What Is The Significance Of Hu Essay — страница 4

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thereby adding a degree of meaningful continuity to our existence. But perhaps this is not the authentic way in which death presents itself to us. In order for us to understand Heidegger s phenomenological assessment of mortality, we must first investigate another ontological characteristic of Dasein, namely that of Care. The formerly existential totality of Dasein s ontological structural whole must be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being alongside (entities-encountered-within-the-world.) This being fills in the signification of the term care (237). According to Heidegger, man s existence is characterised as Care. This Care presents itself initially, in possibility: man makes things instrumental to

his concerns and, in doing so, projects himself forward, into the world. Secondly there are the limitations (or, to use the existential terminology, the facticity) of mans existence. Heidegger exemplifies these limitations with the concept of throwness, a concept that encompasses the resulting facticity of our finite lives. Thirdly man seeks to avoid the anxiety of his limitations and so flees toward that which Heidegger calls an inauthentic mode of existence. One final constituent of care is the aforementioned falling. Simplistically, this refers to the typical, everyday mode of existence that we encounter when we choose to flee the accompanying anxiety of authenticity. Our anxiousness comes about because of our very Being-in-the-world, furthermore, Anxiety confronts Dasein with

the knowledge that it is thrown into the world always already delivered over to situations of choice and action which matter to it but which it did not itself fully choose or determine. Here, once again we may be reminded of Sartre s existentialism, particularly when he speaks of our monstrous freedom . In anxiety, Dasein is anxious about itself; furthermore, in falling Dasein is anxious about its monstrous freedom , a freedom of such monstrous proportions that Dasein s very existence necessarily involves the act of projecting itself upon one or more possibilities. As Mulhall states, anxiety plunges Dasein into an anxiety about itself in the face of itself. Paradoxically it is anxiety that rescues Dasein from an inauthentic, fallen mode of existence, an irresponsible existence in

the world of the-they. When Dasein confronts itself with itself i.e. when Dasein confronts itself with the intimidating connotations of its possibilities (bearing in mind that Dasein is possibilities), it is forced by anxiety to recognise its own existence as essentially thrown projection, but its everyday mode of existence as fallen. Leading from this experience of self-recognition, which goes far beyond our typical expectations, anxiety reveals Dasein s existence as thrown projection fallen into the world . This then, is meaning of Care. When the existentially autonomous ontological elements of fallenness, thrownness, anxiety, facticity, and authenticity are combined, we are, according to Heidegger, left with the essential characteristic of human existence. With the cumulative

conception of Care we see, not for the first time in Heidegger s philosophy, an element of continuity or holism. This is perhaps not altogether unusual due to the practical nature of existentialism. Heidegger s philosophy does after all, concentrate upon Dasein s ways of being , an expression which indeed implies a transitory nature. As we have seen, continuity can often be important to us, as humans, when we consider mortality. It offers us meaningful consolation when we think of death as the fulfilment of a life. But if death belongs in a distinctive sense to the Being of Dasein then it must, says Heidegger, be defined in terms of the characteristics of Dasein which incorporate a kind of being which is ahead-of-itself Being-already-in-the-world as being alongside- entities

which we encounter in the world i.e. it must be defined in terms of Care. From the outset there is a fundamental problem, a problem that stems from the attempt to understand the being of Dasein as being-a-whole. If Dasein is ontologically ahead-of-itself, i.e. surging up in-the-world, then it is always and at any given moment oriented towards the next given moment of its existence. Therefore as long as a Dasein exists, its existence, in terms of being-a-whole, is incomplete. But once Dasein s existence is brought to an end by death the Dasein itself is gone and is therefore, no longer capable of looking upon its existence as a whole, Thus, the idea of Dasein grasping its existence as a totality seems to be a contradiction in terms: for Dasein to be a whole is for Dasein to be no