Dasein – GV Loewen

The Pursuit of Unhappiness

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.

Holus Bogus

Holus Bogus (The ‘all’ is a fraud)

The call to the whole is the anathema of the call to conscience. Associated with Das Man in Heidegger, at the very best it collectivizes care, allowing each Dasein the same shadow of a more general entanglement. For to be distracted by this or that, or by this person or that person in the anonymous ‘open space of the public’ is something which is alongside Dasein’s own being-present. But what if one cannot find egress, at all, from an omnipresent non-being which takes for itself the worlding of the world? It is the this situation which deprives us of our situatedness, mine ownmost life, if you will. Just as does the fact alone deprave facticity, belief unmake the one who wills, and hexis make a mockery of praxis, so too does the all overtake Dasein’s ownmost; what is closest to us takes on the guise of only what is nearest. My thrownness could thence be anywhere, for all has been made the same thing by the all. I am no longer myself, but nor am I an other who, as her own Dasein, entails meaningfulness face to face with mine own. Heidegger never fails to use this phrase, ‘face to face’, common enough but now placed in a serious, though not fatal, confrontation with both itself and with the other. But if all are the same thing, no such perspective can be had. And yet I too can speak for you, for I and thou now also have been collapsed in a false dialectic. This is the ontology of the evil of evil.

Ricoeur famously enjoins us to understand the evil of evil as ‘fraudulency in the work of totalization’. His examples are the church and the state, as these are institutions the humankind which present themselves as the all in all, and demand not merely our obedience but also our worship. It would seem as well the singular selfhood, developed in direct contraposition to both, and at the very moment the state had overtaken the church in the historical position of and as ‘the all’, is as well at risk for a similar fraudulency. Simmel notes more than once that while we do change over the life course, and even our memory cannot vouchsafe the singular consistency of any one life, let alone on behalf of others, nevertheless we do continue to exist as a being who has made its own history over against History proper, and carved out some minute niche of ‘personal’ culture over against the tradition. More profoundly, each of us is tasked with confronting that same tradition, in an hermeneutic dialectic which does not fall for the fraud of the all. We are at once the apex of several existential dialectics: 1. Self and other uplifted into mine ownmost being; 2. Memory and anticipation uplifted into the living present; 3. History and Zeitgeist synthesized by presence ‘itself’; 4. Habit and improvisation made into innovation; 5. The waking self and the unconscious coming together as a contemporaneous consciousness; 6. Anxiety and the call to conscience metastasizing themselves into Sorgeheit; 7. Reason and imagination combining in a unique intelligence, human consciousness itself, and so on. Let us take each of these, briefly, in turn.

1. I am not the all in all, neither by myself nor, and of especial caution in our time, with others seen as ‘the’ others. On the one hand, I must negotiate the generalized other, both as its willing vehicle – ‘voluntarily’ in Weber’s sense of social cohesion – but as well as an individuated agent sometimes opposed to it, through the development of an ethics based upon personal experience but also an understanding of the looking glass self; how I imagine others perceive me. In order to accomplish each of these reflexive tasks, I must eschew thinking of myself as only what I have previously believed to be mine ownmost, or my closest-to-hand.

2. Memory knows the past more precisely than can anticipation know the future, but it may not always be as forthright. For the future is unknown in an open manner, and memory can be standoffish pending my acts or their absence. ‘Memory yields to pride’, Nietzsche cautions, but surely not in all cases. Sometimes the two are co-present, as when we are proud of something we have done or something we have avoided doing. Elsewise we may be unsure of the outcome of an act, as its playing out remains ongoing, so neither pride nor memory can grasp complete hold over what is nonetheless, past, and thus past redux. Anticipation is limited, though not shuttered, by prior events; we do not tend to ‘unexpect the expected’, as anyone undertaking critique must do. The living present is just that; a kind of amalgam of partial memory – both biased and incomplete – and only an incipient openness lensed through the anticipatory stance, or instanciation.

