This essay, which is long, is the second part of what will, in any case, be a fairly lengthy series wrapping up the Ontology Project and facing towards the problem off structure.  This essay is, then, a technical and preparatory exercise for what is to come, clearing the ground on which pure ontology and the basics, at least, of human difference may cohere in, and contribute to, a single, life-affording causal structure for Dasein.

FIVE CASES CONTRA HEIDEGGER

Why has Martin Heidegger’s 1927 opus Being and Time, arguably the most important book of philosophy of the 20th century, never fed into even an embryonic nationalist project to sideline the Nietzschean fiction and challenge the systemic dominance of liberalism?  Setting aside the endless, besmirching academic arguments about his years as a NSDAP member, and his brief and fraught rectorship at Freiburg, the answer most immediately to hand is that its quest is for the meaning of human being, not its nature.  Both are ontological quests, for sure.  But the former, addressed phenomenologically and without strongly-drawn lines, has proved a gift for thinkers concerned primarily with Being’s relation to World as the social environment, which all-too-easily shifts into the politicised study of the structure of society, language and semiotics, power and inequality.  These academics of inauthenticity would be horrified to find emerging from Heidegger’s thought a model of Man as a relational and agentive being, expressing what is most essential to him, commanding a politics of his shared natural interests.  But, of course, we would be highly delighted.

But to arrive even theoretically at such a definitively real Man on the basis of an account of Being is a really demanding intellectual undertaking.  Many would say impossible just on the basis that Being and the lived-life are categorically exclusive.  Heidegger’s forest of subtle and recondite formulations, which are oft-times run into one another with a cavalier freedom, do not advance the likelihood of success one whit, notwithstanding the fact that he was a Swabian identitarian and German nationalist himself.

In this long-delayed second part to this series (for any undue abstraction in which I hereby apologise) our search for agency will address Heidegger’s model critically and from the conviction that our reality is human being as bearer of Nature’s difference and specificity, and it isn’t intellectually undeliverable.  But there is no immediate way to it in Heidegger’s Dasein.  More clearly drawn parameters, strictly ontologically-derived, internally consistent, are necessary.

In this hunt for definition and consistency, then, I will confine myself to five examples of problem areas, and where possible suggest some re-working.  The objective is to demonstrate both the nature of the problem and that of the solution, and not to be exhaustive in any way; and out of that, as ever, to encourage the development of a complete and advantageous philosophy.

CASE 1: THE QUESTION OF CRISIS-DASEIN

As beings are biological and sociobiological and as their particular array of traits are inherited, so they are ethnically differentiated and specific.  The being of beings must, in its turn, and in its arrayal and deportment, carry some imprint of that specificity; not directly as a first-order effect of evolution, of course, but at the very least consequentially and receptively, like an ancient landscape, perhaps, weathered into uniqueness over the aeons.

Were this not the case then we would have to conclude that the being of a being is a neutral and unfeatured thereness, a profound and singular abstraction from the ontic, sans any hint of a constitution.  But we know perfectly well that the being of a tiger, say, is not that of a mollusc, and once one acknowledges the differential effect on being of different beings, then difference is unstoppable.  One’s enquiry must arrive at the principal specifics of difference, and with human being so we must come to ethnicity as a weathering effect on that ancient landscape.

Heidegger’s phenomenological interrogation of the meaning of being proceeds via the novel medium of a common base-entity or being-ness, Dasein.  Except through the presumption that authenticity will find its mark, he does not approach it from the proving direction of a constitution by imprimatur.  He is a putative light-shiner - he sets about determining “the basic content of Dasein’s existential constitution” with:

... those structures in which disclosedness constitutes itself: understanding, state-of-mind, falling, and discourse.

