Heidegger set out to question what it means to “be”, what it means to be a Being, and what constitutes such a phenomenon. He took his approach phenomenologically, meaning from the approach of analyzing one’s own being, in what is commonly referred to as a subjective approach, analyzing phenomena as they appear within one’s own experience. He took this method and applied it in a broad ontological manner to the question of what is Being. Heidegger stated that we must develop a deep understanding of what it means to Be, what our Being is, prior to any objective pursuit, such as science or other intellectual activities. This phenomenological analysis, which seeks to give description and insight into the nature of our experience, and how it comes to fruition, what characterizes it, is necessary something which is presupposed in any scientific endeavor, without being explicitly stated. By continuing to ask scientific questions, in pursuing technological advancement, without clarifying the subjective mode, and the perspective and characteristics of it, we necessarily are engaging with material from a foundation that is unexplored. Heidegger sought out to explore this foundation, that which is the essential characteristics of our Being, in order to shed light upon anything which proceeds from it, which is all of our subjective experience, which, in reality, is all that truly matters to us. Heidegger discovered that our Being, the one we have access too, the one closest to us – so to say, itself is best understood through the many modes which are available to it, in general, the Being that we are, is a Being for whom his own Being is a problem for it, which is, what he termed “Dasein” or in general, the human condition, a Human Being.

The modes of being can be characterized as having distinct characteristics, arising, and being modified, by situations, environment, history, the present. In short, our experience is tempered by temporality itself, by time. Building off of Heidegger insight, Merleau-Ponty pointed out that this very being is deeply entwined with our perspective, which is primordially grasped and develops the contents of experience as an aggregation through time. The perspective which directly intuits and filters content of sensory input, through a signification structure, or a value structure, necessarily determines which information is manifest in consciousness. The development of datum in accordance with our inbuilt value structure, and modifications to the value structure, both from intuited pre-conscious perspective data collection, and conscious direction, mutually influence each other and reinforce the content which is manifest in our actions and conscious experience in the present moment. Heidegger makes reference to the nature of our being that of contained the threefold tenses of time, bundled up in the present. The present experience is tempered by historicity, the past, and is an intuition, and potentiality, of the future, both past and future, showing their modifications and effect within the manifestation of the present moment’s contents, in short, our being is modified by the unity of time, containing within it the past, present, and future.

The past isn’t following behind us, or a property making up who we were. It isn’t behind us, it is with us, it necessarily is us. This is so due to the past actively manifesting the future through our Being which is located in the present. Our past is characterized by humans thrownness, by us being here, in those times and places, in which we were thrown into, in which we existed without placing ourselves there. We relate to our present by being in a mode where we attempt to make sense of the world, where we try to feel comfortable, in satisfying desires, in short, we wish to be “at home in the world” in the present. Towards the future we are living as a projection of ourselves, we relate to the future by imagining the goals and aims wish we wish to accomplish. Now necessarily our present moment relation to each of these is contained in the present. This threefold nature of temporality is bundled in the present, and while there is a unity of the three, in the present, we, in our directedness, relate to each one differently. It is part of a humans very Being not in the conventional sense that we are using lessons learned through retrospective analysis or acting on  habits formed in the past, but it is itself part of the becoming future, it is a functional perspective of making sense out of our being in describing our history as being us as we are, and even being within the present, as it not only causally produced this moment, but continues acting within every moment of being, in an abstract sense it is moved from implicit to Being to its truthful place implicitly located within the definition that we give Being.

