Dear Dasein,
We saw last week that the initial project of analyzing Dasein came to an end with the concept of care.
But Heidegger did not want Being and Time to be merely an “anthropology”. In fact, in his later work he criticizes Being and Time with being too anthropocentric.
It was always meant to serve his ultimate mission — what he calls “fundamental ontology”.
Paragraphs 43 and 44 are where Heidegger begins to connect his analysis of Dasein to the project of fundamental ontology.
In a way, he is showing off. Heidegger is showing off how, as a result of his analysis of Dasein and careful avoidance of the traditional approaches to philosophy, he can not only reject the theories and problematics of all the major Western philosophers before him, but show that many of their problems and questions don’t even make sense and are therefore not problems at all.
In just a few pages, Heidegger tries to show that the most longstanding problems in philosophy, such as the problem of how we can know f…
