Magdalen

Magdalen With the Smoking Flame, by Georges de La Tour. 1640

William Barrett, in his Irrational Man, intro­duces us to Existentialism and sum­ma­rizes the devel­op­ment of Western Thought in the process. The book came out in 1958, but can be read fruit­fully and applied pro­duc­tively to the prob­lems we face today.

In the sec­tion on Heidegger, whom I haven’t read in years but should return to, Barrett dis­cusses Heidegger’s Field Theory of Being, and places it in his­tor­i­cal context.

The Greeks were the first to remove objects from their sur­round­ings, their back­ground, their con­text, so they could study them in iso­la­tion. In a sense, atom­ize them. This was nec­es­sary for the cre­ation of Science. But the Greeks still lived in Nature, not in oppo­si­tion to it, so this process wasn’t truly dis­rup­tive, much less fatal. Fast for­ward to Descartes, and we are sun­dered from Nature and our minds are split from our bod­ies. Subject and object. Mind and mat­ter. Doubting all things but the source of doubt and work­ing back from there. This made the con­quest of Nature the next nat­ural step in our devel­op­ment. We saw things, not Beings in time, so con­quest and sup­pres­sion were eas­ier. Things lack a sense of auton­omy, when the subject/​object split is in place. I would add that this also made it eas­ier for humans to see each other in that light, or that dark­ness. Subject and object. Me ver­sus the things around me. Opposition, rather than the recog­ni­tion of mutual auton­omy or subjectivity.

Heidegger coun­ters this with his con­cept of Being in the world, and our exis­tence in the form of a field. Barrett, through Heidegger, pro­vokes much thought, when he adds that our field is like light, and truth (aletheia) is rev­e­la­tion. Our field is light, our light a field, and as we move for­ward in the dark­ness of time and space we expe­ri­ence rev­e­la­tion, because we make what was hid­den to us unhid­den. We gain truth to the degree that we shine our light field on more of the world.

Humans look for­ward to the future, which we face in var­i­ous moods. Not men­tioned in the dis­cus­sion is the obvi­ous fact of our biol­ogy. Humans, like most ani­mals, look for­ward, not back­ward. We stand fac­ing not only our future, but see in one direc­tion at a time.

Where our field is not, is untruth. We carry untruth within us as well as truth, and time passed can become untruth, as the light leaves one place and moves on to the next. Darkness returns in our absence. It fills in the space we depart from. Heidegger, like most of the Existentialists, believes we also carry our deaths within us. Within our Being is non-​​Being, and it is from the real­iza­tion of our finite­ness in space and time that we become truly whole. Without an authen­tic encounter with our mor­tal­ity, we never fully achieve the human and remain mere frag­ments of Being.

Nietzsche crossed over into essen­tial­ism when he tried to reduce our fun­da­men­tal dri­ves to one: The Will to Power. Our most basic drive is to rad­i­cally expand our field of power and influ­ence, not just sur­vive, accord­ing to the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Evolutionary biol­o­gists have come to sim­i­lar con­clu­sions, though with more com­plex­i­ties and ambi­gu­i­ties thrown in, but the debate rages on. Our genes don’t just want to con­tinue through time, they want to increase and expand their influence.

Heidegger’s phi­los­o­phy presents the poten­tial for an end to this will to power for power’s sake. Though he didn’t take heed of the obvi­ous impli­ca­tions of his own views, when it came to his polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions, he did present to the world a beau­ti­ful, poetic way out of that dead end. There is no need to con­quer and sub­due our sur­round­ings to extend and expand our fields of light. In fact, the destruc­tion of our sur­round­ings sends things back into dark­ness and untruth. The impli­ca­tions for this phi­los­o­phy are clear, at least to me:

Discovery is truth. The embrace of one’s own mor­tal­ity is truth. The recog­ni­tion and acknowl­edg­ment of the rad­i­cal sub­jec­tiv­ity of all things is truth, and we can’t know any­thing until we under­stand this. Understanding is impos­si­ble as long as we objec­tify our sur­round­ings and impose our sub­jec­tiv­ity on all things, keep­ing those things from their nat­ural auton­omy as Beings in the world. If we keep the wall between our­selves and the rest of the world, stay within the mind/​matter dual­ity, we can never under­stand the world, find truth, or become real selves.

Let it be. Or as Wallace Stevens wrote, Let be be the finale of seem.


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