A Layman’s Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: Part 2

Introduction to Heidegger’s Phenomenological Ontology.

A Young Martin Heidegger (credit: faculty.georgetown.edu)

¶ 3. The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being

The totality of entities can, in accordance with its various domains, become a field for laying bare and delimiting certain definite areas of subject-matter. These areas, on their part (for instance, history, Nature, space, life, Dasein, language, and the like), can serve as objects which corresponding scientific investigations may take as their respective themes. Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and naively, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of Being in which the area of subject-atter is itself confined. The ‘basic concepts’ which thus arise remain our proximal cluse for disclosing for this area concretely for the first time. (Heidegger, 1927)

Without presuppositions of Being itself (which are pre-scientific in nature), science (more specifically, the natural and the human sciences) cannot conduct inquiry into beings, which is its subject matter, Heidegger claims. Mathematics, Biology, Physics, the Human Sciences, and the Theology — they all carry assumptions of Being itself — here, we are compelled to restate that the inquiry into beings require a ‘primordial’ knowledge of Being itself. And when these disciplines are met with an internal crisis, it means there are fundamental changes in the nature of the beings studied, thereby, a revision in the ontological foundations (ontology, here, is used to mean the study of what is, of what it means to be, of Being itself; the ontological pertains to Being itself) of the disciplines themselves. The work of tending to these changes, Heidegger writes, is the work of the philosophers, not the scientists, however. To use an example, Gelven writes, “what it means to be scientific is prior to the question of what science is.” And self-evidently, the former question is ontological. Thus, this establishes the “ontological priority of the question of Being,” that ontology must first understand the meaning of Being, and that ontology is prior to all disciplines of inquiry.

¶ 4. The Ontic Priority of the Question of Being

The ontic priority of the question of Being is the priority of Dasein among other entities concerning the inquiry into Being itself. Here, the ontic pertains to beings. Dasein must be investigated, for Dasein, Heidegger writes, is “ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.” Dasein already knows what it means to be, and this sets it apart from other kinds of beings. And Dasein’s understanding of Being itself is one of the ways that Dasein can be. Thus, Heidegger writes:

Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological. (Heidegger, 1927)

Existence (Existenz) is the “kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another.” This means that existence is the mode or way of Being of Dasein itself. Existence is exclusive to Dasein. No other entities can be said to exist, which is very odd, considering that Heidegger’s parlance is contrasted with many of our common vernaculars, even the terminology of many variants of Western metaphysics. Existence, then, is Dasein’s own understanding of Being. However, Dasein’s “Being-ontological,” that is, Dasein’s vague understanding of Being itself, is “pre-ontological” and too early to develop an ontology itself. This sort of pre-ontological knowledge is pre-theoretic, primordial.

Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence — in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting. The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself. The understanding of oneself which leads along this way we call “existentiell”. The question of existence is one of Dasein’s ontical ‘affairs’. This does not require that the ontological structure of existence should be theoretically transparent. The question about that structure aims at the analysis [Auseinanderlegung) of what constitutes existence. The context [Zusammenhang] of such structures we call “existentiality”. Its analytic has the character of an understanding which is not existentiell, but rather existential. The task of an existential analytic of Dasein has been delineated in advance, as regards both its possibility and its necessity, in Dasein’s ontical constitution. (Heidegger, 1927)

A particular Dasein’s understanding of itself, not its Being, not what is common to all Daseins, is called existentiell, Lee Braver suggests. And the character of the analysis of Being is existential; that is, the analysis concerns the universal structures of Dasein’s existence. Braver: “existentiell qualities are ontic ones that pertain to particular Dasein whereas existential features pertain to our ontological way of Being that is common to all Dasein.” Thus, Dasein’s understanding of Dasein’s ontological constitution is defined as the existential, as opposed to the ontical constitution of a particular Dasein.

Therefore, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein. (Heidegger, 1927)

What is the existential analytic? It is the analysis of Being itself through the understanding Dasein’s existence, Dasein’s way or mode of Being. Through this analytic, Heidegger maintains, that all ontologies can find their basis.

If to Interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself — the pre-ontological understanding of Being. (Heidegger, 1927)

Bibliography

1. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Malden Blackwell, 2013.
2. Gelven, Michael. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois, 1989.
3. Braver, Lee. Heidegger: Thinking of Being. Cambridge, Uk, Polity Press, 2014.