The
second lecture Roderick delivers in his series of lectures on “self under siege”
is on Martin Heidegger and Rejection of
Humanism. Heidegger is known by many thinkers as an extremely profound
philosopher, who raises the issue of the self in the modern era. He tries to
recast the very term this lecture series is based on, namely “the self”, since
he believes it is not adequate to capture all the necessary complexities that
the discussion about the human being requires. Heidegger, in “Being and Time”
replaces this term with the German word “Dasein” which could be translated to “human being there
in the world.” The immediate question that comes up is why? Why quibble over
semantics? Roderick argues that Heidegger wants to remove all the implications
and interpretations that come with the word “the self”, which have come under
the mark of suspicion as it was discussed in the first lecture/post. He wants
to distance himself, even in terms of language, from these pre-conceived
notions and give a new narrative of the self.
Heidegger
offers us what he calls “hermeneutics of dasein”, or the story about the self.
There is however a delicate point here worth contemplating. Heidegger does not
start by talking about his methods as a way to insure his knowledge. He starts
with a story, and Roderick argues that the advantage of a story as opposed to a
method is that when a story is powerful and interesting enough to grab you, it
is not the best thing to question whether the narrative was true or false? And
whether the events in the story really happened? It should be also noted that a
story or tale is not simply random thoughts that could be dismissed on the
grounds that it is unrealistic. We tend to forget that a theory, whether
expressed using mathematical models or in plain words, is not any different
from a story or tale. Theories are in fact spanned tales, that in a scientific
language are housed within models.
“Care”
is what Heidegger interprets as what is fundamental to the being of dasein, or
the self. This notion comes into play in the
threefold structure of dasein: past, present, and future, and he suggests that
we need to examine the trace of “care” in these structures. In terms of the
past, Heidegger argues that we are beings already in the world, so he rejects
the idea of examining an issue with a clean slate, starting without prejudices, starting without biases,
starting without interpretations. This is the deep and powerful blow he lays
against philosophy as a discipline that can start from the scratch. Heidegger
argues that we are thrown into the world, somewhere, some when, some race, some
gender, some class, and all
of that already comes along, and from the minute we begin to speak a language
or learn a culture; and learning a culture, contrary to what analytic
philosophers say, is not like learning to pick out patches of blue, or being
sure that this is your hand, it involves many complex steps before you are in
one.
In
terms of present, care reveals that we are at home in the world trying to be at
the right place and articulate our place. And in terms of future, we are always
ahead of ourselves, in the sense that our plans or projects, even when they are
about the future, belong to the present. Heidegger also realizes that we cannot examine
the issue of the self without looking into what he calls “mood.” He believes
that the mood that truly reveals what dasein really is – which connects with the
lecture about the masters of suspicion – is anxiety. That is the mood that will
reveal, as it were, the formal existential character of dasein is anxiety. The
mood of anxiety Heidegger talks about however is not the kind that makes you
run to a doctor or psychologist. He talks about anxiety before the fear of
nothingness, anxiety in the face of the death. Institution of death is one of
the universal structures of all the stories about the self. The mood of anxiety
Heidegger talks about is an underlying structure of what it means to be a human
rather than a mood that shows up occasionally and can be fixed by Dr. Phil or
Opera Winfrey! In other words, if you remove this anxiety you remove the self
as well.
Why
does Heidegger emphasize anxiety? He believes that it is part of the structure
of being to want to make our lives a project, a story that is a connected story
worth telling rather than a series of disconnected junks that happened to us. If
that is agreed on, then our relation to the past is filled with anxiety because
we all start from this time of abandonment to the values of others (the
culture), to the “they”. Heidegger believes that until we can face our
nothingness, we tend to fill our lives with busy-ness (or business). It is only
then that we can be free from our project, for our project. It is only when we
face our nothingness that we are able to choose an authentic project and carry
it out, and free ourselves from as many constrains as we can from the “they”,
and free ourselves from the chatter of everyday. This is a project that is
always towards death and this runs in the conscious veins of our project.
Roderick
remarks that our lives today are probably too superficial for the account
Heidegger is giving about the self, he talks about facing the fear of
nothingness while people fear being caught carrying People magazine, or fear
losing followers on Facebook or Twitter! A culture in which death has no
significance for our project is a culture in which self is under siege. In this
light, the utter obsession of being young and looking young in our societies
today, represented by the crazy number of plastic surgeries or botax
injections, or the outrageous number of media ads about anti-wrinkle and
anti-aging creams, lotions and procedures, brings out the reality of the self
under siege for those who can see the strings in this puppet show!
For
Heidegger, self is the endless pursuit of authentic life. An authentic life is
one in which you don’t flee from your destiny, but one in which you shape it as
far as you can. Now this might sound a bit like one of those sentences often uttered
by fraud motivational speakers in their seminars on “how to become successful in
life” or “10 steps for creating the life you want”! Remember however that
although the appearance of the two might look similar, but Heidegger is talking
about shaping our destiny through facing the death, embracing the anxiety of
nothingness, and freeing ourselves from empty conformity and the cliché set by
the “they”, not running towards this cliché, not through “unleashing the power
of goal setting”, “positive thinking”, or “believe everything is possible” and
this type of crap. He is not romantic or superficial about the process of
shaping our destiny, he knows that we are given certain historical conditions and
limitation to deal with. An authentic life is a life worth talking about, worth
reading about, not a life of whoring around from one get-together to the next,
from the perfect vacation in Bahamas to the awesome Halloween party with “good”
friends, from one cool café with jazz music while working on our next startup idea
to the luxury French bistro for dinner while discussing Bard Pitt and Angelina
Jolie’s heart-breaking divorce and the disaster in Syria, while joking about
the last nonsense uttered by Donald Trump. It seems that the theory of
evolution does not work very well in the case of dasein, as our evolution seems
to be a race to the bottom. Theodor Adorno notes that “No universal history
leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the
slingshot to the megaton bomb”. And the chilling unspoken context to this claim
is that the path from slingshot to megaton bombs is paved with humanitarian rhetoric.
Roderick
argues that one main drawback of Heidegger’s account of the self is that
although it seems that Heidegger has tried to provide a concrete primordial account
of the self, yet again he has given us another abstract account at another
level, an account heavily structured around the notion of “authenticity”. Roderick
argues that one can be an authentic anything. You can be authentically a member
of Third Reich, or authentically a Donald Trump supporter. Having said that,
Heidegger’s account certainly has important elements: his account frees us from
the philosophical prejudice of starting a project with a clean slate and
carrying it out rationally, he provides a much more concrete sense of the
world. He also provides an important account of what it means to be fleeing
from oneself, he tells us what authenticity is not about, although his account
of what it is about remains quite abstract.
