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Mtsar & Riva (Interview)

…one might easily come to the idea that the most extreme sharpness and depth of thinking (Denken) belongs to the mystic. This is moreover the truth. Meister Eckhart testifies to it – Martin Heidegger

It is now possible and necessary to consider the question of Heidegger’s mystical leanings and delve into the pros and cons of the issue. Let us not heed the static of academic goons who ad nauseum repeat the tired party line that he wasn’t “a mystic,” offering not a jot of substantiation for their myopic assurances. They imagine that they’re mere statements will be blindly accepted worldwide, such is their outright duplicity and arrogance. Ignore the obligatory naysaying of the institutionalized and we recognize at once the mystical quality of Heidegger’s later thought.

It helps if we widen our definition of the term “mysticism,” making sure we are not influenced by religious connotations. Let us think of it in terms of Mystical Naturalism and Mystical Aestheticism, as we find with the work of Holderlin, Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Pater, Rilke, Marcel and Barfield, etc.

This is not to endorse Pantheism of any kind, since we are not tracking the activity and presence of a religious god, nor are we considering any form of Christian or Eastern esoterism.

We can appreciate the mystical within Heidegger by referring to early German thinkers such as Meister Eckhart, Jacob Bohme, Angelus Silesius, and others. Certainly, in his later works we find direct allusions to early German mystics such as Eckhart and Silesius. Several terms and ideas in Heidegger’s later works – particularly Sway and Releasement – resemble the thought of Duns Scotus and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

His ruminations about the majesty of the natural world, his evocative musings on forest walks and half-lit landscapes are reminiscent of Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and of many German Romantics. It is known that he lectured on Schelling’s Naturophilosopie, and his love of and debt to Rilke and Holderlin has also been widely acknowledged.

His repeated use of terminology right out of the antique German mystical tradition caused much consternation. Materialistically minded readers reacted in horror, accusing him of obscurantism and incoherence.

Heidegger subsequently traded the idealism of fundamental ontology for the mystical posture of his later works…which no longer assert the dependence of being on human being, but instead treat being as something essentially mysterious and inexplicable – Taylor Carman

Heidegger’s evocative statements about the ambivalent qualities of Being strike the reader as particularly non-materialistic and mystical in tone. His emphasis on Being’s concealment is akin to the thought of the high German mystics of previous ages. His comments about moods, preconscious states of awareness, and of letting-be, etc, are akin to Taoist teachings. It is also striking that he worked on his own translation of the seminal mystical book, the Tao Te Ching by the ancient Chinese mystic Lao Tzu. Senior Taoist thinkers from Japan invited him to live and teach in Kyoto, and he invited top Taoists to visit him for extended periods in Germany. The most eminent Taoists thinkers of the Kyoto school openly declared Heidegger’s thought to be essential for an understanding of the deepest Zen and Taoist principles.

His statements about “mystery,” “silence,” “care,” “dwelling,” “letting-be,” “gifting,” “gratitude” and “meditative thinking,” etc, can be identified as mystical, as can his comments about the grand humility of authentic types whose perspectives on existence are vastly more attuned and sensitized to reality than that of folks entangled in ontic life. Indeed, his description of the authentic person – especially in the guise of the loner and outsider – can be regarded as semi-mystical.

Clearly, Heidegger’s descriptions, in this regard, influenced great Existentialist writers such as Herman Hesse, Gabriel Marcel and Albert Camus. Some point to his focus on Being-Toward-Death, finitude, angst, evasion, self-deception, collectivism, inauthenticity, nothingness, the importance of art, etc, as quasi-mystical elements of his overall philosophy.

The meditative man is to experience the untrembling heart of unconcealment. What does the phrase of the untrembling heart of unconcealment mean? It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, it means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin with – Martin Heidegger

Some Heideggerian scholars, such as William Barrett, John Caputo, Richard Capobianco, Alfred Denker and Barbara Dalle Pezze are open to the idea that Heidegger’s work is of a mystical bent. Others think of it as semi-mystical, rightly advising that Heidegger’s mysticism is not automatically to be associated with better known mystical schools, Christian, Gnostic, Sufi, Vedic, Chinese, German, Romantic, or other.

An “esoteric” reading of Heidegger’s texts convinces me that he can correctly be defined as a Mystical Naturalist, or in modern parlance a Naturalistic Pantheist or Religious Naturalist. It is for this reason that thinkers such as Arne Naess formed the Deep Ecology movement, largely due to Heidegger’s ideas on the importance of nature and man’s pathological insensitivity toward it.

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…a turning with mortals in their essence – Martin Heidegger

In his later work Heidegger calls for a new way of thinking about the divine. Metaphysical thinking has failed. Its God is pronounced dead. Materialism is dead also, its “matter” has left the building.

Okay, what’s to be done? Do we remain impervious and atheistic? Do we continue in the dark, as nihilists and/or decadents? Do we seek a haven in mechanistic science and technology, or in transhumanism?

Did we experience the death of God, and pass-through valleys of darkness in order to rebuild ourselves from the ground up?

In Being and Time, Heidegger’s concern was Dasein’s questioning of Being, the act that makes Dasein Dasein. Of course, the questioning of Being is really a requestioning that changes direction over time. It must also morph with personal experience, maturation, and historical events.