Our fundamental mode of being, in general, is characterized by intentionality. This intentionality implies that consciousness is always directed towards something, or with an object, an idea, a thought, a Kantian “Idea”. In other words, our being is always in relation towards a content. Our conscious gaze is directed towards something, and that intentional directedness of consciousness, and the contents it points at, necessarily is predetermined by our value structure, or what Heidegger refers to as the nature of care. That which fills out conscious experience, is the product of inherited, nurtured, developed, perspectively tempered, systematically built up, content. This content which is the production of the filtration of the perspective system, based upon the significance, or sense of which we are in relation to content, and the hierarchy of importance discerned by our embodied Being, makes up that which influences our Being. Our conscious gaze, marked by the modification of temporality, directed by intentionality towards a content, is deciphered as containing content which we care about. In other words, we only pay attention to that which has been developed, systematically, by the entirety of our Being, as something that is important, as something significant, that has a sense, in which we “care” about. Our consciousness cannot be directed upon phenomena in experience that doesn’t matter to us. If we are conscious of it, it has presented itself as something with meaning which, in the present moment, is manifesting itself in certain significance, which is intuited an ingested by the perceptive system, displayed in conscious experience, and further modified by our conceptual linguistic system to be represented symbolically using language. Granted, this description isn’t necessarily all Heidegger, there is a lot of my personal connection between different phenomenological discoveries and their entwinement into a complete picture, but the discover of intentionality, and care, are fundamental to Heidegger, and displayed in this way, gives us an abstract description which is objectively true of our subjective experience, which, in short, is what phenomenology seeks to uncover to us.

Spatiality for a being such as we are, Dasien, is experienced not in the distantially of phenomena, but rather what is most proximally subject of our conscious awareness within the present moment. What is closest is not felt or seen or experienced as what is physically closest, but as that which is most ready to consciousness, as that which is occupying our present conscious state, or has the ability to be so. In this way London might be closer to the man who is contemplating England, than the shoes on his feet, phenomenologically speaking. We see our contact lenses before objects objectively speaking, but in analyzing our being and its relation to spatiality, we always see and experience entities farther away, and feel them as closer to our experience, than the glasses which we see, and objectively are much closer. This is what Heidegger means by the concept “closeness”.

Apart from the general characteristics which make up our Being, there are different modes of being, that are distinct and contain their own significations, apart from the generalized universal attributes described above. These different mode of beings are reflective of the way in which we inhabit the word, several of which, as described by Heidegger, I will out outline.

One such mode is what Heidegger refers to as ready-to-hand, indicating that being which we embody in relation to tools, or something which becomes an extension of our self, without much thought about it, the mode of being which pertains to me typing, is that the device I am using is ready to hand for me, I am not analyzing it’s being, nor questioning its composition, I am using it as equipment for a certain end, as an extension of myself. Its meaning as ready-to-hand is intrinsic in my relation to it as it fits into the broader structure of the purpose I have for it, for which I am directed. The object that is ready-to-hand is not a content which we are subjectively conscious of, or focused upon, it is like our shoes, we do not think about them while walking, yet they are ready at hand to us in relation to the action new have in “walking”. It is the primordial sense of the term, existing prior to any theorizing, and the object is seen in its significance towards us as something to achieve a theorized end.

The theorized end, or contemplated phenomena for which the ready-to-hand is applied, towards which the gaze of consciousness is intentionally directed upon, is the present-at-hand. The being of the object is in relation to us, and our perception of it is modified by the state it is in. When the state is something to be utilized, it is present at hand to us. When the state of the object is perceived in a fashion that it itself is the object of conscious intentionality, then it becomes present-at-hand, or that which is the intentional object of phenomenological experience. The ready-to-hand object itself goes relatively unnoticed, until it breaks, or becomes un-ready-to-hand, and it is recognized from the perspective of another type of being, where it presents itself as present-at-hand. Meaning, it no longer is a working tool for an end, but it itself has been made into an end, that must be fixed to continue what is meaningful work for me (which writing happens to be). This present-at-hand device now becomes analyzed and inspected as a problem, and the mode of being which grasps and experiences such a phenomenon is another state which us humans, Dasein, encounter. The intentionality of our being, that of the which we are directed towards, becomes the content which is present-at-hand within the moment, to us, subjectively. The “object” or Kantian “idea” is that towards which we are directed at, and is denoted by the term present-at-hand.

Present-at-hand and Ready-to-hand are what objects are in relation to our conscious perception of them, and are altered as the contents of consciousness are altered. An object that is, at one subject moment, being used towards an end, if phenomenologically analyzed (retrospectively) it would be admitted as being ready-to-hand for us in that moment. If the next moment, our conscious gaze becomes directed upon the object, and thus it becomes the direct object of our intentionality, it moves from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand, for us, in that moment.

