Page 233 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

16 Educating-Within-Place: Care, Citizen Science, and EcoJustice 207

The question of the meaning of Being is central to Heidegger’s thought. Although
he is also interested in the being of entities in numerous forms, he is more concerned
about the being of their surrounding context, and ultimately the Being of the world
as a whole (Inwood 1997). The question of the meaning of this Being and its relation
to knowledge and science founded on such questions as “What can we know?” and
“What are the foundations of sciences?” radically challenged the conventional epis-
temology of the time favoring a disinterested, objective inquirer. Suspicious of such
an epistemology, Wollan (2003) paraphrases Heidegger as follows:
It is an interested human being, situated in a particular place and a particular time, with
many other relations and attitudes to many other things than the object of its sciences. As
well, he suggested knowing is not the first relation we adopt for things in the world. As a
physical and cultural being the human is always placed within a deeper understanding of
what it means to know something than that which in an aggressive way claims to have a
direct contact with the world itself. Through human social practice is conveyed not just a
hidden understanding of what it is, for example, to be a person, but an understanding of
what it is to be at all. (p. 33)
And it is this “hidden understanding” of the meaning of Being that perplexes
Heidegger and becomes the project of his philosophical investigation over the
course of his career. He is not thinking of Being as something that is, rather Being
is something that makes itself apparent to us, a “clearing” opened by our shared and
practical lifeworld (Heidegger 1962). For students interacting with worms in their
local environments, this might involve, through their previous experiences describ-
ing worm ecology (beyond the scientific framework), discovering other meanings
for worms beyond data objects. Learning experiences could be structured for them
to discover the role worms (as Darwin described them – the Earth’s ploughs) play
in revitalizing the soil, or the mystery behind their hermaphroditic reproductive
abilities, or the fact they did not exist in North America prior to colonization, and
so forth. An emphasis on the fact that we could not exist without the presence and
activity of worms would surely instill wonder and awe; the impression that these
beings, their environment, and our relationship with them is remarkable.
Heidegger begins by considering human begins, as they are capable and com-
pelled in the first place to pose the question about Being, so he naturally begins
his inquiry there. To distinguish between the Being of all beings, and the Being of
human being, Heidegger conjures the word Dasein, with various translations prof-
fered: “being here” or “being there,” existence, human being, and so on. Adds
Wollan (2003):
Dasein is Heidegger’s way of referring both to human being and to the type of Being
human’s have. … Dasein is essentially in the world, not simply in the sense that it occupies
a place in the world together with other things, but in the sense that it continually interprets
and engages with other entities and the context in which they lie, the environment or the
world around us. Dasein is at the centre of the world, drawing together its threads. (p. 34)
Regardless, Dasein is distinctly human being’s Being, or as Moran (2000) notes,
“the specific mode of Being of humans” (p. 238). Furthermore, Dasein is not a
specific entity that realizes itself through rational, logical-theoretical thinking,