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April 28, 2004
Terri Brooks
Back to Heidegger's text. In para 36 of What is Metaphysics Heidegger asks:
"But now a suspicion we have been suppressing too long must finally find expression. If Dasein can relate itself to beings only by holding itself out into the nothing and can exist only thus; and if the nothing is originally disclosed only in anxiety; then must we not hover in this anxiety constantly in order to be able to exist at all? And have we not ourselves confessed that this original anxiety is rare? But above all else, we all do exist and relate ourselves to beings which we may or may not be ? without this anxiety. Is this not an arbitrary invention and the nothing attributed to it a flight of fancy?
The questions I am interested are: 'Is anxiety a flight of fancy'? 'If it is not, then must we live in anxiety in order to live'?
Heidegger does not explicitly address these questions. He is more concerned to show that the nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa. He says that:
"No matter how much or in how many ways negation, expressed or implied, permeates all thought, it is by no means the sole authoritative witness for the revelation of the nothing belonging essentially to Dasein."
Heidegger then talks about nihilative behavior in which Dasein remains shaken by the nihilation of the nothing. He says that unyielding antagonism, stinging rebuke, galling failure, merciless prohibition and bitter privation are not types of mere negation. he says that nihilative behavior testifies to the constant though doubtlessly obscured manifestation of the nothing that only anxiety originally reveals. Such anxiety is usually repressed.
But it is always there ready to open out within our:
"...comfortable enjoyment of tranquilized bustle. ..... Original anxiety can awaken in existence at any moment. It needs no unusual event to rouse it. Its sway is as thoroughgoing as its possible occasionings are trivial. It is always ready, though it only seldom springs, and we are snatched away and left hanging."
Repressed because it is marked by our finitude?
In the light of this account the expression of anxiety in the Terri Brooks painting could have been more turbulent and distorted, since anxiety ties us up in a lot of jarring emotional knots:
Stacha Halpern, Multiple Frames
In the last paragraphs of What is Metaphysics Heidegger turns back to the philosophical tradition and the nature of philosophy.
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