Summary: Being and Time (page 6)

What, then, should be the starting point of this inquiry—of this fundamental ontology? Where are we to begin?

Let us build on a crucial point that emerged earlier: the human being has something specific about it, compared with other beings. It has a distinctive, privileged relation to being, which Heidegger sums up as follows: For this being, in its being, this very being is at stake. ¹

What does this mean?

First of all, that Dasein does not merely show up among other beings but, as we have seen, has a pre-understanding of being. Only the human being can think being, take it as the object of its reflections, and seek to define it.

Even when it is not explicitly thinking about being, it always has an implicit pre-understanding of it: everyone knows what 'is' means in a sentence such as 'the sky is blue', without being able to explain it. This is the kind of paradox that, we recall, Heidegger invited us to ponder in these terms: That we always already live in an understanding of being and that at the same time the meaning of being is shrouded in darkness – this shows the fundamental necessity of repeating the question of the meaning of "being".

Thus, it belongs to Dasein's very constitution of being that, in its being, it has a relation of being to this being.

This leads Heidegger to a striking conclusion: the human being is itself ontological: The ontic pre-eminence of Dasein consists in the fact that it is ontological.

But a second meaning can also be found in the proposition for this being, in its being, this very being is at stake.

The human being has another relation to being: it does not merely understand being, it is—it exists. 'Existence' is this relation to being, this mode of being, this 'manner of being' that characterises Dasein.

Heidegger defines it as follows:

The very being in relation to which Dasein can comport itself, and in relation to which it always already does so in one way or another, we call existence. And since the determination of the essence of this being cannot be carried out by indicating some real quid, but since its essence rather consists in the fact that it has, each time, to be its being as its own, the title "Dasein" has been chosen as a purely ontological expression for this being. Dasein always already understands itself from its existence – from a possibility of being itself or not being itself. These possibilities Dasein has itself either chosen, or fallen into, or has always grown up in; existence is always and only decided by Dasein itself, in the form of a seizing or a failing-to-seize the possibility. The question of existence can never be settled by anyone other than the existing itself.

These few lines are of the utmost importance: here, for the first time, the founding principle of existentialism is set out in so many words. This passage had a profound impact on Sartre, who, a few years later, would make it the starting point of his own thought.

Let us go back to the beginning. The human being has no real quid. Quid means 'what something is'—its essence. Real refers to the thing (res in Latin). Heidegger's point is that, unlike a thing such as a pen, the human being has no essence. What it has is existence—or rather, it exists. Whereas a pen will always be a pen and cannot be anything else, the human being has a choice between different possibilities. It is not simply this or that; it can choose to do good or evil, to become a sailor, a clerk, a politician—and it can change all that at any moment. Nothing can ultimately guide the human being in its choices, as the final sentence underlines: The question of existence can never be settled by anyone other than the existing itself.

Here is Sartre's reading of this in Existentialism is a Humanism. He expresses the same idea in far more accessible terms, in a work aimed at a general readership—with the gift for striking formulas so characteristic of him:

There is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept – and this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What does it mean here to say that existence precedes essence? It means that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and only afterwards defines himself. Man, as the existentialist sees him, if he is not definable, is because he is at first nothing. He will be, later, and he will be as he has made himself. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.

Even though Heidegger publicly distanced himself from Sartrean existentialism a few years later in his Letter on Humanism, Sartre's text is valuable because it brings out the revolutionary character of this passage from the introduction to Being and Time.

We can now understand the second meaning of the proposition for this being, in its being, this very being is at stake. What is at issue at every moment, for Dasein, is its being—because it chooses and shapes it, in so far as it exists. It has a unique, specific, privileged relation to being because it exists. This, too, is what this enigmatic formula expresses.

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