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7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / h. Dasein (being human)

[being as directly experienced by humanity]

18 ideas
Being is revealed at the point between waking and sleep [Anon (Cent)]
     Full Idea: At the point of sleep when sleep has not yet come and external wakefulness vanishes, at this point being is revealed.
     From: Anon (Cent) (Centring [c.500 BCE], 50)
     A reaction: One for Heidegger. The problem with eastern philosophy is that no one expects that this revelation could be put into words, so we cannot compare our revelations of being, or pass them on to others. Which means they can't be criticised.
The idea of being must come from our own existence [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: I would like to know how we could have the idea of being if we did not, as beings ourselves, find being within us.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01)
     A reaction: I could envisage a creature with an entirely 'externa' mind, that just focused on environment, and took its own place in it unthinkingly for granted. I suppose he's right, though.
Novalis thought self-consciousness cannot disclose 'being', because we are temporal creatures [Novalis, by Pinkard]
     Full Idea: Novalis came to think that the kind of existence , or 'being', that is disclosed in self-consciousness remains, as it were, forever out of our reach because of the kind of temporal creatures we are.
     From: report of Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06
     A reaction: It looks here as if Novalis kicked Heidegger's Dasein into the long grass before it even got started, but maybe they have different notions of 'being', with Novalis seeking timeless being, and Heidegger, influenced by Bergson, accepting temporality.
Personality overcomes subjective limitations and posits Dasein as its own [Hegel]
     Full Idea: Personality is that which overcomes the limitation of being merely subjective and gives itself reality - or, what amounts to the same thing, to posit that existence [Dasein] as its own.
     From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Elements of the Philosophy of Right [1821], 039)
     A reaction: This looks like the source for Heidegger's distinctive concept of Dasein. The emphasis in Hegel is on creating it out of subjectivity by an act of choice. For Heidegger Dasein seems to be a primitive concept.
The only true being is of the senses, perception, feeling and love [Feuerbach]
     Full Idea: Being as an object of being - and only this being is being and deserves the name of being - is the being of the senses, perception, feeling, and love. …Only passion is the hallmark of existence.
     From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §33)
     A reaction: This remark seems to make Feuerbach a romantic and anti-Enlightenment figure. I don't see why there shouldn't be just as much 'being' in doing maths as in admiring a landscape. The mention of love links him to Empedocles (Ideas 459 + 630).
We get the concept of 'being' from the concept of the 'ego' [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Being is everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception 'ego' that there follows, derivately, the concept 'being'.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols [1889], 2.5)
     A reaction: 'Being' is such a remote abstraction that I doubt whether we can say anything at all meaningful about where it 'comes from'.
As a thing and its perception are separated, two modes of Being emerge [Husserl]
     Full Idea: We are left with the transcendence of the thing over against the perception of it, ...and thus a basic and essential difference arises between Being as Experience and Being as Thing.
     From: Edmund Husserl (Ideas: intro to pure phenomenology [1913], II.2.042)
     A reaction: I'm thinking that this is not just the germ of Heidegger's concept of Da-sein, but it actually IS his concept, without the label. Husserl had said that he hoped to reveal a new region of Being.
For man, being is not what he is, but what he is going to be [Ortega y Gassett]
     Full Idea: Being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being. Everything else in the world is what it is….Man is the entity that makes himself….He has to determine what he is going to be.
     From: José Ortega y Gassett (Toward a Philosophy of History [1941], p.112,201-2), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 4 'Problem'
     A reaction: [p.112 and 201-2] This seems to be Ortega y Gasset's spin on Heidegger's concept, by adding a temporal dimension to it.
Heidegger turns to 'Being' to affirm the uniqueness of humans in the world [Heidegger, by Gray]
     Full Idea: Heidegger turns to 'Being' for the same reason that Christians turn to God - to affirm the unique place of humans in the world.
     From: report of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927]) by John Gray - Straw Dogs 2.4
     A reaction: This is the first remark I have encountered that makes sense of Heidegger's Being to me! It places Heidegger as a modernist philosopher, trying to grapple with the decline of religion. I'll stick with Bertrand Russell on that.
