Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 45 out in Being and Time is referred to as the existential analytic. Rather than answering the question of being directly, the existential analytic elaborated a way to think about how one might ask the question “What does it mean to exist?” Although Heidegger wrote before modern technology was developed, his writing is central to helping us understand how technology is affecting the human mode of existence in a primordial sense. Being-in-the-world is an important part of the analytic. For Heidegger, being-in-the-world referred to the activity of existing. Heidegger (1927) explained: Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being- in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’ Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world . (sec. 12: 84) The term Dasein refers to a being who is capable of questioning its own being, suggesting humans only. Here, Heidegger made the case that part of human being was the environment in which people dwelt. Part of human existence is defined by the world around them and how humans relate to that world. In other words, human interaction with the world cannot be separated from their mode of existence. In modernity, much of how beings relate to the world is communicated through screens and interfaces. This is a different mode of existence and thus should be examined to see how it is changing the human way of being. The nature of being is always finite. For Heidegger, authentic living is the Dasein living toward its own possibilities. Because humans are finite, humans live within time. They live in the present oriented toward their future, attempting to conquer where they have come from. Heidegger offers two possible modes of existence (Wheeler, 2015, Sec. 2.1). Authentic living requires that Dasein project themselves onto their environment and choose to make their own choices; inauthentic living occurs when people allow themselves to be dragged along in the flow, doing what one might do. The one or the they-self refers to people choosing not to choose anything and instead do what they perceive others around them are doing. The one-self is illustrated in social media in which the feedback loop of observing how others live encourages humans to emulate each other rather than forge their own paths. People do the expected and thus live inauthentically by ignoring the human’s power to choose (Wheeler, 2015, sec. 2.2). Humanity can allow itself to be swept away in a crowd and never truly make a choice for themselves. Midzein , which means being-with or present-at-hand, is important to the technological investigation. The term Midzein is typically used when discussing dwelling in the environment. For Heidegger, you lose something of the ontology of a tool when you change its use. The way Dasein frame their tools affects both their ontological function and the