Middle English, from gerund of been be. Middle English, from present participle of been be. See more words from the same century. Accessed 12 Nov. English Language Learners Definition of being Entry 3 of 2. Nglish: Translation of being for Spanish Speakers.
Britannica English: Translation of being for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. The totality of all things that exist. One who lives or exists, or is assumed to do so. A human being , a divine being. Present participle of be. The definition of being is since or because. The state or fact of existence , consciousness , or life , or something in such a state.
The state or quality of having existence. The state or fact of existing or living; existence or life. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.
So how do we carry out fundamental ontology, and thus answer the question of the meaning of Being? It is here that Heidegger introduces the notion of Dasein Da-sein: there-being. Haugeland , complains that this interpretation clashes unhelpfully with Heidegger's identification of care as the Being of Dasein, given Heidegger's prior stipulation that Being is always the Being of some possible entity.
This fits with many of Heidegger's explicit characterizations of Dasein see e. That said, one needs to be careful about precisely what sort of entity we are talking about here. As Haugeland notes, there is an analogy here, one that Heidegger himself draws, with the way in which we might think of a language existing as an entity, that is, as a communally shared way of speaking. This appeal to the community will assume a distinctive philosophical shape as the argument of Being and Time progresses.
The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what, according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes that one might take through the text of Being and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be e. More specifically, it is human beings alone who a operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being although, as we shall see, one which is pre -ontological, in that it is implicit and vague and b are able to reflect upon what it means to be.
Mulhall, who tends to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develops the idea by explaining that while inanimate objects merely persist through time and while plants and non-human animals have their lives determined entirely by the demands of survival and reproduction, human beings lead their lives Mulhall , This gives us a sense of human freedom, one that will be unpacked more carefully below. This can all sound terribly inward-looking, but that is not Heidegger's intention.
In a way that is about to become clearer, Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible.
So perhaps Mulhall's point that human beings are distinctive in that they lead their lives would be better expressed as the observation that human beings are the nuclei of lives laying themselves out.
The second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is special about human beings as such, emphasizes the link with the taking-as structure highlighted earlier. Sheehan develops just such a line of exegesis by combining two insights.
These dual insights lead to a characterization of Dasein as the having-to-be-open. In other words, Dasein and so human beings as such cannot but be open: it is a necessary characteristic of human beings an a priori structure of our existential constitution, not an exercise of our wills that we operate with the sense-making capacity to take-other-beings-as.
And this helps us to grasp the meaning of Heidegger's otherwise opaque claim that Dasein, and indeed only Dasein, exists , where existence is understood via etymological considerations as ek-sistence , that is, as a standing out. Dasein stands out in two senses, each of which corresponds to one of the two dimensions of our proposed interpretation. Second, Dasein stands out in an openness to and an opening of Being see e.
As we have seen, it is an essential characteristic of Dasein that, in its ordinary ways of engaging with other entities, it operates with a preontological understanding of Being, that is, with a distorted or buried grasp of the a priori conditions that, by underpinning the taking-as structure, make possible particular modes of Being.
Heidegger puts it like this:. Being and Time 3: 33—4. This resistance towards any unpalatable anti-realism is an issue to which we shall return. But what sort of philosophical method is appropriate for the ensuing examination? Famously, Heidegger's adopted method is a species of phenomenology. In the Heideggerian framework, however, phenomenology is not to be understood as it sometimes is as the study of how things merely appear in experience.
Presupposed by ordinary experience, these structures must in some sense be present with that experience, but they are not simply available to be read off from its surface, hence the need for disciplined and careful phenomenological analysis to reveal them as they are.
So far so good. But, in a departure from the established Husserlian position, one that demonstrates the influence of Dilthey, Heidegger claims that phenomenology is not just transcendental, it is hermeneutic for discussion, see e. In other words, its goal is always to deliver an interpretation of Being, an interpretation that, on the one hand, is guided by certain historically embedded ways of thinking ways of taking-as reflected in Dasein's preontological understanding of Being that the philosopher as Dasein and as interpreter brings to the task, and, on the other hand, is ceaselessly open to revision, enhancement and replacement.
For Heidegger, this hermeneutic structure is not a limitation on understanding, but a precondition of it, and philosophical understanding conceived as fundamental ontology is no exception. Thus Being and Time itself has a spiral structure in which a sequence of reinterpretations produces an ever more illuminating comprehension of Being.
As Heidegger puts it later in the text:. What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way… In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.