3. Beyond ourselves, but nevertheless both perceived and indeed endured, are the ‘times’ themselves. At once the moment ‘in’ history as well as the cultural atmosphere which can both enlighten and shroud such a moment, we are inside the manifolds of what has been bequeathed to us as a culture, while at the same time once again coming face to face with the ‘spirit of the age’. How aged, how spirited, cannot be decided on my own, without the syntagmatic temporality that belies the Now and yet also generates it more or less continuously, as Husserl speaks of in his densely parsed analysis of ‘internal time consciousness’.

4. Akin to Zeitgeist itself, habitus rests beyond our individual vision and indeed our control. It is not constructed of a hundred personal habits, but rather imposes itself upon us as a kind of habituation. Even so, force of habit, so-called, cannot make its way against all comers. The unexpected, or at least, less predicted, does happen from time to time. In this, we are reminded of our fuller humanity as generalists and improvisers. The great skill of adaptation sees us through time and again. Of course, there is always the next experiment, both in discourse and in life. As improvisers we are closer to Dasein’s authentic being-in, but as mere habituants, we have fallen within a specifically fraudulent entanglement.

5. Contemporaneity means more than mere coincidence. We are yet unsure of the chronology of specific sequences of Traumdeutung. Most will agree that dreaming, when recalled at all, is often simply a caution about physiological functions which have, over the course of sleep, become imminent and thus must wake us in order to be solved in conscious action. Similarly, though more of a resolution, anxiousness or other forms of concern – though yet not, whilst remaining unconscious, concernful being – requires of us a just as conscious, though much less automatic or habitual, action, in order to come to some sort of self-understanding, either about what it is we are actually concerned about, or more deeply, and thus more analytically, some aspect of our character that is awry. But the timing of these processes, from the metaphoric dream-state to the pragmatic waking act, varies greatly. The so-called ‘recurring’ dream suggests a pressing engagement with one’s past, for instance, and perhaps precisely due to the fact that we are replaying personal interactions which befit only the past, and never the present let alone the future. The unconscious is characteristically and regularly offended by such prolapsed inaction on our parts. To be truly contemporary, the self must unite the awkwardly communicated and even absurdly theatricalized insights of the unconscious with a reflective and reasoned Selbstverstandnis.

6. Concernful being, once present, in its turn is the summit of care and anxiety, taking the most fruitful elements of both in their specific instances and even instants – this ‘instant instance’ is for the phenomenologist a sign of instanciation – that have as their hallmark an insistence about them, impresses us with how much concern they can generate on our part in response to them. These are no mere phobias, nor will they be too liable to repression, becoming neurotic, unless we summarily ignore all instances of the call to conscience, which very few of us truly do. Dasein’s ethical compass does not misdirect, but it does require us to read it off, much as does a dream remembered. The advantage of anxiety over dreams is that it can take hold of us fully, without undue interpretation or dramaturgical analysis, and while we are awake. Of course, to be awake and ‘awakened’ are sometimes two different things and not only this, as well often opposed to one another, for the normative living-on within that which is closest to us and that which is alongside of us often gets in the way of reflective, fully conscious, understanding. Selfhood in its authentic moment is thus also charged with calling a halt to the quotidian, as an immediate and compassionate response to the call of conscience itself.

7. Finally, we have elsewhere already said much about the unique, if unquiet, confluence of human reason and human imagination. Akin to memory and anticipation, reason is reflective upon experience, and thus mostly concerns what is referred to as the past, or more simply, as ‘past’, and done with. But only in the unreasoned sense is this past complete. We reopen it, in almost cliché fashion, and it becomes part of the living present, even spilling itself onto the opening space of the futural, enacting part of what we can understand Husserl examining as the present process of the future in its making, or its ‘futurity’. Selfhood, ‘sovereign’ in its ideal sense, apart from any ‘evil of evil’, reaches reasoned reflection while trailing imaginative alternatives and ‘projects of action’ which, in their turn push that same self to further experience and thence reflection both. Here, more than at any of the other dialectical apexes, I am closest to the species-being or ‘species essence’.

But even at this point, I am not the all, not ‘whole’, and not merely another within the whole. These seven dialectics, and there are presumably a few others to be noted, prevent any sense that I can be fully aware of each of their dynamics and for all occasions and experiences that I will have over the life course. Simmel’s late holism of a human life is to be regarded more as a rubric – however I shall change, I am yet, in the presence of the present-being, still myself, still my self – and not as an existential synthesis. If we are able and willing to unmask the fraudulent totality in institutions, however historical and vast, then we should also take the same phenomenological lens to our own beings. The self-examined life is as it stands very much worthy of life; it is we who must attain the same marque as is already and always imbedded in the human project itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, religion, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Pride Goeth After the Fall?