He analyses the temporality of each, pulling in anxiety and fear as “states of mind” which have the potential to disclose Dasein.  The direction of flow here is towards the shock and disaccommodation of some dread event, a personal disaster or, perhaps, natural disaster, which functions as “the exception”, knocking out the standard behavioural range of personhood, stripping everything back to the truth of a man.  On the surface it is not an unreasonable thesis.  Life conceivably can work like that although it is likely to be a very rare event indeed (which I will expand upon from Case 3 down); and given the power of absence and mechanicity in Man it is certainly not inevitable.  Everyone (excepting psychopaths, I suppose) has the full range of emotions.  Everyone reacts psychologically to disaster.  Some fight for every inch, some freeze, some submit and pray or don’t pray.  Who but the individual his or herself is to know what is from the very ground of that individual’s being and what from his or her personhood?  If it is only for the individual to know this, what is to save us from solipsism?  Then, even if it isn’t solipsistic, a reduction to the individual’s experience ineffably delivers us to a politics of prescribed universalism.  Nationalist philosophy could not issue from that.  Neither could it be systemic to the rest of human life, when there is no crisis in train.

In philosophy, as in politics, the universal tends to homogeny, and homogeny to distance from the lived reality, just as difference and specificity will tend to nearness to it.  An account of Man which does not adequately account for human difference and specificity will never produce a fit outcome.  The unfortunate people under its organising hand will be fated to live the lie of oneness.

Certainly, Heidegger did determine that Dasein has a constitution.  But the arraying of that, along with the conceptualisation of other significant elements in his schema, only encouraged co-option by the postmodern equalitarians.  Obviously, we, too, are looking to incorporate into our thinking that which is immediately useful and, where possible, to qualify whatever else has potential.  This essay is about the latter.

CASE 2: THE QUESTION OF THE MEANINGS OF “WORLD”

We have already touched on the openness of Heidegger’s model of World to appropriation by sociologists and equalitarians.  The reason for it is simply that he employed the word in multiple forms, meaning most of the things you or I might mean even in casual conversation.  It is that loose.  Of course, he had a principal interpretation, which is the physical world of Place and Time wherein Dasein abides.  As such, it belongs wholly to the material universe.  But, again, it does absolutely nothing to discourage the shift into sociological thinking.  One obvious redress, to my mind, is to split World in two, one part of which is hived off to world-as-culture, referring to the enworldment (“thrown-ness” in Heidegger’s terminology) and personification of human beings (“the one” or “the they”).  But that being a matter of the lived-life of beings it does not concern this investigation.  However, the other, a long step back into the ontological realm, beyond Heidegger’s strict focus on human being, certainly does.

In his address of identity Heidegger holds, as a nationalist should, to the general model of the prior essence … the natured principle ... which is precisely a move away from the universal homogeny of prior existence.  This latter I have previously attempted “to set out as”:

... this austere and unlit, singular, factic thereness of a thing, and of all things under the governments of Time, Entropy and Happenstance ... existence as absolute homogeny, existence as raw, imperishable precondition.

In contrast, essence’s priorness makes human being its own act and possession.  Being’s cosmic antecedents in the universal laws lose their power to manufacture homogeny:

Always, Time and Entropy drag this life back towards discontinuity and disintegration, and the cold state of mechanics.  Always life’s essential, voracious appetite for continuity, born of that initial happenstance, impels it forward and proves itself, within its own confines and by its perfect integrity, as equal as equal can be to the vast forces without.

In these bio-philosophical terms, that which was not yet temporalised was but an anomalous and fragile, accidentally-arising separation from, and thereby difference to, the prevailing “cold state of mechanics”.  This existent “something” which was essentially different could preserve its difference only as long as it engages in a Manichean struggle with the blind and profane, homogenising forces without (including, of course, Time).  It is by that struggle in perpetuity that the existent will to difference endures the fraying and breaking work of Time, and by enduring it appropriates it.  That event of appropriation essentialises existence and transposes it into one eternal moment of Be-ing.  It is the present, not fire, which this Prometheus steals from the gods of Time.

That I hold to be closer, ontologically, to what we can know from Genesis of Man’s creation of Adam from “the dust of the ground”.  Though it may not, I grant you, inspire quite as Michelangelo inspires:

However, in our context Adam’s creation is but the continuation of a one-time, anomalous and accidentally-arising separation, out of which we might draw the following trio of foundational conclusions:

a) The essence of the founding vita is difference from “the cold state of mechanics”, but the essence of difference is the essential principle itself.

b) Differentiation essentialises existence and transposes it into Being.  Essence’s act of existing is Being.

