April 26, 2004

Heidegger, anxiety and death

It is at about this point in What is Metaphysics that doubts begin to arise about Heidegger's conception of human beings living in a state of dread expressed through the nothing.

Heidegger does sum things up a bit for us. He says:


"Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom. With that the answer to the question of the nothing is gained. The nothing is neither an object nor any being at all. The nothing comes forward neither for itself nor next to beings, to which it would, as it were, adhere. For human existence the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such." (para 35)

This lecture course by Tom Bridges helps to clarify things a little. And we do need clarification. Tom usefully says that a key has to do with what Heidegger means by moods. He says:

"One of the ways that "the nothing" is encountered is in certain moods.....the term "mood" (Stimmung, in German) -- [means] to tune up, as in to tune up a guitar) is a technical term for Heidegger. He introduced it in Being and Time and he uses it in this essay with the full expectation that his audience will have some idea of its technical meaning. We tend to understand moods psychologically, as emotional states, states of feeling. Heidegger rejects that interpretation. For Heidegger, moods are manifestations of a fundamental and specifically human capacity or faculty that he calls Befindlichkeit -- another technical term that refers roughly to the fact that we always "find ourselves" in a situation, that our understanding of things is always a situated understanding, that the things we deal with and talk about are always things-in-a-situation.

Thus, for Heidegger, moods are ways in which our "situatedness" is revealed at any given time. Moods, then, are not just emotions dwelling in private consciousness. Moods have something like a cognitive function. Moods are our attunement to the situation in which we find ourselves at any given moment. They reveal something about that situation..."


Thus the mood of anxiety reveals our situatedness as a whole whereas fear always expresses our engagement in a particular situation.

We can step back a moment here, and remind ourselves that Heidegger is arguing that we are dealing with a domain that science itself can never address. Tom Bridges says that Heidegger's understanding of science is that science excludes all the everyday perspectives, considerations, and descriptions that normally determine the way we talk about things to "let things themselves alone determine how they are described." The pursuit of the scientific ideal impartiality and objectivity depends upon that exclusion. So what is essentially other to, and excluded from, scientific discourse is nothingness or "the nothing."

It is up to philosophy to explore the nothing.

The nothing is an way of describing the everyday world that we inhabit--what latter came to be called the lifeworld by Husserl. As Tom Bridges says, science is only concerned with the things themselves and so 'the nothing else' "aspect of the scientific ideal suggests a putting aside, or out of play, the sort of economic, cultural, and psychological considerations that normally determine our descriptions of the world." The ideal attitude of scientific impartiality and objectivity -- i.e., the attitude by which scientists let the things themselves, and nothing else, excludes all our normal, everyday, interested, one-sided, biased ways of describing and understanding things, in order then to be able to let our descriptions be governed by the things themselves.

Tom says that "The nothing" is our understanding of that which "clears the decks" of all our preconceptions and our wishful thinking about things and allows us to confront things stripped of the normal, everyday meanings with which we always clothe them. It is by virtue of our understanding of "the nothing" that we can dis-cover things and say of things that are that they are such and such.

If the mood of anxiety reveals our situatedness as a whole then what does anxiety refer to? It is at this point that we come to the doubts expressed by Dylan over at Poetics of Decay. He says Heidegger’s use of anxiety is both a being-towards-death (in Being and Time) and a holding-out into the Nothing (in What is Metaphysics?) A more important question is at stake: is nothingness synonymous with death? I have tacitly interpreted it as such, even though Dasein’s mortality is absent from What is Metaphysics? I have been presupposing that What is Metaphysics is a development from Being and Time, not a turning away.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 26, 2004 05:08 PM | TrackBack
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But it is the development from Being and Time to What is Metaphysics? a coherent development, or is it, as I am susceptible to believe, the beginning of Heidegger’s ‘turn’. Could the omission of mortality in What is Metaphysics? even have anything to do with Heidegger’s desire to distance himself from the headiness of French existentialism, a distance he would later render explicit in the Letter on Humanism? But that would surely be odd since only two years separates the texts.


Posted by: Dylan Trigg on April 26, 2004 11:17 PM

Dylan,
you are probably right.There is probably a rupturing between 'Being and Time' and 'What is Metaphysics.'

I'm not a Heidegger scholar. I'm more interested in how I can bend Heidegger to make sense within Australian culture. Hence my connection between 'What is Metaphysics' and the anxiety caused by the neo-liberal economic reforms in the earlier posts.

Heidegger is important because he speaks about anxiety in everyday life not the main game of the economy, as did the economists who said they were doing social science.

From this everyday perspective in Australia anxiety leads to depression, to drugs and often to suicide. It's all mixed up together. That Heidegger is talking about anxiety in everyday life is good enough for me.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on April 27, 2004 09:09 AM

I don't think there is a great rupture between B&T, WiM?, and the later Heidegger. The later Heidegger is exploring other areas within the same broader theme. In the 1920's, rising through the university system as Husserl's assistant his thought was in the context of phenomenology. Later he focus more the directly on ontological matters.

This passage from "Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy" connects being-towards-death and Heidegger's later concerns via temporality:


In making possible the disclosiveness of the “there,” temporality is the “ground” of the disclosure of a world, of things in the world, and of Dasein as being-in-the-world. This ground is not anything permanent but rather is a temporal event. It is also not reducible to presence, since it discloses in its finitude, permeated by nothingness, in Dasein’s authentic being-towards-death.
In Contributions, Heidegger rethinks the disclosive and finite character of the temporality that constitutes the meaning of being in Being and Time in the notion of truth. He unfolds truth as the unconcealing-concealment of being.

I don't believe the later Heidegger refutes that "Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety", found in B&T.

Posted by: Pete on April 30, 2004 03:56 PM
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