Given that Dasein’s questioning of Being is itself constantly advancing, at some point no handrails will be required. Dasein will proceed without religion, metaphysics and traditional paradigms set by science, technology and “common sense.” What he finds is a new kind of thinking and new objects of that thinking. As such, he must recast himself as an Aesthetic being.

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…gods are hiding not only in the primal forests and mountains of the earth but are present— incognito—in the streets of the cities as well. All things are divine so long as they are approached with consideration and care, that is, when we let them be as what they are—images – Robert Avens

Little of Heidegger’s main philosophical insights on Dasein and Being are understandable until we come upon his explanation of the differences between Earth and World, as expressed in On the Origin of a Work of Art, The Thing and Building, Dwelling, Thinking, and other works.

After all, we might ask what the term Being-in-the-World means. What is Being and what is World?

We find ourselves “thrown” into the world, learning (or being trained) to find our way using will, reason and intellect as guides. The indoctrination of society, which begins early, makes us into subjects not Selves. In the end we become subordinated to our own ignorance, going on to pollute the minds of the newborn.

As Heidegger succinctly pointed out, most of what we do in terms of our worldliness – eating, sitting, walking, driving, chatting, and so much more – is invisible to us by its proximity. We cannot say we are lucidly aware of it. Are we aware of the door handle every time we turn it to enter or exit a room? Are we conscious of typing on a keyboard, or of breathing? Apparently, our Being-in-the-World is accomplished with natural efficacy. Heidegger was interested in how and why this is the case.

Strangely, it’s no different when it comes to thinking. It’s not gratitude, that’s for sure, and its certainly not noticed. It’s something that “happens” to us without our being aware of it. This was also a major theme of Heidegger’s work. He pointed out that our language is yet another phenomenon that goes largely unthought. His famous statement again:

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking – Martin Heidegger

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Dreams contain images and thought associations which we do not create with conscious intent. They arise spontaneously without resistance as representatives of psychic activity withdrawn from our arbitrary will – Carl Gustav Jung

As we see, making sense of Heidegger’s work is no easy task. This is also the case with his writings and lectures in the years following Being and Time.

In later years he spoke enigmatically about the “Fourfold,” which left most people puzzled and disinterested. His comments on the “gods” confused many readers and listeners. It sounded “mystical” to their ears. This is because, when all is said and done, his doctrine of the Fourfold is mystical in the fullest and most correct sense of the word.

Most commenters on Heidegger have a difficult time making sense of this aspect of his philosophy, and struggle to make it clear for readers. Understanding it is easier when we approach the subject after considering Heidegger’s attitude toward psychology and psychoanalysis. Doing so helps us grasp a vital aspect of these practices that Heidegger’s sharp mind honed-in on. It’s an aspect that would certainly have captured his interest, supporting and strengthening his theories pertaining to the mysterious Fourfold.

In general, the first coterie of Existentialist thinkers didn’t have a high regard for psychology and psychoanalysis. John Paul Sartre, in particular, worried that modern humans turn to psychologists for similar reasons as their forebears turned to priests and pastors. In the past, one went to confession and told the priest all about their hang-ups and “sins.” After spilling out their guilty consciences and receiving absolution, they left the church to continue sinning and feeling guilty. Sartre was all too aware of the underlying human need for father-figures and pathological penchant for self-deception. Inauthenticity is the order of the day, as far as Sartre was concerned. Social man’s very existence demands he live in “bad faith” with himself.

Might not the psychologist, and techniques of therapy, allow a client or patient a way out of taking responsibility for his life? Sartre said yes, that is absolutely what regularly happens. There’s duplicity on both sides, with the client and with the doctor. Instead of this or that cause – caste, class, poverty, ignorance, crassness or incompetence, etc - being a hindrance, I can disingenuously place the blame for my failures on my “unconscious.” Doctor, it’s my drives and complexes that make me what I am. It’s my animal instincts, compulsions and unconscious unfulfilled wishes that ruin my life. In the past I blamed Demons, today I blame the psyche. And so, it goes.

Sartre and other Existentialists were having none of it.

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Heidegger has not told us in so many words what Being is; but anyone who has read his text through has from it a concrete sense of Being quite different from anything that our philosophic tradition has so far brought to light – William Barrett

From the year dot, humankind experienced Mystery. It was around us then and it’s around us now. When it comes to Mystery absolutely nothing has changed. However, humanity’s attitude and response to the mystery of Mystery has changed, and not for the better. Strangely, the presence of Mystery hasn’t endeared us. Instead of loving it, we loathe it.

Gabriel Marcel declared that humanity suffers from chronic misosophy, or “hatred of wisdom.” He gives several perceptive accounts of why this is. We can add to the baneful condition, declaring that humanity also suffers from hatred of Mystery. Hence the surfeit of inauthentic types surrounding us, particularly in the hallowed halls of academia.

