Reply to: Re: Introduction to Heidegger- Dasein
Jan Straathof wrote:
>
>do you mean that the future [of Dasein] already has happened ?
>
>but if the future already has happened, then the future is already
>realized; all what is realized is determinated [by its conditions],
>and thus the future would be determinated, fixed, unchanging
>and closed. How could human being -as Dasein- exist without
>freedom, change and openness ?
I came across the following passage in Emerson's early journals which evokes the uncanniness of Dasein's craving for repetition as the time-place where it may find freedom, change and open-ness:
[we] renew as oft as we can the pleasure the eternal surprize of coming at the last fact as children run up steps to jump down or up a hill to coast down on sleds or run far for one slide or as we . . . go many miles to a . . . place to catch fish and having caught one & learned the whole mystery we still repeat the process for the same result though perhaps the fish are thrown overboard at the last. The merchant plays the same game on Change, the card lover at whist, and what else does the scholar? He knows how the poetry he knows how the novel or the demonstration will affect him no new result but the oldest of all, yet he still craves a new good & bathes himself anew with the plunge at the last. (JMN.VIII. 12-13)
I'm wondering about the distinction Henk brought from Gasche between immer wieder and immer schon, as two available takes on the "always already. . ." which constitute Dasein's condition of possibility. If I understand the "immer schon," it is more of the pleasure seeking cathexis that draws us to the always already having been as necessarily repeatable, perhaps by way of confirming its existence and therefore ours. Kierkegaard's ill-fated attempt to repeat his visit to Berlin comes to mind.
I came across something in Blanchot which perhaps better reflects the immer wieder:
"The end of history. It is not histroy that comes to an end with history, but certain principles, questions, and formulations that will from now on be prohibited through a decision without justification, and as though with the obstinacy of a game. Let us therefore suppose that we renounce the question of origin, then all that makes of time the power and mobility--that which surreptitiously makes thought advance in that it also sets speech in motion. Let us suppose we give ourselves ( with the obstinacy of a game) the right to a language in which the categories that up until now have seemed to support it would lose their power to be valid: unity, identity, and the primacy of the Same, and the exigency of the Self-subject--categories postulated by their lack, and from the basis of their absence as the promise of their advent in time and through the work of time. Let us suppose that, supposing the end of history, we were to suppose all these categories not abolished certainly, but realized, comprehended and included, affirmed in the the coherence of a discourse from now on absolute. The book now closed again, all questions answered and all answers organized in the whole of a sufficient or founding speech--now, writing, there would no longer be any reason or place for writing, except to endure the worklessness of this NOW, the mark of an interruption or a break where discourse falters in order, perhaps to receive the affirmation of the Eternal Return."
(Infinite Converstaion, tr. Susan Hanson, 272)
The " immer wieder" as I read it here is an affirmation of the possibility of thinking, especially thinking which sees itself as a "new beginning." The "immer schon," on the other hand, has to do with the simple pleasures ("which mean a lot") without which Dasein wouldn't know what to do with itself.
but I'm not sure of myself here. What is the difference/relationship between Repetition and the Eternal Return?
>and futher, you are still talking about two Dasein's: the one
>that is running [now], and the one that is runned after; again
>which one is Dasein ?
Freud talked about "two individuals" almost necessary to explain the "for whom" the pleasure of a wish fulfillment is dreamed by the dreamer ( the dreamer "himself" having a definite aversion to said wish fulfillment which is what prompted the dream in the first place).
Happily, I can usually tell which Dasein is which by the light of day.
Duophrenically yours,
Allen
Allen Scult
515 271 2869
Website: "Heidegger on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics"
http://www.mac.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html
Fax: 515 271 3977
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