Summary: Being and Time (page 4)

Heidegger notes that even if this question does indeed have a meaning, it remains obscure: It is not only the answer that is lacking to the question of being; the question itself is obscure. ¹ Before attempting to solve it, we must first work out in a satisfactory way how to pose the question. How?

Let us start from something simple: we are dealing with a question—the question of being. What is a question? What are the structural moments that constitute it as such?

We need to distinguish four things:
- the questioning itself, the act of inquiring;
- that which is asked about: what the enquiry is concerned with—here, being;
- that which is sought: what we are aiming at in raising the question—here, the meaning of being;
- that which is questioned: that from which we seek the answer. Since 'to be' means the being of a being, it is beings that we are going to question.

In other words, our investigation will lead us to concern ourselves with beings: it is in them that we shall discover the meaning of being, by virtue of the fundamental relation that obtains between the two.

The problem is that we call many things 'beings', and in many different senses. Trees, stones, and exercise books are beings. Are we to look for the meaning of being by starting from beings of this kind? Or is there a privileged being, from this point of view, that should be questioned first? If so, what is this exemplary being, and in what sense does it have a kind of priority?

Let us return to our point of departure: the question of being. The privileged being we are looking for is probably the one that does the questioning: the human being—in other words, the being that we, who question, each time ourselves are.

The human being has a special relation to being simply by virtue of the fact that it raises the question of being—but also because, as we have seen, it always already moves within an understanding of being. It is therefore in this being that we shall look for the meaning of being.

To be more precise: this average and vague understanding does not reveal to us the deeper meaning of being. It is in fact shifting, confused, and little more than a merely verbal acquaintance.

Yet this average and vague understanding of being is a fact—and one that we shall have to explain. Where does it come from? How is it possible?

Strictly speaking, Heidegger does not use the term 'man' but 'Dasein': This being which we ourselves always already are and which, among other things, has the essential possibility of questioning, we shall always designate terminologically as "Dasein". Why does he feel the need to coin a neologism here—one that translators generally leave in the original German?

Because Heidegger wants to avoid all the vagueness attached to the word 'man'. The human being is a complex phenomenon that can be approached from many different standpoints and is the object of various disciplines—linguistics, history, anthropology, biology, and so on.

Heidegger wants to study it solely from the standpoint of ontology. From this angle, the human being is that being which has a distinctive, privileged relation to being. This is what the term 'Dasein' conveys: 'sein' in German means 'to be'. To use this term to designate the human being is already to insist that we are going to consider it in its relation to being, and not from this or that other perspective.

'Da' means 'there'. 'Da-sein' therefore expresses the idea of 'being-there', 'being-present'. Why Heidegger chooses to characterise the human being as a 'being-there' is something we shall only be able to understand later, as we read on. This is one of the questions around which the whole project of Being and Time is organised: to explain and justify this definition of the human being as 'being-there'.

An objection now arises: is there not a logical circle here that dooms the enterprise to failure from the outset? A vicious circle that could be summed up as follows: First we must necessarily determine a being in its being, and then, on this basis, we want to pose only the question of being – what is this, if not going round in circles?

Heidegger replies that this kind of formal objection—which would ultimately forbid any inquiry whatsoever—cannot be applied to the sort of investigation he is trying to carry out. Even if the objection from circularity may hold within the framework of a deductive science, what we are dealing with here is a quite different kind of research, which Heidegger describes, in deliberately enigmatic terms, as the liberating bringing-to-light of a ground.

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