ABSTRACT
This chapter unpacks Heidegger’s concepts of being-in and care, which pick out the basic form of Dasein’s being as a self. Being-in functions as a kind of characterization of our basic “faculties” or capacities: self-finding, discourse, and understanding. Together these explicate the form that the existence of any self has: it finds itself amidst and a part of a totality of entities, with a structured set of possible ways to be among them, and a drive and ability to take up these possibilities as its own. This requires undertaking to be an aggregate of roles as well as the single one who must manage to hold them together in some sort of unity. Deeper analysis of the structure of being-in then yields two ways of understanding Dasein’s being as care: facticity/falling/existence and already-in/amidst/ahead-of-itself. These are ways of describing our basic finitude as beings who must undertake to be within a world and among others. Analysis of them, however, points to the need to find an underlying formal structure that shows in what their basic unity consists.
