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(INDEX) Education, Philosophy, Religion: The Dog Days of Summer Posts

ANNOUNCEMENT: My 50th Birthday is Next Month and Starting August 7th I’ll be Blogging About and Celebrating the 100 Years Centenary of Martin Heidegger’s Gift of “Being and Time!”

(Part 2/2) Announcement About My Upcoming Series of Posts Celebrating 100 Years of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” Beginning August 7

NOW, THE MAIN ARTICLE:

“In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise of phenomenological “kindergarten.” To tear apart [zer-reissen] means: to tear into two parts, to separate: to make two out of one. If a sock is torn, then the sock is no longer present-at-hand—but note: precisely not as a sock. In fact, when I have it on my foot, I see the “intact” sock precisely not as a sock. On the contrary, if it is torn, then THE sock appears with more force through the “sock torn into pieces.” In other words, what is lacking in the torn sock is the UNITY of the sock. However, this lack is paradoxically the most positive, for this Unity in being-torn is present [gegenwärtig] AS a lost unity.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars p. 11)

“Twice the audience laughed over the “torn sock” saying. At first Heidegger answered pedantically, “I do not know why you are laughing. You must learn to endure the scope of a sentence such as the one I have cited.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars  p. 100).

SECTIONS

• Objects of Inquiry
• Acedia and Cura
• Big Question Disposition
• Heidegger’s Philosophy of DEATH
• The Obvious
• Wherein the High Horse?
• NEXT STEPS

Objects of Inquiry

To begin with, Heidegger is going to look at the meaning of Being as we are the ones who already have a vague understanding of it.  We have an unclear understanding of Being and try and clarify it in various ways, e.g., Hegel sees Being as the most general and empty concept.  We can think about Being and ask about it even though Being is not a being and not nothing. 

The thinker feeling empty at everyday life might be compelled to ask the question of the meaning of Being, and so let’s ask after the understanding of Being when we are questioning.  Researching in the various disciplines of scientific academic questioning (e.g., psychology, anthropology, history, math, physics, etc.) are going to presuppose contexts, criteria, etc., always already in place that identify what belongs to objects of inquiry in their specific field and how to interrogate them.  Here are two guiding questions: (i) What are the characteristics of an object of inquiry in general – in other words, what are the criteria we employ that make questioning in general as a way we relate to the world possible?  (ii) What belongs to an object of inquiry in a specific science, like the field of anthropology? 

An object of inquiry (sometimes called a “subject” or “phenomenon of study”) in an academic discipline is the specific category of entities, processes, relations, or questions that the field systematically investigates using its distinctive concepts, methods, and standards of evidence.  For example, we speak in this way of the “world of psychology,” and for instance within it/through the lens of psychological description/diagnosis/treatment the beings in the schizophrenic’s world may “appear” in a conspiracy saturated way.

General Characteristics of an Object of Inquiry:

Across disciplines, objects of inquiry typically share these traits:

Specificity to the field — Each discipline has a core focus (or set of foci), even if it overlaps with others. For example, psychology might center on individual mental processes and behavior, while sociology emphasizes social structures and group dynamics. Yet, Social Psychology is also a field.  The object is what the discipline “carves out” for specialized attention. studocu.com

Accumulated specialist knowledge — Disciplines build bodies of theories, concepts, terminology, and empirical findings tied to their object. These are refined over time through debate, evidence, and methodological rigor. insidehighered.com

Empirical and/or interpretive accessibility — Objects are things that can be observed, described, analyzed, or interpreted using the discipline’s tools (e.g., experiments, ethnography, archival research, modeling). They are often complex, relational, and context-dependent rather than isolated facts.

Dynamic and contested boundaries — What counts as a legitimate object can evolve with new theories, technologies, or societal changes. Disciplines debate their scope, methods, and what constitutes valid evidence or explanation.

Holistic or reductionist framing — Some fields seek broad, integrative understanding (e.g., “what it means to be human”); others break phenomena into measurable variables.

Objects of inquiry are not just “topics” but are shaped by the discipline’s questions, assumptions, and ways of knowing. They enable systematic inquiry rather than casual observation.

Objects of Inquiry in Anthropology

Anthropology is broadly the study of what it means to be human, encompassing biological, cultural, linguistic, and historical dimensions. It pursues a holistic understanding of humans in all times and places, asking questions such as: What makes us human? To what degree are humans alike or different? How do biology, culture, society, language, and environment interact?

Anthropology’s objects of inquiry are characteristically human ways of being—past and present, across cultures and environments—examined through comparative, contextual, and often fieldwork-based lenses. Key characteristics include:

Holism and integration — Anthropology integrates the biological and the cultural, the material and the symbolic, the local and the global. It avoids reducing humans to one aspect (e.g., purely biological or economic) and instead studies interactions among them.artsci.laverne.edu

Cultural relativism as a guiding principle (not absolute moral relativism) — Phenomena are understood first in their own cultural and historical contexts before cross-cultural comparison. en.wikipedia.org

Diversity across subfields (the “four fields” in much of American anthropology):

Cultural/Social Anthropology: Social relations, beliefs, practices, kinship, economy, power, identity, rituals, globalization, and everyday life. Objects include cultural meanings, institutions, and processes of change.northcentralcollege.edu

Biological/Physical Anthropology: Human evolution, genetics, primatology, human variation, adaptation, and bioarchaeology. Objects include fossils, DNA, skeletal remains, and physiological diversity.

Archaeology: Material remains of past societies (artifacts, settlements, landscapes). It reconstructs behavior, technology, and social organization from what people left behind. oer.pressbooks.pub

Linguistic Anthropology: Language use in social context, communication, discourse, and how language shapes thought and culture.

Ethnographic and comparative methods — Heavy emphasis on long-term participant observation (fieldwork), interviews, and cross-cultural comparison. Objects are often studied “from the inside” (emic perspectives) while also seeking broader patterns (etic analysis).

Broad temporal and spatial scope — From human origins (millions of years ago) to contemporary issues (e.g., migration, climate change impacts on indigenous groups, digital cultures). It includes both small-scale societies and complex modern ones. education.nationalgeographic.org

Focus on “the other” and reflexivity — Traditionally studying non-Western or marginalized groups, but increasingly includes all human societies (including anthropologists’ own) with attention to the researcher’s positionality.

Examples of specific objects in anthropological inquiry: gift exchange and reciprocity (Mauss), rites of passage (van Gennep), kinship systems, shamanism, colonialism’s legacies, human-primate relations, or the cultural construction of race/gender.

Anthropology’s objects are typically relational, embedded in context, and meaning-laden. They resist purely quantitative or universalizing approaches in favor of thick description and interpretive depth, though many anthropologists blend methods (e.g., mixed-methods or evolutionary approaches).

In short, anything that illuminates the human condition—biologically, culturally, linguistically, or historically—can become an object of anthropological inquiry when approached with the discipline’s characteristic curiosity about diversity, similarity, and the interplay of nature and culture. Boundaries are flexible, and interdisciplinary work is common.

The anthropologist stands in the light of the contexts and categories of anthropology (and “science” in general), and engages with anthropological objects of inquiry with the tools and methods employed by academic anthropology that are proper to that field. 

Heidegger reverses this.  He starts with the question of Being and the average everyday way we are in the world (e.g., with our tools) and proceeds to disclose more and more fundamental contexts.

To summarize, in general, an object of inquiry is any phenomenon, concept, or problem systematically targeted by research. It serves as the focal point that drives a discipline’s hypotheses, data collection, and theoretical modeling.

Characteristics of an Object of Inquiry in General

While specific to their respective sciences, most objects of inquiry share several core characteristics:

Boundedness: They are defined by specific parameters or scopes that distinguish what is included in the study from what is excluded.

Observability or Measurability: They exhibit empirical, conceptual, or historical evidence that can be analyzed using the discipline’s accepted methodologies.

Systemic Nature: They consist of interconnected components, structures, or processes that can be broken down to explain underlying mechanisms.

Problem-Driven: They are conceptualized to answer a specific question, resolve a puzzle, or fill a gap in existing knowledge.

Objects of Inquiry in Anthropology

In anthropology, the overarching object of inquiry is the human experience, encompassing both biological evolution and cultural diversity across time and space. Rather than examining humans in isolation, anthropological objects of inquiry are deeply holistic, focusing on relationships, systems of meaning, and interconnectedness.

Specific objects of inquiry in anthropology generally fall into distinct areas of study:

Belonging & Kinship: The ways individuals and groups connect, including community formations, family structures, social inclusion, and exclusion.

Classifying the World: How different cultures structure meaning through language, symbols, myths, and knowledge systems.

Production, Exchange, and Consumption: The economic and material ways human beings interact with their environment and global networks.

The Body: Culturally significant interactions with the human body, such as expressions of identity, health, illness, and healing.

Conflict & Power: How human societies experience and manage conflict, violence, or resistance resulting from imbalanced power dynamics.

Anthropologists define their objects of inquiry through qualitative field research, particularly ethnography. To ensure an object belongs to the field, anthropologists prioritize the emic perspective (how the subjects themselves understand their world) alongside the etic perspective (the analytical frameworks of the observer)

Analogously in physics, with a particular understanding of nature in place, the physicists of the early modern period in science aimed at outlining what belonged to their discipline as such by identifying/stamping what belonged to nature in the scientific sense (Nietzsche called this Will to Power in the notebooks: “Stamping Becoming with Being is the highest kind of Will to Power”).  I quoted these passages from Heidegger last post but perhaps the fuller context here will make them more accessible.  Reading is essentially re-reading and we always see more the 2^nd time.  Heidegger in his various Kant studies says regarding the thing of Nature (in the narrow scientific sense):

• “Kant defines this thing of nature as the thing accessible to us, the body that is as object of experience, i.e., mathematical-physical cognition. The body is in motion or at rest in space, such that motions, as changes of place, can be numerically determined in terms of their relations. For Kant, this mathematical determinateness of natural body is nothing contingent—is no form of calculating processes merely attached to it—but rather the mathematical, in the sense of what is moving in space, belongs first and above all to the determination of the thingness of the thing.  There is in this mente concipere, a prior grasping-together, of what is supposed to be determinative, in a unifying way, for every body as such, i.e., for corporeality: All bodies are the same. No motion is privileged. Every place is the same as every other; every point in time is likewise the same. Every force is determined only in accordance with the change of motion it causes—and this change of motion is itself understood as change of place. All determinations of body are delineated in one blueprint, according to which is: the natural.  As mente concipere, the mathematical is a projection of the thingness of things that, as it were, leaps over [hinwegspringender] things. Projection first opens a play-space within which things, i.e., facts, show themselves.   As axiomatic, mathematical projection is the grasping-in-advance of the essence of things, of bodies; hence, the blueprint prescribes how each thing and the relations between all things are to be constructed.  Natural bodies are now only that which they show themselves to be in the domain of projection. Things show themselves now only in the relations of places and time-points and in the measures of mass and working forces.  Because projection, according to its sense, posits a uniformity of all bodies according to space and time and relations of motion, it also simultaneously makes possible and demands as an essential mode of determining things a completely uniform measure, i.e., numerical measurement.  Specifically, the res extensa or extended substances are re-presented in terms of shape and motion as what is “really real” in them, location and mobility, that which makes the res extensa predictable and controllable.  For Descartes this made us “the masters and possessors of nature (Descartes, Opp. VI, 61 ff).”  This is made possible for Descartes via the structure of the cogito as that which, in re-presenting, unconsciously creates for beings the conditions for presentability: indubitability and certitude.  On the basis of this, error is possible, when in re-presenting, something is presented to the one representing that does not satisfy the conditions of presentability: indubitability and certitude.” 

And so, as Will to Power, Descartes foundationally appropriated the understanding of truth pregnant in Thomas and fulfilled in Luther as certainty – free from doubt, because what had to be certain and free from doubt for Luther was the salvation of the soul.  In this regard, Being, as Heidegger notes, is historical. 

Are the various aspects of the discipline of anthropology historical, emerging over time and in specific contexts, or did anthropology just show up ready made from heaven?

Anthropology did not appear ready-made from heaven. Like every academic discipline, it is thoroughly historical: it emerged gradually over time through specific intellectual, social, political, and economic contexts, evolving in response to changing conditions, debates, and needs. Its development reflects broader shifts in Western (and later global) thought, particularly from the 18th–19th centuries onward.

Key Historical Phases in Anthropology’s Development

Precursors (Ancient times to Enlightenment):
People have always reflected on human differences—travelers, historians, and philosophers like Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, or Montaigne compared cultures. Systematic precursors appeared during the Age of Exploration (15th–18th centuries), when European encounters with diverse peoples generated curiosity, classification efforts, and often ethnocentric or colonial justifications. Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Rousseau, Montesquieu) developed ideas of “natural man,” progress, and cultural variation that later influenced the field. These were not yet “anthropology” as a discipline but laid intellectual groundwork. education.nationalgeographic.org

Formal Emergence (Mid-to-Late 19th Century):
Anthropology coalesced as a distinct field during the Victorian era, tied to colonialism, industrialization, evolutionary theory, and the professionalization of science. Key drivers included:

Darwin’s influence (1859 On the Origin of Species) and earlier evolutionary/social evolutionary ideas (e.g., Tylor, Morgan) that framed human societies as progressing through stages (savagery → barbarism → civilization).  Nietzsche challenged the notion of survival of the fittest because what we actually see in history and today is the subjugation and dominance of the powerful and strong by the weak and sickly (e.g., suing them in court).

Colonial expansion and administration: European powers needed knowledge of colonized peoples for governance, resource extraction, and missionary work. Museums, learned societies (e.g., Ethnological Society of London, 1843), and expeditions collected artifacts, skulls, and data.

Physical anthropology/biological aspects grew from anatomy, craniometry, and racial science (often problematic and later critiqued).

Early figures: Edward Tylor (cultural evolution), Lewis Henry Morgan (kinship), Franz Boas (later, anti-evolutionist and founder of modern American cultural anthropology).northcentralcollege.edu

The discipline institutionalized in universities, museums, and scholarly associations in the late 19th/early 20th centuries (e.g., American Anthropological Association in 1902).

20th Century Professionalization and Diversification:

Boasian revolution (early 1900s, U.S.): Franz Boas emphasized cultural relativism, historical particularism, fieldwork, and rejection of grand evolutionary schemes and racist hierarchies. This shaped modern cultural anthropology.

British social anthropology (Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown): Functionalism and intensive participant-observation fieldwork.

French tradition: Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) and influences from Durkheim and Mauss.

Post-WWII and decolonization: Critique of colonial roots, rise of applied anthropology, feminist anthropology, and postmodern turns (e.g., Clifford, Marcus on reflexivity and writing culture).

Expansion of the four fields and sub-specialties (medical, urban, environmental, digital anthropology, etc.).

Ongoing Evolution (Late 20th–21st Century): Anthropology continues to change in response to globalization, postcolonial critique, indigenous scholarship, climate change, biotechnology, and debates over representation and ethics. It has become more reflexive about its own history (including complicity in colonialism and pseudoscience) and more inclusive of voices from the Global South. Methods and objects of inquiry have expanded (e.g., multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies).

Why This History Matters

Anthropology’s objects of inquiry (human diversity, culture, evolution, etc.) were not discovered in a vacuum. They were shaped by the contexts in which the discipline formed—often Eurocentric, imperial, and tied to power imbalances, even as many anthropologists worked against those forces. This historical contingency explains its strengths (holism, relativism, fieldwork) and persistent critiques (e.g., who gets to study whom?).

No discipline arrives fully formed. They are human creations: products of curiosity, ambition, funding structures, ideological currents, and societal needs. Anthropology’s story is one of gradual institutionalization, internal critique, and adaptation—very much an earthly, historical process.

Heidegger does the reverse in Being and Time. Instead of starting with the context and elucidating the principles of a specific discipline like history or psychology to see what belongs to the field as such, Heidegger starts with the question of the meaning of Being and the basic way we are in the world (such as with our tools), to show how these behaviors point to contexts and structures.

Heidegger in Being and Time deliberately inverts the typical disciplinary approach we described earlier.

Heidegger’s Ontological Method vs. Ontic Disciplinary Inquiry

Standard academic disciplines (anthropology, psychology, history, etc.) generally operate at the ontic level: they presuppose a domain or “object of inquiry” (e.g., human cultures and societies for anthropology) and then develop concepts, methods, and criteria to study phenomena within that already-delineated region of beings. They start from a context (the field) and work outward to clarify what belongs inside it.  Modern logic sometime does this by asserting the principle of contradiction as a foundation and building on top of it.  The principle since Aristotle says “something can’t both be and not be, at the same time and in the same way.”  Kant later removed “at the same time” because the principle is just about the relation of concepts and so does not refer to time.  I will return to the principle below.

Heidegger reverses the direction. He begins with the most fundamental question—the question of the meaning of Being (Seinsfrage)—and analyzes the entity for whom Being is an issue: Dasein (human existence as “being-there”). From concrete, everyday ways of being in the world, he uncovers the underlying ontological structures that make any regional ontology or scientific inquiry possible in the first place. Key examples from Being and Time that illustrate our point:

Being-with tools (Zeug, readiness-to-hand): Heidegger starts with the most mundane example—using a hammer. We don’t primarily encounter it as a present-at-hand object with properties (ontic description a physicist or anthropologist might start with). Instead, it is encountered in a referential totality of equipment, purposes, and involvements (the workshop, the task, the “in-order-to”). This reveals Being-in-the-world as a basic existential structure, not a Cartesian hermetically-sealed subject confronting objects. ecomig2014.files.wordpress.com

Everydayness and fallenness: From average, absorbed coping in the world (with “the they”/das Man), he uncovers temporality, care (Sorge), thrownness, projection, etc.

Worldhood: The context or “world” is not a container or aggregate of things but a structure of significance disclosed through Dasein’s existence. Disciplines like anthropology or history presuppose such a world; Heidegger wants to show what makes worlds possible ontologically.  We mention the conspiracy saturated beings in the world of the schizophrenic.  Everyday life is similarly relational, just in a less extreme more inconspicuous way.

