1. In der Durchschnittlichkeit des alltäglichen Daseins liegt keine Reflexion auf das Ich und das Selbst, und doch hat sich das Dasein selbst. Es befindet sich bei sich selbst. Es trifft sich da selbst an, womit es gemeinhin umgeht.
2- ... Das Dasein, immer in der Jeweiligkeit des gemeinigen, weiß um seinen Tod, und das auch dann, wess es nichts von ihm wissen will.
3. Das Vorbei jagt alle Heimlichkeiten und Betriebsamkeiten auseinander, das Vorbei nimmt alles mit sich in das Nichts.
These statements are contained in the best possible of all world experience, that of Heidegger. I found them recently at his 1924's lecture "Der Begriff der Zeit", presented at the Marburg Theological Society and perhaps the skeleton of what shortly thereafter would fall under his programme of "Time & Being". Their spell is something that one could hardly avoid falling upon the world on oneself, being thrown upon oneself... what he called in those days "Geworfenheit" (thrownness) and perhaps the highest possibility of Existential philosophy (but by no means an ethical possibility, because it's rooted in the impossibility of possibility - I think he follows Kierkegaard and Hegel more than he would have liked to admit, dialectic elsehow reversed by Levinas into the possibility of impossibility and the postmodern kernel of "passivity beyond passivity"). What is most striking (and perhaps the root of Heidegger's ontological freedom, which as I argued before was opposed by Kafka in a non-solipsistic manner) is that Heidegger's Dasein and its inability to understand itself is rooted in the "averageness" of everyday life more than it could actually stem from everywhere; the fascination and seduction of this "path" is its uprooting from both philosophy and theology, namely "thought" springing forth from the foundational fountain, a foundation before the foundation (which Hegel attempted as well) - only from the experience of the human being.
For Heidegger in the unreflected everyday life Dasein can be "contained", yet it escapes as soon as one "untimes" his existence into the metaphysical and fades away with everything else worldly into the Nothingness, and the Geworfenheit takes place at the very moment of passing from this averageness into the "spherical" (borrowing from Weber) realm of philosophy or reflection yet this everyday life can't be returned to its original stand-point following the reflection because (as Kierkegaard and Weber) he notices with "anxiety" how this everydayness can by no means be chosen deliberately, it is a burdensome imposition and the imaginary flight following it crashed before itself and "creates" philosophy not in the theological sense of "vita contemplativa" but in the Greek sense, it "fabricates". Hegel solved the problem by turning philosophy into world history (and I'm arguing in my work, "theology as history"), for Heidegger on the other hand the solution is far more complex: He shifts the importance of the "What" (which is the foundational principle of Greek philosophy since Socrates) toward the "How", so that the moment of Existence and the fear of Death can be experienced by their own right and phenomenally unconcealing existence, instead of discovering it; this I presume (at least from Levinas) is the heritage of Husserl. This is in fact, the most passionate way to do philosophy one could ever think of since the Greeks, yet I can't accept...
As a Jew I find it terribly troubling because the "How" implicates an exchange of sights and vantage points in between life and death in the Augustinian sense and a "transformation" in the sense of Rilke: "Choose to be changed. Oh experience the rapture of fire in which a life is concealed, exulting in change as it burns.... Every span of delight is the child or grandchild of division which they traverse in wonder. And Daphne, since her transformation into a baytree, desires that you choose to be changed into wind". Rilke differs from Heidegger in being a monotheist, and an atheistic monotheist at that - while Heidegger remains heathen and engraved in mystical symbols that undoubtedly conform to the norm not of National Socialist ideology (a rather weak structure in itself) but of Nazi art, which is closely followed by Viattimo and Ortiz-Oses "Catholicism" in the postmodern sense that adopts "Daimon" as the postmodern God, "Daimon" is the experience of Dasein which betrays the world in presenting "Nihilism" as history and negatively advancing Hegel in the most extreme theological fashion possible.
This you can clearly trace in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" and a very obscure and hardly known lecture "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" in which Heidegger takes Lessing upon himself in a very unchristian way for no other purpose than vivaciously justify the Nazi ideas on the relationship between art, Nazi architecture and racial purity. Nonetheless and paradoxically enough this lecture remains one of the most important (in my opinion) texts in 20th century philosophy together with "The Question of Technology", because thereby Modernity unfathomedly is found naked to the raw bones and untimely unearths the Hegel's concept of humanity in the "journey" from history to the end of history, which is actually not the concentration camps but the Enlightenment, so that "now" the real history might be in fact written or in the Hegelian sense, "Aufhoben". Yet Hegel's concept wafts in between abstract and concrete "images" that lastly eliminate the image in its entirety and produce the "human being" of the future (and here is where the "Futureness" of Heidegger is at stake and the "How"s of his concept of time) in a way eliminating the possibility of "all possible ethics", just like Kant eliminated the possibility of "all possible metaphysics". Heidegger's "Dasein" lives up to the unenlightened concept of "Being in the World" of his philosophical tradition, one which can no of no possible ethics and doesn't even recognize it.
Phenomenology remains the best possible philosophical method, specially in its Existentialist version because it can accurately describe without destroying or distancing (as it was in its 19th century counterparts); but all in all I can't accept Heidegger's "How" which I perceive to be a rather young "Owl of Minerva". I turn instead to the phenomenology of the public world and that's where I find Hannah Arendt in between aesthetics and theology. I don't want to entirely believe on the postmodern fallacy of a "post-metaphysical" world upheld by most contemporary philosophers and by all of my teachers, but I shall recognize in times of identity politics the "What" is at stake more than anything else and in recognizing this one returns to metaphysics anew, not in the "paliative" care offered by Hegel at alia but as a truly unifiying and constructive beginning in which Modernity paves a way back into Monotheism, or not even back... perhaps for the very first time. And in the possibility of this metaphysics is where the whole political philosophy of Arendt is at stake; when the chickens come home to roost.
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