Book contents
- Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos
- Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reconstructing the Davos Debate
- Part I The Lasting Meaning of Kant’s Thought
- Part II ‘What Is the Human Being?’
- 5 Cassirer’s Functional Account of the Animal Symbolicum
- 6 Heidegger’s Existential Analytic of Dasein
- 7 Infinity or Finitude
- Part III The Task of Philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Heidegger’s Existential Analytic of Dasein
from Part II - ‘What Is the Human Being?’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2022
- Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos
- Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reconstructing the Davos Debate
- Part I The Lasting Meaning of Kant’s Thought
- Part II ‘What Is the Human Being?’
- 5 Cassirer’s Functional Account of the Animal Symbolicum
- 6 Heidegger’s Existential Analytic of Dasein
- 7 Infinity or Finitude
- Part III The Task of Philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Reconstructs Heidegger’s well-known analysis of Dasein as analogous to his interpretation of Kant: I argue that Heidegger also views Dasein as a (pre-)ontological, phenomenological, and hermeneutic way of being. Demonstrating this requires a circular reading of the first book of Being and Time. Following Heidegger's own argumentation leads us from Dasein's usual and predominant understanding of being (6.1), through the structural moments of 'being-in-the-world' that constitute its possibility (6.2), to 'care' as the foundational unity of these conditions (6.3). Once this is established, reading Heidegger's magnum opus backwards shows that Dasein is at its core an ontological way of being due to its concern for the being of beings, enacts this concern in a phenomenological manner through its 'being-in', and is thereby both enabled and hindered by the hermeneutic situation of its everyday understanding (6.4). By distinguishing the argumentative procedure of Being in Time from the resulting picture of our human condition, this chapter provides a more systematic picture of Dasein's existential constitution than Heidegger managed to display.
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- Cassirer and Heidegger in DavosThe Philosophical Arguments, pp. 131 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022