FREUD TO DERRIDA Martin Heidegger, doyen of continental existentialism inventing a pristine vocabulary that would enable us, as it were, to philosophize in the nude The most important of Heidegger’s coinages is Dasein Dasein is the kind of being that is capable of asking philosophical questions, and as Heidegger expounds Dasein it sounds initially suspiciously like the Cartesian ego But whereas Descartes’s ego was essentially a thinking thing, a res cogitans, thinking is only one, and not the most fundamental, of the ways in which Dasein has its being The primitive element of Dasein is ‘being-in-the world’, and thinking is only one way of engaging with the world: acting upon it and reacting to it are at least as important elements Dasein is prior to the distinction between thinking and willing or theory and practice Dasein is caring about (besorgen) Dasein is not a res cogitans, but a res curans: not a thinking thing, but a caring thing Only if I have some care about, or interest in, the world will I go on to ask questions about it and give answers to those questions in the form of knowledge-claims 84