Heidegger Concepts II: Dasein

I’ll be posting videos checking up on my comprehension of Heidegger's Being and Time periodically by giving brief exposés of some of his key ideas. This may be useful to those who want a condensed version of some of his ideas (although I can't be confident I understand any/much of Being and Time completely).

In this video, I discuss Heidegger’s notorious idea of “Dasein”. Literally translating to “Being there”, Dasein is a crucial concept in Heidegger which he uses as a key way of answering the question of being. The use of the term “Dasein” is very similar to the way Hegel speaks of Spirit as becoming conscious of its self-reflexivity and selfsameness and has interesting implications for the way one conceives of the human condition.

[RolfGoebel]

This is a a very thoughtful introduction into Heidegger's key concept of Dasein. It is interesting that Heidegger seeks to develop the idea that Dasein is BOTH a spontaneous, intuitive immersion in the openness of the world AND a self-reflective inquiry into the framework conditions of this mode of being. It seems to me that that the paradoxical but productive tension between these two poles accounts for the centrality of Dasein in Heidegger's philosophy!