We're generally keen on coping in the USA.
We understand coping, and we understand what it means to engage with the world.
And we can surmise quite easily what Being-Alongside-Death may mean in a common sensical way.
But what if we're wrong about coping and death?
What if our previous understanding (verstehen) shows itself to be inadequate?
What if we acknowledge that we don't know what this configuration of the phonetic alphabet really signifies?
Then we must carefully examine "coping as engagement with the world" anew, with a dialectical knife. We must cut through what obscures our understanding of the hermeneutical aspects of the simple word "coping", and regain an understanding of the world as Reason.
Primordial coping, as referenced in Heidegger, is how we blindly and ignorantly deal with a world of engagements. Socrates once said "the only thing I know is that I know nothing". Perhaps one may stratify what this means in terms of universal structures and archetypes. I cannot bring myself to touch a webster-miriam, as I consider looking up definitions of words to often cause our verstehen to become, once again, obscured.
Coping, as in all that human Dasein engages with in everydayness, is primordial exactly in the sense one would commonly recall if asked to a normal human. To even ask oneself what coping really means is to engage in a willful act of preconscious existential Being-Alongside-Death.
When we cope with what I'll merely call the "World-as-Such", we are setting a series of willful engagements with the world. The world, which is also not entirely known, is a vicious and dangerous place.
Often we cope with the world by coping with death, even though it is an act of living spirit. The Geist, Mind or Spirit is not only ontically verifiable through self examination and the eidetic reduction as per phenomenology, but in fact constitutive of what it means to be an entity-in-the-world (Dasein).
So the question it would seem is oblique...
What does a Dasein DO exactly when it engages with Being-Alonside-Death?
Well what it does is as the structure of Reason does universally, i.e. primordially cope.
Coping is no mere mechanism!
Primordial coping is simply ALL WE DO!
So looking at coping as the way a being often engages with Being-Alongside-Death reveals ultimately that "Death" is an issue that needs resolving. Death is often pictured in literature and culture as a horrific hoodie clad being with no face. How different is this conception of death from what actually in all facticity transpires when one goes from life to death?
Perhaps things such as moral malfeasance, the criminal black market, lack of discipline or self control in interpersonal relationships or even substance abuse disorder are constitutive of a kind of coping that has a certain kind of facticity due to the necessity of "Being-Alongside-Death". Perhaps the best way to verstehen coping is to circumspect with intentionality about the ontology of the structure which death gives to every Dasein.
Life is the positive structure of Death,
just as
Death is the negative structure of Life.
Death.
Life.
Death.
Life.
Death.
Life.
So when we cope with our own death (other peoples deaths are unimportant for this examination as we can never know what the experience of death is to another Dasein),
we should revel in our own ignorance about the primordiality of Being-Toward-Death (our own utmost potentiality) and existentially come to responsible and moral conclusions as the willful act of our coping with the world-as-such.
THANKS FOR READING!
RT STILLWELL DDU 2019
#IamStetsonBlack
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