Jeremy Fortune
Pre-ontological Structure and the Worldhood of Dasein
Heidegger, in his Existentialist fashion, defines (in a loose sense of the word) Dasein as “a being for which, in its being, that being is an issue.” While he continues to use this phrase in conjunction with the more Existentialist sections of Being and Time, the Phenomenological concept of Dasein is tied up with the notion of the worldhood of the world, and how equipment presents itself to Dasein in its everydayness. And while Dasein continues on to define an authentic Dasein—one that becomes a being-towards-death, effectively destroying the “They”—Heidegger leaves the “current” Dasein as a somewhat undefined form, leaving the Existentialist tradition of the projectedness of humanity into possibility as a definition enough for Dasein.
However, keeping with the philosophy of everydayness that Heidegger is committed to pursuing, it seems that the definition for Dasein as projected does little for the pre-ontological concept that we seem to have regarding it. For instance, when asked, “Who are you?” Dasein may respond with a variety of answers, or may not respond at all, but to respond “I am a person who accepts his death as his ownmost possibility” seems not only to not answer the question, it tells us nothing about how Dasein is currently defined. What is needed here is an ontological current definition of Dasein—one that still contains some aspect of projection, but nonetheless affords an answer as to what the current Dasein is.
Additionally, Heidegger’s concept of ontology as phenomenology is based on the pre-ontological conception of being as Dasein currently understands it. Heidegger assumes this point, but does very little to describe just how this pre-ontological notion of being came about in Dasein. I do not speak of psychological reasons in Dasein’s development, but rather the phenomena related to the being of entities as they are first encountered and just how this...