Heidegger is doing fundamental ontology. He is not trying to replace or directly compete with positive sciences (anthropology included), but to provide their “ontological genesis” or conditions of possibility. Sciences are themselves ways of Being-in-the-world (theoretical attitude as a modification of circumspective concern), and they tend to forget this by treating their objects as decontextualized and present-at-hand.  Anthropology asks after the human, but what is a human?  Is it an animal?  If so, what kind of animal?  A rational animal?  Why think this?  Clearly, there is much left unthought here.

Implications of the Reversal

This approach is “reverse” in that it moves from existence to structures to regional ontologies. It is phenomenological and hermeneutic: it interprets the phenomena of average everydayness to retrieve what has been covered over by the tradition (e.g., Cartesian hermetically-sealed subject-object split).

The later Heidegger moves even further from this, toward the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), language, poetry, and technology—further emphasizing how specific historical contexts (epochs of Being) shape what can appear as objects of inquiry at all. Our observation highlights a deep methodological point: disciplines like anthropology study beings (cultures, humans, artifacts) within an implicit understanding of Being. Heidegger wants to make that implicit understanding explicit and question it at the root. This doesn’t invalidate disciplinary work, but it challenges their foundations and invites a more primordial look at how we are always already situated in meaningful contexts.

Acedia and Cura

The “noonday demon” was the ancient desert monks’ personification of acedia—a deep, soul-crushing state of listlessness, boredom, and restlessness that struck hardest at mid-day. Derived from Greek, the word means “lack of care”. Monks experienced an intense aversion to their routine, feeling that the sun stood still and the day would never end.

The desert ascetics, such as the 4th-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, were the ultimate minimalists. They stripped their lives of virtually all worldly possessions, retreating to solitary cells in the Egyptian desert to live solely on sparse rations (like bread and water) and engage in uninterrupted prayer, chanting, and manual labor. Thinkers found them interesting because they showed what it was like for a person when isolated from society, indulgences, and other distractions.   Blaise Pascal, from his Pensees, or Thoughts—particularly the section on Diversion, admits, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

Ironically, the desert monks did not view the noonday demon as a result of too much activity, but rather as an attack that tempted them to abandon their minimalist discipline. When the “demon” struck, it made them crave a less restrictive life, leading them to question their vocation and daydream about fleeing to easier, more comfortable places of everyday people (The They).  In philosophy, Das Man (German for “the one” or “the they”) is a concept from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time that describes the anonymous, conformist “everyday” self. It represents how society dictates how we should act, think, and dress, leading to a loss of individual authenticity.

Key Characteristics of “Das Man”

The “They”: Instead of making authentic choices, we default to doing what “they” (society/the crowd) do.

Averageness: It levels down unique thoughts and behaviors, encouraging mediocrity, conformity, and the pursuit of novelty.

Idle Talk: It relies on superficial chatter and the uncritical acceptance of public consensus rather than deep, personal understanding.

Comfort: While it restricts individuality, living in Das Man is comforting because it removes the burden of personal responsibility for our choices.

As I said, the noonday demon has always been philosophically interesting because it reflects what shows up when you strip all distractions and interests from the person – like the idea of the Greeks that when all Life is stripped from a person you are left with a restless shade.

So, to recap, Acedia is a state of listlessness, apathy, or existential boredom. Originating from Greek meaning “lack of care,” it was historically described by early Christian monks as the “Noonday Demon”—an overwhelming restlessness that tempted them to abandon their spiritual duties. Today, it encompasses both spiritual apathy and modern burnout.

Historical & Spiritual Roots

Historically, acedia was closely tied to—and often translated as—the deadly sin of sloth. However, rather than mere physical laziness, it represents a profound spiritual and emotional stagnation. Desert monastics characterized it as the “Noonday Demon” because it would strike in the heat of the day, causing monks to feel intense dissatisfaction, restlessness, and disgust with their daily routine.

Symptoms and Manifestations

*** Acedia does not always look like inactivity; it can manifest in two opposing ways:

• Restlessness: Constantly seeking distractions, busywork, or entertainment to avoid doing what you are actually supposed to do.
• Sluggishness: An overwhelming feeling of lethargy, emptiness, or an inability to care about your responsibilities or place in the world.

Overcoming Acedia

Though the term originates from early religious texts, the condition remains highly relevant today as a form of modern existential burnout. Overcoming it requires identifying the root cause of the disconnection and taking actionable, grounding steps:

Mindfulness and Routine: Re-engaging with daily responsibilities instead of escaping into mindless procrastination.

Connection and Purpose: Seeking meaningful interactions, practicing self-care, and engaging with creative or spiritual outlets to cure the emptiness.

Patience: Building resilience to push through periods of low motivation and lack of emotional reward

Around the time Heidegger was writing  Being and Time, acedia had captured the imagination of various intellectuals.  For example, Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin, a German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, essayist and contemporary of Heidegger analyzed literature through the lens of acedia, particularly in his seminal work The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928), his study of Baroque mourning plays.

Acedia—classically a medieval sin of spiritual sloth, apathy, or “indolence of the heart”—serves as a key interpretive category for Benjamin. He connects it to melancholy (often saturnine melancholy) and uses it to characterize the worldview and heroes of Baroque Trauerspiel (plays of mourning), distinguishing them from classical tragedy.

Key Aspects of Benjamin’s Use of Acedia

In Baroque drama: Benjamin describes acedia as a moral and existential failing that ruins great men. It manifests as indecisiveness, inaction, and passive acceptance of fate. For example, he explicitly links the prince’s (e.g., Hamlet’s) hesitation and melancholy to “saturnine acedia.” Baroque heroes, unlike classical tragic heroes who resist fate heroically, succumb due to this slothful inability to act decisively.en.wikipedia.org

Broader context: This ties into Benjamin’s analysis of allegory, ruins, empty historical time (post-Reformation, without clear eschatological direction), and the melancholic temperament of the era. Acedia crystallizes themes of melancholy that run through his early works. link.springer.com

Later echoes: The concept appears in other writings, such as Thesis VII of “On the Concept of History,” where it relates to historical materialism, empathy with victors, and the historian’s task. Scholars also connect it to his views on modernity, alienation, and boredom.

Benjamin’s engagement with acedia is not a passing reference but a productive lens for understanding how literature (especially German Baroque drama, Shakespeare, and related traditions) reflects theological, political, and existential conditions. It influences discussions of his own melancholic style or method in secondary literature.

In short, acedia is integral to Benjamin’s literary criticism of Baroque forms, framing character, temporality, and allegory in ways that highlight modernity’s precursors.  Benjamin integrates acedia into his literary and philosophical frameworks through three main areas:

1. The Tragic Hero in Baroque Drama

In his major early literary study, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin uses acedia to diagnose the psychological paralysis of the Renaissance and Baroque monarch.

The Slothful Prince: He views the indecisiveness of the ruler as “saturnine acedia”.

Passive Fate: This spiritual dullness prevents the tragic hero from taking action, forcing them to passively accept doom rather than fight it like classical Greek heroes.

Hamlet: Benjamin famously applies this to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, identifying the prince’s famous delays as a textbook manifestation of acedia.

2. Baudelaire and Modernist Spleen

In his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, and his essays on Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin maps medieval acedia onto modern secular conditions.

Evolution of Boredom: He views acedia as the direct historical ancestor of modern spleen, ennui, and mass industrialized boredom.

The Allegorist’s Gaze: For Benjamin, the poet or critic suffering from acedia views the world as a collection of fragmented, devalued ruins. This deep sadness strips away the capitalist illusion of “progress,” leaving raw material behind to be reinvented through allegory.

3. A Critique of History and Empathy

Benjamin’s most famous use of the term appears in his final essay, On the Concept of History (Thesis VII), where he pivots from literary criticism to the philosophy of history.

The Indolence of the Heart: He critiques traditional historians who try to neutrally “empathize” with past eras.

A Moral Failing: Benjamin argues this empathy stems from acedia—a lazy despair that lacks the revolutionary energy needed to grasp the true, fleeting images of history and fight for the oppressed

*Lack of Care vs Care

Acedia and Cura are two diametrically opposed concepts from ancient philosophy and theology that deal with human attention, responsibility, and emotional investment. While acedia represents a destructive “lack of care” or spiritual apathy, cura represents the vital presence of “care,” attentiveness, and existential concern.

The primary differences and similarities between these two principles are outlined below:

Direct Comparison

Feature	Acedia (The Absence)	Cura (The Presence)
Etymology	Greek akēdia (literally “without care”).	Latin cura (meaning care, concern, or cure).
Core Definition	Spiritual torpor, apathy, and listlessness.	Devoted attention, solicitude, and responsibility.
Philosophical Status	Classified as a vice or “capital sin” (sloth).	Classified as an existential condition or virtue.
Psychological State	Emotional numbness, boredom, or frantic avoidance.	Attentiveness, active worry, or loving stewardship.
Action Trend	Paralyzing passivity or flight from duty.	Purposeful engagement and preservation.

---

Key Differences

1. Moral and Existential Value

Acedia is a pathology or vice. In Christian monasticism—pioneered by Evagrius Ponticus—it was called the “noonday devil” because it caused monks to feel restless, bored, and despairing of their spiritual duties.

Cura is an essential human structure. In Roman mythology (the Myth of Cura) and later in Martin Heidegger’s existential philosophy, Cura is what defines human beings. It is the inescapable drive to look after oneself, others, and the world.

2. Manifestation of Energy

Acedia drains purposeful energy. It causes a “don’t-care” attitude toward spiritual or moral growth. It can look like physical laziness, but it can also manifest as frantic, distracting busyness meant to avoid true responsibilities.

Cura channels focused energy. It can manifest positively as careful attentiveness and love, or negatively as heavy anxiety and dread (sollicitudo). Either way, it means a person is intensely engaged with reality rather than detached from it.

3. Relationship to Time and Place

Acedia seeks escape from the present moment. Someone suffering from acedia constantly wants to be elsewhere, imagining alternative lives rather than facing their current situation. One of the essential meanings of akēdia in monastic literature in late antiquity is an indifference in regard to the care of the self—represented as a loathing of the place (horror loci) (Cass. inst. 10. 2) and consequent wandering from the monastic cell (e.g. Pall. h. Laus. XVI. 2; XXI. 1).  As well as being listed as one of the disordered thoughts (VG 36.2), in the Vita of Antony akēdia retains this sense of carelessness (VG 17.4; 19.1).  The impulse to leave the cell signifying a desire to be elsewhere (Apoph. Pat. Alph. Antony 1 = Syst. VII. 1; cf. Evag. Pr. 12); an inability, that is to say, to remain in the present moment – whereas the opposite would be mindful care of the moment.  As such, it was both an anticipation and mirror image of the more total abandonment of the practice spiritual exercises (askēsis).  This included neglecting attentiveness (prosochē) to one’s disordered and compulsive thoughts (logismoi) and dreams, and an inability to concentrate or persevere with reading. 

Anxietas denotes a spectrum from minor or intermediate severity that could lead to severe depression, despair, and even suicide.  In the monastic period akēdia more commonly signified a pathological form of boredom at the milder end of this spectrum.  One that, nevertheless, was often accompanied by physical symptoms.

Cura anchors a person to the present. It forces individuals to take responsibility for the timeline of their lives, managing their past, present, and future through active stewardship.

Core Similarities

1. Linguistic Roots

Acedia is the direct linguistic negation of care. The Greek root kēdos means care or concern, making a-kēdia the literal state of being without cura. They are two sides of the exact same coin.

2. Dual Nature (Internal and External)

Both concepts operate simultaneously on psychological and external levels. Acedia is both an internal numbness of the heart and an external neglect of work. Similarly, cura is both an internal emotional concern and an external act of caretaking or healing.

3. Focus on Human Vulnerability

Both terms highlight the fragile relationship humans have with meaning. Whether a person falls into the void of not caring (acedia) or shoulders the heavy burden of caring too much (cura), both concepts map out the psychological terrain of human suffering and fulfillment.

In ‘The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,’ Heidegger illustrates the meaning of the term Dasein or being-there in contradistinction to its negation, nicht – Da – Sein (a term he uses differently in other places), and does so explicitly to bring out a very specific dimension of human existence.

Heidegger illustrates this with the example of being in a conversation with someone and yet ‘not being-there. ‘ We mean this in English when we say that the mind wanders (away) so that we are not caught up in the conversation, but in some other matter that we are concerned with, so that if someone were to ask us for the substance of the conversation we would not be able to tell them.

This being-away is not simply a not-being-there in the sense that if the dead person is no longer there (is simply absent), but rather our concern redirects itself away from the immediate, is not enthralled in the lustre of the immediate, but rather concerns itself otherwise – the meaning of which we shall soon see (see FCM, 63; CTP, 212-213).

Heidegger says that “this potential to be away ultimately belongs to the way man is in general. Yet man has the potential to be away in this manner only if his being has the character of being-there.” (FCM, 63) The not-being-there speaks to a peculiar attunement of boredom in Dasein, which Heidegger calls its most fundamental attunement. (cf FCM, 89)

Generally speaking, Heidegger suggests, boredom is a kind of stretching out of time, even if we drive it away or escape it by finding something to occupy ourselves with, and hence is always with us  in some way or other.  It will go away for a certain period of time, but since no involvement can concern us absolutely, it will return. We cannot escape it through the passage of time. Heidegger says that “[w]ith open eyes [boredom] looks into our Dasein (albeit from a distance), and with this gaze already penetrates us and attunes us through and through … [It is an] insidious creature that maintains its monstrous essence in our Dasein.” (FCM, 79). This boredom is a not being lost in or engrossed by something, which happens at various times to various degrees, and we usually encounter it because of the various ways we try to ‘pass the time’ in relation to it.

On the other hand, at a fundamental level, it happens subtly, and yet absolutely. Often as people we will make time for ourselves to go out for the evening with friends. In doing this we our able to leave ourselves behind for a time, that empty us which we would have had to live with if we remained at home. Even this, though, doesn’t allow us to escape our boredom entirely, as evidenced by a slight yawn or polite tapping of the fingers during the conversation. And in any event, you know it is just for one night, that your desire to eliminate boredom will not be properly satiated by it.

Everyone knows that, for instance, the luster of a new favorite song quickly wears off after repeatedly playing it for hours on end – a problem also for new love. In the time we give ourselves for the evening out, we bring time, the drawing out of time, to a standstill, but only for a while where we are entirely present in the situation, cut off from our past responsibilities and future concerns.

We see this in the reverse direction when melancholics observe people that have been oppressed by something or other (either directly or indirectly) and the oppressed take it up as their cause to right the injustice with all the fire of youth in an existence of unity and purpose. This is the essence of being-there as Care/Cura.  The individual with the cause  speaks from an existence pervaded by purpose and a drive toward the overcoming of inequity and tyranny, while the melancholic, partially out of amusement and partially out of self-pity remarks: “at least this person, unlike me, has a cause.”

We might say that there are many things that press on us in life: the sensation of first eye-contact with a strange girl, the heartbreak of a love betrayed, the oppression of one’s ‘rights,’ the need to fight for philosophy against a common conception of its triviality, the sorrow at the emptiness of religion in our time, the philandering of politicians, the television channel changer that is not at hand, and we could draw this out infinitely. Heidegger writes that the most profound boredom consists in the fact that none of these concerns oppress us absolutely, “[t]he deepest, essential need in Dasein is not that a particular actual need oppresses us, but that an essential oppressiveness refuses itself, that we scarcely apprehend and are scarcely able to apprehend this telling refusal of any oppressiveness as a whole.” (FCM, 163-165)

Similarly, we see Seneca’s “nausea,” seasickness, which means profound boredom:

26.  Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle, fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26)

We see a similar thought about this eternal return of the same expressed in the Jewish tradition by Ecclesiastes: Ecclesiastes in the bible makes the point about the tedium and pointlessness of life because there is just a circular bad repetition  ad nauseam of “the same” with the consequence that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), that life becomes inherently meaningless in the face of eternal recurrence:

All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

Seneca says the rich are especially prone to boredom.  In Epistle 24 Seneca says boredom can be such a problem that it leads to suicide.  Life is seen not as bitter but superfluous, and one is prone to the libido moriendi or death drive. Seneca observed that some people seek death not out of great tragedy, but out of sheer exhaustion from the repetitive nature of life. He noted that both the highly educated and the ignorant could fall victim to this.

Like the historical analogy with Ecclesiastes and The Stoics, Nietzsche seems to very much have Schopenhauer in mind with eternal tragic temporal repetition. Schopenhauer said in On the Sufferings of the World:

“Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life… [And in his essays on Pessimism Schopenhauer summarizes] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

 To which Nietzsche responds to Schopenhauer regarding the performance from the point of view of the creative and artistic individual:

“56. Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naivete with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather, fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary. – – What? and that wouldn’t be –circulus vitiosus deus? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Eternal return wipes away meaningfulness from beings, and so this is tragic for the eros of the sick and weakly like Achilles, but an opportunity for creation for the transfiguring godless agape of the artistic and healthy.  Circular time devastates, like a favorite gospel song can go from presencing numinously to presencing irritatingly just by playing it on continual repeat.  Hence, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche twice: “To stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest form of will to power.”

Even when a person experiences the profound apathy of acedia, they are still burdened by their existence. The fact that the world feels “empty” or “meaningless” in acedia proves that human beings inherently expect it to have meaning. You can only experience a lack of care because your baseline state is designed for care.

Heidegger distinguishes between authentic care (facing up to one’s freedom and mortality) and inauthentic care (losing oneself in the superficial distractions of everyday life).