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If lost Dasein must find itself, then it must have had an original state of unity that was destroyed. Everydayness is seen as negative since it eclipses Dasein's self. Dasein has a true self that is overcome by “das Man” – Havi Carel

The baneful motive behind metaphysical thinking and establishment of the All-Father at the Omega Point or Pole, stems, as said, from our need for psychic stability and grounding. It also stems, says Otto Rank, from our fear of the “irrational” that exists within us as the so-called “unconscious.” For Rank, the unconscious is simply understood as uninhibited libido and “will.” His account of will and the Will-to-Will recalls the ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on the same subject. But as far as Rank was concerned, the socialized brain strives ever to dissociate itself from this flow of unstructured libido. The first move in this act of dissociation is the ego’s demonization of the unconscious as a threatening and ultimately bestial region. After that comes more stringent superego control, orienting the ego to society’s supposedly “rational” norms. This, says Rank, accounts for the advent of psychoanalysis, the discipline in service of the superego, intent on designating as “neurotic” and pathological anything not under conscious wilful control.

Freud referred to the unconscious as the “id,” which simply means “it.” It’s not a bad definition, since the term “unconscious” isn’t really accurate. If it’s not consciousness, then we simply don’t know what it is. It’s really not the unconscious, so to speak, for the simple reason it might be something else. The word tells us little.

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Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known – Oscar Wilde

Dasein is being there – a being in a space. We ask about the being, but not the there, the space in which we find ourselves. Is it not part of our being? Does it not shape us? Is it not the part of the world we occupy until life ends. What do we know of it in existential terms? Why does metaphysics have nothing to say about it?

What and where is “there?” How do I find myself in a place? What does this occupancy entail and mean? I maintain that there is no revelation on these questions, no true understanding, until one becomes an Artist. Only Artists think space.

Certainly, the term Da-sein (as used by Heidegger in later writings) implies activity of human sort. What activity can be as significant and revealing as art? It cannot be compared to ontic activities which occupy us in our everydayness. All the birthing, learning, working, worrying and surviving. What value lies in any of it if beauty did not exist, and if we as Beings-in-the-World did not respond to it?

One’s response to beauty makes one what they are. It makes us Dasein or Being-in-the-World. In this sense Being-in-the-World can be equated with Being-Toward-Beauty. As such, the way is open for us to revision Metaphysics, Existentialism and Fundamental Ontology, etc, in Aesthetic terms, taking it for granted that Being and Beauty are synonymous. After all, what is more philosophical than the existence and contemplation of beauty?

Many commenters agree that there are definite aesthetic principles espoused by Heidegger, and that at the very least aesthetics is half-way to his Fundamental Ontology. Art, not science, is Dasein’s failsafe means of dealing with reality now that the props of religion have crumbled, and man wanders homelessly without familiar traditional compasses. In the modern age of uncertainty and despair, high Art provides purpose, inspiration and hope. Via Art man holds on to his world, sanity and Selfhood. He keeps open his image-making faculties and symbolic sensibility. Without these there can be no Self-image and no Self.

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Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know – John Keats

According to the later Heidegger – in the years following the publication of Being and Time – Heidegger theorized that Being manifested itself differently through successive historical periods or epochs. Our present technological age manifests Being in a different way than before the modern and pre-modern epochs. Heidegger explains his new outlook in works such as The Question Concerning Technology (1954).

Despite this cogent and insightful proposition, we might add a provocative theory of our own, to radically enhance our understanding of how Being manifests through the ages. It may be noted that man’s appreciation of beauty remains relatively constant across historical eras and epochs. Our aesthetic sensibility cuts across every moment of time, from before the era of the ancient Greeks to the present day. This leads us to the conclusion that the so-called, ‘’overthrowing of Metaphysics,’’ proclaimed by Heidegger, can not be fully achieved until Aesthetics becomes the dominant branch of philosophy. We hold to this proposition, even though Heidegger himself did not wholeheartedly explore its possibilities.

Beauty can be described but never explained. It transcends the limits of reason and thinking. Why is this the case? We might ask, what part beauty plays in the history of philosophy, based as it is on speculative thinking. We conclude that the phenomenon of beauty certainly does have a place, given that it transposes our attention from the whatness to the thatness of things. Our attention is not on what a thing is, but on that it is. We are confronted, once again, with the all-important philosophical query – why is there something rather than nothing?

What we call Being also transcends the limits of thought and brings before the same question. Therefore, as I maintain in this text, Being and Beauty must not be considered as two separate realities.

Because Being isn’t a specific being, it defies explanation. It is what Barfield called the ‘’Unrepresented.’’ It is not easily conceptualized and never will be. However, as we’ve seen, it’s a matter of Imagination and the natural image-making faculty of consciousness that helps bring beings close to Being.

To think about the past inevitably means to form images in the mind. To think about anything including oneself is to do likewise.

What we call “ideas” are nothing of the kind. They are, in fact, images, pure and simple. What a materialist calls ‘’Matter,’’ is itself nothing more than an idea or image. It this sense the materialist, is really a closet idealist. Pity he doesn’t know it.

The point is that we are profoundly Aesthetic beings. Or, in other words, Being is an Aesthetic concept.

Taking Barfield seriously, we see that one reason for Being’s obscurity is our inability to commune with it and, let it work on our symbolic psyche. There is no invocation in language or art and, therefore, no reciprocal discourse.

This lack effects consciousness drastically, keeping us locked within the Problematic. If Being is “nothingness,” it’s because we want it that way.

