standing-in is at the same time persistently steadfast {inständig} in the sense of “incessantly remaining in the essential relation to the being of beings”; the “persistent steadfastness in being” is named “care.” But even this word is so burdened by everyday language that every other use remains surrounded by misinterpretations. “Care” in “Being and Time” means the persistently steadfast guarding and preservation of the truth of being, never the concern about beings. What is true of care is also true of other fundamental words that are named in the “Analytic of Dasein.”)
(η) Anxiety, Death, Guilt, and the Nothing within the Realm of Questioning in “Being and Time”
Everyone who is even somewhat familiar with “Being and Time,” in view of what has been said up to now, would be justified in replying as follows: what in the end must be granted must be granted, namely, that in “Being and Time” thinking goes beyond the questions that the title “Being and Time” indicates. The reflection indeed directs itself to the being of each being and to the being of beings as a whole, not only to the being of the human and least of all to “existence” in the narrow, Kierkegaardian sense; indeed, not only to existentia in the traditional metaphysical meaning either.
If the questioning thus aims at being and not at the isolated being, the human, then why do the extensive discussions of anxiety, death, guilt, and the nothing press so conspicuously into the foreground? The answer to this is: the enumerated themes are dealt with only because the one question “Being and Time” is posed everywhere, even where it is not at all always being dealt with specifically, and where it seems as though everything were aiming only at a “philosophical anthropology” or a “philosophy of existence.”
Of what sort the one question of “Being and Time” is and where the “provisional aim” of this treatise is located can be found succinctly and clearly in the preface, on page 1. There it is said, even with spaced letters for emphasis: the question goes toward the “meaning of being.” This already implies, above all, that the question does not go toward beings or toward the “meaning of beings.” And what “meaning” means is discussed in detail in § 32: “meaning” is, according to “Being and Time,” the realm of projection for understanding. Insofar as it is a matter of understanding in the sense of the understanding of being, what is being asked about with the “meaning of being” is the open, from which something like being is at all understandable, in such a way that the words “being” and “is” and their variant forms are not mere sounds and noises, but each time name something which we