Heidegger on Dasein: The Essence of Dasein Lies in Its Existence

Original Text

The German original from Sein und Zeit (1927), Division One, §9:

"Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz."

John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's English translation renders it:

"The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence."

Translation

In plain English, Heidegger is saying that what a human being is is not a fixed nature or a given substance but the way it lives its being. For a rock or a tool, essence precedes existence: the rock is what it is regardless of anything it does. For the being Heidegger calls Dasein (literally "being-there," his term for human existence), the reverse holds: there is no pre-given "what" that determines it; instead, the human being is constituted by its living, choosing, projecting, and becoming. The "essence" of such a being — if one may still speak of an essence — is simply that it exists, that it has to be its own being, and that it can lose or gain itself in the process.

Context

Martin Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927, dedicating it to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. The book's project is to recover "the question of being" — the question that Heidegger believed Western metaphysics had forgotten by treating being as a category among others. His strategy is to interrogate the being for whom being is an issue: the human being, which he calls Dasein. The term is chosen carefully: Dasein means "being-there," and it names not a thinking subject in a container called the world but a being that is always already involved in a world, caring about it, and understanding itself in terms of it.

The sentence appears in §9, "The Theme of the Analytic of Dasein," where Heidegger is preparing the ground for his existential analytic. He is distinguishing his approach from the philosophical anthropology and psychology of his day, which treated the human being as a thing among things — an object with properties, an animal with added consciousness. Against this, Heidegger insists that Dasein's mode of being is fundamentally different from the mode of being of things, and the difference is captured in the sentence: things have essences; Dasein has existence.

Meaning

The meaning of the quote unfolds in several layers. First, it is a rejection of essentialism about the human being. The tradition that runs from Plato through Descartes and into the sciences tends to define the human being by some fixed property — rationality, consciousness, selfhood, a soul. Heidegger's sentence denies that any such property captures what it is to be human. The human being has no fixed "what"; it is not exhausted by any set of attributes, however richly described.

Second, the quote asserts that the human mode of being is existence in a special sense. Existence, for Heidegger, is not merely being alive. It is the mode of being of a being that is concerned about its own being — that stands before possibilities, that must choose, that can be authentic or inauthentic, that projects itself into a future and owns or disowns its past. This is what Heidegger calls "existentiality": Dasein's being is an issue for it. A being that exists, in this sense, is not a finished thing but a task — it has its being "to be," and in every moment it is deciding, whether it knows it or not, what it will make of itself.

Third, the quote carries a normative charge. Because Dasein's essence is its existence, there is no external standard by which its life could be settled in advance. The human being must become itself, and it can fail to become itself — Heidegger calls this failure "inauthenticity," the drifting of the self into the anonymous "they" of public opinion. The quote therefore founds the possibility of authenticity: since nothing is given in advance, everything depends on how we take up our own existence.

Philosophical Interpretation

The sentence is one of the most consequential in twentieth-century philosophy. It is the basis of the existentialist slogan "existence precedes essence," which Sartre made famous, and it marks the point where phenomenology turns into existential analysis. For Heidegger, however, the sentence is not a declaration of radical self-creation in Sartre's sense. Dasein is not a pure freedom that invents itself from nothing; it is thrown into a world it did not choose, and its projects always take off from a situation that is not of its making. The essence-existence reversal is Heidegger's way of saying that the human being is a being of project and thrownness together — it must become itself, but only on the ground of a factical situation it never authored.

The quote also distinguishes Dasein from all other beings and thus grounds Heidegger's critique of every philosophy that would treat the human being as a thing, an object of science, or a mere part of nature. Because Dasein's being is existence, the methods appropriate to things — measurement, classification, causal explanation — can never exhaust what the human being is. This has consequences for the human sciences, for ethics, and for the very idea of a meaningful life: if the essence of the human is not given, then the meaning of a human life cannot be read off from a fixed nature but must be worked out in the living of it.

Related Concepts

• Authenticity — owning one's existence rather than drifting
• Freedom — the project of becoming that Dasein is
• Meaning — worked out in living, not given in advance
• Phenomenology — the method through which Dasein is disclosed

Related Learning Path

Read §9 and the surrounding sections of Being and Time in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation. Pair this quote with Heidegger on thrownness, which shows the situation from which Dasein must become itself, and with Heidegger on being-toward-death, which completes the analysis of authentic existence. For the existentialist transformation of the same claim, see Sartre's statement that existence precedes essence. The Existentialist Wisdom collection traces the learning path from Dasein to authenticity.