Heidegger: You've Forgotten the Most Important Question (1927)

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]We have forgotten the question.

[00:00:03]Not a small one, not a technical one.

[00:00:07]The question, the most fundamental question a human being can ask. And the strangest part, we have forgotten that we forgot it. The question is this, what does it mean to be? Not what things are there in the world.

[00:00:25]Not how do they work, but why is there something at all rather than nothing?

[00:00:31]What is the being of beings? We walk through the world surrounded by things.

[00:00:36]We use them, we name them, we study them. But the fact that they are, that they have being at all, this we no longer notice. We look at the hammer, never at what it means for the hammer to exist.

[00:00:51]There is one being, however, for whom this question is not just academic. One being for whom being is always already an issue. We call this being Dasein.

[00:01:03]Dasein means literally being there.

[00:01:07]And Dasein is you.