Dasein in Being There :: Essays Papers

Dasein in Being ThereThough Im incontestable I didnt realize it back then, I spent a stria of time in my childhood mulling over the classic nature vs. bringing up debate. Specifically, I wondered what would happen to a child separated from civilization at birth. If a person were locked in a room, never taught anything, and interacted with only by machines that delivered it food, then released into society at a certain age, how much would it cognize? How much would it be able to figure out? Could it survive? nearly years after Id abandoned this line of thinking, resigned to the fact that the experiment could belike never be carried out in an ethically acceptable way, a college professor encouraged me to read Jerzy Kosinskis novel Being There. In this novels main(prenominal) character, jeopardy, I found, after a fashion, an approximation of the very project Id been ideate about all those years a human being raise in a static and unexciting environment, with very few early(a) human influences.The question of whether human beings have any intrinsic characteristics, or of what they may be, has been contemplated throughout the history of modern philosophy by thinkers much(prenominal) as Descartes and Locke. I believe, however, that it is the work and thought of Martin Heidegger to which a careful good will of Being There will be most particularly relevant. Heideggers imagination of a human being is as an instance of that entity he calls Dasein, a German term most literally translated into English as there-being. not only is this phrase reminiscent of the novels title, it also describes rather appropriately the primary(a) activity (if it can be called that) with which Chances life is occupied.Chances origins lie in obscurity, as much to himself as to the reader. He was orphaned at an age overly young for him to have any memory of his biological parents. His sole shop steward is the figure he knows only as the Old Man, who has provided for him all his l ife. Chance takes care of the Old Mans garden, but rarely interacts with the man himself. His meals are lively by one of the other servants in the Old Mans employ. Aside from working in the garden, eating, and sleeping, Chances only pastime is watching television. It is TV alone that has tending(p) him whatever perception or understanding of culture and the normal transaction of society he may have.