Page 157 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 4 #3

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Notes

j In Heidegger's Being and Time, Angst, perhaps most closely translated as "anxiety"
in English characterizes one's encounter with death. Angst isn't knowing you will die.
Angst is feeling your death so deeply that it is often experienced as that cold, consum-
ing, "gut wrenching" terror that overturns one's world. Thrownness is the realization
that one can do nothing to change or alter the inevitable. In the end, dying and death
are inseparable from being human.

k "Das Man" literally means "The Man" - in a very impersonal, almost third person way.
Heidegger argued that when we deny death, we deny ourselves and ultimately deper-
sonalize ourselves - this is a kind of alienation of the self from itself. Following upon Ni-
etzsche, Heidegger argued that the world of "absolute truth," the world of "good and evil"
is the world of depersonalized humanity. It is a world of despair, violence, war, murder,
and the kind of morality that distorts rather than affirms our humanity.

l Sorge doesn't have a single word equivalent in English. Rather, it means something
like care, compassion, love, concern, empathy.... all in one word.

m The phrase "I rebel, therefore we are and we are alone" is at the heart of Camus' "ex-
tension" of the Heideggerean "logic." When I rebel against death, that highly personal
act of rebellion, in turn affirms that all humans are and are alone. The world of human
being, given the "facticity" of death, is by definition solipsistic - the world is my world and
whatever truth I fashion is my truth. Hence, the fundamental aberration of the world of
Das Man: It asserts the universality of meaning in truth when in fact there is no truth past
the fact of death.

While neither Heidegger or Camus "define" the role of love in human existence,
the use of Sorge as the defining moment of authenticity establishes the foundation. More-
over, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche clearly establishes the link between rebellion
and love when he wrote, "Whatever is done from love, always occurs beyond good and
evil." Further, Nietzsche's discussion of art as the foundation for fashioning an authentic
life establishes the link between creativity, love, and rebellion.

Summer 2014 | 157

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