I am reading some Martin Heidegger right now, and it is always difficult to wade through his distinction between ontical and ontological existence. It seems to me that ontical is the particular, concrete analysis of Dasein, whereas the status of something considered in the abstract is thus ontological.
This can help to explain the statement from the Introduction to Being and Time (p. 15 of the Stanbaugh translation; I usually use the other translation, but I find this passage is more clear in Stanbaugh than in Robinson and Macquarrie) that has long perplexed me: “We intimated that a pre-ontological Being belongs to Dasein as its ontic constitution. Dasein is in such a way that by being it understands something like Being.” In other words, a human being (Dasein) sets its interpretive faculties on understanding Being as such. A human being is so structured and oriented towards being able to understand Being in the abstract, since it has being in the particular (which is basically what he says earlier when he says, “The analytic 0f Dasein thus understood is wholly oriented toward the guiding task of working out the question of Being”).
