What Is the Problem of the Meaning of Being? > 39
way in which it seizes its prey or evades its predators, the way in which it builds its nest and so forth. For we do not question the fact that the being into which we wish to transpose ourselves does relate to other beings, that it has access to its prey and to its predators and deals with them accordingly. The question as to whether we can transpose ourselves into the animal assumes without question that in relation to the animal something like a going-along-with, a going along with it in its access to and in its dealings with its world is possible in the first place and does not represent an intrinsically nonsensical undertaking. (FCM, 203–4)
For us, “beings as such” means “as disclosed to Dasein,” and that means in their significance, for a Dasein whose primordial mode of being is care (Sorge), a practical investment in the world, attuned to and sensitive to significance, importance, and mattering, all implicit in our comportments with beings, deeply familiar, and unthematic. Human animals also have a biological species form, but that does not determine the world for Dasein. In a very shorthand way, we can say that the background world for any possible accessibility and for their own individuation is a historical world—what Heidegger will call, using another term for openness, a clearing (Lichtung), not a species form. Our world is always also a specific historical world and a horizon of sense, not mere instinctual attentiveness.
Said a slightly different way: beings are manifest to Dasein as Dasein is, in its distinctness as a being. That distinctness is its “existence,” its being as pure possibility and not as a substance or mind, and that mode of existence is practical, care (Sorge). Dasein is what it takes itself to be, within a world into which it is thrown, over which it has no power or influence. This means that primordial access to beings and to beings as a whole, being as such, is not originally cognitive, not the object of judgments, but requires instead what Heidegger calls a prior attunement, a Stimmung,16 an orientation that stems from its primordially practical involvement, given the horizon of possible meaningfulness set by its world. Obviously, in a cognitive sense, we can know what an MRI machine is, or a molecule, a cavity, a poem. We can provide a list of identifying predicates, more or less. But since Heidegger claims we encounter anything we do always with greater or lesser degrees of involvement, it is that involvement within a world that allows meaningful access to the beings that show up in such a world. We normally do not just happen upon an MRI; we are being examined, or we are running the
16. Wellbery 2010 provides an indispensable account of the various uses of Stimmung in the German language, one that I have found especially valuable in understanding Heidegger’s usage.