DERECHOS Y GARANTÍAS EN LOS PROCEDIMIENTOS DE COMPROBACIÓN

The question we have yet to answer is how is primordial ontology revealed through the nothing if a direct confrontation is rejected out of hand. How does transcendence occur? It is important to approach Heidegger’s analysis of Angst in terms of the philosophical function it performs as opposed to it merely being an existential intrusion into human experience. Angst is an ontological activity of Dasein that reveals beings as a whole for the first time.

In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing. But this ‘and not nothing’

we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather, it makes possible in advance the manifestness of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such.³⁷

Angst is an existentially unsettling experience that makes manifest the phenomenon of beings as a whole. Angst affords an insight into the originary openness of beings, that is, the condition of being. The question remains, how is that manifestation is accomplished?

On account of the language and structure of Being and Time, many scholars have drawn a parallel between Heidegger and Kierkegaard’s existential themes.³⁸ Indeed, early studies into the movement have chronicled the history of existentialism from Kierkegaard through Nietzsche to Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre and may also include Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich and Gabriel Marcel.³⁹ Heidegger was read as a philosopher of existence whose use of Angst, guilt, being-towards-death etc. is present in order to direct Dasein to an authentic selfhood.⁴⁰ This reading of Heidegger is feasible as all the elements of an existential interpretation are in attendance in Being and Time; however, to remain at this level of analysis is to ignore the ontological distinction in the work. Owing to an increased familiarity with Heidegger’s method, the link between Heidegger and Kierkegaard is no longer considered to be as pronounced as once supposed and a close reading of Being and Time will evidence the ontological impetus that governs the investigation from its beginning.

So far as existence is the determining character of Dasein, the ontological analytic of this entity always requires that existentiality be considered before-hand. By ‘existentiality’ we understand the state of Being that is constitutive for those entities that exist. But in the idea of such a constitutive state of Being, the idea of Being is already included. And thus even the possibility of carrying through the analytic of Dasein depends on working out beforehand the question about the meaning of Being in general . . . Therefore funda-mental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.⁴¹

The more philosophically literate of the existential studies cited note Heidegger’s ontological bearing as opposed to the psychological subjectivity of Kierkegaard.⁴² This difference is exposed in Richard Coe’s Angst and the Abyss through directly focusing on the usage of Angst and nothingness in each of the thinkers under analysis.⁴³ Coe’s thesis is that if a divergence exists it is because the shared terms, Angst and nothingness, execute different effects. The method results in a more clear appreciation of the paths that each thinker is pursuing.

Coe contends that the misconception surrounding Heidegger’s project was due in part to the rendition of Angst by the English term ‘anxiety’ in the Macquarrie

and Robinson translation.⁴⁴ In a post-Freudian world Heidegger’s Angst was taken to be a psychological and therefore subjective anxiety. Consequently, the ontological determination of Angst suffers disregard and is replaced by a more restricted psychological function. To this I would add that the grasping of the meaning of the ontological difference is by no means a simple task. The ability merely to state the difference between beings and their condition does not bring to light the significance of Heidegger’s philosophy. Furthermore, to comprehend the ontological difference as an issue of repute requires a thorough acquaintance with the problems of the Western philosophical and theological traditions as well as a familiarity with Heidegger’s works. Particularly after Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to differentiate his thought from metaphysics through a deepening of the understanding of being. A metaphysical argument may draw attention to the necessary conditions but it will not bring the ontological import of being and nothingness to experience. Heidegger’s thought, like philosophy itself, requires the reader to accomplish the process for themselves, in order to ‘understand’ in experience. This experience is a rare occurrence and Heidegger is pursuing the moment that initiates the possibility of thought itself. In so doing, he rejects the Cartesian position that states that thought commences with an original thought that enables consciousness. Nothingness must be brought to experience as the original openness of being, beings and hence thought itself. It is Angst that performs the task of bringing human Dasein before the nothing. The experience is seen as the opening of ontological awareness, that is, the original perception that beings exist at all rather than there being ‘nothing’. Although there are many theological implications to these claims, Heidegger is not describing the creation of the world; he is recounting the disclosure of the world and of being and nothing to Dasein. Precisely because Dasein is also a being in the world, it is ‘blinded’ by other beings and, therefore, cannot this ‘see’ its way towards an ontological awareness by way of familiarity with other beings. Similar to the logical argument that in a world of ‘red’ one cannot ‘see’ the colour ‘red’, so too in a world of beings one cannot see beings without the bequest of the ontological difference. A form of transcendence is required in order to account for Dasein’s ability to differentiate beings from other beings and beings from the condition for their occurrence.