Despite our neglect and symbolic impoverishment, we retain in our depths an intuition of Wholeness and Totality. It’s the natural consequence of our proximity to things as they exist around us. The blossom and fruit on the branch exist because of the twig, bough and trunk, which exist because of the roots. The tree exists because of the soil, which sits atop the ground, which exists as the surface of the earth, which revolves in space, which exists because of other forces at work, and so on. It’s empirically verifiable despite the fact that we rarely if ever articulate the wider context of anything. It’s too bad, since Being is that Totum made invisible by proximity. Heidegger’s later writings explore this, contextualizing Dasein in spatial as well as temporal terms.

Urbanized Das Man is certainly not inclined to give Being the attention it deserves. He’s surrounded by too many beings for that. He’s far too ungrateful for being alive, and too proud of his inauthenticity. As Nietzsche might have put it, he’s still angry at God for being dead.

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Psyche’s primary activity is fantasy and image-making - Jeffrey C. Miller

The ideas of British philosopher and linguist Owen Barfield help shine light on obscure areas of Heidegger’s corpus. Barfield’s original thought and approach contradicts the philosophies of Descartes and Kant and is akin to that of the German Romantics and Mystics. It is primarily an Aesthetic philosophy, similar to that expounded by Goethe, Schelling, Steiner, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Rilke and Holderlin. Academic commenters on Heidegger completely ignore the influence of Rank, Marcel and Barfield on his ideas. Unlike these men, they tend to ignore the role of Aesthetics, relegating it to the fourth and least important discipline of philosophy.

Interestingly, Barfield was a contemporary of Heidegger, and it’s possible that both men were aware of each other’s work. Barfield’s first book History of English Words came out in 1926, one year before Being and Time. In any case, there are many areas of similarity between the two thinkers, particularly regarding art and language.

Heidegger’s earliest formulations on language in “Being and Time”—those that would form the very basis of his phenomenology—sound nearly identical to Barfield’s remarks in chapter VII of “Saving the Appearances” - Michael Vincent Di Fuccia

Both thinkers stressed that because they are so proximous, the processes and significance of consciousness and language are strangely concealed from us. Nevertheless, all we need to know about Being-in-the-World can be disclosed by a phenomenological study of language. We are, after all, the only species to communicate in such a sophisticated way. What is it we say, and what is it we do not say with our words? What is left unarticulated? This was so important a subject for Heidegger and Barfield, that they investigated the obscure origins and meanings of many evocative words. Let language itself open the way and reveal what remains unuttered. Instead of language maintaining the divide between subjects and objects, let it be the means for reuniting them.

Instead of a polarizing cogito, Barfield, like Heidegger, believed that language preserves an ancient connection between Self and World. It speaks of an originary and reciprocal empathic participation between Self and World that precedes the rise of ego-consciousness and rational cognition. There’s a primordial intentionality and recognition of the world in operation before the advent of the hard subject-object divide. His comments about Original Participation are reminiscent of Gabriel Marcel’s view on Mystery and language.

…meaning is something that cannot be talked about at all – Owen Barfield

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There can be no Stoicism without a belief in an inalienable inner sovereignty, an absolute possession of the self by the self – Gabriel Marcel

We see that Marcel’s thought helps elucidate central Heideggerian principles.

Marcel apparently introduced the word “Existentialism” into French philosophical circles but wasn’t keen to be known as an Existentialist. He eventually converted to Catholicism, but before and after this event his ideas were undoubtedly Existentialist in complexion.

Even more importantly, as we’ve seen, Marcel explicitly advocates for Personalism. Also, for Marcel, Being isn’t as remote and indefinable as it sometimes seems in Heidegger’s work. Emotion and feeling matter to Marcel, making a difference when Dasein attempts to answer the call of Being.

Many commenters on Heidegger give the impression that Being is not agreeable to human feeling or intention, and that it is almost wholly indifferent, impersonal and even ahuman. This is particularly the case when they comment on Heidegger’s later work that emphasizes the spatial rather than temporal connotations of the relationship between Dasein and Being. Regrettably, the academics tend to misconstrue Heidegger’s later work. They declare that it’s obscure but not mystical. They’re wrong on both counts, and they know it.

It is true that Marcel’s message tends to be hopeful. His take on the future of humankind isn’t particularly fatalistic. Indeed, Marcel was a great champion of hope, fraternity (availability) and intelligent social participation. He was also a committed advocate of Man-as-Artist, and spoke of the absolute importance of art, music, poetry and drama as the foremost means for engaging Being.

In Being and Time Dasein is not a detached God-like intellect surveying external phenomena. He is not an imperious rational brain sitting above and beyond worldly phenomena. That notion is, as I call it, mystera. Nor is Dasein a transcendental subject with categories of mind that give us a tangible world while at the same time concealing its true nature.

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A higher acting is concealed in releasement than is found in all the actions within the world and in the machinations of all mankind – Martin Heidegger

Gabriel Marcel and Paul Tillich were not inclined to see Heidegger as any kind of mystic, despite his evocative and idiosyncratic writings on art, poetry, technology’s dangers, and so on. Marcel saw Heidegger as a reductionist and quasi-materialist whose philosophy wasn’t sufficiently descriptive of the nature of Being. He faulted Heidegger for reducing Being to an epiphenomenon of time and history.