Acedia perfectly mirrors what Heidegger calls falling (Verfallensein) and deep boredom.  When hit by acedia, an individual flees from the anxiety of their own freedom. Instead of choosing a meaningful path, they either paralyze themselves or scatter their attention across meaningless tasks to escape themselves.  But there is great healing to be had with profound boredom.  Evagrius says “Once you’ve contended with acedia, you really experience a deep peace that is deeper than almost anything else you’ll ever find. Because you’ve come through that really bad time of thinking everything as meaningless. Nothing matters at all, and then you pull through.”  Likewise, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that avoiding boredom at all costs prevents deep personal growth and creative breakthroughs – failing to tap into that restless energy. He believed that the modern impulse to constantly seek distraction strips life of its profound meaning.

Perhaps the most famous recent essay on acedia came from Aldous Huxley in his 1958 essay “Accidie” (his spelling for acedia).   Describing it as an extreme form of boredom or ennui, Huxley suggests that the evolution of urban life has led to a new source of acedia for many city-dwellers.  “Habituated to the feverish existence of these few centers of activity,”  Huxley wrote. “Men found that life outside them was intolerable insipid.  And at the same time they became so much exhausted by the restlessness of city life that they pined for the monotonous boredom of the provinces, for exotic islands, even for other worlds—any haven of rest.”  According to Huxley, what began as a peculiar disorder found in desert monks may well have become a major complaint of the modern age. 

This reminds us of Odysseus who left home pursuing the uncanny of adventure and battle only to end up trapped on the island of Kalypso, the uncanny (deine) goddess offering him the luxuries of a god but Odysseus only pines to return to his home/hearth and wife.  “[t]he hearth is the site of being-homely … Latin vesta is the Roman name for the goddess of the hearth fire … para: alongside – beside, or more precisely, in the sphere of the same presence; parestios, the one who is present within the sphere of protection and intimacy belonging to the homestead and who belongs to the radiance and warmth and glow of this fire (Heidegger’s HHTI, 106,).”

Heidegger links cura directly to time. To care means to project yourself into the future while dealing with your present reality.  Acedia disrupts this temporal flow. In a state of acedia, the future is stripped of possibility, the past feels like a weight, and the present becomes an agonizing, stretched-out void.  By looking at how acedia breaks a person’s relationship with time, we can better see why Heidegger argued that healthy, functional cura is what keeps our experience of time moving forward.

In Being and Time (§42), Heidegger explicitly uses an ancient Roman fable—the Myth of Cura, recorded by the Roman writer Hyginus—to show that his philosophical concept of “care” is not a modern invention, but an ancient, pre-philosophical insight into human nature.

By analyzing this myth, Heidegger bridges abstract metaphysics with primordial human storytelling, showing that human beings have always understood themselves as shaped entirely by care.

The Narrative of the Myth

The fable is brief but rich in symbolism. The story unfolds in a few simple movements:

1. The Creation: While crossing a river, Cura (Care) sees some clay. She thoughtfully begins to shape it into a creature. While she is pondering what she has made, Jupiter (the sky god / spirit) arrives. Cura asks him to give the clay creature a spirit, which he gladly does.
2. The Naming Dispute: Cura wants to name the creature after herself. Jupiter refuses, demanding it be named after him since he provided the spirit. Suddenly, Tellus (the Earth goddess) rises up and demands the creature bear her name, because she provided the body (the clay).
3. The Judgment: Saturn (Cronus, the god of Time) is called upon to judge the dispute. He delivers a cosmic verdict:
   • Jupiter will receive the spirit upon the creature’s death.
   • Tellus will receive the body back into the earth upon death.
   • Cura will possess the creature for its entire duration of life, because she was the one who first shaped it.
   • The Name: The creature will be called Homo (human), because it was made from humus (earth).

How Heidegger Decodes the Myth

Heidegger uses this myth to validate his entire existential framework. He extracts three profound ontological truths from Saturn’s judgment:

1. Care is the “Fabric” of Human Life

Saturn awards Homo to Cura for the entity’s entire lifespan. Heidegger highlights this to show that care is not an accidental characteristic you experience occasionally. It is the permanent condition of being human. From birth to death, to be human is to be occupied by, worried about, and engaged with existence. You cannot escape care; it is the “holding environment” of human life.  Cura is what has disclosed itself as the humanity of the human, not being “a rational animal.”

2. The In-Between Nature of Humans (Facticity vs. Possibility)

The myth perfectly maps onto Heidegger’s concepts of thrownness (Facticity) and projection (Possibility):

Tellus (Earth/Body): Represents what Heidegger calls our thrownness. We are physical, mortal beings bound to the earth, born into a specific time, place, and limitation we did not choose.

Jupiter (Spirit/Sky): Represents our projection. We have a consciousness that aims upward, looks toward the future, and visualizes endless possibilities.

Cura (The Binder): Care is what negotiates these two forces. Humans are caught between their physical limitations and their spiritual freedom. Care is the tension of navigating a mortal life filled with choices.

3. Time as the Ultimate Judge

It is highly significant to Heidegger that Saturn (Time) is the judge who decides human destiny. Heidegger’s central thesis is that the meaning of human being is rooted in time.
By having Time decree that Care possesses humans, the myth anticipates Heidegger’s conclusion: human existence is a finite stretch of time, and “Care” is simply the way we experience time. We care because we are finite (the cancer patient may think in terms of “the time I have left”), moving toward death, and must make our limited time count

In Heidegger’s philosophy, cura (care), acedia (apathy), falling (Verfallensein), and deep boredom (tiefen Langeweile) form a tightly knit web of concepts. They describe how human beings handle the heavy burden of their own existence.

To put it simply: Cura is the baseline rule of human life. Falling and deep boredom are psychological and existential states where that baseline rule gets twisted. Acedia is the ultimate, historical manifestation of this breakdown.

Here is how these concepts intimately connect.

1. Falling (Verfallensein) as the Escape from Cura

For Heidegger, cura (care) means you are completely responsible for your own life. You must make choices, face your mortality, and define who you are. This creates immense anxiety. Because this anxiety is painful, humans naturally tend to run away from it. This running away is what Heidegger calls falling (Verfallensein).

The Inauthentic Escape: When you “fall,” you plunge headfirst into the superficial, everyday world. You lose yourself in idle talk, curiosity, and doing what “everyone else” does (the realm of Das Man, or “the They”).

The Connection to Cura: Falling is not the absence of care; it is a deficient, inauthentic mode of care. You are still caring, but you are caring about trivialities—celebrity gossip, social status, or endless busywork—specifically to avoid caring about your actual, authentic self.

The Connection to Acedia: Acedia historically represents the breakdown of this busywork. In classical theology, acedia makes a monk restless, causing him to constantly check his cell door or wish he were elsewhere. This restless distraction is precisely what Heidegger describes as the “curiosity” and “restlessness” of falling.

2. Deep Boredom (tiefen Langeweile) as the Collapse of Falling

If falling is how we use busywork to escape ourselves, deep boredom is what happens when that busywork completely fails. Heidegger dedicated a massive portion of his 1929/30 lectures to analyzing boredom, dividing it into three levels. The third level is “deep boredom” (tiefen Langeweile).

The Experience: Unlike being bored by a late train or a dull party, deep boredom has no specific object. It is a profound, echoing emptiness where the entire world, all activities, and all things slip away into total indifference. It is the eerie feeling of “it is boring to one.”

The Connection to Cura: Deep boredom forces a confrontation with cura. When the world becomes completely indifferent, you are stripped of all your usual daily distractions. You are left entirely alone with the bare, raw fact of your existence. Deep boredom forces you to realize: “I exist, my time is ticking away, and I am the one who must decide what to do with it.”

The Connection to Acedia: Deep boredom is the exact phenomenological translation of acedia. Acedia is the “noonday demon” where everything loses its color, meaning, and value. Both states pull back the curtain of daily busyness to reveal the underlying abyss of human existence.

Heidegger and Boss comment

• “Our patients force us to see the human being in his essential ground because the modem ‘neuroses of boredom and meaninglessness’ can no longer be drowned out by glossing over or covering up particular symptoms of illness. If one treats those symptoms only, then another symptom will emerge again and again … They no longer see meaning in their life and … they have become intolerably bored (Heidegger and Boss, Zollikon Seminar, 160-161)”

3. The Synthetic View: The Arc of Existential Flight

To understand how Heidegger uses these together, look at them as a psychological and existential sequence of how humans handle reality:

The Baseline (Cura): You are built out of care. Existence matters to you.

The Defense Mechanism (Falling): Because caring authentically is terrifying and exhausting, you distract yourself with the world. You mistake “being busy” for “caring.”

The Crisis (Deep Boredom / Acedia): Suddenly, the distraction stops working. Acedia/Deep Boredom strikes. The world loses its flavor. You cannot muster the energy to care about your usual distractions.

The Crossroads: For Heidegger, this moment of profound acedia or deep boredom is actually a gift. It is an existential wake-up call. It strips away your inauthentic illusions and forces you to either sink into total despair or reclaim your cura authentically by choosing your own path in the face of death.

In Martin Heidegger’s philosophical framework, Acedia/Deep Boredom (tiefen Langeweile) and Angst (Anxiety) are both profound existential moods (Stimmungen). They are not mere psychological feelings, but cosmic shifts in how human existence (Dasein) experiences the world.

While both moods strip away our everyday illusions and expose the raw reality of existence, they do so with opposite dynamics. To put it simply: Angst is an aggressive, terrifying confrontation with freedom, while Boredom/Acedia is a paralyzing, oppressive drain of all meaning.

The Core Contrast

Dimension	Deep Boredom / Acedia	Angst (Anxiety)
The Core Sensation	Oppression and Paralysis. The world feels completely flat, gray, and indifferent.	Uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). The world feels strange, unstable, and slipping away.
The Movement of the World	The world refuses us. It locks us out and offers absolutely nothing to engage with.	The world collapses. Its entire structure of meaning slips away into insignificance.
The Direction of Focus	Dragged down into a frozen present. Time stretches out agonizingly and stagnates.	Projected into the future. The self faces its own ultimate finitude and mortality.
The Existential Call	Forces us to realize our empty time must be filled by our own choices.	Forces us to realize our radical freedom and responsibility for our own life.

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1. Deep Boredom / Acedia: The Refusal of the World

In his 1929/30 lectures, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger explains that deep boredom occurs when the world tells us: “There is nothing here for you.”

The Mechanism of “Emptying”: In deep boredom (the secular twin of monastic acedia), entities do not vanish. They remain exactly where they are, but they lose their utility and value. Your books, your phone, your career, and your relationships all stand before you, but they are completely stripped of meaning.

The Experience of Time: Boredom binds you to a stagnating, elongated present. Time becomes a burden because it is “passing too slowly,” leaving you trapped in an existential waiting room with no exit.

The Result: You are left completely paralyzed by a profound apathy, paralyzed by the weight of your own existence because the world has refused to entertain or distract you.

2. Angst: The Collapse of the World

This, too, is a different way of “There is nothing here for you.”  In Being and Time (§40), Heidegger isolates Angst as the ultimate mood that unlocks authenticity. Angst is completely different from fear; fear has a specific object (e.g., fear of a spider or a failing grade), whereas Angst is about nothing in particular.

The Mechanism of “Slipping Away”: In Angst, the entire web of cultural meanings and social roles that you rely on completely collapses. You realize that the titles you hold (student, worker, citizen) are just fragile constructs. The world does not turn flat and heavy (as in boredom); instead, it slips away entirely, leaving you feeling “uncanny” or “not-at-home” (unheimlich).

The Experience of Freedom: When the world collapses in Angst, you are forced to look at your ultimate limitation: death. Facing death isolates you from the crowd (Das Man). It forces you to realize that you are radically free, completely alone, and entirely responsible for inventing your own purpose out of nothing.

How They Work Together: The Trap vs. The Springboard

To see how these two concepts interact within Heidegger’s understanding of human life, consider them as two different doors out of our superficial, everyday lives:

• Angst is the lightning strike. It shocks you out of your comfort zone. It is terrifying, but it contains an electric energy. Because it exposes your mortality, it acts as a springboard that directly forces you to seize your life and act authentically
• Boredom/Acedia is the slow, suffocating fog. It traps you in place. It shows you the emptiness of existence, but it drains your energy to do anything about it. You must fight your way out of boredom by actively forcing yourself to care again.

We see these two for instance in the poetry/music of popular culture:

• Recall from Alanis Morissette’s song “All I Really Want”

Why are you so petrified of silence?

Here, can you handle this ……………?

Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines

Or when you think you’re gonna die?

Or did you long for the next distraction?

The lyric explores the anxiety of being left alone with your own thoughts and the tendency to seek out endless distractions—like bills, exes, and deadlines—just to avoid the stillness.

• Similarly, in “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes we hear

I was tired of my lady

We’d been together too long

Like a worn out recording

Of a favorite song

The question of the meaning of Being implies a certain kind of questioner, is Dasein or being-there (as opposed to nicht-da-sein or not-being-there when you are not caught up/ bored with what’s going on) as cura because such questions are asked by philosophers and poets, people passionate for the big picture(s) in all areas of life with meleta to pan. We have the ancient image of Thales lost in thought and falling in a ditch.

Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being is not a neutral or universal question that anyone asks at any time. It presupposes a distinctive mode of Dasein—a specific way of being “there” (da) rather than “not-there” (nicht-da).

Dasein as Engaged Questioner

Dasein is not just “human being” in a biological or generic sense. It is the being for whom its own Being is always an issue, circumspective, the being that is thrown into a world and projects itself upon possibilities. The question of Being arises most authentically when Dasein is not lost in absorption or “fallen” into the everyday chatter of das Man, but when it is brought back to itself through care (Sorge / cura).

Care (Sorge) is the fundamental ontological structure of Dasein: ahead-of-itself (projection), already-in-the-world (thrownness), and alongside entities (concern and solicitude). Philosophical questioning is a heightened form of this care—an anxious, passionate disposition for the big picture(s) rather than the individual brushstrokes:  meletē tou pantos (care for the whole).

This contrasts with the distracted, bored, or “not-there” modes: when one is fully caught up in equipmental dealings without reflection, or disengaged in idle talk, curiosity, or ambiguity. The question of Being requires a certain resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) and authenticity—a willingness to confront anxiety (Angst), finitude, and the call of conscience.

Heidegger thus describes the questioner in a way that echoes the ancient philosophical ideal: the one who is passionate for the whole.

The Thales Image and Philosophical Tradition

The anecdote of Thales of Miletus falling into a well (or ditch) while gazing at the stars (told by Plato in the Theaetetus and Aristotle) perfectly captures this. The philosopher is so absorbed in contemplating the cosmos and the fundamental nature of things that he loses practical orientation in the everyday world. The Thracian maidservant laughs at him for this “impracticality.”

Heidegger appreciates this image because it illustrates:

The shift from absorbed, practical concern (Besorgen) to a theoretical, ontological gaze.

The tension between everyday “being-there” (practical coping) and the rarer, more primordial “being-there” of wonder and questioning.

That authentic philosophy (and poetry) involves a kind of ek-stasis—standing outside the ordinary absorption to see the whole.

This connects to the Greek thaumazein (wonder) as the beginning of philosophy. Philosophers and poets (think Hölderlin for Heidegger) are exemplary because they keep the question of Being open, even at the cost of appearing ridiculous or out of place in the everyday world.

In short, the question of the meaning of Being calls for a caring, engaged, whole-oriented Dasein—one that is passionately “there” in a deeper sense, even (or especially) when it seems absent from ordinary concerns. It is not asked by everyone in the same way, nor at every moment. It requires a certain attunement, often cultivated through anxiety, breakdown, or deliberate retrieval of the forgotten question.

This also explains why Heidegger sees his project as a retrieval (Wiederholung)—re-awakening a question that has been covered over by the Western tradition’s focus on beings rather than Being itself.

Let’s tie this directly to the text of Being and Time.§40:

Anxiety as the Mood that Discloses Care and Pulls Dasein Back to Authentic “Being-There”

In Division One, Chapter 6 (§39–§44), Heidegger culminates the preparatory analysis of Dasein by showing that the unified ontological structure of human existence is Care (Sorge). §40 is pivotal: anxiety is not just one mood among others but a distinctive basic state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) that discloses Dasein in its wholeness.

Key points from §40:

In everyday absorption, Dasein is “there” in a fallen, dispersed way — lost in the ready-to-hand equipmental context and the public “they” (das Man). This is a kind of being-there that is not authentically there (our nicht-da-sein).

Anxiety (Angst) has no definite object (unlike fear, which has a worldly entity as its threat). What anxiety discloses is the world as world and the nothing/nowhere: “That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such.”  So, the awkward kid at the party desperately wants to fit in but can’t and so at least tries to put on a show that he’s fitting in by pretending to be interested in examining a plant.  Or, the thinker feels let down by everyday beings as a whole (as trivial) that most people are caught up in.

This specific transition—(i) desperately trying and searching but failing to find meaning in the concrete, everyday world and consequently retreating into, or being saved by, the world of pure ideas—is a profound archetype spanning literature, philosophy, and history.  Heidegger calls our attention to Aristotle that Aristotle asks why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of a gloomy, melancholic temperament (Problemata XXX.1 953a10-14)?  (ii) We too see this in the realm of thought with thinkers anxiously adopting and abandoning intellectual system after system trying to find their place/fit.

The inability of the awkward kid to fit in the world of the party or the thinker in the everyday world can be thought in analogy to the broken hammer not belonging to the world of the carpenter.  Why?

In Heidegger’s Being and Time, a referential totality (or Verweisungstotalität) is the interconnected web of purpose and meaning that makes up our everyday world. Rather than experiencing objects as isolated, independent entities, we understand them in relation to one another and to our own projects and goals. So, a table is badly positioned in the middle of the gym during the basketball game – not just from our point of view but in itself.

To understand a referential totality, Heidegger uses the example of equipment (or Zeug): a hammer. You don’t just see a isolated block of wood and iron. The hammer is defined by its in-order-to (in order to drive a nail); the nail is for fastening wood; the wood is for building a house; and the house is for sheltering human life. Every piece of equipment points to, or refers to, another tool, a human action, and ultimately, a purpose (which Heidegger ties to human existence).

