VI

CARE AS THE BEING OF DASEIN


¶ 39. The Question of the Primordial Totality of Dasein's Structural Whole

BEING-IN-THE-WORLD is a structure which is primordially and constantly whole. In the preceding chapters (Division One, Chapters 2-5) this structure has been elucidated phenomenally as a whole, and also in its constitutive items, though always on this basis. The preliminary glance which we gave to the whole of this phenomenon in the beginning! has now lost the emptiness of our first general sketch of it. To be sure, the constitution of the structural whole and its everyday kind of Being, is phenomenally so manifold that it can easily obstruct our looking at the whole as such phenomenologically in a way which is unified. But we may look at it more freely and our unified view of it may be held in readiness more securely if we now raise the question towards which we have been [181] working in our preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein in general: "how is the totality of that structural whole which we have pointed out to be defined in an existential-ontological manner?"

Dasein exists factically. We shall inquire whether existentiality and facticity have an ontological unity, or whether facticity belongs essentially to existentiality. Because Dasein essentially has a state-of-mind belonging to it, Dasein has a kind of Being in which it is brought before itself and becomes disclosed to itself in its thrownness. But thrownness, as a kind of Being, belongs to an entity which in each case is its possibilities, and is them in such a way that it understands itself in these possibilities and in terms of them, projecting itself upon them. Being alongside the ready-to-hand, belongs just as primordially to Being-in-the-world as does Being-with Others; and Being-in-the-world is in each case for the sake of itself. The Self, however, is proximally and for the most part inauthentic, the they-self. Being-in-the-world is always fallen. Accordingly Dasein's "average everydayness" can be defined as "Being-in-the-world which is falling and disclosed, thrown and projecting, and for which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is an issue, both in its Being alongside the 'world' and in its Being-with Others".


Being and Time (M&R) by Martin Heidegger page 225