Krell (1994:363) – compreensão de ser

Oblivion seems to seal the fate of Dasein, as unneeding, unheeding. Like Nietzsche’s herd of cows at pasture and child at play, like Kafka’s ape roaming the rainforest before the circus troupe captures him, oblivious Dasein is indifferent to the question of being. A remarkable complacency (Bedürfnislosigkeit) surrounds the question with an impenetrable fog; a remarkable lack of need (Unbedürftigkeit) characterizes the “they” in their quotidian concerns (SZ 177, 189). The tradition of philosophy exhibits such complacency in its neglect of the question of being (21, 46); it is as though philosophers too were Cartesian extended substances (92), more like mindless, indifferent stones and animals than vital thinkers.¹

However much Dasein declines to heed and neglects to need the question of being, it nonetheless moves within and is animated by something like an “understanding of being.” Not a theoretical observation of entities or a scientific comprehension of their being, to be sure, but an understanding (in) which Dasein lives. Being is not only the most universal and undefinable concept, but also the most evident one: “That we in each case already live in an understanding of being and that the meaning of being is at the same time veiled in obscurity demonstrates the fundamental necessity of fetching back again (wiederholen) the question concerning ‘being’” (44).

What does it mean to “live” (in) an understanding of being? Can we ever understand such “living,” if the living itself encompasses understanding? Can living leap over its own shadow?

Whether or not we can ever understand it, such living within an understanding of being, Heidegger assures us, is a fact (5: ein Faktum). Thus the formal structure of the question concerning being yields a particular facticity and a certain movement or motion. We move (wir bewegen uns) in a vague and average understanding of being, not insofar as we theorize and construct ontologies, but simply by being alive. Such animation or, better, animatedness (the passive form of Bewegtheit, “movedness,” is not to be overlooked) is Heidegger’s principal preoccupation both before and after Being and Time, from the period of his hermeneutics of facticity (roughly 1919 to 1923) to that of his theoretical biology (1929-1930) and well beyond. Moreover, our factical animatedness within an understanding of being, which is an understanding in which we live, directs us to something very much like being. Nietzsche, in a note that will become important for both Heidegger and Derrida, writes as follows: “ ‘Being’—we have no other notion of it than as ‘living.’ — For how can something dead ‘be’?”²