CONCEPT
Dasein
Heidegger's name for the being for whom its own being is at issue — the mortal, finite, world-inhabiting being who cares, dwells, and asks the question of Being.
Dasein — literally 'being-there' in German — names the specifically human mode of existence that distinguishes humans from every other kind of entity. The stone exists but has no world. The animal has an environment but not a world in the horizon-of-meaning sense. Only Dasein stands in what Heidegger called the clearing — the open space in which beings can show themselves as what they are. Dasein is characterized by care (Sorge), by thrownness into a world it did not choose, by projection toward possibilities it must realize, and by the awareness of its own finitude. The AI discourse lacks vocabulary for Dasein because its instrumental register — productivity, efficiency, capability — cannot name the being who exists in the mode of having its existence matter to it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Heidegger introduced Dasein as the central analytical concept of Being and Time (1927), his attempt to reopen the question of Being after two and a half millennia of Western metaphysics had progressively forgotten