Heidegger’s conception of ownedness as the most fully realized human form of life emerges from his view of what it is to be a human being. This conception of human Dasein echoes Kierkegaard’s description of a “self”. On Heidegger’s account, Dasein is not a type of object among others in the totality of what is on hand in the universe. Instead, human being is a “relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation is to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about who and what we are. Heidegger expresses this by saying that, for each of us, our being (what our lives will amount to overall) is always at issue. This “being at stake” or “being in question for oneself” is made concrete in the specific stands we take—that is, in the roles we enact—over the course of our lives. It is because our being (our identity) is in question for us that we are always taking a stand on who we are. Since the German word for ‘understanding’, Verstehen, is etymologically derived from the idea of ‘taking a stand’, Heidegger can call the projection into the future by which we shape our identity ‘understanding’. And because any stand one takes is inescapably “being-in-the-world”, understanding carries with it some degree of competence in coping with the world around us. An understanding of being in general is therefore built into human agency.