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June 30, 2004
Trevor,
I want to build on what on what I written in this post. There I was addressing the situation of being stranded in the desert in the film, A Japanese Story. This is a situation that involved anxiety due to the realization that their average or normal understanding with its rules and standards was of little help.
Hurbert Dreyfus says that:
"Holding onto this anxiety makes possible the openness, involvement and willingness to take risks that, in turn, make possible the acquisition of expertise. Resoluteness thus makes possible the virtuosity of the Heideggerian phronemos who, because he has held onto anxiety and so no longer takes for granted the banal public interpretation of events, can see new possibilities in the most ambiguous and conflicted situations and so can do something that all who share his world will retroactively recognize as what was factically possible at the time Such a person’s understanding of his society is richer and deeper than the average understanding and so he is generally more effective. But he is not yet fully authentic."
The extra that is needed for authenticity is the anxiety of facing death, in which we give up our identity and world altogether.
The situation of being stranded the Pilbara desert was such a situation. It in required resoluteness and decisive action to get out of being bogged and death. In an earlier post I said that the two characters affirmed an authentic existence for themselves in the face of certain death. Through this resoluteness they overcome their cultural lostness.
That situation in this film involves a primordial understanding of the current situation that makes possible a skillful coping in the current world (Aristotle) and a primordial understanding of Dasein itself that makes possible a transformation of self and world. This Christian moment is one of St Paul on the Road to Damascus and it is I presume the Kierkegaardian strand that runs through Being and Time. The two characters changed after that situation.They put their cultural prejudices and habits to one side and became lovers. They became different people.
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