Page 234 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

208 D. Karrow and X. Fazio

although Heidegger does recognize that consciousness exists, he deliberately tries
to downplay the foundational significance of mental states.
The balance of the work within BT is spent analyzing human existence through
an enquiry into the Being of Dasein (human being’s Being). The analysis shows
that Dasein has a fundamental structure of Being-in-the-world, “being with things
and with others, in such a way that its whole existence is structured by care”
(Moran 2000, p. 238), one of several basic features of Dasein’s Being known as
existentials. We even caught glimpses of this prestructure as students interacted
with their worms. Observing secondary students express concern or anxiety over
severing worms inadvertently while digging for them, was both surprising yet reas-
suring. There are many more existentials beyond care and there is a connection and
a time structure linking them together in entirety. As well, they are not apparent on
their own, but observable through people’s concrete existence or social practice.
Adds Wollan (2003):
The existentials are totally decisive for comprehending what Heidegger means by Dasein’s
Being-in-the-World because they are the basis for and make possible the individual
human’s concrete existence. The existentials are not separable from each other and equally
involved in our discloure of the world and ourselves, they are in Heidegger’s term “equip-
rimordial.” The existentials appear strange to us, because of the tendency in the human
manner of being to overlook their existential basis; things [our emphasis] appear to be
closer to us than the existentials.
Phenomenological analysis seeks to prove the existence of these existentials in light
of their genuine expression. Let us examine the existential of care more closely, as
it becomes a focus for what follows in the remaining section where we make the
case for it as a precondition for ecojustice.
Heidegger comes to the conclusion that care is the fundamental structure behind
Dasein’s Being-in-the-World through the influence of Kierkegaard’s work on death
and anxiety, “Dasein’s Being is Being-towards-death” (Moran 2000, p. 240). As
human beings are each directed toward death, human nature is radically finite.
Anxiety, one of many moods (also existential), is our unique capacity to sense
death, or that a certain nothingness or groundlessness beseeches us. It reveals to us
a certain homelessness and our only way to understand this is to turn away from it.
It thus serves to demonstrate to us that we are caught up in a structure of care about
the world; we are not indifferent to it (consider the reaction of the secondary students
previously described). Adds Inwood (1997): “[C]are is correlative to the significance
of the world. Only if Dasein is care can it dwell in a significant world, and only if
it dwells in a significant world can Dasein be care” (p. 59). The anxiety experience
refers to something we already know; that the human existence is entirely guided
by the principle of care. As such, we experience that our Being is realized and
guided by the care of to be (Wollan 2003). Just as the scientist might investigate or
search and presume neutrality, we see that beneath this neutrality there is the mood,
the concern of the scientist to discover, to reveal new ideas or theories and to attempt
to level off temporal aspects.
The existential of care is also expressed through Dasein’s spacial character.
Although beyond the scope of this work (see Wollan 2003), an analysis of Dasein