Being and Time And this is a tension that, it seems fair to say, is never fully resolved within the pages of Being and Time. The best we can do is note that, by the end of the text, the transcendental has itself become historically embedded. More on that below. What is also true is that there is something of a divide in certain areas of contemporary Heidegger scholarship over whether one should emphasize the transcendental dimension of Heidegger's phenomenology e.
How, then, does the existential analytic unfold? Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as what he calls equipment , that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on. Indeed we achieve our most primordial closest relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner.
Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand. The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects i.
Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them.
Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present what Heidegger calls circumspection is non-subject-object in form.
Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task e. Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most basic way of encountering entities.
He maintains, however, that they apply to a derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe e.
With this phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an independent, objective universe.
Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure. The final phenomenological category identified during the first phase of the existential analytic is what Heidegger calls un-readiness-to-hand. This mode of Being of entities emerges when skilled practical activity is disturbed by broken or malfunctioning equipment, discovered-to-be-missing equipment, or in-the-way equipment. When encountered as un-ready-to-hand, entities are no longer phenomenologically transparent.
However, they are not yet the fully fledged objects of the present-at-hand, since their broken, malfunctioning, missing or obstructive status is defined relative to a particular equipmental context. The combination of two key passages illuminates this point: First:. The damage to the equipment is still not a mere alteration of a Thing—not a change of properties which just occurs in something present-at-hand.
When something cannot be used—when, for instance, a tool definitely refuses to work—it can be conspicuous only in and for dealings in which something is manipulated. Thus a driver does not encounter a punctured tyre as a lump of rubber of measurable mass; she encounters it as a damaged item of equipment, that is, as the cause of a temporary interruption to her driving activity. With such disturbances to skilled activity, Dasein emerges as a practical problem solver whose context-embedded actions are directed at restoring smooth skilled activity.
Much of the time Dasein's practical problem solving will involve recovery strategies e. In the limit, however e. With this spectrum of cases in view, it is possible to glimpse a potential worry for Heidegger's account. Cappuccio and Wheeler ; see also Wheeler , argue that the situation of wholly transparent readiness-to-hand is something of an ideal state.
Skilled activity is never or very rarely perfectly smooth. Moreover, minimal subjective activity such as a nonconceptual awareness of certain spatially situated movements by my body produces a background noise that never really disappears. Thus a distinction between Dasein and its environment is, to some extent, preserved, and this distinction arguably manifests the kind of minimal subject-object dichotomy that is characteristic of those cases of un-readiness-to-hand that lie closest to readiness-to-hand.
On the interpretation of Heidegger just given, Dasein's access to the world is only intermittently that of a representing subject. An alternative reading, according to which Dasein always exists as a subject relating to the world via representations, is defended by Christensen , Christensen targets Dreyfus as a prominent and influential exponent of the intermittent-subject view. Among other criticisms , Christensen accuses Dreyfus of mistakenly hearing Heidegger's clear rejection of the thought that Dasein's access to the world is always theoretical or theory-like in character as being, at the same time, a rejection of the thought that Dasein's access to the world is always in the mode of a representing subject; but, argues Christensen, there may be non-theoretical forms of the subject-world relation, so the claim that Heidegger advocated the second rejection is not established by pointing out that he advocated the first.
Let's assume that Christensen is right about this. The supporter of the intermittent-subject view might still argue that although Heidegger holds that Dasein sometimes emerges as a subject whose access to the world is non-theoretical plausibly, in certain cases of un-readiness-to-hand , there is other textual evidence, beyond that which indicates the non-theoretical character of hitch-free skilled activity, to suggest that readiness-to-hand must remain non-subject-object in form.
Whether or not there is such evidence would then need to be settled. What the existential analytic has given us so far is a phenomenological description of Dasein's within-the-world encounters with entities. The next clarification concerns the notion of world and the associated within-ness of Dasein. Famously, Heidegger writes of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. In effect, then, the notion of Being-in-the-world provides us with a reinterpretation of the activity of existing Dreyfus , 40 , where existence is given the narrow reading ek-sistence identified earlier.
Understood as a unitary phenomenon as opposed to a contingent, additive, tripartite combination of Being, in-ness, and the world , Being-in-the-world is an essential characteristic of Dasein. As Heidegger explains:. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is.
This state of Being does not arise just because some entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. As this passage makes clear, the Being-in dimension of Being-in-the-world cannot be thought of as a merely spatial relation in some sense that might be determined by a GPS device, since Dasein is never just present-at-hand within the world in the way demanded by that sort of spatial in-ness.