… and, to connect us to Heidegger’s starting point:

c) Being, as it is here in this single, eternal moment, be-comes Dasein.

Now we have a context for Dasein, and thus a place for it in the general scheme of Creation.  To such primordiality we have assigned the idea of World, offering no postmodernist an opportunity to create mayhem.

CASE 3: THE QUESTION OF THE UNWELCOME INCURSION OF COGNITION

As noted above, when Heidegger accounts for Dasein’s constitution, he does not start with the sparest interpretation available, namely the three primary elements of being, there, and then.  He starts with those structures in which Care in the exception discloses itself as “Dasein’s Being”, which deposits him and us among the ambiguities and subjectivities of human emotion.

Emotion is the language of one of the cognitive systems of the brain which is external- as well as inward-facing.  Like thought and sensation (the languages of the other two exterior-capable cognitive systems) emotion’s interpretation of external events is on the basis of the preference for evolutionarily adaptive choices over maladaptive ones.  Distributed in two separate regions, there are said to be no less than twenty-seven distinct human emotions.  Some are primordial, simple in form, associated in operation with the five senses, wholly reactive, and fast in deployment.  Some are “higher” and complex in form, moral in kind, more cumbersome in deployment, ascriptive in operation, anticipatory as well as reactive. 

The assumption by phenomenologists like Heidegger and Husserl that emotion in crisis, as a cognitive reaction, necessarily cuts through to the primordial ... to “Care as Dasein’s Being” ... is completely arbitrary.  The fact that it can do so under extreme circumstances does not imply that it will on a regular and reliable basis.  The fact that emotion, by its sheer speed of deployment, is sincere in its reporting does not mean that sincerity extends further, say, to the unconcealing of what was formerly concealed, all the way to the primordial.  Methodologically, it’s all too ad hoc and unsatisfactory and downright convenient.

To be absolutely clear, going in from the outside, through emotion, is a sub-optimal, crisis-restricted method.  To “be-there-then”, or at least closer to it, requires a certain intentional traversal of the connecting path of attention, which runs through the physical, and which alone can close the distance between these two very different non-physical entities.  For, while the cognitive machine sees and processes our experience of the world as it immediately impacts upon us, Dasein is a naïve witness to the eternal real, or that pregnant scintilla at Dasein’s stand-point in Creation.  That which is elemental and constitutional to Dasein … to being-there-then … is grounded in Creation and can only shape Dasein’s witness accordingly, such that Creation itself might be parsed element to element, structure to structure, and the results may (or may not) be taken up afterwards by the cognitive machine.  But the naïve witness of Dasein and the interpreting witness of Mind must not be casually run into one other or conflated in any way. 

After all, is Dasein brain?  No, it is not.  Is Dasein Mind?  No, it is not.  Does Dasein have a Mind?  No, it does not.  Does it have a nervous system?  No, it does not.  Nor is it any operative component of the cognitive machine.  Nor does it avail itself of such, nor any other faculty of Mind.  In deployment, it is prior to the Mind and the Mind’s cognition, and if there was no cognition whatsoever yet it would still be-there-then.  It is only being-there-then.

CASE 4: THE QUESTION OF TIME’S ABSENCE OF AGENCY

Does even this spare, primordial form of Dasein possess the clarity and consistency to yield results from this investigation of causality?  Not yet.  To arrive at that we still have to establish some parameters for there-then.  It is quite a dense thicket, hedged about by academic disagreement.  It will take some time.  But we will cut through it.

In Division Two of Being and Time Heidegger moved his focus from human being to Time.  He took pains to reject the standard model of Time as an unending progression of quicksilver, present moments stretching from the point of all origin to the end of all that exists.  Instead he appended it to the span of a life and of all lives, universalising death as the end of Dasein’s temporalisation.  By that means temporality achieves such comparability with Dasein itself that Heidegger directly identified the two as one.

