Dasein

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.

Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in Division I of Being and Time proceeds through a series of structures he calls existentialia: being-in-the-world, being-with-others, throwness, projection, falling. None of these are properties Dasein has; they are modes of being Dasein is. The vocabulary deliberately resists translation back into the standard categories of philosophy of mind, where consciousness is treated as a kind of substance with properties.

Dasein has been one of the most influential and most contested concepts of twentieth-century philosophy. Sartre took up Dasein as the for-itself in Being and Nothingness, but Heidegger's Letter on Humanism rejected the appropriation as a humanist misreading. Merleau-Ponty developed the analysis through embodiment in ways Heidegger had bracketed. Levinas argued that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein occluded the more fundamental ethical relation to the other.