Heidegger sometimes uses the term dwelling to capture the distinctive manner in which Dasein is in the world. To dwell in a house is not merely to be inside it spatially in the sense just canvassed. Rather, it is to belong there, to have a familiar place there. It is in this sense that Dasein is essentially in the world. Heidegger will later introduce an existential notion of spatiality that does help to illuminate the sense in which Dasein is in the world.
So now, what is the world such that Dasein essentially dwells in it? The German term Bewandtnis is extremely difficult to translate in a way that captures all its native nuances for discussion, see Tugendhat ; thanks to a reviewer for emphasizing this point.
Crucially, for Heidegger, an involvement is not a stand-alone structure, but rather a link in a network of intelligibility that he calls a totality of involvements. Take the stock Heideggerian example: the hammer is involved in an act of hammering; that hammering is involved in making something fast; and that making something fast is involved in protecting the human agent against bad weather. Such totalities of involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental practice.
As such, they define equipmental entities, so the hammer is intelligible as what it is only with respect to the shelter and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which it meaningfully relates in Dasein's everyday practices. And this radical holism spreads, because once one begins to trace a path through a network of involvements, one will inevitably traverse vast regions of involvement-space.
Thus links will be traced not only from hammers to hammering to making fast to protection against the weather, but also from hammers to pulling out nails to dismantling wardrobes to moving house. This behaviour will refer back to many other behaviours packing, van-driving and thus to many other items of equipment large boxes, removal vans , and so on. The result is a large-scale holistic network of interconnected relational significance.
Such networks constitute worlds, in one of Heidegger's key senses of the term—an ontical sense that he describes as having a pre-ontological signification Being and Time Before a second key sense of the Heideggerian notion of world is revealed, some important detail can be added to the emerging picture.
Heidegger points out that involvements are not uniform structures. Thus I am currently working with a computer a with-which , in the practical context of my office an in-which , in order to write this encyclopedia entry an in-order-to , which is aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy a towards-this , for the sake of my academic work, that is, for the sake of my being an academic a for-the-sake-of-which.
The final involvement here, the for-the-sake-of-which, is crucial, because according to Heidegger all totalities of involvements have a link of this type at their base. This forges a connection between i the idea that each moment in Dasein's existence constitutes a branch-point at which it chooses a way to be, and ii the claim that Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible.
This is because every for-the-sake-of-which is the base structure of an equipment-defining totality of involvements and reflects a possible way for Dasein to be an academic, a carpenter, a parent, or whatever.
Moreover, given that entities are intelligible only within contexts of activity that, so to speak, arrive with Dasein, this helps to explain Heidegger's claim Being and Time that, in encounters with entities, the world is something with which Dasein is always already familiar. Finally, it puts further flesh on the phenomenological category of the un-ready-to-hand. Thus when I am absorbed in trouble-free typing, the computer and the role that it plays in my academic activity are transparent aspects of my experience.
But if the computer crashes, I become aware of it as an entity with which I was working in the practical context of my office, in order to write an encyclopedia entry aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy.
And I become aware of the fact that my behaviour is being organized for the sake of my being an academic. So disturbances have the effect of exposing totalities of involvements and, therefore, worlds. At this point in the existential analytic, worldhood is usefully identified as the abstract network mode of organizational configuration that is shared by all concrete totalities of involvements. We shall see, however, that as the hermeneutic spiral of the text unfolds, the notion of worldhood is subject to a series of reinterpretations until, finally, its deep structure gets played out in terms of temporality.
Having completed what we might think of as the first phase of the existential analytic, Heidegger uses its results to launch an attack on one of the front-line representatives of the tradition, namely Descartes.
This is the only worked-through example in Being and Time itself of what Heidegger calls the destruction Destruktion of the Western philosophical tradition, a process that was supposed to be a prominent theme in the ultimately unwritten second part of the text. In stark contrast, Heidegger's own view is that Dasein is in primary epistemic contact not with context-independent present-at-hand primitives e.
What is perhaps Heidegger's best statement of this opposition comes later in Being and Time. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood. For Heidegger, then, we start not with the present-at-hand, moving to the ready-to-hand by adding value-predicates, but with the ready-to-hand, moving to the present-at-hand by stripping away the holistic networks of everyday equipmental meaning.
It seems clear, then, that our two positions are diametrically opposed to each other, but why should we favour Heidegger's framework over Descartes'?
