Not Being There
A few thoughts I wanted to share. Please do not crucify me upon them.
I always understood the following phrases metaphorically: ‘I didn’t really feel like I was there.’ ‘I felt like someone else was inside my body.’ ‘I didn’t feel like I was alive.’
That is, I understood them to reflect a state of being, a being-blase kind of thing. But in my moments of recent epiphany, when the world floods my sensations with such rich impressions, I wondered if these statements had a literal truth.
Is it possible that in those moments where for whatever reason, perhaps because of a trauma, perhaps because we have become habituated to everyday life, perhaps because of a sensory overload from life in the metropolis, we really are in a state of non-being.
Does this imply a dualism? Because if the body is still functioning, and yet the mind feels as though it doesn’t really exist, surely this would only be possible if there was a separation between mind and body.
Maybe this is the case only if we choose a less nuanced concept of being. Having read Heidegger, and understood a little, we might be able to see parallels between the feeling of not being there and the state of being that he called ‘thrown’, I forget the German term. This is a kind of being in which we are not attendant to our own possibilities for being, but rather to those of the ‘crowd’ around us, we measure ourselves according to the standards of the faceless ‘them’ and live our lives accordingly.
I like this concept, except that I feel it might be a tad too action-oriented, that it implies that to really be we need to go out and satisfy our possibilities for being through doing something.
Even when we are completely passive we are still attending to our most basic needs. If we fail to breathe, after twenty seconds, thirty seconds, the air in our lungs expires and we very quickly learn a basic fact about our being in this world.
Does being ‘thrown’ also lie in not attending to the world at all of which we are a part. Are we not ‘thrown’ when we experience the world as a grey homogeneity, when we do not experience the world much at all.
Perhaps then, nichtdasein, the feeling or state of non-being, occurs when the self is disconnected from its own embodied nature and the fact that this self and body exists in a physical world.