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The Paradox of Being: Dasein As a Potential REPORT .91 The Paradox of Being: Dasein as a Potential "Ground" for Futures Work* Marcus Bussey University of the Sunshine Coast Australia Carol J. White's1 work has a natural cadence and a silencing others; specific 'things' emerge while others clarity of expression which makes the philosophical disappear according to the intelligibility of the context. questions being dealt with come alive and appear Importantly, Dasein sets the horizon while allowing for seductively clear. Such is the richness of the intellectual alternatives to exist at the margin (White 2005: 139). world she weaves that insights abound yet come in and Thus, human subjectivity is framed by our awareness or out of focus as the philosophical terrain shifts. unawareness of the things around us as discrete units, Ultimately this is a work that critiques the metaphysical from this arises issues of authentic and inauthentic self- yearning for certainty. It opens up culture and processes hood (White 2005: 30, 34). Furthermore, our sense of of social ordering to a deepened understanding of the "being" is determined by our interaction with/in interplay between action and presence. (through) Dasein as a set of cultural background prac- Central to the work is the concept of Dasein, tices (White 2005: 3). which has been generally understood as "a way of being All sorts of questions emerge here. Central to them present in our everydayness". White shifts the focus all is the fact that Dasein, as an ontological explanation, from the existential context of individual-presence to allows us to understand Being as the dynamic of cultural the cultural presencing of conditions of intelligibility and and individual activity; it is, for critical futurists, a site for argues backwards through Heidegger's works that what the maintenance or transformation of the current order. he was groping towards in his classic Being and Time Choice and anxiety, an awareness of personal and col- becomes clear only retrospectively (White 2005: L) The lective vulnerability, pervades Dasein and sits within this Foreword by White's mentor Hubert L. Dreyfus offers a ontological backdrop. Yet Dasein has an ontic dimen- clear synopsis of this process and elegantly outlines the sion that reflects our Being-in-context, it is our situated- development of our understanding of Dasein as a cul- ness in time and space; a site in which we reveal our tural condition as opposed to an individual one. selves to ourselves. Is there is a connection here This is where it gets very interesting for futurists between the "realities" of structure and agency? White's looking for ways to understand social change and its analysis seems to suggest such a cross over. Does link with personal transformation. To White, Dasein is a Dasein offer a way to understand the unitary nature of a ground or background that contextualises human con- persistent dualism within our work as futurists? Is this sciousness – what Heidegger calls a "thing context" concept able to bring practical depth to Ken Wilber's (White 2005: 4) - it allows for some possibilities while integral ontology (Wilber 2001)? In addition, can it be * Book Review of: Carol J. White (2005) Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude Ashgate, Aldershot, UK Journal of Futures Studies, May 2006, 10(4): 91 - 94 Journal of Futures Studies extended to the four quadrant analysis Wilber Dasein to become the image of God; God's has developed and Slaughter has extended so favourite creature died for Dasein to become effectively into integral futures work (Slaughter the conscious subject. Old possibilities are left 2004)? Furthermore, are the links with Dasein's behind in this transformation, and new ones ontic nature able to enrich Sohail Inayatullah's take their place in the 'there' of being." (White epistemic work with Causal Layered Analysis 2005: 22) (Inayatullah 2004)? And finally, if we switch civil- Another interesting point that White isational lens, when looking at the Tantric social makes is that Dasein needs a future as much as philosophy of P.R. Sarkar, can we engage his a past in order to situate the present. Here it is understanding of subjective approach through bounded by Heidegger's specific concept of objective adjustment with the Dasein that is death, not as the passing of an individual but as simultaneously active and passive and able to the closure of a particular Dasein. White sums sustain the paradox of such a condition (Sarkar this up: "Dasein acquires a future when it 1996)? acquires an understanding of being such that Other points can be raised here. There is a being is in question2. In this respect, 'primitive paradox in that being is bounded by individual Dasein' has no future3. As the future which is the consciousness, it is marked by finitude; yet it 'to come,' what Western Dasein will be comes also takes form and content from the timeliness to it from its