Dasein: on being "thrown" into the world

Bruce Wilshire:

"...the world is not meaningful on the same level as are events merely in the world. The latter events, of whatever sort, presuppose the utterly fundamential sense of the world in which they occur. As infants and then a tofddlers growing up we simply absorb unwittingly, by osmosis as it were, the sense of the world that the authoriites all around us have themselves brought with them to every situation. That is, we absorb our culture, and its taken-for-granted background sense sense of world, undleliberately.

"We do this by what I call memtic engulfment: undeliberate immitation of others. Inexorable, our culture structures our neural, muscular and glandular systems, our reality as minding organisms. John Dewey is right: our minding is our adapting, our coping on a gut level with the world around us, and only the smallest fraction of this coping ever gets into our consciousneess, let alone into the focus of that."


Heidegger called this Dasein---our being "thrown" into a world that is already prefabricated into an existential Reality. As children we are all indoctrinated to absorb this conventional wisdom. In fact, by the time we imagine ourselves to be "autonomous adults" few of us will be consciously aware of just how manufactured our sense of "what the world is" actual has become. The "self" is, by and large, an existential illusion. It is analogous to a patchwork quilt in which one set of crcumstantial contexts just happens to overlap another set---not out of necessity...or because this is the most Rational or Logical manner in which to integrate them; but simply because, fortuitously, we were born in this historical era and not that one...into this culture and not that one....into this family and community and not that one.

Human identity is, when push comes to shove, a self-perpetuating con job. In other words, we delude ourselves into imagining the way we see the world around us is derived from a detached and objective assessment of The Way Things Really Are. But so much of the way things really were is integrated into this perception there is no realistic way we can assess the world around us except as one who has been indoctrinated for years to view it in one way rather than another.

The most intriguing question than becomes one in which we ponder what this all means for those who do become self-conscious of their own acculturation. Once you become more or less fully aware of how your sense of self has been fabricated as Dasein how can you make a more honest assessment of what is truly real and what you have only been brainwashed all your life by others to believe is real?

RP