Quotation
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“The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence.”
Martin Heidegger · Phenomenology · Modern · 1927
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is ontological: what it is to be the kind of entity we ourselves are is not a fixed what, set down like the essence of a table, but a having-to-be, so that our being is at issue in how we exist. A competing reading imports Sartre and hears a cheer for radical freedom against any nature. Heidegger marks essence with quotation marks and spends the section distinguishing existence from present-at-hand occurrence. The sentence is in Being and Time, section 9, early in the analytic of Dasein. He says the being of this entity is in each case mine. Existence, as he assigns the word, belongs to Dasein alone. You do not first have a nature and then switch it on. The scare quotes are a warning that the tradition's essence, a what, is the wrong question. The right question is the who, answered by existing.
Did Martin Heidegger really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Macquarrie and Robinson's English, with their quotation marks around essence. In the same section he says this 'existence' does not mean the traditional existentia, mere presence-at-hand, which he thinks is the wrong kind of being for Dasein. The sentence is not Sartre's 'existence precedes essence', which is a later slogan.
Where it comes from
Being and Time, §9, in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation
Approximate date: 1927.
How to use it
A careers form in a sixth form in Bristol that asks a pupil to select a fixed type and then live it has assumed the essence Heidegger puts in quotation marks. The sentence does not say there is no fact about the pupil. It says that for this kind of entity the facts get their sense from a life still being led, which can be owned or disowned. A person who treats yesterday's label as a nature has missed the section. So has a person who treats the sentence as permission to have no commitments. Existence, here, is not a holiday from determination. It is the way determination happens for us.
A mindset reading
Ask 'who is being enacted?' rather than 'what type is this?' when the subject is a human life. The habit will not settle a scientific question about bodies. It stops the slide from a description into a nature that was never chosen and can never be taken up. His marks around essence are part of the claim. Drop them and you get a different sentence.
Understand the philosophy
Being and Time, 1927, section 9, opens the preparatory analytic. The key terms are Dasein, essence in quotation marks, and existence as opposed to presence-at-hand. Dasein is the entity we ourselves are, whose being is an issue for it. This sentence is the compressed thesis Sartre later popularised in another form. Heidegger's version is not a humanism of projects. It is a claim about the kind of being that has to be analysed before the question of being in general can move. The letter on language, already in this library, is twenty years later.
- self
- meaning
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is ontological: what it is to be the kind of entity we ourselves are is not a fixed what, set down like the essence of a table, but a having-to-be, so that our being is at issue in how we exist. A competing reading imports Sartre and hears a cheer for radical freedom against any nature. Heidegger marks essence with quotation marks and spends the section distinguishing existence from present-at-hand occurrence. The sentence is in Being and Time, section 9, early in the analytic of Dasein. He says the being of this entity is in each case mine. Existence, as he assigns the word, belongs to Dasein alone. You do not first have a nature and then switch it on. The scare quotes are a warning that the tradition's essence, a what, is the wrong question. The right question is the who, answered by existing.
Did Martin Heidegger really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Macquarrie and Robinson's English, with their quotation marks around essence. In the same section he says this 'existence' does not mean the traditional existentia, mere presence-at-hand, which he thinks is the wrong kind of being for Dasein. The sentence is not Sartre's 'existence precedes essence', which is a later slogan.
Which work is it in?
Being and Time, §9, in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation Approximate date: 1927.