fragilekeys

Can one become unworthy of being? It is palpable that one approaches a monstrosity here.

These words come toward the end of Hans Blumenberg’s recently translated “Care Crosses the River.” In his short section entitled “Concern for the Worthiness of Being,” Blumenberg recounts how Max Scheler introduced this idea (that we can be unworthy of being), which would lead to Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein. It underpins the distinction between “everydayness” and “authenticity,” the prime value-judgement at work in Heidegger’s work. For both of these men, and especially with the idea of being-towards-death, the basic idea is that we have lost sight of the “luminous idea of death” and have let the motivation of infinite progress, business, working, acquiring, gossiping, and so on, overrun our ability to clearly perceive our existential condition: the inevitably of death. This leads to “inauthenticity,” where we don’t match up to the question always-already posed to us by Being. Without that sense of being that senses the “possibility of my own impossibility,” my own death, we haven’t yet penetrated into the deepest mystery or meaning of being. The implication, of course, is that insight into “death’s inevitability” “augments life’s intensity.” On this account, we are led one of two ways, or a mixture of both: lament the loss of religious or spiritual knowledge of our death-condition, and/or call for renewed death dances and philosophical treatises on the possibility of being’s non-being. Continue reading →

We’re accustomed to the idea that we have lost our childlike imagination, creativity, and open-ended perception of the world. Anyone who has spent time with a young child can attest to this. World and self seem to emerge as one in the child, where curiosity and emotive response are the rule. Then, something snaps, perhaps gradually or perhaps at once. There is a conflict in this loving growth-relationship between self and world. The divide is registered; calculation sets in. Not only do we form ourselves along this fault line of pain-pleasure and self-protection; not only do the many forms of the “social” suddently erupt; but responsibility for all this — the world and oneself — sets in. We feel that something is missing, that we are here to do something vitally important, and that our link to the past (while technically only beginning with our conception) in fact extends far back into some pre-historic ancestry. Culture-critique will never eliminate the biological, sociological, and spiritual sources of human heritage. Our very being is grounded in such feelings. It is the legitimate structure and rationalization for “adulthood” itself, emerging from a childhood that wakes up indebted to breast and clean air — which, for the adult, is tied to an inaccessible “memory” of an immersion absolutely prior-to-self. The result is the suspicion that “adulthood” is itself an ulterior motive in comparison to the initial swoon, whose sense seems to be lost forever. Continue reading →