Pride Goeth After the Fall? (On mistaking the ‘what’ for the ‘who’)

In Western cosmogony, Adam and Eve discover what they are, and this leads to their expulsion from the timeless scene of paradise. Whatness is not something compatible outside of the historical, and history itself begins with the outcome of the expulsion. Within this newly human history, what one is becomes paramount, at least until our own times. It may be a member of a marginal semi-nomadic ethnicity, such as the ‘pariah community’, to use Weber’s description, like the ancient Hebrews. Or it might be more basically, male or female, man or woman, as the two naïfs in the Garden abruptly uncovered. Yet more primordially, either child or adult, as the original division of labor was that of age, not gender. Whatever one was, given the complete absence of the concept of the individual – something much of the world yet today fails to recognize – it was this what that defined one’s very being. What one was, was the same as who one was.

Because there was no ‘who’, there was no danger of self-misrecognition. Indeed, one could suggest that Satan’s guise in Eden, that of the serpent, was an attempt on the part of the already fallen archangel to gain a new identity. Not for the purpose of subterfuge, but rather for self-understanding. In this sense, there is a double expulsion at work in Genesis. The ‘Fall of Man’ is actually an echo, or better, a resonance, of the prior fall from the firmament of God’s darker brother, so to speak. Satan has lost his identity, his whatness, and is now in search of himself. Along the way, he encounters two beings, his niece and nephew perhaps, who know not what they are. In a singular act of compassion, he helps them reveal this to themselves. Since Satan himself didn’t expect to be flung from the Garden either, we cannot presume that his act was in essence a plot against Being. It did turn out, however, that it was the first proto-historical act.

If there was a brief moment of pride in the recognition of what the apical humans were, followed by shame, it was of course a false pride, a kind of bravado in the face of a novel and unexpected fate. Satan no doubt felt nothing of the sort. For him, pride was more simply an after-effect of certain actions in the world, now suddenly set in temporal motion. Over this new kind of time, pride then became a commodity of sorts, something to be bargained for the spiritual fellowship selling one’s soul would provide both parties. Apparently, it’s lonely at the bottom as well. In the meanwhile, pride itself took on its unashamed sensibility only after the fall, not before it. And it is this pride, equally misrecognized as magnanimity, that continues its shady career to this day.

We find it in all places, exuded by all comers. But its essential character is that the person displaying it has mistaken the ‘what’ for the ‘who’. Unlike in antiquity and long before, this actually matters today because we do have a clear conception of the individual, even though this idea is not yet three centuries old. Today, authenticity means being a ‘who’, not a what. Certainly, the confluence of what social scientists call structural variables, some of these also referred to as life-chance variables, goes some way in forming not just what we are, but as well our personal identities, an aspect of the ‘who-ness’ of Dasein. But they are like primer, an undercoat of social circumscriptions and fraternal framings that allow us to be recognized within the odd confines of a mass and anonymous social organization. The very use of nametags at conferences or other like events is an attempt to personalize the impersonal, to allow strangers to behave more like kindred, though still in a very formal and, as is said, ‘professional’ manner. Such a thing would not have been necessary in smaller scale societies, and certainly never within this or that community, where all were necessarily kin.

To hang one’s personal hat up on whatness is to have internalized the very anonymity from which one desperately seeks egress. To state that ‘I am’ this or that in an ever-lengthening list of impersonal pronouns and descriptors – a cisgendered white male, for instance, to cut things short for myself – is to obviate the historical essence of who I am as a person and as a being-in-the-world. It is both an ethical and a phenomenological error, and one that has profound implications for one’s own humanity. One possible reason for the burgeoning fashion to ignore one’s personhood is simply the idea that commodification has belatedly caught up with the self. Individuals are messy, even chaotic. Their singular alchemy is momentary, like the absent presence of the philosopher’s stone itself. I am, at the end of the day, only myself after all. To at once take pride in this fleeting flotsam seems both vain and in vain. Far easier would it not be to join with other ‘whats’ and thence and therefore be proud of this false identity. And yet this is the entire point: it is a lie in the face of one’s existential project to identify only and fully with the whatness of being. Only the non-historical deity, left behind after the fall – His attempt to reunite with His own children was also a failure and ended in His death – can claim to be both a what and a who in pure syncretism.