Marcel agrees with the essence of Heidegger’s thought but had perceptive criticisms. I will paraphrase them here, given that Marcel was by no means a systematic writer. He had no philosophical system and chose to present key ideas in the form of diaries, letters, memoirs, stories, plays and poems. It is, however, vital that we spend time examining his extraordinarily insightful ideas, particularly as they pertain to Heidegger’s descriptions of Dasein, Being, Being-in-the-World, Being-Toward-Death, anxiety, and so on.

Marcel was, like Heidegger, an anti-Cartesian, although his theories of consciousness are in their own dualistic. He certainly agrees with Heidegger that death is a great mystery. No one lives forever, and no one has returned from the “other side” to tell us about it. What a medic, philosopher, priest or layman says about it has little value. All we have are their opinions. The mystery of death levels us all. One’s personal comment is as good as that of any other person. Most agree that the inevitability of death does generate dread, and that, as Heidegger said, few individuals return from the unpassable horizon to seize their life in the present and make good on their possibilities. Marcel agrees that encountering temporal finitude encourages some people to become “authentic.”

What Marcel wants his readers to think about, and be aware of, isn’t death, per se, but Mystery.

We hear ourselves say “the mystery of death,” and so on, but what do we know, asks Marcel, about Mystery itself? When someone says, “mystery of death,” our focus is immediately on death rather than mystery. Why so? asks Marcel. After all, death is not the only mystery confronting us. There’s the mystery of life itself, and of mind, body, perception, time, cosmos, birth, suffering, past-lives, creativity, genius, beauty, love, women, freedom, will, ESP, God, evil, and so on. At all times throughout history we’ve been confronted with Mystery, and yet we find it unthought. Ask yourself what you know about it?

Marcel’s Existentialism is rooted in this question. Consequently, his take isn’t quite the same as that of Heidegger and other thinkers.

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Self and world belong together in the single entity, Dasein. Self and world are not two entities, like subject and object…but self and world are the basic determination of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world Martin Heidegger

As we’ve seen, Dasein defines man as “Being-There,” in a place as well as a time, a place in which living really happens. This place includes the physical body and its surrounds.

From Dasein’s place he encounters the world, as a Being-in-the -World. As such, Dasein’s place of being is fundamental to his essential being. Dasein cannot be thought of without thinking about the world seen from where he stands. Once this is understood, Cartesian and Kantian views of man crumble to ashes.

In Heideggerian terms what is truly Existential about us is not only our “thrownness,” but that being thrown entails or results in a time and place of being. Thrownness is our ontological limit. Concepts of freedom must, therefore, be contextualized in terms of the limit to our essential freedom. Again, this limit is unthought by Metaphysics, Idealism, Rationalism, and other schools of philosophy.

Heidegger's conception of thrownness is precisely a denial that Dasein is free in any radical, unconditioned sense – Taylor Carman

Although we are not consciously aware of this limit, we are inclined to intuitively wish to exceed it. Hence religion, supernaturalism, paranormalism, séance and out-of-body spiritualism. Today we try escaping it via digital interfaces and “virtual realities.” It’s all rather futile since no one can escape thrownness or death.

We must find ourselves within the limit imposed by our thrownness. What freedom we know and who we become must be in the context we actually experience.

Using the German word Dasein, Heidegger draws attention to how we experience the world and its objects and entities. Crucially, we do not relate to the world as if we are outside or beyond it. We exist in and amongst the things of the world, and are deeply involved with the world, which is at all times an interpreted world or web of “significance.” This is the world we find ourselves in, and what we care about.

Key to Dasein’s beinghood is Da, his thereness. Dasein is literally a being who is always in a space or clearing. More correctly, we are a space or clearing. From our place of being we “overlap” with the larger world. Said differently, the world makes it possible for us to be Da - a space or microcosmic-world within a world.

In Heideggerian terms, Being (Sein) shows up in the Da or clearing that is Dasein. Being becomes a question because it presences in and as the Da (or space) that is Dasein.

Dasein becomes Da-sein, dwelling in the expanse that has been opened – Barbara D. Pezze

If and when Dasein sets out to question Being, it is from his place that he does so. That place or clearing becomes something very special in relation to Being. It partakes, as it were, in the Truth of Being. It’s where Being itself calls for the Question of Being to arise within Dasein’s being.

We were born at a certain place, and when we die it will also be at a certain place. So, it goes with other critical moments in life. It’s no different with the Mystery of Being. It is impossible, thought Heidegger, to conceive of it in any other way. Whatever life-questions I ask, and whatever meaningful events happen, even if I’m merely sitting at my kitchen table, overlooking a beautiful valley or experiencing my first romantic kiss, my place is not to be forgotten or minimized in importance.

There is not one space and time only, but as many spaces and times as there are subjects – Ludwig Binswanger

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“Know Thyself!” is the command Socrates issued to philosophers at the beginning…of all Western philosophy – William Barrett

According to Existential Psychology man is an ontologically divided being. Not only does he possess a divided brain, with left and right hemispheres, but his consciousness and personality are fundamentally polarized.