Dasein is a mode of Being distinguished by concern for its own Being [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], Intro I.04)
     A reaction: How do you distinguish the Being of normal humans from the Being of someone in a deep coma, who has no existential issues? Has that Dasein ceased to be? Why does angst create a new mode of Being, but flying doesn't?
Dasein is ahead of itself in the world, and alongside encountered entities [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: The formal existential totality of Dasein's ontological structural whole is: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], I.6 41)
     A reaction: If you find that thought really illuminating, you are probably on the wrong website. However, the thought that we exist 'ahead of ourselves' might be a fruitful line for existentialists to explore.
In company with others one's Dasein dissolves, and even the others themselves dissolve [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: This being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of being of 'the others', in such a way, indeed, that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.164), quoted by Mark Wrathall - Heidegger: how to read 5
     A reaction: He seems to be describing the psychology of someone who joins a small crowd which gradually increases in size. I take this relation to others to be the basic existential dilemma, of retaining individual authenticity within a community.
'Dasein' expresses not 'what' the entity is, but its being [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: When we designate this entity with the term 'Dasein' we are expressing not its 'what' (as if it were a table, house, or tree) but its being.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.297), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 2 'Phenomenology'
     A reaction: Presumably analytic discussions of persons try to be too objective. Heidegger is trying to capture the thought at the heart of Kierkegaard's existentialism. Objectivity and subjectivity are never in conflict. Is there really a different mode of existence?
The word 'dasein' is used to mean 'the manner of Being which man possesses', and also the human creature [Heidegger, by Cooper,DE]
     Full Idea: Heidegger borrows a common German word 'dasein', meaning 'being' or 'existence', to refer both to 'the manner of Being which... man... possesses', and to the creature which possesses it.
     From: report of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.32) by David E. Cooper - Heidegger Ch.3
     A reaction: This just strikes me as an elementary ontological mistake. Because something has startling properties it doesn't follow that we have a different type of Being. Magnets don't have a different type of being from ordinary iron.
'Dasein' is Being which is laid claim to, and which matters to its owner [Heidegger, by Cooper,DE]
     Full Idea: We each of us not only have Dasein (our kind of Being), but we can lay claim to it. Also the Dasein of a thing 'is an issue for it' - we care about the kinds of creatures we can make ourselves into.
     From: report of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.67) by David E. Cooper - Heidegger Ch.3
     A reaction: Heidegger says other more puzzling things about Dasein. The second half of the idea is what makes Heidegger an existentialist, and an inspiration for Sartre.
Dasein is being which can understand itself, and possess itself in a way allowing authenticity [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: Dasein is an entity which, in its very being, comports itself understandingly towards that being. ...Mineness belongs to an existent Dasein, and belongs to it as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.78), quoted by Mark Wrathall - Heidegger: how to read 1
     A reaction: He might eventually persuade me that Dasein is so different from mere material being that it deserves a category of its own. But a reductive account of mind is also a reductive account of being.
I say the manifestation of Being needs humans, and humans only exist as reflected in Being [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: The fundamental thought of my thinking is precisely that Being, or the manifestation of Being, needs human beings and that, vice versa, human beings are only human beings if they are standing in the manifestation of Being.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Martin Heidegger in conversation [1969], p.82), quoted by Richard Polt - Heidegger: an introduction 5 'Signs'
     A reaction: I don't think I understand the second half of this, but I sense some sort of intuition that the consciousness of humans 'enlarges' Being, or bestows an identity on it, or some such thing.
For Sartre there is only being for-itself, or being in-itself (which is beyond experience) [Sartre, by Daigle]
     Full Idea: The two most fundamental modes of being in Sartre's ontology are being in-itself, and being for-itself. ...The in-itself lies beyond our experience of it.
     From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.2
     A reaction: This appears to be Kant's ding-an-sich, paired with Heidegger's Dasein. If those are the only options, then reality is either subjective or unknown, which seems to make Sartre an idealist, but he asserted that phenomena vindicate the in-itself.