Hardly the Last Word

Some people, I realize, think that philosophy is an insidious pastime that makes muddy what was perfectly clear before. ?I happen to be one of those people who thinks that many of the schemata I once thought clear were actually inadequate to the realities they purported to explain. ?This discussion might just remind you, O Reader, which sort of person you are.

When Heidegger has set up Resoluteness as the authentic mode of being-towards-death, he has embarked upon the discussion of temporality that is the Time in Being and Time.? In moves analogous to his treatment of distance and place in division one, Heidegger here starts to articulate what an existential treatment of time, one that does not pretend a false transcendence but remains rooted in actual human existence, might look like.? His segue into this topic is to explore the character of authentic resoluteness, noting that a Dasein’s resoluteness, because authentic Dasein is authentic being-towards-death, must be anticipatory resoluteness.

Conventional, das Man conceptions of time, in Heidegger’s view, untruthfully flatten out time so that past, present, and future are all the same sorts of “spans” on a unified line.? Heidegger insists that there is no discrete “past” for Dasein precisely because we do not exist in such an order that we can behold all three at the same time, in the same manner.? Instead Heidegger articulates a human being’s sense of time to the human being’s existence as “having-been” here or there and, on the other hand, having the moment of responsibility in front of every present moment.? In other words, since human existence, as long as the human being exists, stands before every moment with the responsibility for its own authenticity or inauthenticity, and since what Dasein “has been” is an element of the whole rather than a segment that has passed (“past”), temporality for Heidegger means the authentic anticipation of non-existence, alongside a responsible engagement with what one has been, resulting in a holistic being-towards-death.

So anticipatory resoluteness in Being and Time means living as the particular-at-root Being that one is because of where one has been (and that includes all of one’s acts and all of the times one has been acted upon), and it also means seeing the particulars of the moment rather than looking for easily applicable “rules” and taking responsibility for the ways that one will next approach the call of conscience. In the philosopher’s translated words, “In resoluteness, the Present is not only brought back from distraction with the objects of one’s closest concern, but it gets held in the future and in having been” (387).

It’s a sense of the world that inspires some fear and trembling, and Heidegger has no illusion that most people will approach or even desire this potential. Heidegger insists that every Dasein always lives ahead of itself (386), that inauthentic, das-Man life is not a different kind of being but simply a refusal to take as one’s own the order of being common to Dasein.? When human beings live inauthentically, they still stand responsible to do something with the empty moment in front of them; they just don’t own responsibility for it.? Or, to cite Heidegger and his translator, “Factically, Dasein is constantly ahead of itself, but inconstantly anticipatory with regard to its existentiell possibility” (386).

As Heidegger wraps up his discussion of temporality, he returns to the formal vices that he first lays out in Division One and which I discussed in a post in the previous series.? Here Heidegger continues to explore the structure of the vices, noting the ways that they remain the same order of being as Dasein but refuse to take responsibility for it:

• Because genuine fear is couched in having-been in encounters with beings that can do harm, anxiety, the fear without an object, refuses the fear couched in concern and with responsibility for the moment, preferring to fear the invisible (394).
• When Dasein casts its concern everywhere (and therefore nowhere), preferring constant distraction in the present without any attention to having-been and without any genuine attention to the moment in front, curiosity still relates to the having-been and the future but does not give them any resolution or anticipation, instead looking for perpetual novelty in the present (398-99).
• When discourse abandons authentic having-been and ignores the futurity of the people involved, it slips into what Heidegger earlier called idle talk (401).

As with before, Heidegger denies that these ways-of-being are vicious any any moral sense, but the scorn is hard to miss.

Because Dasein is temporal existence, the differences between entities ready-to-hand and entities present-at-hand have necessarily to do with this or that person’s having-been involvement with everyday, equipment-relations and the related (inseparable, really) later shift to beholding them as objects.? Neither the equipment-character nor the object-character goes away, but the standing of the Dasein encompasses both of them in the present moment and stands responsible for them in the coming moment (412).? Before he moves on to a discussion of what being-historical means in this framework, he takes one last opportunity to note that self-assertion of the Romantic and later the Nietzschean variety always happens inside of a structure of Being that the Dasein does not create, that taking a stand on one’s own being always means having a Being to stand upon.? That does not take away responsibility, but it does avoid the solipsism into which Romanticism so often threatens to slip (417).

Christian communities always relate in some way (usually in multiple ways–that’s what makes them communities rather than bee hives) to the traditions that constitute their having-been, and any given Christian within those communities does likewise. ?Although Heidegger’s tendency to prefer structure to comment makes for tedious reading, the same tendency makes his examination quite useful for remembering that the most progressive/liberal community, convinced that some or most of the old ways constitute unconscionable repression and stifling legalism; and the most traditionalist/conservative community, setting up walls against the encroachments of modern and postmodern license, share with one another the basic structure of having-been and future-looking. ?There is no community that does not live at once in the moment-to-come and as the community-it-has-been. ?Although that structure does not itself recommend this or that order for any given community, it does serve as a handy conceptual tool for talking about communities as different without forgetting the common ground without which nobody could even compare them. ?To be “stuck in the past” and to lack “historical memory” are not different kinds of phenomena but two possibilities of the same kind, and when Christians talk to one another (to determine whether the other counts as Christian, if nothing else), we would do well to remember that by definition we share certain ways-of-having-been, and in order to convince one another to live differently, we must share certain possibilities for anticipatory resoluteness.

Such complications of time-language, as I noted at the outset, stand to give us tools more adequate than clock-time to the complexity of living in tradition, and I for one prefer this kind of harder-thinking to a simplicity that can’t say much.

by ngilmour