The reader will be aware that Martin Heidegger explored ‘being’ by contrasting two German words, Sein and Dasein. The former corresponds roughly to the English infinitive construction ‘to be’ and the latter is used in everyday speech to indicate ‘being there.’ Heidegger uses Dasein to refer to human existence: a human’s experience of being. He uses Sein to refer to being in general.
The detailed interpretation of Heidegger’s use of Sein, Dasein, ‘being,’ and ‘existence’ is a complicated and controversial discipline unto itself.
For the present discussion, it is worth noting that Sein and Dasein are active verbs, for which no passive form is possible. The same is true of the English verbs ‘be’ and ‘exist’ — these verbs all have active nominative subjects and no accusative direct objects. These verbs denote some type of agency.
There is another linguistic artifact which expresses being in a transitive way: the German construction es gibt. This structure is usually rendered into English as “there is” or “there are.” But the grammar of es gibt makes the being thing — the thing which is — into a direct object. The existing thing is being put into, and kept in, existence. There seems to be no clearly analogous construction in the English language. It is left as an exercise for the reader to survey English idioms, past and present, to see if there is some such analogous formulation.
Heidegger hints at this type of being — or this aspect of being — which lacks agency when he uses the word Geworfenheit. This word is often translated into English as ‘thrownness’ — human existence is beyond its own control: a human being finds himself thrown into a time and a place not of his own choosing. Not only is the spatial-temporal physical location not chosen, but also cultural and social contexts are not chosen.
The question at hand is this: to investigate the nature of Being by contrasting and comparing the grammatical nominative subject with the accusative direct object. There remains, of course, the question of whether it is a valid or sound method to use the grammar of natural language to explore metaphysical questions.
The reader will remember that Heidegger wrote that Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins, but while that sentence is thought-provoking, it hardly serves to solve or explain these questions.
One might postulate a spectrum, at one end of which is Being as absolute agency: God said, “I am that I am,” a sentence which has kept philosophers, theologians, and Semitic philologists busy for 3,500 years. Being is in this sense an assertion and an action. Being as a choice and as an act of the will.
At the other end of the spectrum is Being as ultimate passivity: That which is — things which are — have been thrown into existence. A conscious, knowing, deliberate thing — a person, a human — finds himself thrown into existence. One simply is, and is at a time and place not of one’s choosing. Searching one’s memory, one finds that at some point in time, one started to be. One simply was. It was certainly not a volitional act. One did not choose to be, nor was one at first even conscious of being. Somehow, it gradually dawned upon one, that one was.
Perhaps one clue is to be found in this usage: that es gibt is often used of inanimate things, and more often used of unaware and non-sentient things. To be sure, this is not a universal rule, and exceptions will be found. But might one generalize that es gibt mainly describes unconscious objects?
On the other hand, Heidegger’s Geworfenheit describes the experience of beings which are aware, conscious, and sentient.
Questions about Being are so foundational and basic that they link automatically to other branches of philosophy and to the written works of many different philosophers. When one notices one’s awareness — whether it be the earliest childhood memories or simply awakening each day — one is suddenly confronted with a world which “is there” — eine Welt, die es gibt — Who put it there? Why is it there? Why is there something rather than nothing?
To be aware and to be conscious leads to experiencing this sense of “thrownness” and to ask, in the first person, Who threw me? Why did someone throw me? Who made me? What is this world into which I am suddenly and involuntarily thrown?
To fully explore Being, the reader will need, in addition to Sein and Dasein, a sense of es gibt.
