Being and Time was published in 1927 and had an immediate impact on German life as it addressed the notion of being directly, something which had not been a dominant area of study for philosophy until apart from 2500 years prior. Heidegger realised that the investigation of being had been abandoned and wanted to rekindle what can be regarded as the most fundamental of all concepts. In this essay I will first explain briefly what Dasein is and then elaborate on how it can be conducted authentically and inauthentically.
Dasein is the term used by Heidegger to define the mode of being which human beings are akin. Prior to Heidegger Descartes had said that the human being could be defined as a thinking thing with both properties of extension and also thought. Prior to Heidegger we had understood the being of human in terms of its attributes, for example with Descartes he identified the Res Cogitans and Res Extensa. For Heidegger on the other hand, the essence of human being is in its existence, and therefore the essence of human being is not in its properties, rather in it’s possible ways of being.
Heidegger recognised that the everyday is hardest for us to understand as we take for granted our own existence as it is a basis for all our actions and thoughts, our systematic processes of understanding cloud the issue of our existence as they depend on our being and this is put into context by Hubert Dreyfus who stated “We are dedicated to theory, we live in the understanding of being but we don’t know the horizon of being”. Heidegger sited that Dasein is that mode of being which is Ontically closest to itself yet Ontologically furthest from itself in the way that we have a Pre-ontological understanding of being. By this what Heidegger means is that w ...