As we’ve seen, humans function on three levels: personal, social and natural. However, despite his ontological rapport with nature (Umwelt) and other people (Mitwelt), Dasein is as a human being (Eigenwelt) not whole within himself. Having a mind means being able to constantly self-survey. It means that one part of us has the capacity to observe another part, which seems very paradoxical. It tells us that consciousness is not unified. There’s a definite split somewhere.

Not only that, but as Freudians and other psychologists point out, we embody a conscious and unconscious mind.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed it is repressed content from the id or unconscious that primarily disturbs the ego. Repression is one means of preventing subconscious content from entering and disturbing consciousness. Of course, the anxiety-making content remains active beneath the threshold of egoic awareness, causing a mood of discontent and unease. As long as unconscious elements remain taboo and unintegrated, Dasein remains a profoundly divided being. The remedy, say psychologists, is to make unconscious content conscious. However, we wonder if this is achieved under the dictates of the will or not. It doesn’t appear to be so, given that one enters therapy to lie down on a couch, in a half-lit room, with eyes closed. A strange thing to do for the will.

Other examples of existential conflict are also discernible. For example, a person may have ideas about themselves not shared by anyone else. These ideas may be self-effacing and self-condemnatory. In fact, in extreme cases a person may quite literally hate themselves, a condition known as autophobia. Such a person, although admired and even adored by others, may loathe their own being. They are, consequently, in a state not of unity but fragmentation. Their self-sadism or masochism may not be discernible until they begin acting sadistically toward others, as a means of displacement and sign to the world of how they hate themselves.

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To will is to will-to-be-master – Martin Heidegger

So far, we have kept our focus on Existential philosophy. However, there are valuable insights to be had when we study a few controversial ideas of the seminal psychologists. This is particularly true of the great Otto Rank, who served as the secretary of Sigmund Freud for twenty-two years.

In his groundbreaking book The Trauma of Birth, the great Otto Rank speaks about pre-Oedipal stages and how an infant’s vulnerable consciousness is disaffected and traumatized by its witless parents. He sketches out a theory delineating methods by which a person non-consciously attempts to return to the repose experienced in the mother’s womb. For Rank this regressive drive supersedes all other drives and subconscious needs, those described by Freud, Jung, Neumann, et al.

This regressive urge is primarily the result of incompetent parents who fail to reassuringly introduce newborns to the Reality Principle, probably because they themselves hate reality.

Naturally, this return to the comfort of the womb cannot happen physically. However, as far as Rank was concerned, it can happen symbolically and psychically. Rank was of the opinion that what psychologists refer to as the “unconscious” can in one context be considered a womb metaphor.

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It is only in the face of death that man's self is born – St. Augustine

Heidegger’s preceptive statements about Dasein as Being-Toward-Death nullify ludicrous arguments denying the existence of the Self, as propounded by Hume, Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, et al. Heidegger found the proof for Selfhood missed or ignored by all.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself – Martin Heidegger

One’s death is one’s own. It starkly drives Dasein to value life and what is his. It drives him to be a Self.

Heidegger’s intention was to reveal how death impacts us on the most mundane levels. What we do every day, semi-consciously or in full deliberate awareness depends on our reaction toward finitude and time we have to be and get things done. For Dasein to become aware of his possibilities depends on this painful recognition of mortality. To recognize the possibility of death means accepting the ending of all possibilities, and of the Self as experiencer.

Dasein’s contemplation of death is not, however, a shared experience. It is, then, categorically, the experience constituting true Selfhood. In this sense we can rightly say that Being-Toward-Death is synonymous with Being-Toward-Selfhood. However, the Self Heidegger gives us back is of a higher octave than any other philosopher offers. It surpasses Nietzschean-type fare such as that of the “Superman.” That Nietzsche exalted such a preposterous creature told Heidegger that he had, as a philosopher, not thought beyond the Metaphysical tradition. Of course, although Nietzsche’s teachings are famous the world over, Heidegger’s improved theories on man’s true identity and role are hardly considered.

One of the most remarkable things about Heidegger’s description of human existence is that it is made without his using the term “man” at all! He thereby avoids the assumption that we are dealing with a definite object with a fixed nature - that we already know…His analysis of existence also takes place without the use of the word “consciousness,” for this word threatens to bring us back into the Cartesian dualism – William Barrett

As we saw previously, transcendence in the Heideggerian sense, refers to the person one becomes after confronting the brevity of life.

One transcends Das Man by thinking more deeply about the value of existence, or one may de-transcend, as it were, by fleeing such thoughts, choosing to live in forgetfulness of life, death and being. In this case, Das Man chooses an inauthentic mode of existence and automatically finds himself threatened by the existence and presence of his nemesis.

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…philosophy, like art or poetry, rests on a foundation of personal involvement…it has its source in a vocation, where the word “vocation” is taken with all its etymological significance. I think that philosophy…has to be considered as a personal response to a call – Gabriel Marcel

The foremost inarguable verification of Selfhood in Heidegger is found in the unlikeliest of places – the theory of “nothingness.” To come upon the Self is to understand the role of nothingness in one’s life. It is to realize that Dasein’s temporal and spatial existence is set upon and determined by it. However, as Heidegger wished to show, it’s not easy comprehending nothingness when our entire psyche recoils from anything to do with it, when consciousness itself has abandoned it, causing it to be even more obscure than it actually is. As Heidegger pointed out, the obscurity of Being and Nothingness is partly due to human dissociation. What passes for modern consciousness is a matter of evasion, self-deception and concealment. What is it, he asked, about Being and Nothingness that we dread? Are we not rational animals? Are we not at the head of the food-chain? Are we not possessors of the world and commanders of reality?

