The AI Crisis and Ontological Framing: A Critical Reflection on the Heideggerian Reading of Large Language Models

This paper examines a Heideggerian argument, increasingly common in AI engineering circles, that condemns large language models (LLMs) to ‘ontological ruination’ and an absolute incapacity for ‘understanding,’ on the grounds that they remain permanently confined to the mode of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) rather than readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). The paper first reconstructs this argument in its strongest form, showing why it deserves to be taken seriously against a sheer infatuation with scaling. It then shows that the argument, as usually stated, suffers from five fatal oversights: it reduces ‘understanding’ to mere practical tool-use, conflates the functional and existential levels, treats the human/Dasein identification as a closed matter, neglects contemporary advances in embodied AI, and misreads Enframing (Gestell) as a uniquely digital-age phenomenon. Drawing on Heidegger’s own later hermeneutics, post-phenomenology (Ihde), and the extended mind thesis (Clark & Chalmers), the paper argues that the way out of this ‘representational monopoly’ is not to abandon AI but to design context-sensitive interactive systems grounded in affordances and hermeneutic transparency. Throughout, two registers of ‘understanding’ are kept distinct—the strict existential sense tied to Dasein’s structure of care, and a weaker functional sense of meaningful linguistic participation—so that the critique of ontological dogmatism does not simply invert into an equally dogmatic claim on the machine’s behalf. The paper closes with practical guidelines for a phenomenological engineering of linguistic systems, and with an open question about whether meaning generated in human–machine interaction can be more than a hermeneutic illusion.