giving time to care for futures
gary e. davis
being and time: Inasmch as you’re given time, do you give time to care?
Inasmuch as you’re not given time, why don’t you gain it? Why don’t you strive to gain time for what truly matters, to be given time to care fruitfully?
Few readers of Heidegger’s texts “Get It” that it’s about there being our belonging in our time here—there in his teaching occasions, now via text which may bond us in there being time together.
Heidegger was always wanting to turn attention to the listener’s pathmaking, not his own (which nevertheless sought to be a good example to philosophy; then, after the war, for general audiences).
The task of thinking in his, “our” dangerous times was always about others’ potential for opening new ways of being fruitfully for one’s times. It was no more about “philosophy” than it was about him.
So, the “end of philosophy” was to be no ending; rather, to be an open telos for what philosophy could become.
For that, he could be a precursor only (no Origin for future thinking) by necessity of humanity beginning again after the “great” (unfathomably horrific) war of those 30 years.
He was a figure of the 20th century, appealing to future readers to appropriate his ways for our ways he couldn’t anticipate.
That said, he was an original.
Thinking what’s yet unthought isn’t mystical. It’s a matter of one’s times: what’s yet to emerge into articulation.
When Heidegger was working, there was not yet a good sense of healthy development, other than the Bildung spirit of Romantic arts (not Freud’s disorder-motived sense of early development). That was integral to Freud’s conflcits with Jung (whose conception of healthy individuation could accomodate Freud’s conception, but not the converse).
When Heidegger was working, he “discovered” what became the Ordinary Language School of Philosophy apart from his Continental influence (the so-called Oxford school, which developed hand-in-hand with conversational linguistics, whose sense of ‘discourse’ is not yet discursive in a philological sense or philosophical sense). ‘Discourse’ in Being and Time anticipates conceptual discourse as immanent potential of our ordinary bonds of language.
When Heidegger was working, there wasn’t yet a specifically humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow, et al.) which became “positive psychology” of flourishing, i.e., actualizing one’s “ownmost potential for being.”
When Heidegger was working, there wasn’t yet a post-Marxist conception of critique (which became Frankfurt school Critical Theory, then beyond that), nor critical phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Enzo Paci).
When Heidegger was working, there wasn’t yet a post-structuralist philology which married tropology with semiotics (Derrida, American Deconstructionism).
When Heidegger was working, there wasn’t yet relational psychoanalysis, which appreciates the fruitfully primary relationality of there being “our” times together in a therapeutic alliance (not primarily as transference).
So, when Heidegger was working, there wasn’t yet an emancipatory conception of developmental psychology, ordinary language analysis, positive psychology, critical phenomenology, literary postmodernism, and relational psychodynamic psychotherapy.
But his “ways not works” prospected all of that (unwittingly) as a holistic conception of teaching—emancipatory and educive (enabling)—in his enowning of post-metaphysicalist conceptuality shared through tropical discourse.
Heidegger was all about teaching an exemplarity of teaching, ways of enabling others’ thinking, being highly engaged in being apt for his times (and for misled others who might be opened to thinking newly through emancipatory, “critical” [post-Negate-ive] interacton).
If you look for some deep height of Heidegger’s thinking (e.g., scholars looking for essential “Being” in Greek thinking, which German mandarins should have needed to do), you’ll only find your ownmost era (stage, level) of conceivability, because Heidegger was all about there being “our” time as yours to come through [re-]thinking.
When one reads at the beginning of Being and Time that “we” are proceeding “concretely,” you’re reading the texted version of his real presence with listeners who are supposed to think of their own lives, already individuated in one’s way (given historicity) in one’s times (given historicality). So, the proximal abstractness of Being and Time is your challenge (which these days likely has little to do with the atmosphere of The Literature in 1920s German humanities). What is exemplary there for our interest in time for caring? (A Heidegger scholar recently wondered why Being and Time “failed to answer the question of being.” But Heidegger didn’t fail. I resolved the question through B&T).
Unlikely it will be that one thinks originally, relative to historical times, but very likely one may think in ways which are unprecedented for one’s life.
To be a leading mind (not me!, obviously) belongs to the few and the rare. If you’ve been with
a truly leading mind, you feel the lack of vanity. It’s as if one’s with a warmly open mind who truly anticipates hearing from you, reading with you, something new to consider.
How happy such days are. If something truly original emerges from our time, we may not know its promise soon, if at all; only that it’s joy to go on, joy to be.