Here are the key characteristics of a referential totality:

The Ready-to-Hand (Zuhanden): This is the mode of being for objects we use daily. We interact with them through practical know-how rather than theoretical observation.

Significance: The totality of these interlocking references and assignments constitutes what Heidegger calls “significance”. This network of significance is what essentially makes a “world” a world, rather than just a collection of physical objects.

Breakdowns: This system of references often goes unnoticed while we are actively using tools. It usually only becomes explicitly visible when a tool breaks—for example, if a hammer breaks, it suddenly interrupts the whole chain of action, forcing us to notice the hammer itself and the task it was meant for.

Here are powerful examples across fiction, poetry, and history of thinkers who felt out of place in the everyday world, and even in the world of thought:

In Fiction

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Faust is the ultimate embodiment of this archetype. The story begins with Faust in his study, completely disillusioned with the everyday world. He has mastered philosophy, law, medicine, and theology, yet feels they have yielded no true meaning. Desperate for experiential, real-world fulfillment, he makes a pact with Mephistopheles. However, worldly pleasures, romance, and political power ultimately fail to satisfy him. It is only when he turns back to a grand, idealistic vision of human progress and abstract creation that he finds a fleeting moment of true peace.

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote: Alonzo Quixano is an aging gentleman living a mundane, boring, everyday life in La Mancha. The physical world offers him absolutely nothing of worth. Consequently, he retreats entirely into the world of ideas—specifically, the idealistic codes of chivalry found in romances. By renaming himself Don Quixote, he superimposes a magnificent world of concepts (honor, justice, giants) onto a dusty, uninspired reality. Even though the world calls him mad, he finds his true purpose entirely within that mental landscape.

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: Siddhartha tries desperately to find meaning in the conventional, material world. He becomes a wealthy merchant, indulges in luxury, and experiences romantic love, only to find that the everyday world leaves him feeling spiritually dead and empty. He eventually abandons the material world entirely to live by a river, finding his ultimate purpose in the abstract, interconnected idea of the “Om”—the oneness of all existence.

 In Poetry

Wallace Stevens: Stevens was a real-life insurance executive who lived a quiet, highly conventional life. However, his poetry is almost entirely a celebration of how the human imagination and the “world of ideas” rescue us from the crushing, mundane reality of the physical world. In his famous poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he describes a woman singing by the sea. The sea is just mindless, everyday nature, but her song—representing the world of ideas and art—completely rearranges and gives meaning to the universe around her.

Fernando Pessoa: The twentieth-century Portuguese poet lived a notoriously drab, ordinary life as a modest commercial translator in Lisbon. Yet, he rejected the physical world, stating that “literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” He created over 70 “heteronyms”—entirely fictional alter-egos, each with their own complex philosophies, biographies, and poetic styles. Through his Book of Disquiet, he documented a soul that completely failed to function in the everyday world but built a sprawling, infinite empire entirely out of thoughts.

Historical Figures

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677): Spinoza was excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam, isolated from mainstream society, and spent his days grinding optical lenses for a meager living. The everyday social and material world offered him no comfort, security, or belonging. Instead, he lived entirely in his mind, constructing a radical, breathtaking philosophical system (Ethics) that viewed everything in the universe as part of a single, divine geometric order. He found his absolute purpose in what he called the “intellectual love of God”—a purely conceptual, rational joy.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986): Though he lived a physical life, Borges famously suffered from progressive blindness, which gradually cut him off from the visual, everyday world. Rather than sinking into despair, he retreated entirely into a universe of books, mazes, and infinity. He famously conceptualized the universe as a vast, limitless library. He became the ultimate dweller in the world of ideas, finding purpose not in physical experiences, but in the infinite combinations of human thought and memory.

Justin Martyr (c. 100 – 165 AD). Before his ultimate conversion, he was a deeply restless pagan intellectual who explicitly wrote about his journey of “shopping around” and switching from one major ancient school of philosophy to another because none of them could satisfy his spiritual cravings.  In his autobiographical work, Dialogue with Trypho, he describes his relentless and frustrating search:  The Stoics: He first joined the Stoic school. He left them in frustration because his master could not explain the nature of God to him (and told him such knowledge wasn’t even necessary).  The Peripatetics (Aristotelians): He then went to a Peripatetic teacher. This thinker was highly concerned with his tuition fee and demanded payment almost immediately. Disgusted by the commercialization of truth, Justin left.  The Pythagoreans: Next, he approached a famous Pythagorean master. This teacher refused to even admit Justin into the school until he spent years mastering music, astronomy, and geometry. Justin felt he didn’t have the patience or the time for such delayed answers and quit.  The Platonists: He finally turned to Platonism. This school captivated his intellect significantly; he loved the theory of ideas and forms, and spent his days in deep contemplation.  The Resolution:  Despite finding some peace in Platonism, his mind remained restless. While walking completely alone along the seashore trying to find quiet, he crossed paths with an old man. Instead of debating him with clever rhetoric, the old man introduced Justin to the Hebrew prophets and the teachings of Jesus. Justin famously wrote that a flame was instantly kindled in his soul. He finally found his resting place, declaring Christianity to be the “only sure and profitable philosophy.”

Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 AD): Famously coined the phrase “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee.” He bounced erratically from standard Cicero-style rhetoric to Manichaeism (a dualistic cosmic religion), to Academic Skepticism, to Neoplatonism, before finally converting to Christianity.  In his Confessions, Augustine describes a restless intellectual and spiritual journey across multiple systems as he sought truth, belonging, and resolution to questions like the nature of evil, happiness, and the self. Key stages included:

Early exposure to Christianity (as a catechumen) but dissatisfaction with its scriptures and apparent intellectual simplicity.

Adherence to Manichaeism (a dualistic religion/philosophy blending elements of Christianity, Gnosticism, and Persian thought) for about nine years as a “hearer.” It appealed to him with its explanations of good vs. evil as cosmic forces and its intellectual pretensions, but he grew disillusioned after meeting a key teacher (Faustus) who couldn’t satisfy his philosophical doubts.

A period of skepticism and exploration of Academic Skepticism (doubting certainty) combined with Neoplatonism (via Plotinus and others), which helped him intellectually overcome Manichaean dualism by framing evil as privation rather than a substance and emphasizing an inner ascent toward the divine.

Final conversion to Nicene Christianity in 386–387 CE, influenced by Bishop Ambrose of Milan, personal crisis, and a famous garden episode (“tolle, lege” — take up and read, leading to Paul’s letters). He was baptized in 387.

Augustine’s path was marked by ambition (as a rhetorician), personal struggles (e.g., relationships, career), and intellectual hunger. He viewed philosophy/religion not as abstract systems but as ways of life, and his writings later critiqued his former affiliations while synthesizing elements (especially Platonic ideas) with Christian faith. This “restless switching” exemplifies the ancient trope of philosophy as conversion or turning (epistrophē).

Galen (129 – c. 216 AD): Though primarily a legendary medical doctor, he was deeply philosophical. His wealthy father explicitly sent him to study under a Stoic, a Platonic, a Peripatetic, and an Epicurean teacher all at once so Galen could analyze them all and choose the best one. Galen grew restless with their constant bickering and decided to forge his own eclectic path

Finally, Horace’s boredom has him restlessly switch between town and country, turn against friends, and switch between philosophical standpoints from Cyrenaic hedonist, to indifferent stoic sage, to apathetic Epicurean, to unbending cynic, to accommodating Peripatetic. His positions are opportunistic and fickle, unable to remain with one set of beliefs.  Horace calls this a kind of boredom and restless desire for change insanity (insanire).  Horace has intellectual horror loci, just as he does in his regular life.

Creative types are exemplary humans, humanity incarnate, extreme examples of the general case of acedia/cura: 

• “Aristotle,  Plato’s disciple,  relates  at one place  (Nicomachean  Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 7ff.)  the basic conception determining the Greek  view on the  essence of the  thinker: ‘lt is said  they  (the  thinkers)  indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in  general ‘demonic’-but also  useless,  for  they are  not seeking what is, according to straightforward popular opinion, good for man.” The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of “philosophy” and of the  “philosopher,”  already knew quite  well  that thinkers  are not “close  to  life.”  But only  the  Greeks  concluded  from  this  lack  of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary-precisely in  view of the essential  misery of man. (Heidegger Parmenides 100).”

Regarding restlessness, In De tranquillitate animi, Seneca addresses a joyous state of mind as peacefully oscillating between satisfaction and dissatisfaction with one’s possessions, between desire for public and private life, and between the high and low literary styles.  He calls this “a great, noble, and godlike thing; not to be shaken,” a phrase Seneca traces to Democritus.  This was euthymia, what for Cicero and Horace was aecuus animus or a calm and balanced mind.  Boredom was a subject which concerned the ancient Greeks, indeed, Socrates suffered the indignity of being criticized by some for repetition and monotony (Kuhn, 1976).

The word ‘acedia’ was used at this time, which is closer to what we would describe as tedium. Plato defended his protagonist by asserting the need for consistency. In the Timaeus he compared the constancy of the stars with man’s own erratic and disorderly thoughts, and believed that people should aspire to the regularity of the heavenly bodies and attune to them (Healy, 1984). The early Christians also aspired to this same ideal, with St Thomas Aquinas writing of the soul entering a state of uniformity (Kuhn, 1976).  Theoria/wisdom is the pure onlooking upon and attuning oneself to that which never changes.  The looking itself bears no alteration, “the possibility of a pure tarrying, which has nothing of the unrest of seeking (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 120).”

Counterposed to the unhomely, to restlessness, dwelling is to be at peace, and Heidegger says “in what does the nature of dwelling consist? … The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace (PLT, BDT, 148-9).” The Greeks called the parestios, the counter concept of apolis/deinon.  However, the unhomeliness of mortal man, as opposed to the divine, consists precisely in his restless lack of ability to remain at home, “The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell (Heidegger, PLT, BDT, 161).”

Nietzsche knew well the difference between living a tragic life of eternal return of the same where everything is experienced “as though” it had been experienced an infinite number of times, like a worn out recording of a favorite song, and a creative life of eternal return of the same difference where everything is joyous and new.  Nietzsche said in a letter to Overbeck that his creative energies being poured into creating his Third Untimely Meditation left him invulnerable to the agitated boring eternal return of cabin fever that was effecting the people around him (Nietzsche, 1975,: 11.3 382).

Anxiety makes Dasein feel uncanny (unheimlich — not-at-home). It tears Dasein away from its familiar, tranquilized absorption in the everyday and brings it face-to-face with itself as thrown projection — i.e., as pure Care: “ahead-of-itself-already-being-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).”

This is the moment when Dasein can become authentically “there.” The question of Being becomes possible precisely because anxiety individualizes Dasein and reveals its finitude, possibility, and responsibility for its own existence. Philosophers and poets (the passionate questioners) often live closer to this anxious attunement.

The Awkward Kid at the Party

The awkward kid at a party, unable to join the conversations and so examining a plant (or phone, bookshelf, etc.), is a good ontic illustration of a minor breakdown in smooth absorption. In Heideggerian terms:

Normally, at a well-functioning party, one is lost in the ready-to-hand social equipment: small talk, gestures, music, drinks — the referential totality of “being-with-others” in the mode of das Man. One is “there” but dispersed and tranquilized.

When that absorption fails (the kid doesn’t “fit”), a slight uncanniness arises. Turning to the plant is still mostly curiosity or a fallback into concern (Besorgen) with an innerworldly entity — a way of covering over the discomfort rather than facing it. It is a minor “not-being-at-home” that is quickly patched.

This is not yet full anxiety in Heidegger’s sense. It is more like a localized breakdown that could open the way to anxiety if pursued further (e.g., if the discomfort reveals the emptiness of the whole social scene). Many everyday “awkward” or “bored” moments hover at this threshold but flee back into distraction.

The Thinker Feeling Let Down by Everyday Beings

This comes much closer to Heidegger’s anxiety. When the thinker feels a pervasive let-down or insignificance in “everyday beings as a whole” (the parties, careers, gossip, pursuits that absorb most people), the mood approaches what Heidegger describes in §40.

The world as a whole “collapses into itself.” Entities lose their familiar significance and appear indifferent/trivial or oppressive.

This is the disclosure of the nothing — not a literal nihilism, but the groundlessness and finitude underlying all meaning. “That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such.”

The thinker experiences uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit): not-being-at-home in the public world of das Man. Everyday absorption no longer tranquilizes. This is the condition in which the question of Being can genuinely arise, because Dasein is thrown back upon itself as pure Care — a thrown projection that must take over its own existence.

Philosophers and poets often dwell longer in this region. They are more willing to let the anxiety disclose the “as a whole” rather than patching it with a plant, a drink, or new gossip (curiosity). Thales gazing at the stars while falling in the ditch is the classic image of this absorbed, uncanny attunement to the whole at the expense of everyday “fitting in.”

Heidegger insists that authentic anxiety is rare and usually fleeting. Most of us (even thinkers) quickly fall back into inauthenticity. The “awkward kid” moment is common; the deep, world-shaking anxiety that individualizes and calls one to resoluteness is exceptional — and it is the gateway to fundamental ontology.

Our contrast between:

Dispersed, tranquilized “being-there” (fallen, curiosity-driven, social absorption), and

Uncanny, individualized “Being-there” (anxious, caring, open to the question of Being)

This exactly what §40 aims to show. Anxiety rips away the Band-Aids and reveals the structure of Care that was always operating underneath.

This also explains why the passionate questioner (meletē tou pantos) often feels alienated from the everyday: they are attuned to a deeper “there,” the big picture(s) or seeing the forest rather than the trees that makes ordinary “there-ness” feel insufficient.

Anxiety thus converts the distracted “not-there” into a resolute, caring “Being-there.” It is the affective condition for raising the question of the meaning of Being with genuine depth.

Curiosity (Neugier) vs. Wonder (in §§35–38, especially §36)

Heidegger contrasts inauthentic, fallen ways of disclosing with more primordial ones. Curiosity (Neugier — literally “greed for the new”) is analyzed in §36 as one of the main characteristics of fallenness (Verfallen), alongside idle talk and ambiguity.

Curiosity is a restless, distracted seeking of novelty for its own sake. It “seeks what is new only in order to jump from it anew to something else that is newer.” It leaps from one thing to the next without tarrying, without genuine understanding, and without letting beings show themselves as they are.

It is a deficient mode of seeing: a kind of “not tarrying” that corresponds to our “not-being-there” or bored/casual disengagement. It keeps Dasein dispersed and entertained by the world rather than opened to it primordially.

This is explicitly contrasted (in Heidegger’s broader corpus and interpretive readings of Being and Time) with wonder (thaumazein). Wonder does not chase the novel; it lets the usual appear as extraordinary. It tarries with beings and lets them be in their Being. Wonder is closer to the philosophical/poetic attunement — the meletē tou pantos (care for the whole / big picture[s]) we mentioned. Thales falling into the ditch exemplifies this: he is so wonder-struck by the stars (the whole) that he is absent from the practical everyday.

Curiosity is the everyday, public perversion of the primordial tendency toward disclosure. It is “being-there” only in a superficial, jumping-around sense. Authentic questioning (the question of Being) requires the shift from curiosity to wonder, often mediated by anxiety.

Tying It Together with Thales and the Passionate Questioner

The philosopher/poet (exemplified by Thales) is the Dasein who, through anxiety or wonder, is passionately there for the whole. Everyday Dasein is mostly “not-there” in the mode of curiosity and absorption. The question of the meaning of Being is therefore not a universal academic exercise but one that arises for a specific kind of caring, anxious, wonder-attuned existence — the one willing to risk looking ridiculous (falling in the ditch) for the sake of what is fundamental.

This also explains Heidegger’s critique of the sciences and disciplines: they often operate in a theoretical mode derived from (but forgetful of) the more primordial, caring, anxious disclosure of Being-in-the-world.

Anxiety as a Privileged Form of Befindlichkeit

Befindlichkeit (§29) is one of the three equiprimordial existentialia that constitute the “there” (Da) of Dasein (alongside Verstehen/understanding and Rede/discourse). It is the ontological condition for having any moods or attunements at all. Heidegger translates the everyday German phrase “wie einem ist” (“how one is” or “how it is with one”) into a fundamental structure: moods always already disclose how things matter to us as a whole.

Ordinary moods (e.g., boredom at the party, mild social awkwardness, cheerfulness) disclose beings within the world while keeping the world itself veiled and familiar. They support falling and tranquilization.

Anxiety (§40) is the distinctive or privileged mode of Befindlichkeit. It does not disclose a particular threatening entity (like fear does) but discloses Being-in-the-world as such and the nothing (Nichts).

Key passage (paraphrased/quoted from §40):

“That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such… Anxiety ‘does not know’ what that in the face of which it is anxious is… Nowhere, however, does not signify nothing.”

In anxiety, the referential totality of the world (the “for-the-sake-of-which” structure) collapses into insignificance. This produces the feeling of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit — not-being-at-home). The awkward kid examining the plant is experiencing a derivative unease — still trying to find a ready-to-hand entity to latch onto. The disturbed deeper thinker’s “let-down by trivial everyday beings as a whole” is closer to authentic anxiety: the world itself no longer offers meaningful absorption.

Thus, anxiety reveals Befindlichkeit in its purest ontological function: it shows that Dasein is never moodless, and that moods are not inner psychological states but ways the world and our existence are disclosed. Anxiety individualizes because it strips away the public interpretations of das Man, forcing Dasein back upon its own thrown projection — i.e., upon Care (Sorge).

Anxiety and the Call of Conscience (Division Two, §§55–59)

The analysis in Division One remains largely preparatory and focused on inauthentic everydayness. Division Two retrieves these structures in their authentic temporal modes. Anxiety provides the crucial bridge.

The call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens, especially §56–57) is how Dasein attests to itself the possibility of authentic existence. Important points:

The call does not come from an external God, superego, or other person. It is Dasein calling itself from out of the depths of its own uncanniness. “The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness” (§57).