The war of suppression he was conducting on the endless chain of the present moment dictated that Time’s progression was, as far as possible, truncated to past → future and temporality’s to having-been → late.  The present/now could not be made to disappear entirely because we never escape it.  But another treatment of it could be reified.  This wasn’t just a word-game.  By categorically distinguishing the open and fluid, objective event of Time from the Being-observant process of temporalisation, Heidegger could then expand on that almost ideologically:

The future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the Present.

... and then, in the next sentence, bringing them into relation:

Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

From these gnomic statements it does, in fact, logically follow that Dasein’s “having been” is the literal future of all Being, brought to that state of meaning through the temporalised staple of the present.  Thus it is that temporalisation processes “later” as “having been”.  And if you find this puzzling, just reflect on how we English-speakers, in bereavement, use the word “late” in a sense very close to this.  There you see - Heidegger made easy!  Alternatively, one might conceivably slip the literal focus on Time’s meaning and consider cognition from the evolutionary perspective.  For in that, too, we humans automatically project mentally forward into the future.  It’s our evolved stance of enquiry and discrimination as to whether the flow of events are life-giving or life-taking, and whether our decision in respect to it will, in any given instance, be adaptive or maladaptive. Our past is with us in the very act, inseparable.  Heidegger, however, remains focussed on Time in the former, literal sense, and emphasises only the eventuality of life taken.

We have now properly arrived at Being-towards Dasein’s singular point of reference of death - “that which is not to be outstripped”, as Heidegger puts it. Why singular?  Because Dasein’s conception is immaculately inconceivable.  Human being is futural.  By its constitution it is thrown onward and does not look back, in which restless state it just is, and then, one day, it is not.  Death as the reference point, that is to say, the point which does not be-long to Dasein, dispenses with the comforting tradition that Being’s point of reference is eternity (along with “the unbroken chain of the present”, the other of Heidegger’s temporal rejects).

It is worth remembering that Man is not a sheep in an abattoir careless that it is filled with the blood and gore of other sheep who have been this way immediately before.  We are not unsuspecting of our end.  Heidegger tells us that Care is the motive factor in that.  But as nationalists we assert that this is not merely the individual being’s Care for self-continuity.  The greater continuity is that of the relational group ... the kin-group ... which the individual cares for, which care is naturally expressed in the preference of his eye and senses.  To be perfectly, brutally scientistic about it, we are genes, we are traits, we are fitness, and the meaning of these goods is greater than the meaning of the individual to the individual.  Further, that meaning supplies us with knowledge of the meaning of finitude.  It is our relationality which visits the death of meaningful others upon us at intervals throughout life.  Beneath the knowledge of death, therefore, lies the meaning of relation, and lies love itself, and, only then one’s own love of living.  With these qualifications I do accept Being-towards-death as a germane and useful descriptive, not least because its “not-yet” at the end of life is so stark and uncompromising, yet filled with something ineffably human.

Well, it might now be “time” for me to have crack at setting down, even as pure speculation, my no doubt pedestrian and jejune alternative to temporalised Dasein (notwithstanding the likelihood of getting it shot to pieces by the cleverer people who know about these things).  So ...

Time is of the physical universe.  It is a dimension in which Creation advances.  But also, and more completely, in Space-Time it converts as a dimension in which Creation expands.  And the anomaly of organic being?  If we hold to the view that at every moment in our infinitesimally small corner of the universe essence stubbornly maintains its priorness over existence, then Heidegger’s idea appears as temptingly logical, obviously, but not whole.  It needs to be treated with circumspection.  Even to argue that temporalisation is just Time’s embrace of Being infers passivity on the part of essence, as if it is indeed a lifeless mass.  But it is the parvenu essence that is separate from the prevailing All and in existential revolt against its blind and profane, homogenising forces.  It is the parvenu essence which needs must strive for mastery just to continue its act of existing, which is being.  It is the parvenu essence which, by that very act, makes its temporal mark on Time, as by its physical being it marks the dimensional world.  The difference between the two is incidental.  They both prove the presence of agency.