concealed end, the realm of of its historical and cultural ground – the throw- death4." (White 2005: 98-99) Interestingly, she ness of Dasein. Thus White observes: "While continues by observing that "Heidegger argues each individual is certainly 'deeply involved' in that Dasein's authentic projection of its future the world, the 'it' through which the world hap- requires it to 'repeat' the possibilities of its past pens is the community, and more expansively, by transforming them in its new understanding the culture." (White 2005: 34) Tina Chanter of being." (White 2005: 99) Thus we find individ- points to this paradox tangentially by way of uals and cultures engaged in a kind of sorting, Heidegger's critique of metaphysics – here she often unconsciously (inauthentically), of features sees the problem as a logical one: "Metaphysics that define a present. This is significant in has obscured from itself the fact that it has used futures as the conscious engagement with time to think being, and being to think time, issues of finitude are the raison d'etre of the without acknowledging that the very interpreta- project. Consciousness of Dasein is central to tions of both time and being that are in opera- Heidegger's understanding of authentic action. tion feed off one another in subterranean ways." Thus Dreyfus states in the Foreword: "If we are (Chanter 2001: 2) White's angle is different, by authentic, we are always actively preserving and situating being in a contingent temporal con- transforming. Indeed, preserving and transform- text the cultural fabric that generates meaning ing each imply the other. One can only preserve and directs self-consciousness is the Dasein that what is transformable. One can only transform resolves the paradox Chanter points to. By cast- what requires preserving." (Heidegger 1997: ing Dasein as a cultural condition White demon- xxxiii) strates Heidegger's proposed corrective to the White argues that Heidegger was specifi- weakness he identified in metaphysics. cally interested in the category Dasein and not The potentiality in Dasein for change is in its constituent processes within the historical ever present. Thus being is negotiated and con- arena. His was a concern with the abstraction. tingent and, in a futures context, open to rene- As futurists however, there is the possibility that gotiation when specific moments cease to be the concept, as a category of being/doing and legible and are replaced or give way to a new therefore both social analysis and engagement, present. Thus, as Heidegger puts it: "History can augment our understanding of the present only dies historically." (Heidegger 1997: xvi) and its limitations and possibilities. Thus thank- White, in extending this point, sums up: "In fully, as White notes "no epoch is privileged" 92 Western history, the rational animal died for (White 2005: 29) as every age is bounded and The Paradox of Being defined by a Dasein that is both human and ness, and the power which I have come to structural. So today "we are the Dasein that recognise as an integral part of all relations regards a forest as timber, a mountain as a quar- in which the abstract quantity of time is ry, a river as water-power" (White 2005: 30) yet used or allocated; all these are mostly within this moment lies the death of Dasein and excluded. Furthermore, where one or even the possibility of another reading. In this sense more of these aspects are included, they one of the tasks of futures could be constructed tend to be presented as serial, linear, pro- as the process of alerting us to the marginal and gressive, or cumulative when in most situa- the authentic in order to engage ethically with tions these aspects would be present simul- social transformation and preservation. taneously." (Adam 1990: 6) (Heidegger 1997: xxxiii) Time and Death enriches the speculative White provides us with an excellent gloss inner life-space of futures studies not by posit- to a rethinking of Martin Heidegger's concept of ing answers but by offering a re-evaluation of Dasein. This in turn feeds into the general work Heidegger's concept of Dasein. One that on constructions of the social from Castoriadis' enables us to more clearly identify minimalist ideas about the social imaginary (Castoriadis constructions of time and being that impede 1997) to the textual renderings of Foucault and social action and sustain processes of social other post modernists (Foucault 1977). A ordering that privilege specific constructions of socially grounded Dasein allows us to think meaning and the possible over others. The about social ordering as a process of contingen- "horizon" that emerges is where change and cies alive with tension. This vivifies the use of transformation both lie. Foucault's concept of heterotopia by Kevin Hetherington in which the seeds of Being are Correspondence present as an horizon of potential or "spaces of transition and deferral" (Hetherington 1997).
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