I found myself oddly thinking about
Heidegger last night as I gave a bottle to my little guy in the darkness of his
room with the noise machine on, my eyes closed.
I thought about how Heidegger was
an ontologist, studying Being, and how, like Descartes, he deduced a baseline,
a fixed point, a north star if you will from which he could find his way.
Every freshman philosophy major
will indeed be slack-jawed, rapt when they read Descartes’ Meditations and
marvel at his fixed point – the cogito, deduced amid the hyperbolic doubt he so
deftly describes. (Look at me, alliterating like a beatnik! (Thank you Captain
Holt)).
Heidegger found his fixed point
through phenomenological analysis:
In studying Being,
this study begins from an individual being – the wondrous, beautiful, mean-what-we-say-say-what-we-mean
german term Dasein…a being there.
This being there is YOU!
This term is so packed and dense it
is sublime. As a being there you are subject to a time, subject to a place and
you were not free to choose the time or the place (time and place is the umwelt – the world around). This lack of
freedom is something Heidegger called facticity – the inescapable accidents of
your existence, like being born in 1970, in Ohio... and also you are not merely
in the world, you are thrown into the world – another great german word: geworfenheit.
However, working through Sein und Zeit,
one learns that after being thrown into the world, you freely choose your
future, you freely choose your time and place but always in the light of
historical constraints. You can be authentic while recognizing your facticity.
What occupied my mind the most was
remembering the idea that with each choice we make, an infinite number of
available choices become possible. Turn to your left and a whole new world is
possible, turn to your right, the same. This may sound inane but consider your
life: Did you follow your bliss? Did you become a success? Did you fail? Did
you…?
Here’s the thing, it is not only
the new world that opens with every choice, this is not the only thing that
makes you up, because with each choice you make, other worlds and other choices
are no longer possible.
Do you see it now? The fragility of
the future, the past, the present? This is why the existentialists harped on
authenticity. You should be authentic and follow your bliss because this world
is tenuous my man, fleeting AF.
And here is where it got weird
(er). I thought about the election. And all the possible worlds that will no
longer be possible. And I felt fragile and as the parent I never thought I
would be, I felt the fragility not just for me but for the little guy in my lap
taking the bottle, and for his big brother trying to get to sleep upstairs.
I slept ok but I would be lying if
I told you I’ve felt this way before…I have not. And I am 46, I have been
through a few elections.
