Re: Death and falling

>Chris, I would argue against the notion that
>
>>the distinction must
>>be objective, in a certain sense, in the same way that we can tell when
>>someone is mad although they believe they are sane,
>
>Isn't it precisely the indeterminate difference between the authenticity of
>being and an inauthentic absorption in beings, or ontological difference,
>that opens the existential analytic? As for madness and sanity, apart from
>the judicial and psychiatric discourses functioning in the mental health
>sector, I would say that the two terms are entirely subjective.

Man, I knew that line would come in for some flak, especially from this
group. In saner parts of our blessed land Rush Limbaugh is considered nuts,
but here he is probably merely dwelling in an "alternative truth," along
with all the fucking militias and their paranoid delusions.

Back to my point. Heidegger needs to distinguish between researchers like
himself doing authentic work and those poor busybodies attending
conferences and writing email messages who inhabit that average realm of
everyday opinion, because on the face of it, there is no difference between
himself and an equally committed chemist in terms of committment to their
task in that both believe themselves to be really committed.

The distinction, as best as I can formulate it, seems to be the wholeness
of the vision guiding the task: the chemist might be doing good and
productive research, but does not include his/her own being as a researcher
within that research, or in Heidegger's language, is not concerned about
his/her own being, that second mode of care which is not concern strictly
taken, and thus is not technically Dasein, or that being which is concerned
with its own being. In not being Dasein, it is alienated from itself and
has fallen away from its being. Where it falls is into the world of
things, which is never its own in a definitive singular sense until it
expressly appropriates this world as its own. It does this by discovering
itself as active in this world, or in some sense, as a movement of this
world itself.

You are correct in noting that authenticity is in opposition to falling;
authentic Dasein is drawn back out of the enervation that belongs to
falling.

The problematic I am working on is where authentic Dasein is located, given
that there is this opposition yet Heidegger maintains that authenticity is
a modification of living in Das Man, which he has described as inauthentic.
I have come to the conclusion that authenticity means to appropriate the
world in which we already live as one's own, to accept one's fate as it is
given; to appropriate means here to gain in overview of the whole in which
one expressly takes on one's place in the whole.

Those who might remember my remarks on this same terrain from last year
will note I have modified my conclusion, having come to a far more
pessimistic reading. Heidegger's authenticity seems to be modelled on the
path Zarathustra reaches in affirming the eternal return of the same as the
solution to the problem of revenge: not being able to alter history (will
backwards), there is only joyful acceptance of one's place, although in
Heidegger's case it is a far more dour affirmation.


Chris




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