The Paradox of Being: Dasein as a Potential "Ground" for Futures Work*

Carol J. White's work has a natural cadence and a clarity of expression which makes the philosophical questions being dealt with come alive and appear seductively clear. Such is the richness of the intellectual world she weaves that insights abound yet come in and out of focus as the philosophical terrain shifts. Ultimately this is a work that critiques the metaphysical yearning for certainty. It opens up culture and processes of social ordering to a deepened understanding of the interplay between action and presence. Central to the work is the concept of Dasein, which has been generally understood as "a way of being present in our everydayness". White shifts the focus from the existential context of individual-presence to the cultural presencing of conditions of intelligibility and argues backwards through Heidegger's works that what he was groping towards in his classic Being and Time becomes clear only retrospectively (White 2005: L) The Foreword by White's mentor Hubert L. Dreyfus offers a clear synopsis of this process and elegantly outlines the development of our understanding of Dasein as a cultural condition as opposed to an individual one. This is where it gets very interesting for futurists looking for ways to understand social change and its link with personal transformation. To White, Dasein is a ground or background that contextualises human consciousness – what Heidegger calls a "thing context" (White 2005: 4) it allows for some possibilities while silencing others; specific 'things' emerge while others disappear according to the intelligibility of the context. Importantly, Dasein sets the horizon while allowing for alternatives to exist at the margin (White 2005: 139). Thus, human subjectivity is framed by our awareness or unawareness of the things around us as discrete units, from this arises issues of authentic and inauthentic selfhood (White 2005: 30, 34). Furthermore, our sense of "being" is determined by our interaction with/in (through) Dasein as a set of cultural background practices (White 2005: 3). All sorts of questions emerge here. Central to them all is the fact that Dasein, as an ontological explanation, allows us to understand Being as the dynamic of cultural and individual activity; it is, for critical futurists, a site for the maintenance or transformation of the current order. Choice and anxiety, an awareness of personal and collective vulnerability, pervades Dasein and sits within this ontological backdrop. Yet Dasein has an ontic dimension that reflects our Being-in-context, it is our situatedness in time and space; a site in which we reveal our selves to ourselves. Is there is a connection here between the "realities" of structure and agency? White's analysis seems to suggest such a cross over. Does Dasein offer a way to understand the unitary nature of a persistent dualism within our work as futurists? Is this concept able to bring practical depth to Ken Wilber's integral ontology (Wilber 2001)? In addition, can it be