Dasein in Being There

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Dasein in Being There

Though I'm sure I didn't realize it back then, I spent a lot of time in my childhood mulling over the classic "nature vs. nurture" 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 know? How much would it be able to figure out? Could it survive?

Some years after I'd abandoned this line of thinking, resigned to the fact that the experiment could probably never be carried out in an ethically acceptable way, a college professor encouraged me to read Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. In this novel's main character, Chance, I found, after a fashion, an approximation of the very project I'd been dreaming about all those years: a human being raised in a static and unexciting environment, with very few other 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 such as Descartes and Locke. I believe, however, that it is the work and thought of Martin Heidegger to which a careful consideration of Being There will be most particularly relevant. Heidegger's concept 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 novel's title, it also describes rather appropriately the primary activity (if it can be called that) with which Chance's life is occupied.

Chance's origins lie in obscurity, as much to himself as to the reader. He was orphaned at an age too young for him to have any memory of his biological parents. His sole custodian is the figure he knows only as "the Old Man," who has provided for him all his life. Chance takes care of the Old Man's garden, but rarely interacts with the man himself. His meals are prepared by one of the other servants in the Old Man's employ. Aside from working in the garden, eating, and sleeping, Chance's only pastime is watching television. It is TV alone that has given him whatever perception or understanding of culture and the normal commerce of society he may have.

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