One the one hand then, a commodification of the self, and on the other, a bravado in the face of a gnawing anonymity that questions one’s ability to actually know who I am. So, for all of those who take such pride in ‘being’ this or that without either accepting, or through avoiding, their singular humanity, Satan, who could not help but blink at our ready-mades, must as well have given up hope. Only the individual, in fullest knowledge of who he is, can gift her soul to another. And this is the further downfall of using social variables to define oneself; we cannot even begin to love one another as cardboard cut-outs taken from a sociology textbook. And if the lesson of the Garden was love at all costs, then our self-commodification desires a different kind of value; one in which I am costed out along structural debits and credits. What is the most valuable persona today, we then might ask, and thus what is the least?

Pending context, the biracial lesbian professional female might be a fair guess at the top marque of the new humanity. She, or perhaps they, are child free, wealthy, well-educated, and yet as well somehow knowing of suffering, of bigotry, of shame. Their garden is full of haute herbs and perhaps haughty herbals as well. Certainly, in culture producing institutions such a persona would carry some cachet, the university, the publishing and entertainment media, fashion, even some political arenas. None of this is sour grapes, for after all, ‘my kind’ of persona held the top spot for overlong it appears. The first shall certainly be last. Even so, any kind of ranking of types of anonymous souls misses both the existential and ethical points. Unless we are also to believe that the very concept of the individual itself is but a DWEM conspiracy! Hadn’t thought of that. Once again, Satan blinks, his eyes widening. What next, he might well wonder. How serpentine can these humans get? Evolve a sense that selfhood should not at all be predefined by caste, labor category, family pedigree, bloodline, biological sex and the rest of it, well, that sounds like a radical freedom to me. Indeed, the Enlightenment conception of the sovereign self could well be understood as the belated outcome of exposing the what just before the fall. At long last, the what has become a who, only in a short historical period, to fall backwards into the what again! Perhaps this trend is actually more like the end of modernity itself, not at all moving into the postmodern, but rather regressing into the premodern. All of this must give any being who imagined that he could play the indefinite role of trickster-cum-devil conniptions. ‘They don’t need me’, Satan was overheard murmuring to himself, ‘Just as they don’t need a me.’

Poor devil, we may empathize. Just proves you don’t have to be red, replete with tail and hooves, to be demonized. Just ask me. And while a popular pundit like Jordan Peterson seems not to recognize the basic historical fact that language use changes over time, and indeed does so through its usage, he does maintain an essential caveat, if I understand his work correctly: that by abandoning singularity we lose the essential link to our thrownness. As a phenomenologist, I take this most seriously, even if I am translating somewhat. And if I am critical of defining oneself in terms of social variables which are shared by millions or billions, it is because it truly is a regression to do so. It has nothing to do with awkwardness, the blinking of the eye in the face of the ‘theyness’ of these persons who abide yet in one body, or the seemingly more and more picayune distinctions made by insiders amongst versions of queerness, no, but rather to do with the question of fallen humanity. We know, at least mythopoetically, how it fell. But today, the question is rather, where did it fall? Just where is that other to self, who, in her ownmost project, will also face a most personal death as will I myself? Where is the fallen whatness that has of late been resurrected to tend its collective farm in lieu of its lost private garden? Where is the otherness that can only present itself as radical to me as a singular self, a sole soul who confronts me as she is?

For now, at least, it appears that she is She alone, along with whatever else She imagines She is, or they are, or this could be. And if I am the only one who mourns this loss, then at once I can put it down to simply being part of my job to mourn it, as well as wonder what was missing in all of the would-have-been whos which have not waited to be elbowed out of paradise, preferring to instead, arm in arm and with a great pride and a bravado since shared, charms itself as if it were courage, stride out the front gates of their own accidental accord.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.