The modes of being which are possible for us are large and range in uniqueness to a scale which is hardly possible to be enumerated, at least presently, but what we can realize is that a range of experiences, of modes of being, are available to us, and they change situationally, I believe, due to determinate causes, which we can also work to uncover, as well as work to develop the characteristics which enable certain modes of being which we care more about, to be more prevalent in our lives. Say the mode of being which strives to overcome something challenging to the entity, becomes appealing to Dasien due to its rewarding nature in overcoming. One can learn the prerequisites and the modes of being which lead to such further entailed modes, and by a greater understanding and ability to recognizing circumstances and situations as having a potential value of initiating said desirable mode of being, better produce them in their own experience.

Heidegger’s had a conception of Dasein being in a natural state of “guilt”. We are guilty due to our thrown projection into our existence. We exist due to our thrownness, we are thrown into the world, into our present moment. We didn’t choose existence, choose this moment, we didn’t create ourselves, but we find ourselves here. Thus, we are indebted, naturally, to existence itself, to the universe, for an existence unasked for, undeserved, unwarranted. Someone who is in debt is naturally guilty. Thus, we are always guilty. Not only are we guilty of contained something which we did not ask for, namely, our existence, our very Being, but we are guilty in not living up to the call of our conscience in acting authentically,we are always guilty due to not being what we have the potential for being. Heidegger notes in his Being and Time that, “when the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the “they” is revealed. Resoluteness brings Dasein back to its own most potentiality for being its Self. When one has an understanding Being-towards-death – towards death as one’s own most possibility – one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.” As our nature has us constantly living in front of ourselves, striving to future possibilities, we never are what we are, we always are living in and for the future, projecting ourselves into it, and we are at fault for not Being this authenticity which we should be, ourselves. Most of the time we are consumed by the they-self, a product of being part of society, of the mass, of the crowd, which shapes us. We are guilty of not being our true selves, as that which stems from the inclination of our own individualized Being, but instead, is modified in accordance with the masses, and seeks to project a false version of ourselves, and thus is inauthentic, and thus guilty of deception. This guilt, coupled with a realization of our finitude, an “expecting” or anticipation of our own annihilation, death, can produce a somewhat original conception of morality, grounded from this guilt. This is comparable to the Buddhist notion of morality being founded upon moral guilt, and moral dread. Thus, we are punished for what our conscience shows us to be bad and are forewarned and enticed not to commit it again, in dread, out of fear for the same suffering we produced before. In this way, guilt, time, conscience, death, and our specific type of Being, Dasien, all are tied together to produce morality. This springs from a resoluteness, or steadfastness, not to act contrary to our authentic selves (uninfluenced by society / norms) (which itself must be influenced and dependent upon such prior influences) but nonetheless is ourselves, not our immersion in a hive mentality, but producing activity that is in reaction to our own developed conscience. This resoluteness, or the ability to heed the call of conscious, to recognize our temporality, both in time and the eventual end of our individual time, and act in a way that accords with our own conscience, is what produces morality. This is all possible due to Dasein’s essential foundational nature as “care”, or the ability to attach importance to phenomena, in the sense of concernful solicitude – valuing / judging.

The idea of being-with-others in the Hiedeggerian sense is a distinctively different state of Being than that of Being-alone, in a sense of your state of Being when other humans or even life forms enter your conscious experience through their being environmentally close (perceived in consciousness physically) as well as mentally close (perceived in consciousness as a mental manifestation). The radical change is immediately recognizable, and I will not go into the details or characteristics of such a change, just that it is manifest in a way many people don’t naturally recognize as a distinct state of Being, which we most of the time, every day, are in. Those who say they do not like being around other people, or don’t like being around a lot of people, really mean to say, they do not like their state of Being-with which is only manifest among others. It is not the others, but it is your own state of being-with which you may find to become uncomfortable if you have aggregated a personality trait of unsociability. It is a mode of yourself which you are not content with, not the imposition of outside forces upon you. The mode of Being-with-others is modified according to the environment, our developed perceptual response, and the individuals to whom are in our company. Only those that are consciously or perceptively intuited as being in our presence are included as causal factors towards the modification of our being, those that go unperceived, or those not in our immediate vicinity, are not causally related to our mode of being-with-others. The unperceived, or unintuited physical presence of another Being, if consciously gazed upon cognitively, in thought or in recollection, modified our being additionally, but is not included in the sense of this term as Heidegger poses it.