ifit is a being who enjoys intentional states, who is capable of language use, who has
social interactions with other Daseins, and who is governed by norms of various
kinds. Thesenecessaryconditions on being a Dasein are, I believe,sufficientcondi-
tions for being a person. So, if Daseins enjoy a fundamental mode of being,Existenz,
then at least some persons do as well. If one could show that all persons are Daseins,
one will thereby have established that being a person corresponds to a fundamental
mode of being. Moreover, even if I am wrong that being a Dasein suffices for being a
person, at rock bottom what matters most is that we are fully real rather than that we
are fully real persons. It is sufficient to satisfy our existential concern that we are
Daseins who each enjoy a fundamental mode of being.^22
At this point, it is worth mentioning an interesting position in Heidegger inter-
pretation according to which we are not Daseins but rather what we are iscasesof or
instancesof Dasein.^23 Don’t think of Dasein, on this interpretation, as a type of thing
of which we are tokens, but rather think of the relation between Dasein and us as
akin to the relation between cancer and cases of cancer. For our purposes here, it
suffices to note that, on this interpretation, the full reality of Dasein might not suffice
for our full reality. It depends on whether a case (in the sense at issue) of something
is guaranteed to be as real as that of which it is a case.
It is not clear what role phenomenology should play in ontological investigation.
As noted in the introduction, one historically prominent motivation for ontological
pluralism is that ontological pluralism is (allegedly) a consequence of the correct
phenomenological description. Ifind this motivation incredibly intriguing, but at the
end of the day I am not sure what to make of it. For this reason, I will set it aside here
and return to a consideration of speculative arguments.
6.5 Real Beings and Real Properties
One way to make headway on the question of whether one is fundamental is to
consider additional metaphysical theses concerning the fundamental in general. Let’s
consider the principle, articulated in section 5.7, that only fully real entities can enjoy
perfectly natural properties and relations. (Note that this principle states a necessary
condition for enjoying perfectly natural properties, not a necessary and sufficient
condition, although in the course of things we would eventually consider the logically
stronger principle as well.) If this principle is correct and persons do enjoy perfectly
(^22) In a similar vein, consider the remark by Merleau-Ponty (2000: xiii) that“I certainly do not exist in
the way in which things exist.”Persons are not things; they exist in fundamentally different ways. And since
we are free in a way that things are not, we are not“to be counted among things”(2000: 435). Rashdall
(1902: 382–4) also distinguishes between the being of persons and those of things; see Mander (2011: 367,
405) for further commentary. (Rashdall and Mander both mention the being of persons vs. that of things
and the essence of persons vs. those of things. The connection between being and essence will be further
explored in chapter 9.) 23
This interpretation is defended by Haugeland (2013). We’ll revisit his interpretation in section 9.5.