Summary: Being and Time (page 7)

Since Dasein is first and foremost existence, if we are to understand the human being we must aim at an explicit account of what constitutes existence. ¹ Heidegger calls this fundamental task—which seeks to identify the coherent whole of the structures of existence—the existential analytic; and he calls this whole the existentiality of Dasein.

Let us take stock. We are seeking the meaning of being. In order to carry out this ontological inquiry, we turned to a privileged being, Dasein. With regard to this question, Dasein has a special status: it is the being that raises the question, it always already has an understanding of being and is itself 'ontological', and it is characterised by this distinctive mode of being that is existence. All of this is captured in the formula: For this being, in its being, this very being is at stake.

Our inquiry therefore undergoes a spectacular reorientation. Our gaze, initially fixed on being, now turns towards the human being; from ontology we are led to an existential analytic.

But this shift—which we must understand, for it is a crucial point—is not a betrayal of our original question. If we turn towards the existential analytic of Dasein, it is in order to seek, in the depths of Dasein, the secret of being. By questioning the being of this privileged being, we hope to uncover the secret of being in general.

We can now grasp the meaning of a sentence which, earlier on, must have seemed rather mysterious:

Thus the fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can spring, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.

And Dasein appears as the ontic–ontological condition of the possibility of all ontologies.

This primacy of the human being had already been glimpsed by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, but had never received its proper expression or justification.

Let us now ask: what method should we use to carry out this inquiry? What rules must this transcendental analytic follow?

Chapter 2 – The Twofold Task in Formulating the Question of Being: Method and Plan of the Inquiry

Why do we need an existential analytic at all? Does Dasein not immediately understand itself as what it is? Since it is precisely what it seeks to know, does it not have a kind of immediate pre-donation of its own mode of being that would render any such inquiry superfluous? Is this not, in a sense, an ontico–ontological datum of the first order?

Heidegger answers by drawing on the distinction he has already established between the ontic and the ontological levels.

Ontically, to be sure, Dasein is not merely close, or even the closest being – we ourselves are this being. And yet, for that very reason, it is ontologically the most distant.

We must distinguish between the ontic knowledge Dasein may have of itself as a being—a knowledge crystallised in ontic sciences such as biology, history, linguistics, and so on—and the ontological knowledge of the being of this being.

On the ontological plane there is no original, immediate given; there is only, as we have already seen, a pre-understanding—an average and vague grasp that is not satisfactory and cannot serve as an adequate guiding thread. This is because this pre-understanding is oriented more towards the world than towards Dasein itself—something we shall only be able to understand later.

Hence Heidegger's conclusion: Dasein is ontically "closest" to itself, ontologically farthest away, without for all that being pre-ontologically a stranger to itself.

The project of an existential analytic thus takes on sharper contours. Dasein is already the object of many disciplines: Philosophical psychology, anthropology, ethics, "politics", poetry, biography and historiography – all of these, in different ways and to varying degrees, have concerned themselves with the behaviours, capacities, powers, possibilities and destinies of Dasein. But they provide only existentiell interpretations of this being—they do not amount to an existential analytic in Heidegger's technical sense.

Alongside the pair ontic / ontological, we therefore encounter a new and essential opposition: existentiell / existential.

And yet our inquiry must still rely on some idea of what the human being is. What idea can this be, given that we have set aside the disciplines just mentioned? Our starting point cannot be 'man' as he appears in history or as he is described in psychology, and so on. To choose this or that definition—for instance, the classical 'man is a rational animal'—would be to impose upon Dasein categories stemming from a dogmatic construction, from an arbitrary idea of being and of actuality.

To escape this difficulty, Heidegger proposes the following solution:

The mode of access and of interpretation must be chosen in such a way that this being can show itself in itself from itself. And this mode must in fact show this being as it is, initially and for the most part, in its average everydayness.

Here, then, is our starting point: we must begin from the everydayness of Dasein; this everydayness must constitute the first thematic field of Dasein's existential analytic.

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