The structure of our everyday lives is informed by a double concealment: oblivion of the darkness of existence and escape from one’s self - Tetsuaki Kotoh

What most champions of Selfhood fail to grasp is that Existentialism’s concern about “nothingness” is comprehensible only in terms of the existence of an Imperial Self that stands upon the void with everything to lose in terms of identity should being collapse into it.

A self is not a thing which may or may not exist; it is an original phenomenon which logically precedes all questions of existence – Paul Tillich

Although in the nineteen fifties Heidegger backed away from the term Existentialism, his work is the necessary apotheosis of said philosophy. This is particularly the case in terms of nothingness and non-being.

In previous chapters we’ve seen that Existentialism is primarily concerned with identity, individuality and Selfhood. It is preoccupied with how beings experience the world they find themselves thrown into without explanation. Later we’ll explore were Dasein is thrown from. For now, we simply acknowledge that Heidegger’s approach to the mystery of Being is through the unique being who, as a being, makes Being important. It’s an extension of care that opens us to the Question of Being, care being our true foundation, not reason or the Will-to-Power.

This care also opens us to the inevitable despair and alienation that accompanies Self-observation. The mere intrusion of the “nothing” shakes the ego to its foundations and upsets the cart. We cannot continue in forgetfulness, serving the senses and laughing in the face of meaning when haunted by thoughts of nothingness. The return from the horizon of death introduces us to this nothingness underlying being. From this point on Being and Nothingness cannot be distinguished. One implies the other. The anxiety that shakes and destabilizes us remains a factor, not only because of death’s inevitability, but because of nothingness. After all, says Heidegger, we don’t experience our own deaths. It’s a possibility that ends all our possibilities but isn’t actually something we live through to understand and explain. Such is not the case with nothingness. It’s something we do experience and must experience as beings.

Existentialism is essentially a philosophy of nothingness, examining the symptoms of distress, despair and dread paralyzing humans who must consciously face it. What shape does a world take when it’s erected as a bulwark against the fear of non-being? That kind of question and inquiry isn’t ever going out-of-date, regardless of what corrupt institutions of learning say and do and what drug monopolies create in their sterile labs.

A few scholars begrudgingly accept that Heidegger’s philosophy is about individualism, but most “forget” to mention it explicitly. Inauthentic types don’t really want other people to be authentic, and most teachers and professors of philosophy are not interested in authenticity, even if they “know” a lot about it. (You should hear what Heidegger said about his academic colleagues.)

In any case, despite academic antics and duplicity, it needs reaffirming that Heidegger’s philosophy is, in its own idiosyncratic way, undoubtedly in favor of individualism. It’s about “Knowing Thyself” as a Self (or in most cases as a non-Self).

Dasein is defined as the entity whose mode of Being is precisely to raise its Being as an issue for itself - T. B. Yagi

Heidegger’s philosophy is deeply personalistic, given that unlike the grey anonymous Das Man, Dasein is concerned with his existence and fundamentally caring toward himself and the world. He cares about Being, and as a being finds himself sincerely asking the Question of Being.

Dasein is that kind of being which I myself always am. It has the character, for me, of a Self – Martin Heidegger

…Dasein is an entity that understands its own being. Dasein exists; and this means it makes choices. It is distinguished from all other entities by comporting itself toward its own existence – Richard Sembera

To be authentic is to testify to one’s being as one’s own – that my being-in-the-world is my own task to bear and something for which I alone am responsible – Sara Mills

...since each Dasein must encounter itself through itself, such an encounter must be a personal one. in place of all the abstract ideas which the philosophers of the tradition occupied themselves with, Kierkegaard and Heidegger have rectified the focus in these ways that we now have a clearer understanding of who we are and our way of Being-in-the-world – T. B. Yagi

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…every answer to this question is impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” such and such. With regard to the nothing, question and answer are equally absurd…For thinking, which is always essentially thinking something, would, as thinking the nothing, have to act contrary to its own essence – Martin Heidegger

We do not commonly think of Martin Heidegger as a dualist, given his insightful deconstruction of the metaphysical dualism central to the philosophies of Descartes and Kant. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that he was deeply preoccupied with the most important, yet most ignored, example of dualism, that of Being and Nothingness.

The truly philosophically minded person is, according to Heidegger and the ancient Greeks, not concerned with what things are, but that they are. The question tirelessly asked is – Why is there something, rather than nothing?

Taking his que from previous thinkers in the metaphysical tradition, Nietzsche attempted to obscure this question with noisy wrongheaded notions, such as that of Eternal Recurrence and the Will-to-Power. Heidegger did not fall into the trap and did not follow suit. He knew that the question concerning Nothingness is not reserved for the abstract metaphysical thinker. It comes crashing into our lives, on the most intimate level, when we sincerely confront the brevity of our existence. One day we will perish, and after doing so will never come again.