The call has the character of an appeal (Anruf): it calls Dasein away from lostness in das Man and back to its “ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self.”

What it calls Dasein to is resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). What it calls Dasein back from is falling and tranquilization.

The call discloses guilt (Schuld) in the ontological sense: Dasein’s fundamental nullity (Nichtigkeit) — the fact that it has been thrown into existence without having chosen its “there,” and that it is never fully identical with its possibilities.

Anxiety and the call are intimately linked:

Anxiety provides the attunement (the Befindlichkeit) in which the call can be heard. In everyday absorption, the call is drowned out by idle talk and curiosity. In the uncanniness of anxiety, Dasein becomes quiet and open enough to listen.

Both phenomena reveal the same underlying nothingness/nullity at the heart of Care: thrownness (nullity of the past), projection (nullity in always being “not yet”), and falling (nullity in everyday self).

Anxiety is the mood; the call of conscience is the discursive mode of that same disclosure. Together they prepare the way for authentic temporality (being-toward-death, anticipatory resoluteness).

In short: Anxiety rips Dasein out of inauthentic “not-being-there” and individualizes it. The call of conscience then gives that individualized, anxious Dasein a direction — toward owning its existence resolutely rather than fleeing back into the “they.”

Overall Movement

Befindlichkeit (general) → Anxiety (privileged disclosure of Care and the nothing) → Uncanniness → Hearing the call of conscience → Resoluteness and authentic historicity.

This is why philosophers and poets (the passion for the big picture[s] meletē tou pantos types) often live nearer the anxious/uncanny region: they are more willing to stay with the discomfort rather than patching it with a plant, a distraction, or public chatter. The Thales image captures the cost and the value of remaining in this attuned state.

One note I would add is the awkward kid at the party often desperately wants to fit in but can’t or doesn’t know how, and so examines the plant, not for something to do but to create the illusion for the rest of the party goers that that he actually is enjoying himself though he really isn’t. There is the double anxiety of not fitting in and trying to not be seen not fitting in. Fearing the judgement and ridicule of the crowd is the second moment here. We might think of Charlotte Bronte’s preface to Wuthering Heights noting Emily Bronte profoundly knew people though was not gregarious and rarely dealt with people. Thinkers are not close to life but this allows them to see the big pictures about life while everyone else is caught up and blind like someone too close to a relationship to see what all her friends see that it’s toxic.

That’s a sharper and more existentially rich refinement of the example. It highlights the layered, often defensive nature of inauthentic modes and contrasts nicely with the clearer (if lonelier) vision of the thinker.

The Awkward Kid: Double Anxiety and the “They”

Our updated description captures two intertwined moments that Heidegger would recognize:

Primary uncanniness — the raw feeling of not fitting in, of the social world no longer seamlessly supporting one’s Being-with-others. The party as a referential totality of “being-with” breaks down, producing a faint but real taste of Unheimlichkeit (not-being-at-home).

Secondary, covering-over anxiety — the desperate concern with how one appears to the they (das Man). The kid examines the plant not primarily out of genuine curiosity or absorption, but as a mask or performance: “Look, I’m engaged with something; I’m fine; don’t notice my exclusion.” This is anxiety about the judgment and ridicule of the crowd — a flight from the first anxiety into a modified form of falling.

This double structure is very Heideggerian. Everyday Dasein is constantly managing its “being-seen” in the public world (the slave girl laughing at Thales falling in a ditch). The fear of ridicule is fear in the mode of das Man — an inauthentic attunement that tranquilizes by directing concern outward toward social approval rather than inward toward the disclosure of Care. The plant becomes a piece of equipment for impression management rather than a genuine ready-to-hand object or a wondrous present-at-hand one.

Most people live in this layered evasion most of the time. The “they” provides both the standard of “fitting in” and the threat of exposure for failing it.

The Thinker’s Distance: Uncanniness as a Way of Seeing

Our point about Emily Brontë (via Charlotte’s preface to Wuthering Heights) is excellent. Emily was profoundly insightful about human passions, power, and the darker currents of existence precisely because she was not gregarious and rarely “dealt with people” in the ordinary social swirl. This distance is phenomenological:

Being too “close” (absorbed in the ready-to-hand social world, lost in das Man) produces a kind of blindness (can’t see the forest for the trees). One is caught up in the immediacy of relationships, small talk, and shared norms — like being inside a toxic relationship and unable to see what outsiders clearly perceive.

The thinker or poet often dwells longer in the uncanny mode. Their relative detachment or social “not-fitting-in” keeps them nearer to anxiety’s disclosive power. They see the “big picture” via the structures of Care, thrownness, falling, authenticity/inauthenticity because they are less fully tranquilized by everyday absorption.

This is not a romantic glorification of the outsider. Heidegger is clear that such distance can also lead to its own inauthentic modes (e.g., detached curiosity or arrogance). But it can free one for a more primordial attunement — the kind that lets the world as a whole and human existence show themselves more originally.

Thales falling into the ditch while gazing at the stars is the ancient archetype: so absorbed in the fundamental that the immediate social/practical world recedes. The Brontë sisters (especially Emily) offer a 19th-century literary version: seeing the grand, often terrifying contours of human Being precisely because they stood at a certain remove from its everyday bustle.

Heideggerian Takeaway

Inauthentic Dasein experiences anxiety but flees it through impression management and fear of the “they’s” judgment. The double layer keeps the deeper disclosure at bay.

More authentic attunement (the thinker/poet) lets anxiety do its work. The resulting uncanniness and distance become conditions for seeing the structures that everyone else is too close to notice — the toxicity of average everydayness itself, the nullity beneath thrown projection, the call of conscience beneath the noise.

This tension is why Heidegger values the poet and the genuine thinker: they keep the question of Being (and the big existential pictures) alive, even at the cost of seeming aloof, awkward, or “not of this world.”  Our examples beautifully illustrate the spectrum from fallen, covered-over anxiety to the disclosive, individuating anxiety that makes fundamental questioning possible.

Big Question Disposition

Howard Gardner’s “existential intelligence” is a candidate or “half” intelligence in his theory of multiple intelligences. It is not one of the original seven (later expanded to eight), but Gardner has discussed it as a strong contender for a ninth intelligence since the 1990s.

Core Definition

Existential intelligence is the capacity to locate oneself with respect to the cosmos — the capacity to ponder the big questions about human existence. It involves:

Asking and contemplating fundamental questions about life, death, purpose, meaning, time, space, consciousness, and ultimate realities (e.g., “Why do we exist?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “Is there life after death?”, “What is consciousness?”).

Sensitivity to deep philosophical and spiritual issues.

The ability to engage with profound mysteries, paradoxes, and the “big picture” beyond everyday concerns.

Gardner describes individuals strong in this intelligence as those who are drawn to philosophical, religious, or metaphysical speculation. They often seek patterns and connections across vast scales of time, space, or abstraction. Examples include philosophers, theologians, cosmologists, certain poets, and thinkers who grapple with existential themes (e.g., figures like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Emily Dickinson in a literary sense).

Key Characteristics

Cosmological and metaphysical orientation — Thinking about ultimate questions rather than practical or narrowly logical ones.

Wonder and awe — A capacity for deep wonder (echoing the ancient thaumazein) and discomfort with superficial answers.

Tolerance for ambiguity and paradox — Comfort (or at least sustained engagement) with questions that may have no clear empirical resolution.

Interdisciplinary reach — Often connects science, art, philosophy, and spirituality.

Status in Gardner’s Theory

Gardner has been cautious about fully endorsing existential intelligence as a ninth independent intelligence. He calls it a candidate intelligence because it meets many of his criteria (identifiable core operations, evolutionary plausibility, potential isolation by brain damage, etc.), but it is harder to measure and more culturally variable than the others (e.g., linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic).In his writings (such as Intelligence Reframed, 1999), he treats it as a “half-intelligence” or emerging one — particularly relevant in discussions of spiritual intelligence, wisdom, or education that addresses meaning and purpose.

Relation to Other Intelligences

Existential intelligence often works in combination with others:

High intrapersonal intelligence (self-understanding) + existential = deep personal philosophical reflection.

High linguistic + existential = profound writing or oratory on meaning (e.g., certain poets or preachers).

High logical-mathematical + existential = cosmologists or theoretical physicists pondering the origins of the universe.

This intelligence aligns thematically with the kind of “passionate questioning for the whole/big picture(s)” (meletē tou pantos) we were discussing earlier in the Heidegger conversation — thinkers who are drawn beyond immediate absorption in the everyday world toward fundamental ontological concerns.

Heidegger’s Philosophy of DEATH

As Derrida notes, Heidegger’s interpretation of Death in Being and Time seems closely related to Christianity and Stoicism. The Stoics considered an active awareness of death to be a crucial, daily part of living. Rather than a morbid obsession, this discipline—often referred to by the Latin phrase memento mori (“remember that you will die”)—was seen as the key to living a truly fulfilling and grateful life. Stoics integrated the imminence of mortality directly into their daily routines in several concrete ways:

The Daily Preparation: When going to bed, Seneca advised preparing the mind by telling yourself, “You may not wake up tomorrow.” Upon waking, he suggested telling yourself, “You may not sleep again”. This practice ensured you balanced your life’s books each day and put off nothing important.

Contemplating the Present: Marcus Aurelius famously wrote in his Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think”. This was an active tool to stop delaying goals and avoid wasting time on trivial anxieties.

Meditating on Loss: Epictetus recommended that when you kiss your child, partner, or friend goodnight, you should remind yourself that they are mortal and could be gone tomorrow. The goal was not to distance yourself emotionally, but to cherish the present moment and treat your time together as a gift. By continuously meditating on death, the Stoics sought to diminish its fear, avoid taking life for granted, and find true freedom and urgency.

The apostle Paul, from the birthplace of the stoic enlightenment Tarsus, was the most influential Christian thinker regarding death, saying that if Christ is not raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sin – and that if the dead are not raised we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die. Of course, Paul thought the end time resurrection was underway, so he championed crucifying the fleshly to be a pure gift for Christ when he soon returns. What is remarkable here is Paul is inadvertently silently co-positing what an achievement an altruistic, disciplined secular person would be: One who has no afterlife but is caring and noble anyway.  Paul says

14 “…and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain. … 17 If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. 19 If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” 1 Corinthians 15:17

And

If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink [be gluttons and drunks], for tomorrow we die.’” 1 Corinthians 15:32 (NRSVUE)

Nietzsche frequently criticized Paul (and Christianity more broadly) for denigrating this world and this life in favor of an imaginary “other world” or afterlife. He viewed Paul as the true founder of Christianity (distinct from Jesus, whom he sometimes portrayed more sympathetically as a life-affirming figure). For Nietzsche, Paul turned the faith into a life-denying, ressentiment-driven system that devalues earthly existence, the body, instincts, and passions in favor of a transcendent, heavenly reward.

Key Themes in Nietzsche’s Critique

Christianity as “Platonism for the people” — It invents an ideal “true world” (afterlife/heaven) to slander and escape this one.

Paul’s emphasis on sin, the cross, resurrection, faith, and future salvation allegedly poisons life-affirmation, promoting weakness, humility, and otherworldliness.

This ties into Nietzsche’s broader attack on “slave morality” and the “death of God.”

Relevant Works and Ideas

Nietzsche develops this especially in The Antichrist (1888), but also in Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and notes in The Will to Power.

In The Antichrist, he portrays Paul as a vengeful, power-hungry figure who hijacked Jesus’ message. Paul’s theology (e.g., justification by faith, the meaning of the cross, and hope in resurrection) shifts focus from Jesus’ life and teachings to death and a future redemption, making this life secondary or worthless without the next.academia.edu

Nietzsche explicitly links this to a hatred of the here-and-now: Christianity’s “other world” is invented to vilify this one, turning it into a longing for nothingness. He sees Paul’s reinterpretation as central to this life-denying turn.

For example, Nietzsche writes (in contexts discussing Christian morality):

Christianity negates life by directing it toward an imagined better world beyond, cursing the passions, body, and sensuality of this life.

He connects this directly to Paul’s role in creating a priestly, decadent religion that values the weak and promises heavenly compensation while devaluing earthly strength and joy.

Connection to 1 Corinthians 15 (Our Previous Point)

Nietzsche would likely have seen Paul’s arguments there—if Christ is not raised, faith is futile and you’re still in your sins; if the dead are not raised, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”—as a perfect example of this otherworldliness. Paul ties meaning, ethics, and hope almost entirely to the resurrection and the next life, which Nietzsche reads as a profound devaluation of present existence unless anchored in the afterlife.

In short: Paul is a central villain in Nietzsche’s narrative of how Christianity became anti-life. Nietzsche saw him as the one who most decisively shifted the focus from affirming this world to escaping or condemning it for a fictional next one. This is a recurring motif across his later works. 

But positively, we note Paul’s being toward death, interpretation of the meaning of death, brings a coherence and oneness to his life, what Heidegger called in Division 2 of Being and Time a “whole of Dasein” – Paul’s unity of beings in his world in the context of Death as (i) fleshly (inauthentic) vs (ii) spiritual (authentic).  Heidegger finds the structure here that Paul’s implementation of is exemplary – Being-toward-death incarnate.  Paul’s famous line in Philippians 1:21 (“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain”) exemplifies this: his entire being is stretched toward an end that gives the present its gravity and wholeness.  In Division II, Heidegger describes how inauthentic Dasein flees from its own finitude into the distractions and idle talk of “the they” (das Man). Authentic Dasein, by contrast, anticipates its ownmost possibility—death as the possibility that cannot be outstripped. This anticipation Makes it a whole (a unified temporal structure: having-been, being-present, projecting toward the future).  All this depends on the meaning you attach to death.

In his seven undisputed letters, Paul contrasts the “works of the flesh” (sinful human nature) with the “fruit of the Spirit” (spiritual virtues): cura. Rather than mere physical desires, he defines the flesh as the selfish, ego-driven nature.

The Fleshly Vices (The Works of the Flesh)

Paul’s most detailed list is in Galatians 5:19-21, with variations spread across Romans and Corinthians. They fall into four main categories:

Sexual Vices: Sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery (sensuality), and orgies.

Religious/Spiritual Vices: Idolatry and sorcery (occult practices).

Social/Relational Vices: Hatred (enmity), discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, and envy.

Appetite Vices: Drunkenness.

Paul warns in Galatians 5:21 that anyone who consistently practices these destructive behaviors will not inherit the kingdom of God.

The Spiritual Virtues (The Fruit of the Spirit)

In direct contrast, Paul lists the virtues produced by the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. He notes that “against such things there is no law”. These include:

Love (agape): Unconditional, self-giving care for others.

Joy (chara): Inner gladness rooted in God, not circumstances.

Peace (eirene): Harmony and tranquility with God and others.

Patience (makrothumia): Endurance and slowness to anger.

Kindness (chrestotes): Benevolence and helpfulness.

Goodness (agathosune): Moral excellence and integrity.

Faithfulness (pistis): Loyalty, reliability, and trust.

Gentleness (prautes): Mildness of temper, humility.

Self-control (egkrateia): The ability to govern one’s own desires and passions.

Paul emphasizes that Christians are called to “crucify the flesh with its passions and desires” and actively “walk in step with the Spirit.”  It’s clear enough what Paul was doing.  As an apocalyptic Jew of that time period Paul believed that evil forces were in control of the world, but that God was soon going to intervene and send Jesus back to destroy them and set up His kingdom.  Paul’s take on this was he looked around himself and condemned what he saw as the demonically influenced way the world behaved and promoted what he thought behavior would be like in the Christ’s new kingdom.  This all is built on Paul’s meditation on death.

Both Paul and Heidegger see an unflinching orientation toward death (or the end) as what rescues life from fragmentation and gives it oneness: coherence/unity.  Both critique a kind of “fleshly” or everyday inauthenticity: absorption in the immediate, the worldly, the they-self.  The result is a transformed way of being in the world—Paul’s “new creation,” Heidegger’s resolute Dasein.

Analogously with an ancient Greek meditation on death, Heidegger notes the great historian Jacob Burckhardt said the Greeks were more unhappy than most people realize (P, 90; also cf. BQP, 40).”  A young Nietzsche attained an auditor’s transcript of this lecture and treated it as his most prized possession.  One can only imagine what a pall it cast on ancient Greek life that the Greeks thought everyone were immortal and lived out this death as an eternity of restless wandering as a listless shade -which in the Parmenides lecture course Heidegger calls “the essential misery of man” for the Greeks.  We see the importance of Plato’s so-called “proofs” of the happy immortality of the soul and the blessed interpretation of death he inherited from Socrates e.g., Outlined in the Apology.

Moreover, analogous to advocating for noble lies in the Republic and Laws with Plato, Regarding Numa Pompilius, Livy wrote:

• “And fearing lest relief from anxiety on the score of foreign perils might lead men who had hitherto been held back by fear of their enemies and by military discipline into extravagance and idleness, he (Numa) thought the very first thing to do, as being the most efficacious with a populace which was ignorant and, in those early days, uncivilized, was to imbue them with the fear of Heaven. As he could not instill this into their hearts without inventing some marvelous story, he pretended to have nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria, and that hers was the advice which guided him in the establishment of rites most approved by the gods, and in the appointment of special priests for the service of each. (Livy 1:19)”

Also, Plutarch suggests that Numa played on superstition to give himself an aura of awe and divine allure, in order to cultivate more gentle behaviors among the warlike early Romans, such as honoring the gods, abiding by law, behaving humanely to enemies, and living proper, respectable lives. See Plutarch, “The Parallel Lives, Numa Pompilius” §VIII.

