A Brief Phenomenology of Dasein

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Heidegger wrote Being and Time he was hopeful that his ontological phenomenology would lead thinking back to its “proper ground.” In a brief essay with the theme as the title, he premised “the end of philosophy.” This “end” has nothing to do with a closed-off finality but, rather, heralds a “new” return to a deeper, primordial thinking. As we move toward one hundred years marking the first publication of Sein und Zeit, his transcendental phenomenology of Dasein still remains opaque. One reason for this is that his work has been engaged with in the traditional philosophical mode rather than as he meticulously outlined in the introduction to Being and Time. Unless this task as he describes it is taken seriously, the profound insights embedded in his work will remain undisclosed. Michael Zimmerman declared that reading Heidegger should be transformative; if it is not, then the deficiency lies with the reading. In this essay I carry through a brief and very simple illustration of the kinds of insights that the experience of authentic engagement with Heidegger's Being and Time opens up.