History, Imperialism, Critique by Ghaffar Asher;

Author:Ghaffar, Asher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2018-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

First political corollary: fallen nature

The fallen state of Dasein simply means that, in Heidegger’s words, Dasein “has initially always already fallen away [abgefallen] from itself and fallen prey to the world [an die Welt verfallen]” (Being and Time 175). In just a few lines, Heidegger will “define” this kind of being-in-the-world as “inauthentic,” and will then proceed to reassure his readers that “not-being-its-self functions as a positive possibility” and that it “must be conceived as the kind of being of Dasein closest to it and in which it mostly maintains itself” (175–176). The first thing to notice in this passage is that Dasein’s “falling away from itself” is described as an act synonymous with its “falling prey to the world.” Inauthentic Dasein “disowns” itself of its ecstatic essence by “absorbing” itself in the world, i.e., by mistaking itself for a thing-like presence whose essence is stable and whose existence is completely determined. However, the same sentence that establishes that there is essentially only one “fall” (to “fall away” is to “fall prey”) also introduces an important difference between the two expressions of the “fall.” As we have come to expect from Heidegger, a wordplay at the centre of this sentence (“abfallen” turns into “verfallen”) adds an ominous sense and a whole new factor to the latter (“falling prey to the world”) that is simply absent from the former, more matter-of-fact expression of “falling away from itself.” In spite of the fact that both expressions refer to the same “falling” phenomenon and the same “falling” culprit, there is already a sense that the “fall” is simultaneously precipitated by two different sets of circumstances: on the one hand, Dasein’s own internal constitution and, on the other hand, Dasein’s inability to resist what Heidegger later calls the “temptation” of being-in-the-world (177). We are already beginning to see that the “falling” existenzial is made to straddle the ontic-ontological difference as a phenomenon that simultaneously pertains to the temporality of history, in which Dasein is literally victimized by its existence in the world, and to the temporality of historicity, wherein the “fall” is an inevitable outcome of Dasein’s constitution.

One can also see in the above passage that Dasein’s primary everyday mode of existence is inauthentic. Dasein is said to have everywhere and “always already” fallen in the world. This “fall,” however, is not the type of event where a being falls from one state into another or where it becomes what it is not. Instead, this fallen being is and remains in the fallen state: it “falls” by remaining fallen. To complicate this further, this being “falls” from the essence it does not have in its “everydayness” by remaining in the world into which it was thrown. This means that no “fall” actually takes place. No separate act is needed here to precipitate the “falling” of Dasein because existence itself—all of it—is a priori fallen. Inauthenticity becomes an ontological category in other words. One has to wonder here about Heidegger’s duplicitous use of active phrases

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