What is Dasein according to Martin Heidegger?

It is a very important concept of the existentialist philosophy of the 20th century in Europe.

Martin Heidegger was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, especially influential in the field of metaphysics as well as in currents such as heresy.especially influential in the field of metaphysics as well as in currents such as hermeneutics or post-structuralism. His philosophy has also been fruitful in fields such as psychiatry, sociology or religious studies.

Controversial because of his relationship with the National Socialist regime, his philosophy is marked by the question of being. In his first original contributions to philosophy (which revolve around his best known and most important work, Being and Timepublished in 1927), this question of being is framed in an existential analysis of the human being, which is the entity in which, unlike things, this question of being occurs.

Heidegger, however, conceives of the human being in essential relation to things and to the world, under the name of Dasein, his most known conceptWhat was this conception of the human being of Heidegger, radically linked with the world and the knowledge of the same one?ç

• Related article, "How are Psychology and Philosophy similar?"

From neo-Kantianism to Being and Time.

Heidegger begins his philosophical production in the first years of the 20th century dominated, in Germany, by neo-Kantianism and the emergence of hermeneutics. Neo-Kantianism sought, after the metaphysical abstractions of German idealism, a return to language and the problematics of time, a return to Kantian language and problematics in questions of the theory of knowledge.. He investigated, for example, the question of knowledge and truth, which for the neo-Kantians were given in pure, universal and objective categories, especially in the field of science.

Against this conception, Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), begins to elaborate his phenomenology, which tries to explain, with the will of rigorous science, how things are given to consciousness. But he does not reduce this analysis to a foundation of science, but is concerned with how things present themselves in everyday life.

For Husserl, things do not present themselves as phenomenal manifestations of an unknowable thing-in-itself, as in the Kantians, but are intuited by consciousness as phenomena that show their own essence. Questions such as truth or knowledge no longer require so much of a foundation of mathematics or the natural sciences as of a rigorous analysis of consciousness. a rigorous analysis of consciousness. It is this perspective that Heidegger will deepen, going beyond the limits of phenomenology itself.

Heidegger observes, in his questioning of being, that the categories of knowledge, which for the neo-Kantians are given in a transcendental, objective and pure structure, identical for all persons, are in reality given in individual, existential and temporal life, that is to say, in the life of consciousness. How do these two apparently contradictory spheres converge in consciousness?

Going deeper into Husserl's intuition, he realizes in Being and Time an existential analysis of the human being insofar as he asks himself about being. That is to say, an analysis of Dasein. Let us look at it in a little more detail.

Dasein and world

According to Heidegger, the question of being has been given throughout the history of philosophy under the prejudice of presence. That is to say, already from Parmenides to the philosophers of the twentieth century, being has been understood as something that is given as present in its totality, as objective and complete. The paradigm of this way of thinking is found in the idea of God as an omnipresent being. With his existential analysis of Dasein, Heidegger intends to inaugurate a new way of understanding being and metaphysics..

To begin his analysis, as we have seen, Heidegger stops asking about being from the theoretical point of view of the sciences and passes to an analysis of consciousness in its everydayness. He thus tries to analyze the question of being in the most general way possible, without privileging any concrete way of facing reality.

What Heidegger now observes is that, as opposed to the conception of being as an objective presence already given, when approaching the analysis from the general point of view that he proposes in his analysis, being appears as possibility. Contrary to what happens with things, the human being, being a Dasein, is possibility rather than reality.. It is insofar as it can be. Dasein is thus, in its most fundamental form, a project.

This being able to be as a project occurs, moreover, always already in a context of things and persons. The human being does not exist in a pure and isolated manner but from the very first moment he tries to understand and determine himself, he is already in relationship.

It is here that we can clearly see the meaning of the word Dasein: to be or to be here. It is about the human being as inserted in a context of things and persons, a world, that precedes him and that conditions his existence, his transcending himself as a project.

Philosophy linked to meanings

The being of things is thus not being present, but belonging to a totality of meanings that is the world. Things signify one another and this signifying depends in turn on the projecting of Dasein. That is to say, Dasein with its project founds the world in which individual things are given in turn.

We see that Dasein is not a tabula rasa, but that from the first moment in which it tries to understand itself in its project, it already has a pre-understanding of the world provided by its context. This is the structure of the circle of comprehension, or hermeneutic circleaccording to which knowledge always starts from a presupposition about things that guides its question. To know is to go deeper into these questions.

Therefore, being is given in a process of knowledge that never ends and is never totally present. This in turn is the existential structure of Dasein, of the human being as a being in the world that exists in constant transcendence of itself. Dasein, being time, is always a being able to be, and is never complete.

This pre-understanding is also not only theoretical, but includes an affective dispositionality. Things always present themselves accompanied by sensations such as joy or boredom, these being affective dispositionalities.These affective dispositionalities are part of the process of knowledge. We see here the consequences of the passage from objective knowledge through universal and objective structures to the Heideggerian point of view that grounds knowledge in the temporal, existential and everyday structure of consciousness.

Healing and being for death

It remains for us to see two essential elements of Dasein: healing and the possibility of death..

For Heidegger, the truth of knowledge is given in the cure, which is a taking responsibility for things. This means that in an existence carried out through a determined project things will present themselves in a more authentic way.

The German philosopher also asserts that Dasein is a being for death. Death is, in effect, that possibility which we know for sure will be realized, but which we never experience as realized. as realized. Insofar as such impossibility of all possibility, it allows possibilities to be such: if we did not die, there would be no sense of time, we should not choose between possibilities, nor could we exist as a project, since it would be possible to realize all possibilities.

Bibliographical references:

• Vattimo, G. (1986). Introduction to Heidegger. Gedisa: Barcelona
• Heidegger, M. (2003). Being and Time. Trotta: Madrid