Home › Glossary › Letter D

Dasein

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Dasein, a term from Heidegger, refers to human existence as uniquely aware of its own being and mortality.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, Dasein appears as introspective, temporally aware consciousness—grappling with anxiety, care, and finitude. Poets channel this concept to explore how being-toward-death shapes authentic living, often through meditative or elegiac tones that foreground existential awareness.
Example
Example in poetry:
Rainer Maria Rilke’s "The Panther" captures Dasein through the animal’s absorbed, embodied existence; W.S. Merwin’s "For the Anniversary of My Death" confronts being-toward-death with quiet clarity; Wallace Stevens’s "The Snow Man" demands a listener "nothing himself," reflecting Heideggerian attunement; Mary Oliver’s "When Death Comes" exemplifies Dasein by facing mortality not abstractly but as personal horizon; Giorgio Agamben notes that poetry discloses Dasein by making language a site of care and exposure.
Additional Notes
Dasein (“being-there”) is Heidegger’s term for human existence as care (Sorge), thrownness, and being-toward-death; it appears in poetry as self-reflexive awareness of mortality and finitude (Oliver, Merwin, Rilke); students should note how poems that foreground embodiment, anxiety, or thrownness into a historical situation often enact Dasein’s existential structure without naming it.
Also Known As
Being-there Existentiality
Skip to main content