The Gospel of John might pick up on this if Dennis MacDonald is right that the earliest stratum of John is an imitation/mimesis of Dionysus and Euripides’ Bacchae. See my analysis HERE.  The  Jews of Jesus’ time were unusual in that they were monotheists and did not believe in the gods of other cultures.  Regarding Dionysus as a god of wine and Jesus and his water into wine miracle, Price says:

2. Water into Wine (John 2:1-11)

Though the central feature of this miracle story, the transformation of one liquid into another, no doubt comes from the lore of Dionysus, the basic outline of the story owes much to the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 17:8-24 LXX (Helms, p. 86). The widow of Zarephath, whose son has just died, upbraids the prophet: “What have I to do with you, O man of God?” (Ti emoi kai soi, 17:18). John has transferred this brusque address to the mouth of Jesus, rebuking his mother (2:4, Ti emoi kai soi, gunai). Jesus and Elijah both tell people in need of provisions to take empty pitchers (udria in 1 Kings 17:12, udriai in John 2:6-7), from which sustenance miraculously emerges. And just as this feat causes the woman to declare her faith in Elijah (“I know that you are a man of God,” v. 24), so does Jesus’ wine miracle cause his disciples to put their faith in him (v. 11).

Uniquely in the Gospel of John, Jesus is identified as God, hence the new and greater Dionysus, and of other people he says “you are gods.”  This seems to be a reappropriation of the passage in the Bacchae where Cadmus says of Dionysus “Even if this man (Dionysus) be no God, as you think, still say that he is. Be guilty of a splendid fraud, declaring him to be the son of Semele, for this will make it seem she is the mother of a God, and will confer honor on all our race” (Euripides, Bacchae, lines 332-336).  We see then the superiority of Jesus where Dionysus didn’t persuade the Jews to faith, Jesus’ wine miracle did.

Paul specifically posits our being-toward-death as the context for the dichotomy between authentic spiritual living vs inauthentic fleshly living – depending on the meaning or how you interpret death.  This was born out of the more ancient and fundamental distinction between the life of the thinkers tranquilly tarrying alongside the eternal and the masses restlessly running from one temporary distraction to the next.  Heraclitus says the hoi polloi are like well-fed cattle: In contemporary language, it shares a similar vibe with phrases like “the masses,” “the plebs,” or “the great unwashed.  Nietzsche thus calls Pauline Christianity Platonism for the people. 

The Obvious

Generally speaking, by thought we mean something like phronesis (circumspection, insight), like where the doctor weighs all the evidence and has an insight about how to proceed with the patient.  This is also partially what we mean when an English Literature professor weighs the textual evidence in Wuthering Heights and its secondary literature and comes to an insight about a theme that had been hidden in the text.  The doctor sifts through the multitude of evidence before having an insight of “the big picture” or the problem and solution “as a whole,” the matter “as such.”  In this sense Nietzsche understood himself as a cultural physician.  Poets do the opposite, waiting on the flash of inspiration and then, so to speak, recollecting what was given in the inspiration.    

For many years now the interpretation of the Nicomachean Ethics has been beset with controversy concerning its penultimate chapters, where it clearly emerges that Aristotle endorses as the best life a career devoted as much as humanly possible to theoria or intellectual contemplation. When we reach the final act of this ethical drama, we have a veritable “divine intervention” in the form of an appeal to the energeia (activity) of divine theoria (contemplation), an activity analogized to that of our own nous (intellect, understanding, thinking faculty), whose proper employment will constitute complete, perfect (teleia) eudaimonia (happiness, well-being?) for us humans (1177b24-5). Furthermore, we are immediately informed, somewhat surprisingly, that such a life would be superior to the human level. For someone will live it not insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divine element in him (theion ti en hauto). And the activity of this divine element is as much superior to the activity in accord with the rest of virtue (ten allen areten) as this element is superior to the compound (tou sunthetou).

Hence, if understanding (ho nous) is something divine in comparison with a human being, so also will life in accord with understanding be divine in comparison with human life. We ought not to follow the makers of proverbs and ‘Think human, since you are human’, or ‘Think mortal, since you are mortal’. Rather, as far as we can (eph’ hoson endechetai), we ought to be godly (athanatizein), and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element (zen kata to kratiston ton en auto); for, however much this element may lack in bulk, by much more it surpasses everything in power and value.  (1177b26-1178a2, tr. Irwin).  

How is Aristotle to be interpreted here so it is more than just a random word collage?  When we do go to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda 9, we are presented there with a picture of God’s thought as focused obsessively on Itself as a “sort of heavenly Narcissus” who finds nothing better to opine than Its own perfect Self, settling “into a posture of permanent self-admiration” (Norman, p. 63 [93]).

To understand this, remember the ancient Greeks generally abhorred aging as it represented a decline from highly prized youth and vigor. Ambrosia feasting gods differed from mortals in that they were eternally in the bloom of youth.  However older warriors, elder philosophers and statesmen were typically well treated.  The youthfulness of youth, compared with the depressed, cynical retiree waiting to die, is in encountering the vibrant, which means being directed at themselves.  Why?  This was the godliness of the gods, forever young, the wonder years in perpetuity.  Dickens in David Copperfield gives a clear example of this with youthful romantic love: “I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else … it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wild flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud.  (Dickens, 2015, ch 33, Blissful).”  This person encountering Dora in everything was, obviously, encountering his own projections.  A restless soul is made whole when attuned to the eternal like the idea of justice, natureness, etc.

Euthymia (Greek: εὐθυμία, “gladness, good mood, serenity”, literally “good thumos”) is a term used by Democritus to refer to one of the root aspects of human life’s goal.  Diogenes Laërtius records Democritus’ position as “The chief good he asserts to be cheerfulness (euthymia); which, however, he does not consider the same as pleasure; as some people, who have misunderstood him, have fancied that he meant; but he understands by cheerfulness, a condition according to which the soul lives calmly and steadily, being disturbed by no fear, or superstition, or other passion.”  In Seneca’s essay on tranquility, he uses the Greek word euthymia, which he defines as “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following the myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction.”

By contrast with phronesis, Theoria or the contemplative life is tarrying with the eternal, like the idea of justice, which never was not nor will be not but simply is, though partially hidden.  Heidegger says “Therein resides the peculiar tendency of the accommodation of the temporality of human Dasein to the eternity of the world … This is the extreme position to which the Greeks carried human Dasein (PS, 122).” He continues in the Heraclitus Seminar with Eugen Fink “one must look upon the useful as ‘what makes someone whole,’ that is, what makes the human being at home with himself … In Greek Theoria is pure repose, the highest form of energeia, the highest manner of putting-oneself into-work without regard for all machinations. It is the letting come to presence of presencing itself.”  Aristotle says that the life of theoria [contemplation], which exceeds phronesis [practical wisdom], is a kind of godly life, an athanatizein [to be immortal] (whereby athanatizein is formed like hellenizein [to be Greek]), that implies that in theoria we comport ourselves like immortals. In theoria mortals reach up to the life of the gods.  Humans escape the restless cabin fever of life in Theoria, and we can think of Nietzsche delighting over his Untimely Meditation in a rainy cabin while his friends there were shack wacky.  Aristotle says only gods and beasts are content in solitude.

Circumspection (insight) is different from science in that circumspection (insight) requires life experience. Heidegger says that young people (he is thinking of Pascal) can become wise in mathematics, but not in circumspection (insight). Heidegger cites Aristotle’s point that “young people are not experienced in the factual conditions of human Dasein itself (PS, 97).” Analogously, young people can be accomplished mathematically but not philosophically, as mathematics deals with abstractions.

‘Circumspection (insight) ultimately deals with the goal not of logos, but of nous – where the discourse ultimately ends. With the Doctor, for instance, he deliberates with the goal of making the patient healthy. At some point, the doctor will come to an insight,’ an aisthesis, a straightforward perception of the big picture(s) that shows him what he must do in order to cure the patient, at which point there can be action. “The outermost limit of the deliberation is the eschaton, at which point the insight arrives, a straightforward perception, the point at which we “see states of affairs as a whole (PS, 1 10).” This is the same as in geometry where a polygon is resolved into a triangle, and the triangle is seen as a simple whole. For the doctor it is never a question of whether to heal, since, as Heidegger says, this is the meaning of his existence and hence always already posited from the outset. The thing the doctor ultimately has in view is the point at which he can intervene.

The notion of the insight follows, among other things, the Greek mathematicians. Heidegger comments that “The Greek mathematicians did not understand axioms as fundamental principles. What they had in mind can be seen in their paraphrase ofthe word: axiomata are koinai ennoiai. Plato used the word often; it means ‘insight,’ ‘to have an insight’ and indeed with the mind’s eye (PR, 15).

Heidegger is contrasting the ancient Greek understanding of “axioms” with the modern one.

In modern mathematics and science (especially post-Cartesian, foundationalist approaches), axioms are typically seen as self-evident, fundamental principles or starting assumptions that we posit or lay down as the secure base for deducing everything else. They function like unprovable but obvious building blocks (e.g., in Euclid’s Elements as later interpreted, or in Hilbert-style formal systems).

Ancient Greek View (per Heidegger)

Greek mathematicians (and thinkers like Plato) did not primarily view axiomata this way—as arbitrary or posited foundational propositions we accept to build a system on top of. Instead, they saw them as koinai ennoiai, often translated as “common notions” or “common conceptions/insights.”

“Koinai ennoiai”: These are shared, commonly held insights or understandings that are evident to the mind in a direct, intuitive way. They are not invented or postulated but recognized as already belonging to thought itself—something everyone (in the relevant community of inquirers) can “see” with the mind.

Heidegger links this to Plato’s frequent use of related terms for insight or intellectual seeing (ennoia from nous, mind/intellect). It is a kind of noetic vision—”with the mind’s eye.” You grasp it as something that shows itself clearly, not something you decide to accept as a starting rule.

In Euclid’s Elements (which Heidegger has in mind), the “common notions” (like “things equal to the same thing are equal to one another”) are distinguished from postulates (more specific to geometry) and function as these shared, self-evident insights.

Broader Heideggerian Context

This point appears in Heidegger’s discussions of the “mathematical” character of modern science, especially in What Is a Thing? (a 1935–36 lecture course on Kant, but with extensive historical excursions).

For Heidegger:

The Greek mathēmatikē (from manthanein, to learn) relates to ta mathēmata—things that are learnable/taught because they are already known in advance in a certain way. Mathematics exemplifies a mode of knowing where we attend to what is already accessible to the mind.

Axioms as koinai ennoiai fit this: they are not “posited” foundations we invent to control beings, but insights into what is already there in the way things disclose themselves. This aligns with Heidegger’s broader emphasis on alētheia (unconcealment) and a more receptive, phenomenological relation to being, versus the modern “representational” or calculative stance.

Modern science turns this “mathematical” (in the broad sense of projective, axiomatic planning) into a ground-plan we impose, making nature predictable and controllable.

Heidegger is doing his typical Destruktion (de-structuring) of tradition: recovering an earlier, more originary Greek experience before it gets covered over by later (especially Roman/Latin and modern) interpretations. “Axiom” shifts from something seen (insight) to something laid down (principle/postulate).

Why This Matters

This distinction illustrates Heidegger’s critique of how Western thought moves toward subjectivism and enframing (Gestell). Greeks are more attuned to what shows itself; moderns decide in advance what counts as foundational and then derive the world accordingly. Plato’s “ideas” and mathematical insights are tied to this noetic vision, not rigid foundationalism.  When Plato thus put above the academy “Let no one enter who doesn’t know math” he doesn’t mean you get in by knowing numbers, but rather the conditions of learning (Mathema), numbers being eminently learnable.

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In short: For the Greeks (on Heidegger’s reading), axioms are shared intellectual insights you come to see, not postulated starting rules you assume. This reflects a different relationship between thought and being—one of attentive disclosure rather than imposition.

So,

Euclid’s Statement

“Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.”
(This is one of Euclid’s “Common Notions” in the Elements — basically an axiom.)

Modern Math Understanding (How You Probably Learn It Today)

In today’s math classes or textbooks, this is treated as a rule or assumption we accept as true at the start so we can build proofs on it.

It’s like a foundation stone we lay down.

We don’t really “prove” it — we just say, “This is obviously true, so we’ll use it.”

Example:
Suppose line segment A is equal in length to line segment B.
And line segment B is equal in length to line segment C.
Then (by this rule) A must be equal to C.
We use it mechanically in proofs like “by the transitive property of equality.”

Modern view: Axioms are starting rules we posit (agree to accept) so the whole system of geometry or algebra works consistently. Math is like a game with defined rules, and this is one of the rules. It’s formal and structural.

How Heidegger Says the Ancient Greeks Understood It

The Greeks saw this not mainly as a rule they invented or “posited,” but as a common insight — something obvious that the mind sees directly.

Koinai ennoiai = “common notions” or “shared insights.”

It’s something everyone with a trained mind can look at with the mind’s eye and immediately recognize as true. It’s not “We decree this is true,” but “We notice this is how equality works in reality.”

They experienced it as a self-evident truth that shows itself clearly, like seeing that a triangle has three sides. You don’t make it true by deciding it; you recognize it.  For Kant the understanding or faculty of rules is used to encounter beings as they are, e.g., a triangle, by applying the rule “3 sided enclosed figure.”

Simple analogy for a high school student:

Modern view: Imagine building a Lego castle. You start by saying, “Rule #1: These blocks stick together.” You make up the rule to play the game.

Greek view (per Heidegger): It’s more like noticing, “Hey, when two things are the same height as a third thing, they must be the same height as each other.” It’s an insight into how equality naturally is. Your mind just sees it clearly — it’s common knowledge among thinking people.

For the Greeks, doing mathematics was about learning to see these clear insights (mathēmata comes from a word meaning “things learned” or “things that can be known in advance”). Euclid’s common notions were shared mental visions, not just arbitrary starting assumptions.

Key Difference in One Sentence

Modern: “We’ll accept this as a basic rule so our proofs work.”

Greek (Heidegger’s reading): “Our minds can directly see that this is true — it’s a common insight, obvious to reason.”

This doesn’t change how you use the statement in a geometry proof today. But Heidegger is pointing out a big difference in attitude toward what mathematics fundamentally is: more about clear seeing and understanding reality (Greeks) versus building a formal logical system on chosen foundations (modern).  This fits into Heidegger’s bigger idea that the Greeks were more open to what things reveal to the mind, while modern math and science often impose structures on the world.

So, math is eminently learnable. For instance: 3X3=9 is proven to a child, not by logic, but by modelling it a number of different ways until they grasp it with their mind’s eye: one way could be manipulatives in groups of three, with three such groups, which can then be counted to a total of 9. You can see how this paradigm of “obvious to anyone” led to the dumbing down of thought. For instance, in debate over school uniforms you have debaters throwing examples and analogies of their side at one another with both declaring victory. The examples and analogies are “obvious to everyone.”

The Positive Side: Why “Obvious to the Mind’s Eye” Matters in Math

Yes — multiplication like 3 × 3 = 9 is not primarily taught through abstract logic to young children. It’s taught by repeated showing until the child sees it.

Groups of blocks, arrays on graph paper, repeated addition (3 + 3 + 3), area of a rectangle, etc.

Once the child gets it, it becomes koinē ennoia — a common insight. They grasp it directly with the mind. It feels self-evident afterward, like when training wheels on a bike are removed

This matches the Greek sense of the “mathematical”: something learnable because it can become obvious through the right kind of seeing.

This method is powerful. Good math teaching still relies heavily on this “mind’s eye” approach before moving to formal proof.

The Downside We’re Pointing To:

When “Obvious” Becomes Lazy

This paradigm easily slides into dumbing down when exported to non-mathematical areas.

In casual debate (school uniforms, politics, ethics, etc.), people often do exactly what we said:

Throw out an analogy or example that feels “obvious” to them.

Act as if anyone who doesn’t immediately see it the same way is stupid or dishonest.

Declare victory because “it’s common sense!”

This is pseudo-mathematical thinking. It mimics the Greek confidence in shared insight, but without the rigor, training, or genuine common ground. Heidegger would likely call this a degraded version of the original Greek experience. What was once a disciplined seeing (trained nous) becomes sloppy appeal to “what everyone knows.”  This is what Derrida critiqued as the metaphysics of presence: assuming something is true because you take it to be obvious.  Taking things as “obvious” closes off critical thought. Derrida’s process of deconstruction was designed to reveal the hidden complexities, contradictions, and historical contexts that make any “obvious” truth possible in the first place.

Key problems with this:

Different people have different experiences, so what is “obvious with the mind’s eye” to one person looks very different to another.

It skips careful analysis. Real Greek mathematics still required proof and careful steps — the “common notions” were starting points, not the whole argument.

It encourages tribal shouting matches instead of thinking. “My examples are obvious → I win.”

Heidegger’s Deeper Point

Heidegger admired the Greek starting point (attunement to what shows itself clearly) but worried that the modern version of this attitude — especially when combined with technology and mass thinking — leads to shallow “obviousness” everywhere. Everyone thinks they have direct insight, but few do the hard work of actually learning to see.

In good math education, the manipulatives and multiple models train the seeing. In bad public debate, people skip the training and just assert obviousness.

Practical takeaway for clear thinking:

In math: Use concrete models until the insight clicks — then move to abstraction and proof. That’s healthy.

In arguments: Treat “obvious” examples as starting points only. You still have to examine assumptions, consider counter-examples, define terms, and test whether the analogy actually holds. Never stop at “It’s obvious!”

Our example of 3 × 3 = 9 is excellent because it shows the method at its best. The problem arises when people treat complex social or moral questions as if they were just bigger versions of counting blocks — and get angry when others don’t “see” the same pattern.

In this regard, as Being/Time, the nous of circumspection (insight) is different from that of wisdom in that circumspection (insight) only deals with things in the here and now and hence with things that could be otherwise. The deliberation that results in the insight about how to treat the patient in front of us is entirely case dependent, and occurs “in the blink of an eye,” a momentary look at what is momentarily concrete, which as such can always be otherwise.

On the other hand, the noein in wisdom is a looking upon that which is aei, that which is always present in sameness. Time (the momentary and eternal) here functions to discriminate between the noein in circumspection (insight) and the one in Sophia … [S]ophia is Dasein’s positionality toward the beings of the world in the full sense. Phronesis is Dasein’s positionality toward the beings which are themselves Dasein (PS, 113).”

