6 - Heidegger’s Existential Analytic of Dasein

Summary

Reconstructs Heidegger’s well-known analysis of Dasein as analogous to his interpretation of Kant: I argue that Heidegger also views Dasein as a (pre-)ontological, phenomenological, and hermeneutic way of being. Demonstrating this requires a circular reading of the first book of Being and Time. Following Heidegger's own argumentation leads us from Dasein's usual and predominant understanding of being (6.1), through the structural moments of 'being-in-the-world' that constitute its possibility (6.2), to 'care' as the foundational unity of these conditions (6.3). Once this is established, reading Heidegger's magnum opus backwards shows that Dasein is at its core an ontological way of being due to its concern for the being of beings, enacts this concern in a phenomenological manner through its 'being-in', and is thereby both enabled and hindered by the hermeneutic situation of its everyday understanding (6.4). By distinguishing the argumentative procedure of Being in Time from the resulting picture of our human condition, this chapter provides a more systematic picture of Dasein's existential constitution than Heidegger managed to display.