Dear Peter, you wrote
<What scares me is .... the notion of my non-self, that *I* am merely an
anticipatory function.>
I understood that in my answer to your mail. Unfortunately my answer was
evidently so compressed that the implications did not unfurl their message,
as Mark's question made clear.(He knows more than he is letting on here!) In
_Sein und Zeit_ , as opposed to his later more far-out metaphysical works,
Heidegger gives a lot of attention to the community that I did speak of but
did not elaborate on. Heidegger's Dasein, as opposed to Sein, is shared
existence or being-in-common & constitutive of self-consciousness and a
person's Befindlichkeit, the sense of her situation; the danger is
accommodating oneself to the established ways of dealing with this, thus
becoming subservient to what H. calls "das Man", meaning the "one" that
reigns supreme in convention as in "one just doesn't do that". Such
attitudes become unpersonal in their monolithic power and it is dread of the
fateful meaning of being-in-the-world that is at the root of any flight from
authentic existence (considering my actions' meaning, accepting death
full-bloodedly) ~ only if dread can be faced, however, can the person attain
a degree of detachment & thus dignity, at least listening to the silent
voice of Being, making way for it. But social experience cannot meaningfully
be negated.. So Mark's question is more or less answered. Heidegger does
not, in my understanding, want to reduce the self to <an anticipatory
function>: but the self only exists before the horizon of her projects as
mediated by tools, relationships etc. Later in his work H. wants to claim
that language has access to Being (which is a ground, not a horizon, thus
indefinable), Hölderlin's later work being an example.But that _Sein und
Zeit_ has a social message should be clear from the use that Sartre made of
it in _L'Être et le Néant_, where those who become inauthentic by conformity
are compared famously to a waiter who sees his identity as "Waiter", only
there for others. That Heidegger should later assent to National Socialism
seems paradoxical on this interpretation of _Being and Time_, only
comprehensible by consideration of the tendency to grandiosity involved in
his growing concern with the quasi-numinous aspects of "Sein" (Being) after
its publication in 1927. One may ask oneself if his later silence on the
matter (towards Celan, for example) was not a self-imposed punishment,
conforming to his idea of the culpability we all bear in accepting
responsibility for our projects ~ but reject it at once, considering the
complacent interview he gave _Der Spiegel_, for example. I hope it is clear
that <the self> is neither a social construction (we help to form it by our
unceasing projects towards the world from chilhood on) nor a mere by-product
of the future as projection, though the latter is a necessary condition of
the self. As I said, Buddhism is more reductive of the self, so if you want
to be scareder, read some of that philosophy!
I've gone on here to an unconscionable extent; unfortunately, as Erminia
says, this is a very complex matter, though I rather doubt her authority in
asserting that my or anyone's explanation <can't be> helpful. It helps me to
think about it, for example. And I admit that I understand very little.
Martin
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