The other morning my daughter, who is nine (and is biologically and by choice a night owl) was having her typical trouble getting up and ready for school. She insisted on clinging to me in the name of being cold, to which I said — “Get up! Get dressed! Dressing is a warming!”
She didn’t miss a beat and replied that, no, cuddling is a warming.
Somehow, I think that interaction illustrates how language can invoke processual notions, instead of flattening concepts into static state-things.
I was thinking of dressing-as-a-warming because I was reading Heidegger.
Heidegger has this wonderful way of making language go broad; he makes the very act of describing something a dwelling and a building. I think this is why I like to read him so much. Somehow the experience of tracking hatch marks across paper takes on this rich and lush expansiveness.
Mostly, in the by and by, we use language to tag stuff — to pin it down (and I do like this) but with Heidegger it’s more about fleshing out the all-ness of a something and its context (and I really like this).
Heidegger speaks of the “originary realm of the powers of being,” but he says we no longer know how to be in this way. That is, there is a darkening of the world that has much to do with rapid technologies that ensnare us into simultaneity and speed, essentially enslaving people into the work-a-day masses fed upon instantaneous images (that are displaced all too soon by the next round).
In essence, we are losing our “metaphysical grounding” and are nearly so far gone that we can’t even perceive our own decline. The decline Heidegger speaks of is a decline of our innate humanity, which has something to do with our being-in-the-world as people with history; something to do with being-in-time in a way that is aware. Hearkening back to Nietzsche, he says that the word “being” is now a “mere locution.” We have forgotten what the word means, he says; we “have fallen out of what this word is saying.”
That we can toss about the word “being” means that we have lost contact with the conceptual notions it ought to invoke. But we must entertain this word, this “evanescent vapor” — not dismiss it as such (as Nietzsche might have us do) — in order to understand its full and rightful scope.
The full scope of an evanescent vapor. Love that.
Heidegger asks what dasein is — what are we to do as beings-in-the-world; “what for, where to, what then?”
“Our asking of the fundamental metaphysical question is historical because it opens up the happening of human Dasein in its essential relations — that is, its relations to being and as such and as a whole — opens it to new possibilities not yet asked about, futures to come, and thereby also binds it back to its inception that has been, and thus sharpens and burdens it in the present.”
As a journalist and collector of personal experience narratives, I know:
To ask one to reflect on their experience of being in the world is to greatly be.
By exploring our experience of being, we ground ourselves, via reflection, in our historical path.
This, then, sharpens our being — burdens it, even — in the present.
Considering our being-in-the-world sharpens the present because it brings our being back to its inception, which, Heidegger says, is quite different than bringing us back to our past, as such. To come back to our inception is to come back to our originary powers; back into the rootedness of being.
I know well this sharpening of the present moment. I know it every time I interview someone that is called to reflect upon their personal experience. It is why I am compelled to do the work I do.
It is also why I refuse to entertain the idea that oral history must ask explicitly historical questions. To ask — to collect contemporary personal experience narratives — is in and of itself a historic enterprise.
Tags: contemporary, darkening, dwelling, experience, heidegger, historic enterprise, historiography, language, narrative, oral history, philosophy, processual notions