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§31. Care [408-409]

There are only different modalities of the individual structural moments of care, such that they can assume the kinds of being which urge and propensity have. We shall have to envisage these two phenomena in still greater detail in order to come to understand how the specific wholeness of the phenomenon of Dasein is now first of all integrated from this primal structure of the being of Dasein as care. The wholeness of Dasein cannot be combined from various ways of being and the coupling which then comes into play. On the contrary, with care we now find the phenomenon from which we can then understand the various ways of being as ways of being, that is, as care.

Care has the formal structure of being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in something. This being-ahead implies a structure whereby care is always a being about something, specifically such that Dasein in concern, in every performance, in every provision and production of something in particular, is at the same time concerned for its Dasein. This being-ahead-of-itself signifies precisely that care or Dasein in care has thrust its own being ahead as existential facticity. This being out for its own being, which is at issue for it, always takes place already in being involved in something, from a being-always-already-in-the-world-involved-in. (In-being is therefore constitutive for every kind of being of Dasein—even for authentic being!) The structure of 'being out for something' which I do not yet have, but being-out in an already-involved-in which eo ipso is being out for something, brings with it the phenomenon of not yet having something which I am out for. This phenomenon of not yet having something which I am out for is called being in want. It is not merely a pure and simple objective not-having but is always a not-having of something that I am out for. It is what first constitutes being-in-want, lack, need. Later, as the interpretation proceeds, this basic structure of care will lead us back to the constitution of being which we shall then come to understand as time. But first it is important to bring out a few more structures in care itself, specifically in relation to what we have learned in the preceding analysis of Dasein.


b) The phenomena of urge and propensity

In the two structural moments of being-ahead-of-itself and already-being-involved-in, there is a puzzling character which is peculiar to care and, as we shall see, is nothing other than time. This peculiar character of the 'before,' of the 'ahead,' this 'fore-character,' namely, that Dasein is always ahead of itself and always already involved in something—which displays a double phenomenon—now determines the concrete ways of being which we have already come to know. Before we proceed toward the understanding of one of these ways of being,


Martin Heidegger (GA 20) History of the Concept of Time