'being-in-the-world'? This is the question the subsequent chapters will take up, but Heidegger already offers several characterisations.

Is being-in-the-world, first and foremost, knowing the world? Knowledge seems to be the primary, most fundamental relation to the world—at least, that is how philosophy has traditionally understood it.

Heidegger rejects this privilege accorded to theoretical knowledge. For him, being-in-the-world is above all a matter of being scattered across a variety of tasks: undertaking, investigating, producing, discussing, and so on. In each of these activities, Dasein is concerned with something.

Care, as expressed in this concern and preoccupation, therefore appears as a phenomenon even more originary than knowledge—whether of the world or of oneself. It is another existential, to which a later chapter will be devoted.

The notion of being-in-the-world even sheds new light on the theory of knowledge.

We often conceive knowledge as a relation between a subject and an object, and so we become entangled in insoluble pseudo-problems such as: How does this knowing subject get outside its inner sphere? How does it cross over into an 'other' and 'external' sphere? How can knowing, in general, ever reach an object?

This problem disappears once we understand that we are not dealing with a subject facing an object, but with Dasein, which exists in the mode of 'being-in-the-world'. In that case, knowing is already alongside this world—there is no leap to make. It is not a mere passive theoretical contemplation of the world; being-in-the-world, as concern, is absorbed in the world with which it is concerned.

Thus, as Dasein directs itself towards a being and grasps it, it does not step out of some inner sphere in which it was first enclosed; rather, in accordance with its original mode of being, it is always already 'outside', alongside a being that 'turns up' for it in a world that is, each time, already disclosed.

Heidegger extends the metaphor: the reception of what is known should not be understood as the return, after a foray outside to seize it, of the subject – laden with its spoils – into the 'retreat' of consciousness. On the contrary, even as it receives, preserves and keeps hold of what is known, Dasein, in so far as it knows, remains, as Dasein, outside.

We can now see how this notion of being-in-the-world resolves—or rather dissolves as mirages—many epistemological problems. This is why it is being-in-the-world, and not knowledge, that is primary and must enjoy a privileged status:

Knowing is a mode of Dasein founded upon being-in-the-world. Hence being-in-the-world, as Dasein's fundamental constitution, demands prior interpretation.

Finally, Heidegger is careful to distinguish the ontological notion of 'being-in-the-world' from the biological notion of 'environment'.

Without further delay, then, let us launch into this ontological investigation—whose primacy, and thereby legitimacy, Heidegger has just established—by examining more closely the last term in the expression 'being-in-the-world': the world itself.

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¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Heidegger: A Close Reading