Heidegger's Meaning Of Being

Now in order to address and explore the question about the meaning of being, Heidegger argues that it requires that being for whom the sense of Being and Being itself matters. This conceptual access to the question of Being can only be possible through an examination of the being of the particular kind of entity that is the human being, a human structure, which he calls Dasein. The concept of Dasein is fundamental and crucial for Heidegger’s project in Being and Time and for existential philosophy in general. More broadly, and in the context of traditional German philosophy, Dasein denotes being, existence. However, Heidegger uses Dasein in a narrower way so that to describe the particular experience of being that applies to the modes of the …show more content…
‘Dasein’ with its literal meaning of ‘there-being’ or ‘being-there’ denotes the human way of being emphasizes that human existence is essentially Being-in-the-world. In other words, Being-in-the-world affirms an internal relation between ‘human being’ and ‘world’ (Mulhall, 2000:40). By this statement, Heidegger postulates that the world is here, now and everywhere around us in such a way that we are totally immersed in it. He understands the world in another ontic sense that stands for that wherein a given Dasein might be said to exist (Mulhall, 2000:47). Following from this, there must be a type of human interaction with entities that casts light on its own environment in order to get the phenomenon of the world exactly into view. The ‘world’, as Heidegger claims, is defined by and identified through Dasein’s tool-guide interactions with the entities in the world and where the world is ultimately a function of our interaction with it (Tietz, 2001:63). Heidegger expresses this point by saying that the terms of the ‘Being-in-the-world’ structure are equiprimordial and gives a phenomenological characterization of the entities that make up our immediate environment. He claims that these entities primarily have the phenomenological character of ‘equipment’. To take his famous example, when I am engaged …show more content…
Heidegger draws a distinction between ready-to-hand and present-to-hand. The primary relationship between Dasein and the world is readiness-to-hand or the availability of tools where the entities that make up the world have a meaning in such a way that they can be used. ‘World’ in this context functions as an ontological term, denoting the being of the entities of the world. On the other hand, present-to-hand, constitutes the world as a collection of occurent things and is not metaphysically fundamental, characterized by the breakage of tools (Tietz, 2001:61). Entities in the world that are encountered as useable and employable in the pursuit of its purposes by Dasein are not just present-to-hand, the object of theoretical contemplation, but ready-to-hand (Mulhall, 2005:41). Heidegger argues that it is because I am always already pursuing these existential possibilities that the world of my experience has an immediate familiarity. Following from this, the modes of practical activity within which entities are primarily encountered are by their nature contributors to Dasein’s modes of existence in the world – to specific existentiell possibilities (Mulhall, 2000:52). Consequently, Dasein not only comprehends the objects in the world, but also concerns (or fails) to concern itself with them, and it is this aspect