The Pursuit of Unhappiness: Entanglement and the Ethics of Öffentlichkeit
The disclosedness of the ‘anyone’, that which is made publicly or yet made for publicity, even if this is personalized, may be thought of as the converse to Eigentlichkeit, or authenticity. One is of Das Man, the other is of Dasein. Öffentlichkeit is that which exposes everything as the amalgamated nothing that it is. This is not of course Nothing, which is the presence of the uncanny and which is, moreover, the source of anxiety for Dasein, and neither is it nothingness, which is, in turn, an imagined state of non-being for which there is no real-time equivalency. As long as I am conscious of my own existence, even as part of something which seeks to negate me, I am something, or something-or-other. This aspect of Heidegger’s self-seeking is only an aside, as it were; a kind of throw-away category that puts up the pretense of seeking the self whereas it is actually a symptom of the search for a selfhood entangled. One cannot be disclosed as either a non-being or as a public thing – one a nothing and the other a ‘something-or-other’ – in the same sense as we have just noted. This ‘or-otherness’ exposes me as nondescript, as unworthy of further examination because I could just as well be anything, or anything else.
We do say to the other, ‘it was nothing’, when she notices we have been rattled by indeed something, but in such cases, if authentic, the ‘something or other’ is a space-filler designed to provide a moment wherein I can try to discern just what it was that was disturbing to me. For it cannot have been simply nothing – which is why Heidegger capitalizes this term; to make it into a thing or a something – and yet if we cannot identify it in either the panoply of the world-as-it-is or even in our imagined worlds, let alone as the nondescript anything of the Öffentlichkeit, then it must have been the Nothing of essential anxiety, the fullest presence of non-presence, which itself presents to us an overfullness of Being. In this second term, the capital denotes not so much a transcendental otherness which is alien to us and radical to history, but perhaps instead, and in its stead, the Gestalt expressing the entirety of our life, held in a moment which brushes by us and does not linger. The publicity of being as part of the anyone, the self which seeks to be nothing like itself but rather anything else, sometimes quite literally, also does not tarry but instead malingers. The shadow of being, what I have analyzed as the ‘penumbra of personhood’, tarries alongside us as does our actual, physical shadow, when the light is right. Note too that Heidegger refers to the ‘lighted space of being’ implying that only here will we be accompanied by our authentic shadow, rather than being engulfed by the umbrous atonality of the public way.
All of this is not to say that the self is not inherently both social and historical. In this other sense, its own undertaking to be other than itself involves the othering of the other, specifically, and not ‘the others’ as stand-ins for selves within the open space of the public, and not the Other, which is an expression of Nothing personified in some cursive manner, in a nocturnal arabesque or a suffering serenity. I cannot grasp the irruptive force of the Nothing, and it presents ‘itself’ in a way to which even my imagined state of non-being cannot cleave. This is not mine ownmost death which has appeared before me like some vivisected visitation, but perhaps it is more like bearing witness to myself as I might yet be; what is the character of my own dead soul? Enduring some torpor of tantalus, I blink at an apparition; shrouded in black framing a face grotesque with expressionist neon, sorrow alone in its gape, but fury in its maw; is this who I am at base, and in baseness? What kind of parallax does such a scrying mirror possess? I look into it with the proverbial darkling aspect and see nothing other than myself as both the nothing and the other at once.
And just as Weber intoned that charisma cannot appear authentically in modernity, so too we are given the sense that the Nothing cannot be part of the public. Hence anxiety as well will never assail us as long as we forget ourselves within the midst of an entangling skein of publicity. Das Man has neither a self nor is a person. It appears to be the answer to the Other for it too has no gender, no age nor exterior aspect which can be said to be fair or handsome, ugly or repulsive. It is the fraudulent Shadow just as is the Other the one authentic. Just so, any intimacy we gather round ourselves in the open space of the public is as the false Syzygy. Anyone will do, and especially so, the anyone who will do anything. In no way am I transfigured by this general disclosedness of ‘the others’; no, I am merely transposed, becoming one of these others without the directed demand of a liminal otherness and outside of the rite by which I pass over into the now lit space of other-worlding.
Unhappiness is better than sorrow; it feels easier. It is something rather than a lingering presence of the Nothing, and it is unrelated to joy, which I cannot ever feel lest I feel ‘all sorrows as well’. So, I pursue unhappiness by being other to mine ownmost beingness, but only through the anonymous tranpositional dynamic which is both the herald and hallmark of Öffentlichkeit. Media confirms my ‘participation’ in this hallows, taste regimes vouchsafe its consumption, the formal functioning of the generalized other abets it – even if this essential selfhood in its more informal and thus less conscious manner is also necessary to become human and be ‘in’ a society at all – and my flight from mine ownmost presence-unto-death absolves it of its patent fraudulence. It too constitutes for Dasein an ‘evil of evil’, for its entanglement of what is closest to me, making it seem that it is only a part of what the anyone can grasp in its entirety and within which the anything can occur at my desire but against my will. One might rationalize at this point by noting that any time I ‘pursue’ something or other I fall into the need for the something-or-other, and this could also be interpreted as part of Heidegger’s sense of what ‘falling’ is about. Here, as a converse to the above, anything will do and especially the anything that will do anyone.
But the very fact that anxiety can be decoyed from the Eigentlichkeit of its own irruptive presence – anxiety is the interiority of Otherness in its mode of being and being-expressed – reminds us that we cannot lose it, just as we cannot be without our own shadow. Anxiety is in fact the key to authenticity, for it knows that even sorrow is passing just as joy can resonate beyond the equally passing public, turning action into act and thus Dasein back into its own thrown project.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.