Dasein:  from Immanuel Kant to Martin Heidegger an Virginia Woolf

                The word “Dasein” ( literally real existence) has acquired several meanings since its entrance in philosophical vocabulary,  according to different philosophers. 

I decided to go in depth into the philosophical concept because of its link with Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway”.

                We owe Immanuel Kant  the appearance of such a word : in his “Critique of Pure Reason”  where  he states that  Dasein is that particular thing’s real existence, knowable only by experience but not in an immediate perception, to use Kant’s words “The absolute position of the Thing in space”.

The concept was later  developed by Friedrich Hegel.  In particular, Dasein is a category of the “Determined Being”, its immediate and unilateral immediacy.

Heidegger used the concept of Dasein to uncover the primal nature of "Being" (Sein).

Heidegger criticized the notion of substance, arguing that Dasein is a being engaged in the world. The fundamental mode of Being is not that of a subject or of the objective, it rather is  the coherence of Being-in-the-world. This is the ontological basis of Heidegger's work.

On Heidegger's account, traditional language, logical systems, and beliefs obscure Dasein's nature from itself.

We can find a link with Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in the extract “What an extraordinary night!”, focusing on Septimus’ character.  

“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

                                                                                                            Clarissa Dalloway, “Mrs. Dalloway”, Virginia Woolf

It follows that Dasein , “being for death” is an act of communication. Both Clarissa’s and Septimus’ characters feel depressed, incapable of any communication. They are outcasts, and they react in different ways: Septimus commits suicide as an extreme attempt of communicating something to the world, Clariss, can’t do this, and pushes herself on.

Daniele Sorrenti