Carman: Seinsverständnis

Seinsverständnis is what makes the analytic of Dasein relevant to the question of being: Heidegger asks about Dasein in order to ask about being because Dasein understands being. This is the basic reason why, in Division II, Heidegger moves the inquiry toward an explanation of Seinsverständnis: “We are looking for an answer to the question about the sense of being in general … Laying bare the horizon in which something like being becomes intelligible at all amounts to clarifying the possibility of the understanding of being belonging to the make-up of the entity we call Dasein. But understanding of being can only be clarified radically as an essential feature of the being of Dasein, if the entity to whose being it belongs is itself interpreted in an originary way with respect to its being” (GA2 231). (CARMAN in WRATHALL)