system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What does Heidegger mean by Dasein having a "Vorontologischer Begriff des Seins?"

Heidegger frequently argues that dasein has a pre-ontological or pre-phenomenological understanding of being, but what does this mean? Does Dasein already operate with an understanding of das Sein selbst? But how is this possible? And does this have anything to do with dasein's nature as Existenz and it's Existenzialen? Heidegger attempts to search for the apriori conditions of experience and any conception of the subject, and he begins with dasein which is ontologically prior and analyses it's structures of it's being (Sorge etc) which ground any ontic approaches to the world or the subject. These ontological Existenzialen are more primary and closer to being, right? So does he think that from these concepts he'll get to Dasein's pre-ontological understanding?
gpt
Heidegger's method is understood to be "hermeneutical", that means trying to gain understanding of something that has meaning, and it has meaning because someone created it as being meaningful - therefore this someone himself already would have an understanding of this meaning. Therefore you could argue that "hermeneutics" is the art of interpreting not the meaning of something, but the creators understanding of it.

In other words: You can only try to understand what has already been understood. Therefore Heidegger claims that in order to understand the meaning of being, we have to assume that there's already an understanding of being prior to our project of explicitly understanding it. And since we as a particular being are able to ask the question of "what is the meaning of being itself", we already would have this kind of prior understanding, even though we can't express it yet.

And there's the difference between "ontological" and "pre-ontological": The project of "ontology" as a "-logy" is according to Heidegger "to make visible", or to express something explicitly. There's a pre-ontological understanding as in: it is lived, but not expressed explicitly (through language, respectively). The pre-ontological understanding does not have the form of a shared language. The "pre-" in "pre-ontological" therefore refers to the "-logical" part of "ontological".

Therefore the project of ontology is to transform this non-spoken, non-expressive understanding into a spoken, expressive, explicit understanding. Which is according to Heidegger a very hard task because language (as the medium of the being of "Man") tends to distract us, it tends to conceal more than it reveals. Therefore he realizes his "ontology" through the means of what he calls "formal indication": expressing the understanding of being itself in a way that it doesn't fully replace our pre-ontological understanding with a fully developed ontological understanding. Rather, it is being expressed only as far as it helps us to get in touch with our own pre-ontological understanding through experiencing it more vividly and more consciously.