Heidegger's flagship argument here is that the systematic addition of value-predicates to present-at-hand primitives cannot transform our encounters with those objects into encounters with equipment. In other words, once we have assumed that we begin with the present-at-hand, values must take the form of determinate features of objects, and therefore constitute nothing but more present-at-hand structures.
And if you add more present-at-hand structures to some existing present-at-hand structures, what you end up with is not equipmental meaning totalities of involvements but merely a larger number of present-at-hand structures. Heidegger's argument here is at best incomplete for discussion, see Dreyfus , Wheeler The defender of Cartesianism might concede that present-at-hand entities have determinate properties, but wonder why the fact that an entity has determinate properties is necessarily an indication of presence-at-hand.
On this view, having determinate properties is necessary but not sufficient for an entity to be present-at-hand. More specifically, she might wonder why involvements cannot be thought of as determinate features that entities possess just when they are embedded in certain contexts of use. Consider for example the various involvements specified in the academic writing context described earlier.
They certainly seem to be determinate, albeit context-relative, properties of the computer. Of course, the massively holistic character of totalities of involvements would make the task of specifying the necessary value-predicates say, as sets of internal representations incredibly hard, but it is unclear that it makes that task impossible.
So it seems as if Heidegger doesn't really develop his case in sufficient detail. However, Dreyfus pursues a response that Heidegger might have given, one that draws on the familiar philosophical distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. It seems that value-predicates constitute a form of knowing-that i. Given the plausible although not universally held assumption that knowing-how cannot be reduced to knowledge-that, this would explain why value-predicates are simply the wrong sort of structures to capture the phenomenon of world-embeddedness.
In the wake of his critique of Cartesianism, Heidegger turns his attention to spatiality. He argues that Dasein dwells in the world in a spatial manner, but that the spatiality in question—Dasein's existential spatiality—cannot be a matter of Dasein being located at a particular co-ordinate in physical, Cartesian space.
That would be to conceive of Dasein as present-at-hand, and presence-at-hand is a mode of Being that can belong only to entities other than Dasein. According to Heidegger, the existential spatiality of Dasein is characterized most fundamentally by what he calls de-severance , a bringing close.
This is of course not a bringing close in the sense of reducing physical distance, although it may involve that. Heidegger's proposal is that spatiality as de-severance is in some way exactly how is a matter of subtle interpretation; see e. Given the Dasein-world relationship highlighted above, the implication drawn explicitly by Heidegger, see Being and Time is that the spatiality distinctive of equipmental entities, and thus of the world, is not equivalent to physical, Cartesian space.
Equipmental space is a matter of pragmatically determined regions of functional places, defined by Dasein-centred totalities of involvements e. For Heidegger, physical, Cartesian space is possible as something meaningful for Dasein only because Dasein has de-severance as one of its existential characteristics. Given the intertwining of de-severance and equipmental space, this licenses the radical view one that is consistent with Heidegger's prior treatment of Cartesianism that physical, Cartesian space as something that we can find intelligible presupposes equipmental space; the former is the present-at-hand phenomenon that is revealed if we strip away the worldhood from the latter.
Malpas forthcoming rejects the account of spatiality given in Being and Time. According to Malpas, then, equipmental space a space ordered in terms of practical activity and within which an agent acts presupposes a more fundamental notion of space as a complex unity with objective, intersubjective and subjective dimensions.
If this is right, then of course equipmental space cannot itself explain the spatial. A further problem, as Malpas also notes, is that the whole issue of spatiality brings into sharp focus the awkward relationship that Heidegger has with the body in Being and Time.
Indeed, at times, Heidegger might be interpreted as linking embodiment with Thinghood. Here one might plausibly contain the spread of presence-at-hand by appealing to a distinction between material present-at-hand and lived existential ways in which Dasein is embodied. Unfortunately this distinction isn't made in Being and Time a point noted by Ricoeur , , although Heidegger does adopt it in the much later Seminar in Le Thor see Malpas forthcoming, 5.
What seems clear, however, is that while the Heidegger of Being and Time seems to hold that Dasein's embodiment somehow depends on its existential spatiality see e. Before leaving this issue, it is worth noting briefly that space reappears later in Being and Time —21 , where Heidegger argues that existential space is derived from temporality. Words related to being actuality , animation , journey , life , living , presence , reality , subsistence , vitality , world , character , entity , essence , essentiality , individuality , marrow , personality , quintessence , self , soul.
How to use being in a sentence In LGBT media outlet Queerty took the app to task for allegedly deleting accounts that made reference to being trans. Martin's Summer Rafael Sabatini. The Bondboy George W. George Washington Ogden.
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