Teaching Myself Heidegger

For Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being is fundamental for the following reasons. It has been attempted to be answered by the history of philosophy in unsatisfactory ways and for him, has largely been passed over by many since the Ancients. Firstly, an attempted answer has been that “Being is the most universal concept”. However, in this it has been implied that Being is a concept that demarcates the boundary for a genus of entities. While that may be true for beings as entities (Seiendes), the concept of Being (Sein) cannot be enclosed in those type of conceptual boundaries. More on the Ontic/Ontological distinction soon.

Secondly, an attempted answer has been that the question of Being is indefinable. He says that we cannot answer the question by pointing at beings as entities. They aren’t equivalent even though they share terminology. However, the indefinability of Being as beings as entities does not rid us of the question according to Heidegger but makes it even more necessary to ask.

Thirdly, an attempted answer is that Being is self-evident. While it is clear that we have an understanding of Being by virtue of the subjects and their proposed connective predicates we assert, as well as the activities and aims of the sciences and what they presume prior to investigation, it does not follow that the question concerning the meaning of Being has properly been asked nor has it been made clear to us conceptually.

Following this, Heidegger discusses the distinction between the ontic and ontological priorities of the question of the meaning of Being. Beings as entities are of ontic concerns, which are concerned with particular entities and their observable attributes. If I were to take up a knife ontically, I would consider its triangular shape, the smoothness of the handle, the sharpness of the blade. Being (Sein) is of ontological concern, which concerns the determinative Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes). In other words, what underlying structures give rise to the Being of beings? In the knife example, the fact that its immediate Being for me is as a tool for me to cut and use toward other ends is in part its Being revealed to me.

It is here where he selects the subject of the investigation ontically, i.e. the entity to be studied among entities. The entity to be studied is Dasein, which is a being that is distinguished ontically from other beings in that it has a concern for its own Being. Heidegger goes on to describe the ontological nature of Dasein, that it is fundamentally pre-ontological. How can this be? Does this not sound contradictory?
It is not contradictory if we understand what Heidegger has been saying, that Dasein fundamentally has a pre-existing essential relationship to its Being. That relation is existential/ ontological in what motivations or concerns ground and dictate Dasein’s existentiel/ontic actions, i.e. what fundamental ontological structures underlie and dictate what Dasein does, how Dasein experiences? This is also why Dasein is ontically distinguished in that it is ontic-ontological, that it is concerned and operates in both realms. We are ontically familiar with our Being as we can directly observe what it is we do or describe in our various experiences. However, we are ontologically foreign to our Being, and this requires what has been described as a hermeneutical approach to Dasein, a method of coaxing out underlying meaning in Dasein in what Heidegger calls, the “existential analysis of Dasein”, or the investigation into the “fundamental ontology of Dasein”.