Dasein
Heidegger's term for the kind of being that is at issue for itself — the human being understood as the entity for whom being is a question.
Dasein is the central concept of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927). The German word literally means being-there or being-here, and Heidegger uses it to name the kind of being that human beings are. He chose Dasein in part to avoid the loaded vocabulary of subject, consciousness, mind, or person — each of which carries metaphysical commitments Heidegger wanted to bracket.
The defining feature of Dasein is that its own being is at issue for it. Dasein is not a thing among other things but the entity that asks the question of being. Heidegger analyzes Dasein as being-in-the-world, always already engaged with things and others rather than confronting them as a detached observer. Authentic Dasein owns up to its finitude, mortality, and freedom; inauthentic Dasein flees these into the anonymous everyday self of das Man, the they.