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(In »Everything is religion«)

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger constructs existentialism on this basic distinction. He categorises the saucepan on the stove and all other indisputably physically existing phenomena within the idea of the ontic. But what else “exists” in a broader sense, outside and beyond the ontic – such as the sadness we read into Fernando Pessoa’s late poem – Heidegger sums up in the idea of the ontological. Heidegger’s point is that the existential human being does not simply live within a Sein (being) in the ontic world, but belongs just as much in the ontological world, in a Dasein (being there or existence as it is generally translated in English). Being there and experiencing Dasein is, according to Heidegger, about being fully human. Thus, the human being is much more than merely a physical being. The world is more than just saucepans. Heidegger’s existentialist idea of Dasein is a metaphysical state.