Thoughts on Dasein, Technology, Culture and Development

Both Heidegger (1972) and Ricoeur (1992) understand the self, or Dasein, as essentially embodied. The self is both made possible and constituted by its material and cultural situation which presents it with a dynamic weltanschauung. But, on the other hand, Dasein is always capable of initiative, of inaugurating something novel.

Dasein is authentic when it ceases to take the world for granted as some objective entity “present-at-hand,” recognizing it, instead, as an open horizon of possibilities “ready-to-hand.” Being is indeed revealed authentically through the temporal horizon of Dasein (Heidegger 1972) in a creative process of becoming.

Acting in as well as understanding the world, becomes therefore a way of being – that is, Dasein is transformed every time it engages in the world.

If one accepts this ontological orientation, that is housed in language, one is to deem the world of work as a premier locus where such an expressive and transformative event can occur both personally and communally.

Accordingly, one can hold that technology (elementary or sophisticated as it may be) and other techniques of production are no longer mere means. They become a way of revealing. With Heidegger (1977: 12-13), one could argue that every “bringing-forth,” that is, the use of technology in the workplace, is indeed a way of revealing as it is the possibility of all productive activities.


Most of the early attempts to capture social phenomena and, through an accurate description, to reach some form of knowledge about the subjects in question as well as the relations among them don’t seem to be thorough if one is to seek for a more dynamic and open-to-the-future understanding of the human condition.

In the light of the ontological turn (Heidegger 1972), culture becomes a mode of being, something so intimate and inherent to human nature that cannot be detached, not even for analytical purposes, from the lived historical essence of being. According to Heidegger (1972), humans’ essence lies in existence. Human existence thus becomes an activity of endless transcendence. Such act is similar to the distanciation between the reader and the text, personal, social or written as the case may be. Being situated, thrown in an historical context and simultaneously having the ability to transcend, imagine and initiate new possibilities are specific features of human being, of Dasein in Heideggerian lingo.

This human faculty, which calls for the exercise of critique, does not take place in a vacuum.

In this light, a radically new working concept of culture emerges: culture becomes Dasein’s lived experience played in a to-and-from movement between throwness and imagination. Accordingly, the understanding of the nature of development changes.

On the one hand, Escobar’s (1985) work traces back and documents every bit of history of development and points out how a certain decision might have had a socio or political consequence up to present. On the other hand, he does not offer any feasible way to escape the historical entrapment, other than by, externally, counterattacking the established status quo. The throwness, in this case, has taken over.

Moreover, such a process ought to be readily available to each and every participant because one is “always already” (Gadamer 1988) part of a historical community. This very historicity becomes the basis for emancipation through narrative identity, that is a kind of identity to which a human being has access via the mediation of the narrative function.