Winter, Week 10 Meeting (Part I)

I.6 : Reality (§43) and Truth (§44)

Last time we saw that dasein's being can be grasped in its unity as care: being-ahead-of-itself-already-in-(a world) as being-amidst (intraworldly-entities). Recall that the goal of BT is to raise the question of what it means to be, and that the analysis of dasein's being is designed to help us do this. We noted that BT’s initial question ‘what does it mean to be?’ gets pursued through the investigation of dasein, the entity that understands being, and therefore gets transformed into the question ‘what does it mean to be dasein?’ – or, put another way, ‘what is it to be able to understand being (at all, in general)?’. So, having established that dasein's being is care, it seems we should now be in a position to say something about being itself.

However, we noted that Heidegger concludes these sections (as he often does) with a question: have we really grasped all of dasein? The answer is no, and this shows that dasein's existence needs to be interpreted further before we can say anything more about the meaning of being.

But we are already in a position to re-think two phenomena that have traditionally been closely associated with being: reality and truth. We discussed some of Heidegger’s claims to the effect that the existential understanding of truth and reality is different from – and in fact grounds – the ways truth and reality have traditionally been understood in their connection with the phenomenon of being.