Transcendence, on Heidegger’s account, relates Dasein to the nothing through the ontological category of Angst. This places Angst at the centre of the ontological difference, Dasein ‘receives’ the difference and therefore openness of being ‘in Angst’. Hence an appreciation of Angst is of importance to Heidegger. However, a psychological understanding that ends in a subjective anxiety does not bring to light the profundity of the ontological difference and would remain a derivative experience predicated upon a deeper ontological category. The distinction between a psychological and an ontological use of Angst is analogous to the disparity between fear and Angst. As Heidegger

proclaims in both Being and Time and What is Metaphysics?, fear is fear of

‘something’ – a thing or being. Angst is fear without object thus it is not directly correlated to an entity.⁴⁵ Metaphysics in its traditional comportment towards beings can only distinguish fear as, for Heidegger, it is not capable of recognizing the ontological distinction that the experience of Angst directs us to. Although fear and Angst are associated terms they do not reveal equivalent experiences. It is a useful distinction that parallels the ontological distinction between being and beings: fear relates to beings, whereas Angst relates to nothingness and hence being. Nevertheless, it is also a distinction that Kierkegaard recognized.

Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited;

sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. The concept of anxiety is almost never treated in psychology. Therefore, I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.⁴⁶

Although Kierkegaard’s location of the ‘experience’ of Angst is internal to consciousness and therefore psychological, it serves a similar function to Heidegger’s use of the term. Through relating Angst to the experience of freedom and hereditary sin, Kierkegaard creates a differential between sinful man and a perfect God that serve as the ‘possibility of possibility’. Angst reveals the relationship of man as a ‘man of possibility’, sinful as that may be, before God. Although, this relation has been read as an ontological one by thinkers such as Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Rollo May, I am more persuaded by Coe’s analysis that despite the foundational role that Kierkegaard’s Angst undoubtedly performs, his methodology is caught in the philosophy of his age and heavily under the sway of Hegel. Therefore, the full ontological horizon, as exposed by phenomenology, is not available to Kierkegaard.⁴⁷

To return to the ontological significance of Angst, if Angst is to be radically different from the ontic perspectives of fear and negation, Heidegger’s approach cannot be allowed to presuppose beings simply in order to negate them. Angst would also have to transcend. Angst would have to avoid the reliance upon beings or at the very least the inductive/deductive reduction of beings to ‘not-beings’ and thence to nothingness. Angst cannot pose a logical question or follow a causal path that discloses the nothing. This line of reasoning first assumes the actuality of beings and then supposes that there is no aporia between beings and nothingness. As a result, no transition is required and a

further ground is not necessary to make sense of beings and being. Alternatively, one could expect an aporia to be present; however, its traversal is unproblematic.

Heidegger describes the experience of Angst as follows:

In anxiety there occurs a shrinking back before . . . that is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of entranced calm. This ‘back before’ takes its departure from the nothing. The nothing itself does not attract; it is essen-tially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are slipping away as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that closes in on Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation.

It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation.

Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and nega-tion. The nothing itself nihilates.⁴⁸

Angst is the experience of the slipping away of beings as a whole and in this experience the phenomena of beings unified ‘as a whole’ first presents itself before Dasein. The nothing attacks the possibility of beings as a whole and thereby provides a stark relief to the presence of beings: that they appear as a whole as a possibility actual in existence. The ‘parting gesture’ of the nothing suggests that the nihilating activity not only reveals beings as a fundamental constituent of the world, but by means of its repelling exposure of beings it intimates another terrifying possibility: that there may be nothing. The nihilat-ing activity of the nothnihilat-ing thus contains a ‘dialectical movement’ that exhibits a ‘positive’ and a ‘negative’ aspect to the one phenomena. The possibility that there may be nothing also reiterates the Leibnizian account of the principle of sufficient reason in that if nothing is a possibility that does not occur, then the something that is in existence appears in some way ‘necessary’.⁴⁹ The nothing presents the structure of being-in-the-world to Dasein through the revelation that there is a ‘unified’ world affordable to Dasein which it is in: Dasein is

‘within the whole’ (das Seiende im Ganzen) which gives meaning.⁵⁰ The nihilating activity presents the whole through withdrawal, through the nihilation of beings as a whole. For this very reason, being and nothing, from the ontological per-spective, are identical. ‘The nothing does not remain the indeterminate oppo-site of beings but unveils itself as the belonging to the being of beings’.⁵¹ Thus Heidegger is in concordance with the Hegelian proposition that pure being and pure nothing are the same. Being and nothingness are not two separate conditions for the emergence of beings, they both belong to the essence of the condition and are necessary for the experience and comprehension of the ontological distinction.

If we return to the Seinsfrage, why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?, we can see that Heidegger’s analysis of the ontological category of Angst enacts the Seinsfrage in its entirety. Heidegger has sought to

give an account of the appearance of beings through the experience of Angst contemporaneously with the transcendence of the nothing which, likewise, grounds Dasein in its being-in-the-world:

Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing.

Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein, is in each case already beyond the beings as a whole. Such being beyond beings we call transcendence. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never adopt a stance toward beings or even toward itself.⁵²

The being beyond beings in transcendence is, for Heidegger, ‘meta-physics’.

Transcendence is fundamental to Dasein as Dasein cannot be Dasein without the recognition of itself as being-in-the-world of beings. Consequently, ‘meta-physics’ as the original ontological awareness of the openness of being is a fundamental constituent of Dasein. On Heidegger’s account, traditional metaphysics, owing to its reliance on the precedence of beings, cannot make us aware of this condition and transcend the sphere of beings.