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Fate and Dasein

17/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Fate is that powerless superior power which puts itself in readiness for adversities—the power of projecting oneself upon one’s own Being-guilty; and of doing so reticently, with readiness for anxiety. As such, fate requires as the ontological condition for its possibility, the state of Being of care—that is to say, temporality. Only if death, guilt, conscience, freedom, and finitude reside together equiprimordially in the Being of an entity as they do in care, can that entity exist in the mode of fate; that is to say, only then can it be historical in the very depths of its existence.

Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical 'there' by shattering itself against death—that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own throwness and be in the moment of vision for 'its time'. Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say, authentic historicality.

It is not necessary that in resoluteness one should explicitly know the origin of the possibilities upon which that resoluteness projects itself. It is rather in Dasein’s temporality, and there only, that there lies any possibility that the existentiell potentiality-for-Being upon which it projects itself can be gleaned explicitly from the way in which Dasein has been traditionally understood. The resoluteness which comes back to itself and hands itself down, then becomes the repetition of a possibility of existence that has come down to us. Repeating is handing down explicitly—that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there. The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero—is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness; for it is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps of that which can be repeated" (Heidegger 1962:436-437).

Heidegger, Martin

1962 Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers.

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The Temporal Character of Dasein

13/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"I will not try to do justice here to the richness of Heidegger's constructive account of what he calls the 'phenomenological chronology of being.' What is of fundamental importance in it for the purposes of this discussion is the notion that being cannot be identified with the 'is' of the present tense, no matter how disguised, or with the mode of presence that corresponds to it. Instead, being is complexly articulated in the way that the system of tenses expresses, and there is no possibility of simplifying this complex ordering in favor of a single one of its modalities. The analysis of this articulation of being into its various modalities is ontology; and perhaps the most radical claim that Heidegger makes is that ontology has an essentially temporal character. This is because the distinctions it explicates among the modalities of being — between the 'is' and the 'is not' and between 'is possible' and 'not possibly' — have to be understood in temporal terms. The articulated structures of being are thus inextricably bound up with the distinctions of past, present, and future that are comprised in our own temporality as this was characterized in Being and Time. What 'is,' is thus necessarily what will or will not be. But these temporal qualifications of the articulations of being also articulate presence, which is, therefore, not just a matter of the static immediacy of the present tense. To put this point in a maximally paradoxical way, presence also compromises absence. It takes the form of the 'has been' and the 'will be' as well as of the 'is,' and the being of the entities that form part of the world of Dasein is understood in just this ecstatic mode that characterizes the temporality of Dasein. In psychological terms, we would speak here of 'memory' and 'expectation,' but it is just this psychological mode of description that Heidegger avoids because it obscures what most needs attention for the purposes of ontology. Instead, he speaks of the presence of such entities as their presence-to the entity — Dasein — which is itself temporal in the way that makes this presence possible. This presence is also declared to be the being of those entities, once it is accepted that the concept of being is complexly articulated in the manner that has been described and that corresponds to the set of temporal distinctions that Dasein itself deploys" (Guignon 1993:103-104).

Guignon, Charles, ed.
1993 The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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An Authentic Being-the Moment of Anxiety

01/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"…Dasein is 'proximally and mostly' not alongside itself but out there alongside in business and alongside the others.

Proximally it is not 'I,' in the sense of my own Self, that 'am,' but rather the Others, whose way is that of the 'they'…Proximally Dasein is 'they,' and for the most part it remains so. If Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way. (SuZ, 129)

We already know one moment when 'disguises' break up and authentic Being discloses itself-the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked ‘that’ against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as a homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being. The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of 'there is nothing behind it.' Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Hediegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to 'let nothingness encounter us.' Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are 'something' real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the 'being possible' that we are ourselves.

Heidegger's analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeting from its contingency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that They are only Everyman, but they are also the philosophers. Because these, Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical back-worlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

And now to authenticity itself. It is the negation of negation. It resists the tendency to escape, to evade, Authenticity has made nothingness its own affair. Authenticity means being born again. Authenticity discovers no new areas of Dasein. Everything can, and probably will, remain as it was; only our attitude to it changes"(Safranski 1998:162-163).

Safranski, Rüdiger
1998[1994] Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Ewald Osers, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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The Connection of Reality and Dasein

14/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The question of the meaning of Being becomes possible at all only if there is something like an understanding of Being. Understanding of Being belongs to the kind of Being which the entity called ‘Dasein’ possesses. The more appropriately and primordially we have succeeded in explicating this entity, the surer we are to attain our goal in the future course of working out the problem of fundamental ontology.

In pursuit of the tasks of a preparatory existential analytic of Dasein, there emerged an Interpretation of understanding, meaning, and interpretation. Our analysis of Dasein’s disclosedness showed further that, with the disclosedness, Dasein, in its basic state of Being-in-the-world, has been revealed equiprimordially with regard to the world, Being-in, and the Self. Furthermore, in the factical disclosedness of the world, entities within-the-world are discovered too. This implies that the Being of these entities is always understood in a certain manner, even if it is not conceived in a way which is appropriately ontological. To be sure, the pre-ontological understanding of Being embraces all entities which are essentially disclosed in Dasein; but the understanding of Being has not yet Articulated itself in a way which corresponds to the various modes of Being.

At the same time our interpretation of understanding has shown that in accordance with its falling kind of Being, it has, proximally and for the most part diverted itself… into an understanding of the ‘world’. Even where the issue is not only of ontical experience but also one of ontological understanding, the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of entities within-the-world. Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are present-at-hand. ‘Being’ acquires the meaning of ‘Reality’. Substantiality becomes the basic characteristic of Being. Corresponding to this way in which the understanding of Being has been diverted, even the ontological understanding of Dasein moves into the horizon of this conception of Being. Like any other entity, Dasein too is present-at-hand as Real. In this way ‘Being in general‘ acquires the meaning of ‘Reality‘. Accordingly, the concept of Reality has a peculiar priority in the ontological problematic. By this priority the route to a genuine existential analytic of Dasein gets diverted and so too does our very view of the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand within-the-world. It finally forces the general problematic of Being into a direction that lies off the course. The other modes of Being become defined negatively and privatively with regard to Reality.

Thus not only the analytic of Dasein but the working-out of the question of the meaning of Being in general must be turned away from a one-sided orientation with regard to Being in the sense of Reality. We must demonstrate that Reality is not only one kind of Being among others, but that ontologically it has a definite connection in its foundations with Dasein, the world, and readiness-to-hand” (Heidegger 1962:233-234).

Heidegger, Martin
1962 Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco.

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