Heidegger’s preoccupation with Nothingness increases after Being and Time, although it is in this book that he deals with the concept in two primary manifestations – Thrownness and Death. We are literally, as beings, surrounded by an abyss of nothingness. We do not know where we came from and know nothing about what happens after we expire.

Finding ourselves thrown into the world against our will is deeply unnerving. It awakens within us a strong but repressed feeling of dread. No one takes birth without experiencing existential anxiety. Similarly, when one becomes aware of life’s brevity they are again confronted with yet more anxiety. Nothingness is Dasein’s beginning and nothingness is his end. It sounds bleak. Nevertheless, Heidegger takes a different tack. For him, Dasein cannot possibly live authentically until he is born-again – a process sure to occur when he sincerely and squarely faces the possibility of his mortality. In this sense, we are – as authentic Dasein – given our second birth by Death.

Earlier I mentioned the relationship between Being and Nothingness. The latter arises as a concept once Dasein returns to the present after experiencing the unsettling effects of protention. Dasein’s experience of the now is never the same. Although the present is relatively familiar and certain, future moments are not. On our tiny island of “now,” it is as if we are surrounded by darkness and nothingness. Life is apparently something salvaged from the abyss of death and nothingness.

Of course, we all question where we came from before being thrown into the world. It’s darkened because we’re blinded by the light of where we are – in a world of significance. Our ontic preoccupations work to prevent us rediscovering our origins in silence and darkness, experienced now as nothingness.

Central for Heidegger is the dread of death and ending of possibilities, the anxiety over non-being. It’s a dread that arises because of temporality and the nothingness that follows its end. Our will detests this reality but find no solution to the problem of mortality. As Rank argued, the only solution for the will is to crave “more life.” He elaborated on the way this is achieved. Sadly, we cannot explore his ideas on man’s fear and of life and death here, nor his ideas on the gymnastics by which the will tries to enhance the experience of living.

We see that Rank is quite correct on this Eros Instinct. After all, on a social level do we not shake our fists at finitude by “having more children?” It’s certainly one form of immortality, but in the end it doesn’t abate the mood of anxiety heaving underneath our daily activities.

We do not and cannot know what lies beyond the moment of death. It feels like standing on the edge of a dark precipice. The predicament is, as said, the cause of existential anxiety, or is at least the stimulus awakening the mood of anxiety which for a few contemplative types catalyzes the dramatic changes mentioned previously.

One need not look at anxiety negatively, given that it often precipitates a shift from mere subjecthood to Selfdom or Selfhood. Nevertheless, Dasein is always surrounded by the nothingness that defines him as Being-Toward-Death. It is this existential disorientation in the face of death that brought man to invent religion, replete as it is with themes of heavens, hells, supernatural gods, angels and the afterlife, etc.

In Heidegger, Nothingness is a presence within our own Being, always there, in the inner quaking that goes on beneath the calm surface of our preoccupation with things – William Barrett

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The Dasein, constituted by ontological comprehension, is essentially not a thing but a happening, and this happening is transcendence – William Richardson

An ugly word looms in front of us when we read philosophy, not just that of the Platonic era, but right down the line to Husserl and Heidegger. That word is “transcendence.” Boring as it is, Heidegger’s teachings make the term less obscure.

On the most basic level – as pertains to Descartes, Kant, and many other thinkers – it describes mental abilities not found in animals. Man thinks about thought and inquires into whether life has an ultimate “meaning.” Kantians believe that our experience of a physical world of objects – our very ability to objectify and stand back as a “subject” observing the world – is due to what he called ‘’Transcendental’’ cognitive structures and mental frameworks. Descartes also took this false view, believing that mind is set off against reality as a detached spectator and imperious commander. In his view, Dasein is apart from and outside perceived reality. He is not a Being-in-the-World, and his origin is beyond or above it. Kant’s system is, for this reason, referred to as Transcendental Idealism. Both terms refer to the fact that cognitive understanding does not necessarily arise from worldly experience. It occurs due to innate a priori categories of the understanding, those making experience of all kinds possible. Behind Kant’s elaborate philosophy of mind lay his need to associate man with God, another all-powerful entity sitting imperiously “above” the gross physical world. Metaphysics, of a Baconian, Cartesian, Kantian or other type, is, according to Nietzsche and Heidegger, born from Dasein’s existential disorientation in a cosmos he must, for his own stability, control and command.

Nietzsche sees philosophy as the means through which the subject attempts to assert control over the world and impose limitations on the limitless – Katrin Froese

When Newton wrote of the role of providence in his General Scholium, he argued that God 'governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all – Andrew Lincoln

It is natural that some beings command and others obey, that each may obtain mutual safety - Aristotle

Descartes also wrote that humanity’s ultimate purpose was to become the ‘Lords and Masters of Nature’ - Baring & Cashford

I have tried to show that religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature” – Sigmund Freud

Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last human being – Sigmund Freud

Technology has ravaged the earth and degraded natural forms to mere utility. Man has labored and thought not with but against the grain of things. He has not given lodging to the forces and creatures of the natural world but made them homeless – George Steiner

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