We may liken that proof to a surprising footprint in ancient, virgin sand:

It exists in Time, yes, but also in locale.  Be-ing thus temporalised and localised is Dasein’s being-in the path of Creation, not as an austere and unlit, singular, factic thereness but as an existent “something” which audaciously self-integrates at its own initiation and insistence into Space-Time’s four-part form.  It is not simply Dasein’s transfiguration within temporality’s “later” made “now” in the process of “having been”.  It is Dasein’s self-birthing and berthing in the cosmic present, marking it by the weight of its own form and constitution.  It was there-then and is there-now.  Whether it is the there-then and there-now of a Dasein of an individual Man, or a kin-group or all humanity, it is the imprint of an entity active in its own tempo-localisation.  Being active, all characterful things must attach, whether they be those of the individual, the kin-group, or all humanity.  The detail of the imprint is Dasein’s character transferring its form to the medium of its presence.

To reiterate, then, while temporalisation is just a narrow mechanical process, Dasein alone can possess character and content, and structure, and it is by these that we may hope to find utility and potential in it.  Otherwise, it is just a pallid apparition, a generality uncertain in its borders and without the faintest ability to point us towards the political agency we must eventually seek.

CASE 5: THE QUESTION OF THE GENERALISATION OF ECSTASIS

There is one more, related obstacle to clarity and consistency which I will briefly address, and that is the problem of Heidegger’s conception of temporality and ecstasis.

In the opening decades of the 20th century (ie, before the distinction with the concept of a centralising enstasis) ecstasis was a term principally from existentialism but also from Husserlian phenomenology.  Prior to these it was a term used in Christian mystical experience.  In the early years of his intellectual career Heidegger was a student of Husserl.  But in Being and Time he did not make the Husserlian argument that consciousness, the mysterious little pool of light given off by the working of the brain, has a phenomenological quality of “being outside itself” when said light is focused on some externality.  Much less did he make any statement about Christian mysticism.  Rather, he stepped back to his own technical interpretation of temporality.  With typical (and typically frustrating) complexity of thought and prose he wrote:

The future, the character of having been, and the Present, show the phenomenal characteristics of the “Towards-oneself”, the “back-to”, and the “letting-oneself-be-encountered by”.  The phenomena of the “towards ...”, the “to ...”, and the “alongside ...”, make temporality manifest as the Ekstase pure and simple.  Temporality is the primordial “out-of-itself” in and for itself.  We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the present the “ecstases” of temporality.

Accordingly, Heidegger theorises that not Dasein or the machinery of cognition but temporality holds unto itself the raw condition of separation, to which temporalised being (ie, Dasein) conforms.  It is an active phenomenal impost to which the being of beings surrenders on account of its unyielding self.  In other words, it is as it is just because it is, and for no other reason.  “Pure and simple”, as the man says.

Once again Heidegger’s basic posture led him into intellectual radicalism.  His whole ontology functioned as a rejection of metaphysics, for which in no small part read religion’s formal monopoly on spiritual revelation, as well as, more technically, Kantian transcendence.  Throughout, he perfectly reasonably sought a truth general and inherent to the common estate of human beings.  But people’s quotidian cares were not Dasein’s Care.  Hence the crisis as a means of breaking-through the silken bonds of the ordinary and the everyday.  The action of the mind in a crisis, envisioning or revisiting, anticipating or imagining some very fundamental care or need, or suddenly understanding the primary importance of survival and continuity, is important, of course.  Regardless, the difference between “now” and “later” and between “now” and “having been” does not account for the mechanics of ecstasis, which is, as thinkers have averred for millennia, (at least initially) an event of an enstatic presence in and to the moment with or without a spiritual component.  Even when that presence reduces to a mere Husserlian practicality, still perception’s standard for judgement of external events, yet again, is the preference for evolutionarily adaptive choices over maladaptive ones, not moving back and forth in the temporal line.

Far be it for me, a Heideggerian, yes, but only for the most utilitarian purposes, to say so, but this looks very like a case of ideological over-reach, a case of arriving at a model of something not because it grows out of the logical earth but because one has to reach another ideological goal, namely confronting the metaphysics of the eternal present.

With that I will quit the criticism of a great and seminal thinker.  The lesson of it is that Heidegger’s thought is both indispensable and problematic for grounding a nationalism of our age.  Division One has the more potential, and in the next essay in this series I will focus on a structure of causality for Dasein from which other ideas might profitably flow.