How did Heidegger define a person's Dasein as?

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Being is grounded in the temporal structure of those beings ("Da-sein") who have an understanding of Being. With this famous reconceptualization of the self not as a subject, consciousness, or ego but as a "Dasein," Heidegger takes the German word for "existence" (Dasein) and interprets it in terms of its basic semantic elements ("there" [Da] + "Being" [Sein]) in order to illustrate his claim that existence is fundamentally a "being-there," that is, a temporally-structured making intelligible of the place in which we find ourselves. ("Dasein is its disclosedness," Heidegger says.) Dasein is always a being engaged in the world. The fundamental mode of Being is not that of a subject or of the objective but of the coherence of Being-in-the-world. Dasein, as a being that is constituted by its temporality, illuminates and interprets the meaning of Being in Time. http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/eands/heid.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein Nov 26 07, 7:45 AM