Friday, April 22, 2016

The Phenomenology of Ontological Being-Towards-Death

The impulse towards non-reflective existence is a kind of basic, primordial
being-towards-death in that we are, ultimately and at once, always transfigured by our necessary conditions of being-in-the-world.  In that we are always "in" the world, one may be still "outside" of a world of being-alongside-others; or distinct alienation.  Reflection itself is a kind of situation-as-such, in which one may be both "inside" a world and "outside" the world; leading to existentially oriented angst and tumult.  Absolute and objective circumspection supersedes the inclination to reflect, in that one may "look about" - so to speak - without either ascertaining nor discerning anything whatsoever; neither a priori cause nor our own ultimate effect of being-in-the-world; which is to say Hosana and death, respectively.
Alienation finds, in-itself, a distinct form of transformation.  This a priori design may seem all together sadistic in the sense of the "master" and "slave" parable transfiguring our basic, brute necessities.  Nature-as-such can be seen in the light of the sun, moon and stars; yet, the finite and infinite never transcend the purposiveness of their epistemological necessity.  Why then are the manifest teleological concerns of existential and existentiel being-towards-death generally considered non-reflectively?
This question can be considered in Heidegger's classical illustration of a core tenet of his Destruktion; that is, the doorknob.

Think of a doorknob.
Heidegger made a profound insight; he posited that in a fundamental sense our experience of the doorknob is a kind of basic and primordial everyday understanding of Ontological being-in-the-world.  Yet in an ontical sense the hand on a doorknob prefigures any quasi-reflective understanding of the knob in-and-of-itself.

Hand and knob both are constitutive of the engagement, yet - paradoxically enough - simultaneously both knob and hand vanish from our phenomenal experience.

How can this be?

Due to intrinsic and implicit primordial being-towards-death.
That is, to say, death imparts to a Dasein consciousness.  For, as Heidegger observed, a doorknob only becomes an object of consciousness when it stops working.  Death as our own ultimate potentiality for being-in-the-world could be viewed as a kind of stopping.  And it is only by virtue of our limitations that exceptions are raised.

Dasein - or Being - can be seen in a dichotomy of ontological and ontical.
The ontological being a kind of experiential understanding and the ontical being the universal existent entities that make up, so to speak, Hosana's totality-of-tools.

But i'm being blithe.

Facticity relates and orients the sadistic design of death in-and-of-itself; and - as such - we live by grace.

DDU 2016
RT STILLWELL
Domestic Democracy United

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