172. Da-sein and the question of being
In Being and Time, Da-sein still has an appearance that is "anthropological," "subjectivistic," "individualistic," etc., and yet the opposite of all this is in view there. It is admittedly not kept in view as what is primarily and uniquely focused on. Instead, this opposite is in view only as the necessary consequence of the decisive transformation of the "question of being" from the guiding question into the basic question.
"Understanding of being" and "pro-jection" and indeed as thrown! The being-in-the-world of Dasein. But "world" not the Christian saeculum and the denial of God; atheism! World from the essence of truth and of the "there"! World and earth (cf. lecture on the work of art5).
173. Da-sein
is the crisis between the first and the other beginning. That says: "Dasein," terminologically and substantively, means something essentially different in the history of the first beginning (i.e., in the entire history of metaphysics) than it does in the other beginning.
In metaphysics, "Dasein"6 names the way, the mode, in which beings are actual. It means something like "simply there" or, to take a step in the direction of a more original interpretation, "presence." This designation of beings can even be thought back into the way they are named in the first beginning, i.e., into φύσις and the ἀλήθεια which determines φύσις. Accordingly, the full genuine content of the term "Dasein" in the first beginning is as follows: to occur essentially (there) by emerging out of itself as unconcealed. Throughout the entire history of metaphysics, however, there can be seen the not-accidental practice of taking the term that expresses the mode of the actuality of beings and carrying it over to these beings themselves and thus to use "Dasein" to mean "the Dasein," namely, the whole actually existent being itself. "Dasein" is thus merely the good German translation of existentia, the stepping forth and stand-
5. Freiburg lecture, "Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," 1935
6. Unhyphenated, an ordinary German term meaning "existence." It refers to the fact that (daß) something is (Sein). Heidegger says here that the term came to be extended to the thing that has existence and thus with the definite article (das Dasein) can mean "entity," any existent being. Heidegger proceeds in the following paragraphs to distinguish from this his own hyphenated term Da-sein. When Heidegger uses Existenz, another term for "existence," the German word will always be indicated in brackets.-Trans.