Being Beings

I woke to a summer-like breeze coming in from the open window, all manner of bird calls, the distant buzz of a lawn mower, a cat shuffling across the foot of the bed, the hum of appliances, the warmth of blankets holding out the chill of late spring early morning air, and I felt suddenly mysteriously engaged in the sensations of my existence, of being alive, of Being. It’s hard to express this emotion fully, though I’m sure many of us experience it (and sadly, perhaps some don’t). It’s a moment of clarity and wonder, a whole-scale immersion into the strangeness, the incomprehensible essence of being something that both is and at the same time is acutely aware of being something that can be aware in this manner.

The ineffableness of what I felt sent me scanning the many bookcases in my house, and then I found it, black-bound, the title lettering nearly worn off the spine, inside pages filled with underscores, marginalia in my undergrad penmanship. It was Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, a book that, despite Heidegger’s many complications as a moral human being (yes, he may even have supported the Nazi party), was essential in my intellectual awakening some forty years ago as an English and Philosophy major in college. 

Specifically, I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the term “Dasein.” This term is the starting point of his rich, at times impenetrable discourse on the nature of “Being”—he never quite got to “Time.” To oversimplify (and just about anything you write, unless you are fluent in German and Greek and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of philosophy is an oversimplification of him), Dasein draws on the unique ability of German to mash words together to more fully express and complicate meaning. Here “sein” most closely means “being.” Adding the “da” in front of it renders an altogether different meaning, one that Heidegger describes as “that being whose Being is an issue for itself.” In other words, we are the one creature (that we know of) who has the ability to contemplate its own existence, to wonder at the mystery of being a living breathing thing in a place inhabited by other Dasein and by other beings who don’t think much about their own Being—and by all this multi-dimensional space filled with strange and wondrous objects and sensations….

Being and Time goes well beyond this and often reads like a kind of parody of people expounding on life’s mysteries while lying around in bean bags, Hendrix all the way up, lava lamps pulsing, a cloud of marijuana haze in the air (yes, another undergrad flashback). He writes: “That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as its own most possibility…In determining itself as an entity, Dasein always does so in the light of a possibility which it is itself and which, in its very Being, it somehow understands….” When studying philosophy, reading sentences like that have always thrilled me. You grasp it fleetingly while you read it, and then when you set the book aside, it fades until, like this morning, a certain sensation washes over you and sends you searching for an old book on a dusty shelf. 

The other term/not-fully-expressible-concept I was reminded of was what he calls “average everydayness” (another stitched-together Germanism). It’s related to the “compound expressions,” “Being-in-the-world” and “the they self.” Heidegger takes care to distinguish this “they self” awash in the “average everydayness” of the world as an “inauthentic self,” one that is pulled inexorably away from its true nature as a Being who can contemplate its own essence, Dasein. For me, and I may have missed entirely the nuance of the 488 pages of Being and Time, these concepts make sense, especially on a lovely late spring morning like today, when that sense of mysterious-awed-overwhelment (Heidegger created words, so I can too) is so urgently present. Heidegger writes: “Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the world and lets the world matter to it in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self.” All too often the day to day “everydayness” of our “they self” blinds us to more essential dynamics always at play as we somehow “exist” in this place filled with things and other “existents.” Perhaps it's only when we just awaken on a late spring morning, the heavy scent of the just-in-bloom lilac now coming through, the pull of our lives not yet begun again, and we are fresh, fleetingly new again, that the colors and shapes and motion and entanglement of our place in the world, like Plato’s escaped cave dweller, nearly blind us with what is more deeply important and “authentic.” 

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If you feel like diving into Heidegger, you can get a copy of Being and Time using my affiliate link on Bookshop.org

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