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July 18, 2004
Trevor,
If I recall some time ago you had problems with Heidegger's account of anxiety. You agued that he had no sense of history. In that post you said:
"I think it’s completely false to say that Heidegger ‘is talking about the “fundaments” of everyday existence and is making public mood a subject of philosophical concern’. You might like to read him that way but it is certainly not what he is doing in Introduction To Metaphysics or indeed any other work, as far as I can see. In fact, the whole of his oeuvre is completely lacking in any real sense of history. There is endless talk about the darkening of the world but this is no substitute at all for history. It has more in keeping with Christian ideas, such as found in the book of Revelation. They both touch on the actual world in more or less the same way.
Anxiety cannot be made into something that characterises the contemporary Australian mood. The mass of people are in a state of forfeiture, in the sense of Being And Time, whereas anxiety or dread is a state of those engaged with Being, the exceptions."
There is a badly written existential account of anxiety in Being and Time with a pre-ontological sense of unsettledness and a privileged revealing of human being's essential nullity and rootlessness. That runs through the 1929 lecture, What is Metaphysics, as you point out. The religious conception buried in this is the Christian account of fallenness and is heavily influenced by Kiekegaard.
I read it historically from the perspective of post 1949 Heidegger.On this account anxiety is within modernity, rather than an essential truth for all human beings. Anxiety is the result of urbanization, overwork, economic reform as a specific response to the rootlessness and nihilism of technological modernity. It is the sense of 'not being at home' in technological modernity in the latter essays on poetics (eg., What are poets for?)
What I would now say is that the latter Heidegger historicises the account of Dasein's understanding of being and the world it opens up in Being and Time. On this historicist understanding each specific epoch in the development of our historical western culture is a metaphysical variation on the pre-Socratic interpretation of reality as presencing. Each of these understandings of being allows different modes of being to show up.
In early modernity reality was made present to human beings by us and we lived up to our standards, criteria or conventions of intelligibility. Early moderns (Descartes) encountered being as objects to be controlled and mastered and organized by subjects in order to satisfy our desires. In late modernity we experience everything including ourselves as resources to be enhanced, transformed and ordered simply for the sake greater and greater efficiency.
That is what has been happening to us in Australia since the 1980s with the neo-liberal economic reforms. Anxiety is interpreted as a sign of the nihilism of this technological present.
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