Being in the Colonies

We are an animal that can orchestrate our actions according to conceptions of time, distance and place. But this does not make us special. Birds build nests. Whales migrate to warmer waters. If consciousness is an organising commentary of the mind, a way to frame current and projected experience, as Nietzsche would have it, then what makes human consciousness unique? Imagine that consciousness exists for us to configure the most convenient life possible. It helps us navigate from one episode of competition to another to establish our relative convenience over other humans. Imagine that the only reason for consciousness is to capture Being. And that Being is finite, contingent, and always, only for a few moments in time. When we have Being, we are at our peak.

Our endless reckoning of contingency occurs because we are without possession of all the facts. Our ability for course correction is not special in the animal world either. Transcontinental birds make adjustments for storms to reach their breeding grounds. Hibernating frogs burst from the earth when it rains. What, then, makes our consciousness stand apart? I contend that we make progress by acting in a manner untrue to our mission. We are the animals that can lie productively to ourselves about our will. We always act in our own interest. But we will ourselves to prevail by pretending that we act for reasons other than ourselves. That we act for the species, the race, the religion, the family, the bringing of modernity, or whatever pretext realises our singular, selfish purpose. We say that love is selfless when it is entirely selfish. We act in free will by abusing love as a pretext. We put ourselves in conflict with people around us who act on the same lie in a desperate bid to win Being. We lie to ourselves and others for therapeutic purposes.

Being is the premier form of existing. It is a clearing made in the forest. It is a space cleared of competition through slaying and elbowing so we can move about in relative freedom. Having gained such Being temporarily, we never know exactly when we will lose it until the moment that we slip off it. Or it slips away from us. We experience anxiety at the loss of Being. We redouble our efforts to recover it. Many people spend most of their life in a state of eclipsed Being. Trying to seize it back or escape its shadow.

There is nothing easy about not-Being. Except for those who try to make a virtue out of mere survival, no one who experiences the doldrum of not-Being dares to call it ‘life’. An existence on a periphery, outside the contest, without the context of friction, holds little or no existential purpose. We can call it numbness or survival but neither mode of existence is Being. Nietzsche would regard idling at the periphery as a state ripe for overcoming. He wanted people to need something better for themselves. Were most people capable of that, they would need no pretext to seize Being and defend it.

Heidegger would say that most people fill up their eclipsed lives with gossip and mod-cons. He wrote about inauthenticity and distraction as antithetical to Being won by balancing demands of the external and the internal. Peripheral people are a majority. They often don’t know that any such balance exists between innate originality and identity expressed through community interaction. They can give no consideration to striving in a state of imperative self-discipline or following an inspired path to transcendence. They have no idea that they could do either thing.

If Heidegger’s being is obscure, then very few people are capable of taking a tilt at Nietzsche’s Superhumanity. Nietzsche set the bar too high for everyone by making transcendence an elite sport rather than one that the masses can tackle inelegantly. Whether capable of it or not, we want ease and convenience won by modest skill to find a being within reach. To run lightly into open space. For most people, seeking relative ease makes abrasion with another necessary. Colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed that people who are conquerors, who won in the will to power stakes, were not necessarily transcending humanity. They did not find the shepherding of Dasein by threading their life between sobriety and gregarious traditions. A form of being constituted by temporary grace could be the highest objective attainable. Such striving for Being is a fight against your environment and other humans in it. Being is known only to its possessor through a state of constructive and relative tension with others.

Heidegger has his uses. His concern in imagining Being as a presencing of nature in a given moment is quite helpful. Being is received by an individual as a palpable sense of nature. It is beyond objective/scientific or subjective/poetic interpretations. Phusis (Φύσις) constitutes being and becoming, as well as unfolding and persistence, at the same time.1 The immediacy of a sense of Being feels like a cooling breeze on the face. It does not care to be called a Spring breeze or ask us about the direction from which it comes. Being is a sensing or openness to feeling that makes us capable of making and remaking zones of community, especially in distressing times. It holds clear implications for individualistic convenience not as a lens on life but as an implicit feeling for how to use the community to realise it.

We are quite good at reading each other for signs of affinity or hostility. Being is not pursued. We don’t pick our fights. We roll with events not of our making to relish the opportunities as they come. The whole time, when holding Being, we hold a disposition, an inclination, to our experience. A time of colonialism, or war, makes the collisions many. A greater chance of death arises from such times, too. Intense awareness of Being is energised by a world of tumult and negativity. Free will to Being is cauterised by environmental incursions and constraints that we have no control over. Being occurs in a compatibilist world. Being is always a being in the world with a sense for immanent friction and strategic accommodation, a gift made possible by consciousness, a feeling of being tuned-in to the possibilities of threat and accommodation.

Being and hubris go together. Those who possess Being suppose themselves to be unique. They dare to sense the world by ignoring interpretive categories. Being has an indignant tone, too. Heidegger pointed towards the Greeks when observing that they let nature speak to them. He liked to gesture towards the two-dimensional Cartesian human who merely has a conversation with themselves imprinting in language the rational sense of subject-object. Being manifests to an observer without Being as an irritation. To the eclipsed, a glimpse of Being looks like it is at odds with the world. For those in Being, their attuned feeling is a matter of personal information. Not something broadcast to others puzzled at the aliens in their midst. No conqueror, invader or belligerent occupant is in the business of explaining themselves. Philosophy is poorer for that.

‘How far does nature require me to go?’ would be the question a Being holder asked if they tried to analyse their motive. They are positively in the moment and pondering what is needed to keep the Autumn sun or the Summer shade on their head and shoulders. An intuition towards self-help arising organically from a perception of nature requires no confrontation with the unconscious. Being is constituted by actions taken maximising positive exposure to the benefits of nature. Kierkegaard’s idea of despair is a feeling held in consciousness but which the holder is unconscious about.2 Yet Being is not about labouring under anxiety hidden from ourselves. It is a conscious calculation of action arising from the threat experience of nature.