Heidegger indicates that wisdom happens through theorein, which means that there is no production involved in wisdom, but rather an idleness, a “not accomplishing anything … but a mere onlooking, a lingering with the object. (PS, 47),” that most properly uncovers beings. The object of wisdom are those things which always are, aei [the world, PS, 48], and hence cannot be otherwise. The objects of wisdom (Justice, houseness, treeness, etc.) are obtained through seeing with the mind’s eye, because seeing is the sense that allows for the greatest determinations of things.

Wherein the High Horse?

It’s notable for some time critical scholars have dissected the historical Jesus to the vanishing point, but still in good protestant fashion treat the 7 “authentic” letters of Paul as sacrosanct windows into to Paul and his thought: a process challenged by such readers as Price, Detering, Livesey, and Berman with the quest for the historical Paul.   

But why should Paul be right to demonize being a glutton and drunk?  If you don’t have a Philosopher’s or Pauline scorecard for life, isn’t a happy life just whatever floats your boat?  Heraclitus the Obscure has an anecdote about him where people came to see him prepared for the extraordinary, whereas they found him warming himself at the stove and saying “even here, gods come to presence. 

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation, titled On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, is a cultural critique of the 19th-century obsession with historical knowledge. He argues that a hyper-analytical approach to the past paralyzes present creativity and that a culture must learn to forget in order to truly live and act.  Nietzsche famously begins the essay by contrasting human historical consciousness with the blissful, unhistorical existence of grazing animals, which live entirely in the moment without being weighed down by the past. He then outlines three types of history and how they can be used or abused.  Wisdom gets reduced to the trivial pursuit of who can recall the most facts the quickest and so the standard of intelligence becomes who wins on the game show Jeopardy – the paradigm of this being the computer.  But again, if people want to astound one another playing Trivial Pursuit, so what?

Why all these Christian hints in Heidegger’s secular analytic of Dasein?  Part of it seems that Heidegger notes he is a Christian theologian and so if my relationship to death individuates me, then of course Heidegger’s presentation of death presupposes Christian categories he identifies with however secular the book is.  Heidegger is trying to do a secular appropriation of what contexts he sees as valuable from the Christian lens without Paul’s hatred for this life.

Several key concepts in Being and Time are widely noted by scholars for their Christian (especially Protestant, Pauline, and Augustinian) resonances, even as Heidegger presents them in a secular, ontological framework. Heidegger, a former theology student influenced by figures like Kierkegaard, Luther, and Augustine, “secularizes” or “destructs” these ideas into his existential analytic of Dasein.

Here are the main ones:

 1. Fallenness (Verfallenheit) and “the They” (das Man).  Dasein tends to fall into inauthentic everydayness, absorbed in the anonymous “they” (public opinion, idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity).

This echoes the Christian idea of fallen humanity—original sin, being lost in the world, concupiscence, or “being-in-the-world” as a state of distraction from authentic relation to God.

Scholars like Richard Wolin note that Being and Time portrays the human condition with a sensibility derived from secularized Protestantism, where fallenness feels like a “curse.”

 2. Guilt (Schuld) and Being-Guilty

Heidegger describes Dasein as essentially “guilty” in an ontological sense: it is “indebted” or “null” (a lack or being-the-ground-of-a-nullity). This stems from thrownness (Geworfenheit)—we are thrown into existence without choosing our ground.

This has strong parallels with Christian original sin, the inherent guilt of finite creatures, and the Lutheran emphasis on radical human insufficiency before God. Conscience calls us to acknowledge this guilt.

3.  Conscience (Gewissen) and the Call

Conscience is not a moral faculty but a silent call that summons Dasein from inauthenticity back to itself—individualizing it through anxiety and resoluteness.

This mirrors the Christian (especially Protestant) notion of the inner voice of conscience, the call of God, or prophetic vocation. It leads to a kind of “conversion” or turning (analogous to metanoia).

4.  Anxiety (Angst) and the Nothing

Anxiety discloses the nothingness at the heart of existence and the uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of being-in-the-world. It is not fear of something specific but a fundamental attunement that reveals our finitude.

This resonates with Christian experiences of dread before the divine, the abyss, or the “fear and trembling” of faith (Kierkegaard influence). It strips away worldly supports, much like confronting God without idols.

1. Being-Towards-Death

As discussed previously, death as one’s ownmost, non-relational possibility that individuates Dasein and enables authenticity.

It carries echoes of stoic memento mori traditions, Pauline emphasis on mortality (“tomorrow we die”), and the Christian focus on preparing for death/judgment. However, Heidegger strips away resurrection or afterlife, making it purely this-worldly and finite.

• Care (Sorge) and Temporality

The Being of Dasein as Care—being-ahead-of-itself (projection/future), already-in-the-world (thrownness/past), and alongside entities (present).

This has structural similarities to the Christian view of human life as oriented toward an ultimate concern (God), with existence stretched between creation (thrownness) and eschaton (end/death). Time as finite and meaningful only in light of the end also has biblical undertones.

• Resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) and Authenticity

The resolute anticipation of death that allows Dasein to take over its possibilities authentically.

Parallels the Christian idea of decisive faith, conversion, or standing resolute before God (e.g., Luther’s “Here I stand”).

Overall Context: Heidegger explicitly draws from Christian sources (via phenomenology and hermeneutics of facticity) but “formalizes” them—removing theological content to reveal ontological structures. Critics and admirers (including Derrida in places) see Being and Time as suffused with a secularized Protestant sensibility: emphasis on individual confrontation with finitude/guilt, suspicion of “the world,” and the need for a personal “call” to authenticity.

These are not direct Christian doctrines in the text—Heidegger insists on a philosophical, not theological, project.

At the other end of the being toward death spectrum, the Epicureans did not view death as an imminent, haunting presence in daily living, nor did they advocate for the frantic, short-term indulgences like the fleshly Paul describes. Instead, they argued that death is completely irrelevant to the living, using this philosophy to achieve long-term mental tranquility.

Here is how Epicurean thought structured the relationship between daily life and death:

Death is Nothing to Us. Epicurus famously asserted that “death is nothing to us.” His philosophy relied on a strict atomistic view of the universe. No consciousness:

Death is the complete dissolution of the body and soul. No pain: Where death is, you are not; where you are, death is not.

No afterlife: There are no punishments or rewards after life ends. Note though that positively Epicurus’ philosophy of life is still grounded in a meditation on death.

Ultimately, where you choose to place yourself on this spectrum individuates us, is our ownmost possibility because in the end, one’s relationship with death is one with the great unknown, for who knows what it is or isn’t? In Plato’s Apology, he tells the jury he does not fear execution because death must be one of two wonderful possibilities: 1. A deep, dreamless sleep. If death is an utter lack of consciousness, Socrates considers it an unspeakable gain. He reasons that even the King of Persia could count on one hand the number of days in his life that were better than a night of unbroken, peaceful sleep. 2. A migration to meet great heroes. If death is a journey to another world where all the dead reside, he believes it is an even greater blessing. He looks forward to meeting figures like Homer, Hesiod, and Odysseus, and eagerly anticipates the chance to continue questioning and philosophizing with them without fear of punishment.

In the end, the possibilities for death and our relationship to it are only limited by the strength of your imagination. Maybe God is a warrior God who sent Jesus as a trick test. If you follow Jesus by loving your enemy as more important than yourself, you have proved your unworthiness and weakness and get annihilated. On the other hand, if you quest after wealth and power despite Jesus’ threats of hellfire, you are worthy and gain paradise.

When I leave the house to go to the store, I am living “as though” the action will be completed. But, the future isn’t guaranteed to any of us. We live “as though” the next moment won’t be denied, although it could. In general, we live as though death is something in a vague future that doesn’t impact the moment, although the moment only is what it is by bracketing death. Death is the great unknown. Personally, I think just like with plants, fungi, bacteria, mice, pigs, chickens, cows etc., when life ends there is no afterlife. I could be wrong, maybe maple trees go to heaven after they get cut down for firewood, but my interpretation of death is the context in which I make sense of the time I have. All we can say of the dead person with certainty is they are no longer there: nicht-da-sein.

I am thus sympathetic to the secular critique of the afterlife such as with Michael Martin and Keith Augustine’s  Myth of an Afterlife ( 2015)

Our ideas provide a helpful backdrop for understanding Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time, particularly in highlighting contrasts, partial overlaps, and what makes his approach distinctive. Heidegger is not primarily offering a “how to live with death” manual in the style of ancient schools or religious traditions. Instead, he pursues an ontological analysis: death reveals the fundamental structure of Dasein (human existence as “being-there”) as finite, temporal, and capable of authenticity.

Heidegger’s Core Concept: Being-Towards-Death

In Division Two of Being and Time, Heidegger analyzes death not as a biological endpoint, future event, or something that “happens” to us (which he calls “demise” or perishing). Death is Dasein’s ownmost, non-relational possibility—the possibility of the impossibility of any further existence or possibilities.philosophynow.org +1

It is certain yet indefinite as to when.

It is non-relational: No one else can die my death for me (this individuates Dasein).

It is always already “imminent” in the sense that Dasein “always already is its end.” We are “old enough to die” from the moment we exist.

This structures temporality and care (Sorge): Dasein is thrown into a world (past), projects possibilities (future), and exists in the present amid beings. Death is the horizon that makes wholeness and authentic existence possible. Everyday “fallen” Dasein flees this in “the they” (das Man)—chatter, ambiguity, and inauthentic tranquilization that treats death as a distant public event.

Authentic Being-towards-death involves anticipation (or “forerunning”)—resolutely facing this possibility without evasion. This frees Dasein from the dictatorship of the they, allowing it to choose its ownmost possibilities with urgency and resoluteness. It is not morbid obsession but the ground for genuine freedom and individuality.

Our everyday example fits perfectly: We constantly live “as though” projects will complete (going to the store, etc.), bracketing the ever-present possibility of impossibility. Heidegger sees this as inauthentic flight; authentic existence owns up to the fragility.

Connections with our Examples

Stoicism (memento mori): There is resonance in the daily awareness and urgency. Stoic practices cultivate virtue by keeping mortality in view, much like anticipation counters tranquilization. Heidegger’s emphasis on not deferring one’s possibilities echoes Marcus Aurelius. However, Stoicism is more ethical/psychological (achieving tranquility or eudaimonia); Heidegger’s is ontological—death discloses the Being of Dasein itself, not just a tool for better living. philosophyoflife.org

Christianity/Paul: Commentators (and Derrida) note secularized Protestant echoes in Being and Time—guilt, conscience, fallenness, and individual confrontation with mortality.

Paul’s “tomorrow we die” (if no resurrection) has a hedonist sense, but Heidegger is not talking about any afterlife or eschatological resolution. Death remains the possibility of impossibility, not a passage to resurrection or judgment.  Death is simply the unknown besides not being there.   Our “crucifying the flesh” point highlights a key difference: Heidegger has no external telos or savior; authenticity comes from within finite existence.secularfrontier.infidels.org

Epicureanism (“death is nothing to us”): This is the clearest foil. Epicurus uses atomism to dismiss death as irrelevant to the living, promoting ataraxia (tranquility). Heidegger explicitly critiques this as inauthentic flight: treating death as a future non-event evades its role as a constant structural possibility that individuates and temporalizes existence. Epicureanism is still “grounded in a meditation on death,” but Heidegger wants us to anticipate rather than nullify it.philosophyoflife.org

Plato/Socrates (Apology): Heidegger is closer to rejecting the “two wonderful possibilities” (dreamless sleep or migration). For him, speculating on what death is ontically (afterlife, annihilation) misses the existential-ontological point. Death is not an event we can experience or imagine positively/negatively in that way; it is the limit-experience that reveals care, anxiety (Angst), and finitude. Our “great unknown” and personal view (no afterlife, like animals/plants—nicht-da-sein) align with bracketing metaphysical speculation, which Heidegger largely does here (though he engages the nothing elsewhere).

Derrida’s Note: Derrida highlights how Heidegger’s death ties to Christian/Stoic lineages while radicalizing them into a secular, existential ontology. Derrida later deconstructs it (e.g., in Aporias), questioning if one can ever truly “experience” or “anticipate” one’s own death as possible, pushing the aporia (impossibility) further. Our reference fits well.

Speculative Twists and “Individuation”

Our imaginative scenarios (warrior God inverting Jesus’ teachings, etc.) and emphasis on death as “the great unknown” that “individuates us” and is “one’s ownmost possibility” directly echo Heidegger. The relationship to death is profoundly personal and non-transferable—it cannot be leveled into public interpretation. My materialist leanings (death as cessation, like other beings) underscore nicht-da-sein, but Heidegger focuses less on the “what happens” and more on how the possibility shapes existence now.  In short, our thoughts illuminate Heidegger by showing the tradition he draws from (while secularizing and ontologizing it) and by exemplifying the inauthentic everyday bracketing he critiques. They also show why his analysis feels both familiar (memento mori urgency) and strange (death as possibility, not event; no prescriptions for tranquility or salvation). Our framing captures the existential stakes beautifully.  When I ask what am I to do with the time I have left, this creates a dichotomy between important and trivial pursuits, like in the song Live Like you were Dying.

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Heidegger argues that “the end of philosophy” does not mean its literal death, but rather its completion and dissolution into modern, calculative sciences. He claims the “task of thinking” is to step back from this traditional metaphysics to re-engage with the fundamental question of Being.

In his essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (published in his collection “On Time and Being”), Martin Heidegger explains that Western philosophy—which began with Plato and prioritized representational and calculative thinking—has exhausted its original purpose. This trajectory has culminated in our modern, technology-driven world, where the truth of Being is forgotten and replaced by scientific control, efficiency, and nihilism. Factually, there will always be an endless treasure trove of new “information” and curiosities from the specific sciences like psychology, anthropology, history, English literature, and physics.

Heidegger’s main concepts include:

The Completion of Metaphysics: The end of philosophy is its fulfillment. It has completed its possibilities and dissolved into specialized sciences (like physics, psychology, and sociology) that manipulate the world rather than understand it.

The Oblivion of Being: Throughout history, philosophy has focused on beings (things that exist) while forgetting Being itself—the underlying context that allows anything to appear “as” a being.

The Task of Thinking: Because traditional philosophy has reached a dead end, a completely new kind of thinking is required. This “task” demands a “step back” (Schritt zurück) out of metaphysics. Instead of trying to master, categorize, or calculate the world, this new mode of meditative, “originary thinking” seeks to listen and remain open to the mystery of Being

As I said, in Greek, the mathema are those things which are properly learnable, of which numbers are the exemplary case. These things are properly leamable because we already have them with us somehow. We say, for instance, that there are three books. We do not read ‘threeness’ off the books, but already have a vague idea of the beings as a group or family, which enables us to identify the books as just these particular three.  The mathematical in general, thought in the light of time, is this dimension of the thing that is always already with us in an indeterminate way.  The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things. Therefore, Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words ‘Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!’ These words do not mean that one must be educated in only one subject – ‘geometry,’ but that he must grasp the fundamental condition for the proper possibility of knowing is the knowledge of the fundamental presupposition of all knowledge and the position we take based on such knowledge (WT, 75-6).

The great Analogy of Being is the prejudice that despite all apparent differences, every persons’ thinking and life are fundamentally the same, so whatever is the case for one person is also the case for the next person, they just need to put themselves in your shoes and repeat the same steps in thinking.  So, as a rule of thumb we agree that like produces like (water will always boil under certain conditions), but the further we penetrate into the phenomenon of cause and effect we see counterexamples like triplets growing up in an abusive home could result with one growing up with severe PTSD, the second unaffected, and the third stronger for it (Nietzsche’s “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”). 

Philosophy has its origins in the lower-class Greeks being trained in simple thinking so they could go to the courts and complain about powerful people taking their land and ask for it back.  This was based on the transformation away from the older principle that “Might makes right,” which allowed the peasant’s whining to be justified.  In the older period, the powerful didn’t have to give reasons or make excuses, they simply did what they wanted.

The new process was based on a simple analogy of taking pity on the weak complainer.  People learned how to give simple examples and analogies based on the principle of “See what happened to me?  You wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to you, so it is wrong that it was done to me.  I want payback!”

Parmenides famously said “The Same: thinking (insight/obviousness) as well as Being.  Heidegger noted that whoever grasped the essence of this saying would lose the desire to write all books.

Nietzsche argued that the weak (whom he called the “herd”) developed reason, logic, and morality as weapons to constrain and overthrow the naturally strong and powerful.

In his critique of society and morality, he noted specific ways this plays out:

The Slave Revolt: In works like On the Genealogy of Morals, he detailed how the weak “invented” universal morality to make the strong feel guilty about their own natural power, vitality, and dominance.

The “Cleverness” of the Weak: In Twilight of the Idols, he argued that the weak are inherently “cleverer” and possess more “mind” because they have to. Reason, patience, and cunning are survival tools used to level the playing field against those who are physically or politically superior.

Critique of Socrates: He viewed the Socratic tradition of rigorous argumentation and dialectics as a symptom of weakness. To Nietzsche, genuinely strong individuals possess an instinctive “will to power” and live by their own created values, whereas resorting to rational argument is a desperate way to seek validation and assert control.

In this way, the principle of non-contradiction is not a principle of all thinking, but of ordinary thought that aims at winning disagreements and finding fault:

(1) Ordinary thinking proceeds by avoiding contradictions and so in principle can’t see, for instance, how school uniforms both should and should not be implemented, at the same time and in the same way:

Sample Arguments For School Uniforms

Key Benefits and Examples:

Reduces socioeconomic bullying and peer pressure: When everyone wears the same outfit, visible differences in wealth (designer clothes vs. budget items) disappear, which can lower teasing, cliques, and anxiety about fitting in. In the UK, many state schools that adopted uniforms reported decreases in bullying incidents related to appearance. Similarly, schools in Japan and South Korea, where uniforms are the norm, often cite this as a factor in maintaining a more egalitarian classroom environment.

Improves focus and discipline: Students spend less time thinking about fashion, trends, or “what to wear,” which can translate to fewer distractions and a stronger emphasis on academics. Some U.S. public school districts (e.g., in Long Beach, California in the 1990s) implemented uniforms and saw improvements in attendance and reductions in disciplinary problems.

Builds school identity and unity: Uniforms create a sense of belonging and professionalism, similar to a team identity.

Supporting Analogy: School uniforms are like members of a sports team or orchestra all wearing matching jerseys or formal attire. The uniformity doesn’t erase individual talent or personality—it channels energy toward the shared goal (winning the game or performing the piece) rather than competing over who looks the flashiest on the sidelines. Differences in skill and character still shine through, but the group operates with cohesion.

Sample Arguments Against School Uniforms

Key Drawbacks and Examples:

Stifles individuality and self-expression: Clothing is a key way adolescents explore identity, creativity, and culture. Forcing uniformity can make students feel invisible or rebellious. Critics point to studies and student feedback (e.g., in Australia and parts of the U.S.) where uniform policies led to disengagement or creative pushback like extreme hairstyles or accessories to compensate.

Doesn’t address root problems and can feel oppressive: Uniforms may mask bullying without solving it, and poor-quality or ill-fitting uniforms can cause discomfort (especially in varying climates). Some research, including reviews by the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S., has found mixed or minimal long-term academic benefits, suggesting uniforms are a superficial fix. In extreme cases, rigid policies have sparked student protests (e.g., in parts of Africa or India over costs and enforcement).

Potential hidden costs and impracticality: While marketed as cheaper, families may still need multiple sets, plus regular replacements as kids grow. Enforcement can also create unnecessary conflict between students and staff.

Supporting Analogy: Requiring school uniforms is like mandating that all employees in a creative company (or all citizens in a society) wear identical business suits every day. While it might create a surface-level sense of order and equality, it risks diminishing personal flair, morale, and innovation. People still bring their unique perspectives, but the enforced sameness can make the environment feel restrictive rather than empowering, potentially reducing overall engagement and authentic community.

Protagoras is quoted as saying ‘There are two contradictory λόγοι about everything.’ Protagoras believed a truly good speaker could argue persuasively for any side of any argument.  This concept likely inspired the ancient text Dissoi Logoi. It involves examining opposing arguments to demonstrate that the validity of a statement depends on the context and perspective of the speaker.  For example, a right angle triangle appears very differently to a child just learning her shapes vs a teenager in geometry class vs a geometry professor researching the history of the Pythagorean Theorem.

(2) Similarly, the “obvious” distinction between self and world fails to grasp the unity of the two in beings: e.g., (i) the boringness of the book, or (ii) houseness appearing incarnate in the mansion, merely present in the average house, and deficient in the dilapidated shack, while the mansion is at the same time gawdy, and the shack quaint and rustic.  Moreover, Niagara Falls is simultaneously an awe inspiring wonder of the world, unremarkable background scenery, and annoying noise pollution. Dickens in David Copperfield gives a clear example of this with youthful romantic love: “I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else … it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wild flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud.  (Dickens, 2015, ch 33, Blissful).”   

(i)  I experience the boringness of the book as one of its traits like plot and setting, though I know the next person need not find the book boring.  Toohey describes the Greeks initially didn’t have a word for boredom that maps onto ours, and so expressed it outwardly and metaphorically.  Aristophanes in the Archarnians has one character say 

“I grown, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do.  I write, I pull at my hair, I figure things out as I look to the country, longing for peace.  (30-32).” 

He does not name that he is bored, but describes the symptoms.  Similarly, Euripides’ Medea describes men becoming fed up or bored, had enough of their families, and then acting unfairly (244-46), but again, boredom as an emotion is not named.

Apollodorus in Plato’s Symposium 173c says nothing gives him more pleasure than discussing philosophy, but listening to the idle conversations of the rich is boring because they prattle on about nothing and do nothing.  This shows us a clear view of how the thinkers looked down on the highest values of regular people (wealth), and agrees with Heraclitus’ point that the masses are like well fed cattle.

Pindar said too lengthy an exposition might lead to boredom, but again the symptoms are named, not boredom.  By contrast, Plutarch matter of factly talks about the boredom of soldiers due to apraxia, a lexical obvious term apparently missing from earlier Greek times.

Iliad 24. 403 and Euripides Iphigeneia in Aulis 804-8 seem to both demand a word for boredom.  The Greek for the condition of the soldiers in the Iliad passage suggests they were not merely bored, but vexed and disgusted at having to wait. Ennius (239-169 BCE) points back to his interpretation of Euripides play and writes “We are not home and not on military service.  We go here.  We go there.  When we’ve gone there we want to go away.  The mind wanders indecisively; we only live a sort of a life.”  They go here and there, but cannot settle or derive satisfaction from life because of a lack of things to do (praeterpropter vitam vivitur).  We can see the connection to the wandering shades. “Horror loci:” revulsion at where one is.

Lucretius in “On The Universe,” later imitated by Horace and Seneca, speaks of the anxious, bored lives of the Roman rich going here and there, pursued relentlessly by anxiety and boredom (3. 1060-76)  Bailey remarks boredom and restlessness were an aspect of human life near the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire.

Importantly, Horace’s description of Bullatius’s boredom and restlessness as horror loci woes in Epistles I. II were countered by philosophy (verses  25-30), with the exercise of logic (ratio) and prudence (prudential) that brought about a calm mind (aequus animus), though Horace did not think Philosophy to be a cure for him, who in the city wanted the country, and in the country wanted the city.  In Epistles 1.8 Horace describes the lethargic illness of boredom as a trait of old age.  Restlessness being brought to repose with a calm mind seems to be what Heidegger and Holderlin see as the purpose the Greeks had for philosophy.  Counterposed to the unhomely, to restlessness, dwelling is to be at peace, and Heidegger says “in what does the nature of dwelling consist? … The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace (PLT, BDT, 148-9).”

(ii)  It is how beings stand in relation to the person that makes possible overcoming ambiguity/obscurity with Aristotle’s apophantic judgments (taking something as something else: e.g., The sky is blue / I take the sky as blue).  This specifically refers to a statement that explicitly assigns a predicate to a subject to make a definitive truth-claim (e.g., “[I take] the mansion as Gaudy” – the mansion is Gaudy).  In philosophy, apophantic (derived from the Ancient Greek apophainein, meaning “to declare” or “to reveal”) describes a type of statement, judgment, or proposition that makes a clear declaration about a subject.  In its nature, this kind of judgment is verifiable by anyone through appeal to our common thinking techniques and shared life world. 

For example, resolving the question of the majesty of the mansion vs the gaudiness of the mansion refers to your ear: which possibility calls/speaks to you.  Heidegger notes “taking something as something else” makes error possible, such as mis-taking the rustling dead leaves in the wind I hear at my feed “as” a living thing.  The being I encounter always already appears in the light of einai Being, choris separate from, ton allown the others, and kath auto in itself.  For instance, I encounter the dog as not me (apohansis: I take something “as” something else).

Pursued further, this notion of the ear is very ancient.  We might ask does any ancient thinker use language like “what calls or speaks to me” like I might say empiricism or impressionism really strikes a chord with me?   Plato wrote that the soul (psuche) possesses an inherent kinship with ultimate truth and beauty. In the Phaedrus, he describes a “resonance” or “shudder” (the Greek word is phrike) that grips the soul when it encounters earthly beauty, because it “speaks” or reminds the soul of the divine Forms it once knew.  In his Confessions, Augustine describes hearing God’s truth not as an external sound, but as a voice speaking inwardly that “strikes a chord” or pierces his heart. He describes this as the voice of the “Interior Teacher” (Christ within) resonating with the deepest parts of the soul, famously writing that the human heart is restless until it “speaks” to its true origin.  Interestingly, Stoics like Epictetus literally used the language of “impressions” (phantasiai). They taught that we receive daily impressions from the world that “call” out to us, demanding our assent. While moderns say an impression “strikes a chord,” Epictetus advised his students to examine those impressions critically and ask: “You are just an impression, and not at all the things you claim to represent.”  In philosophy, the  restlessness of the soul is brought to calm tranquility as it attunes to the eternal (e.g., Justice, houseness, natureness, etc.)

In any case, Antisthenes took uniqueness to an extreme logical brink. He argued for the denial of predication—meaning you cannot say “Socrates is wise” or “The cloth is white.”  This actually makes good initial sense because if a being is most primarily a unique “this,” general predicates would be foreign to what it “really is.”  But even to talk about “what it really is” means the being is present in the light of Being: the entity’s true/genuine Being.  Let’s consider Plato and Aristotle’s critique of Antisthenes.

The Identity Rule: For Antisthenes, the word “is” can only mean “is identical to.”

No Shared Concepts: “Socrates” is a unique being. “Wise” is a separate concept. If you say “Socrates is wise,” you are falsely claiming that the person Socrates is the exact same thing as the abstract concept of wisdom.

The Conclusion: Because every being is uniquely itself, you can never use general words to describe it. You can only utter its unique name, or compare it to something else (e.g., “Silver is like tin”). Science, definitions, and theories are impossible.

Plato in the Sophist called Antisthenes doctrine “the most laughable (katagelastotata).” The being I encounter always already appears in the light of einai Being, choris separate from, ton allown the others, and kath auto in itself. For instance, I encounter the dog “as” not me.

We have pinpointed the exact philosophical pivot that Plato weaponized in the Sophist (251b–c) to dismantle Antisthenes’ view. By introducing the “as” of intentional encounter—the fact that a dog always appears to you “as” a dog, “as” a being in itself (kath’ auto), and “as” not you (choris from others)—we are describing what Plato called the Blending of Kinds (symploke ton eidon).

Plato found Antisthenes’ doctrine “most laughable” (katagelastotata) because the very act of stating the doctrine destroys the doctrine itself.

The Phenomenological Reality: The “As-Structure”

Our example of encountering a dog reveals the fatal flaw in radical uniqueness. We never experience a blooming, buzzing confusion of totally isolated particulars. The moment any object registers in human consciousness, it arrives pre-packaged with metaphysical relationships:

Being (Einai): The dog appears as existing. It is a part of reality, flashing the light of Being before you even name it.

Separateness (Choris / Alterity): You experience the dog “as not me” and “as not the tree next to it.” Its uniqueness is not an isolated bubble; its uniqueness is actually defined by its boundaries against other things.

In-itself (Kath’ auto): It carries its own center of gravity. It is an independent entity, not just a phantom extension of your own mind.

Plato’s Solution: Difference is a Form of Being

Antisthenes thought that if a dog is “not me,” then “not me” implies non-being or a lie. Plato corrects this in the Sophist by redefining “Not”.

For Plato, when you say the dog is “not me,” you are not banishing the dog to the void of non-existence. Instead, you are invoking a specific, cosmic Form: The Other (To Heteron).

The dog has Being (Einai), but it also participates in the Form of the Other relative to you. Difference is a real structural relation woven into the fabric of the universe. Therefore, addressing a being through its relationships and predicates isn’t a betrayal of its uniqueness—it is the only way its uniqueness can actually show up to a conscious mind.

What was crucial to the Greeks was movement: the appearing of the circling bird of prey “as nature;” the mansion appearing (“Parousia,” Phaedo) as houseness incarnate; the magnificent blueing of the sky after the storm, and also the plain blue sky always subtly blueing.  This movement is grounded in the Prime Mover God (theos), which is not the Christian superstition like later Christian writers appropriated Aristotle to mean.

Does Aristotle say something like some things can’t be explained in the straightforward way using obvious examples and analogies and so require “touching thigein” the subject matter such as Plato’s allegory of the cave that models the path to enlightenment?

Yes, Aristotle explicitly uses the concept of “touching” (thigein or thinganein) to describe a unique form of direct, infallible understanding that cannot be broken down by standard explanations, examples, or logical arguments.

While Aristotle is famously known for his structured, logical proofs (syllogisms) and physical explanations, he recognizes that at the very peak of human knowledge—when dealing with fundamental, indivisible truths (the “incomposites” or asuntheta)—logical breakdown is impossible. At this level, you either experience the truth directly, or you completely miss it.

For Nietzsche thus a person’s writings should originate from their own deep, personal, and lived experiences.

He famously expressed this philosophy of authentic writing in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he wrote: “Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”

Nietzsche reinforced this idea in The Gay Science when he distinguished between superficial writers and those who write out of necessity:

“I am not one of those who think with an inky pen in their hand, much less one of those who in front of an open inkwell abandon themselves to their passions while they sit in a chair and stare at the paper. I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing… so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts.”

Genuine philosophy and art cannot be faked—it must be drawn from the core of one’s own existence.  You can’t explain romantic love to a 4 year old who has no frame of reference with which to appropriate the idea.

Aristotle’s use of this concept maps tightly to our idea through several key philosophical frameworks:

1. The Metaphysics of “Touching” (Thigein)

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book IX (Theta), Chapter 10, he addresses how the mind interacts with simple, uncompounded realities.

Beyond True or False: For normal things, we make a statement (e.g., “The sky is blue”) by joining a subject and a predicate. That statement can be true or false.

Contact as Truth: For a simple, fundamental essence, you cannot separate it into parts to explain it. Aristotle writes: “With regard to uncompounded substances… truth is to touch (thigein) and assert them, and ignorance is not to touch them.”

No Middle Ground: Under this framework, you cannot have a “false” opinion about a foundational truth. You are either “in touch” with it (you see and understand it completely), or you are totally ignorant of it. There is no partial, step-by-step reasoning that can get you there.

2. Connection to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Our intuition linking this to Plato is highly accurate. Though Aristotle heavily critiqued Plato’s theory of separate transcendent Forms, he inherited this specific view of ultimate contemplation (noesis) from his teacher:

The Cave Parallel: In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, when the escaped prisoner finally looks directly at the Sun (the Form of the Good), it is not an analytical, step-by-step calculation. It is a blinding, unmediated flash of direct intellectual vision.

Intellectual Intuition (Nous): Aristotle translates this exact phenomenon into his concept of Nous (pure intellect or intuition). He argues that while science and logic rely on demonstrations, the starting principles of logic cannot be demonstrated—they must be grasped immediately by the mind, just as the hand directly touches an object without an intermediary tool.

Summary of Differences in Explanation Styles

Aristotle essentially divides knowledge into two completely separate tiers:

Method of Explanation	Target Subject Matter	How It Works
Logic & Discourse (Logos)	Composite things, science, ethics, and physical objects.	Broken down using premises, examples, and analogies.
Intellectual Touch (Thigein)	Simple essences, first principles, and the Divine (the Unmoved Mover).	Direct, unmediated, flash of experience; either 100% understood or not grasped at all.

For example, let’s summarize Plato’s allegory of the cave without understanding it:

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave describes chained prisoners in a dark cave who mistake dancing shadows for reality. When one prisoner escapes into the sunlight, they discover the truth. The story illustrates how our senses can limit us, and how seeking education moves us from ignorance to true understanding.

The Story

In The Republic (Book VII), the philosopher Socrates asks us to imagine people living in a deep underground cave since childhood. They are chained by the neck and legs, forced to stare only at a blank stone wall.

Behind them is a massive fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway where people carry various statues and objects. The fire casts the shadows of these objects onto the wall in front of the prisoners. Because these shadows are all they have ever seen, the prisoners believe they are entirely real. They even compete to see who is best at naming the shadows as they pass.

The Escape and The Return

Socrates then describes what happens if one prisoner is unchained and forced to turn around.

The Fire: Looking at the fire hurts their eyes, and realizing the statues are more “real” than the shadows confuses them.

The Outside World: If the prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, the intense brightness would initially blind and disorient them. Eventually, their eyes adjust, and they see the real world—trees, rivers, and the sun, which represents ultimate truth and goodness.

The Return: If the escaped prisoner returns to the cave to tell the others about the real world, they would struggle to see in the dark. The other prisoners would think the journey made the escapee foolish and blind, and they might even attack the escapee for trying to free them.

What it Represents

The Cave: Represents the visible world. It symbolizes ignorance and living life based purely on what we see and hear using our limited senses.

The Shadows: Represent illusions, stereotypes, and the “second-hand” information we accept as truth without questioning it.

The Escaped Prisoner: Represents the philosopher or the truth-seeker. This person has the courage to question the status quo and seek education, even if it is uncomfortable and difficult.

The Sun: Represents ultimate truth, knowledge, and enlightenment. It illuminates everything else and allows us to see the world as it truly is

Our summary isn’t “wrong,” but we fail to see the big picture.  It’s like interpreting Heidegger by summarizing and repeating his neologisms without letting his work speak out of the core of our existence and the human condition.  For example, Plato’s allegory of the cave teaches what enlightenment is like in Plato’s book on Justice with the legal theme of prisoners.  We go along according to our guiding criteria (ousia, Being) such as the traditional marriage when we encounter how it unexpectedly (thaumazein) does figurative violence to LGBTQ+ rights.  So, unable to appropriate this outside phenomenon (beyond being, epekeine tes ousias), in the spirit of Justice we deconstruct our guiding perspective and reconstruct it in a more inclusive way.  In this way we ever more fully uncover what Justice is and always was in a hidden way.

PS

During the 1930s, Heidegger realized he could not successfully complete the original project of Being and Time using only this human-centered approach. He made “the turn”. Instead of examining how humans reach out to grasp the meaning of being, he began to look at how Being itself reaches out to humanity. In this later period, humanity is not the master of meaning, but rather the “shepherd” or the clearing (Lichtung) in which Being discloses itself

To fully embrace the turn and think this from the history of Being we would need to re-awaken the notion of polis and how the Greeks once knew themselves through the public arete they strove for in front of their fellow citizens and gods, and how there was no difference between who one was and one’s being part of the collective.  As the age of individualism emerged, Sophocles called humanity apolis/deinon/homeless.  I talk about this extensively in previous posts.