Plato taught Aristotle. Aristotle influenced almost everybody, including Thomas Aquinas, who likewise influenced almost everyone in the Western world. From Dante to Martin Luther and Goethe, the bible played its role until Spinoza, Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant took up the mantle of thought to influence Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others right up to our present time. For two thousand years, the baton of knowledge and humanity’s desire to understand our place in the cosmos has been a thread passed from generation to generation. These thinkers wrote in order to distill accumulating theory into new tools that might allow others to forge better processes as we try crawling out of the proverbial muck. In their search for answers, even if flawed and, in retrospect, unenlightened, those who force us to think differently are helping us understand existence.
Some of us write to explore our existence as we become aware of our Dasein. I am referencing this German word here on the 250th birthday of Hegel, who wrote of the subject, but it is the definition by Heidegger that resonates with me most. Da means “there,” and sein translates to “to be,” so we could say Dasein means “being there” or “presence,” but you should know some German to better understand that nothing is as it appears on first blush regarding simple meaning. In English, we translate Dasein as “existence” though many things are in existence, including animals, insects, molecules, planets, pollution, and us.
Put another way, Dasein means that humans “are” in the world, that we are aware of self and of a universe of meaning constructed by humans to learn how to understand our involvement. These structures are the results of human experiences and the consciousness that cultivate the seeds of Dasein. The science of attempting to understand this is called phenomenology. It is within this realm that we explore metaphysics, and within that, some of us are concerned with the noetics of our species. So, “being there” cannot simply mean mere existence, but it demands that a person is actively engaged in exploring the most important aspects of humanity as it relates to the mind’s interpretation of our place in the realm of knowledge. That is what is meant by noetics, in my understanding.
Consider the idea of a current moment where we cannot see forward and are content with where we are; we are in our “normal.” Being in the present without knowledge or bias about any immediate demands or questioning of certain higher orders that would require a fundamental cultural or intellectual shift because things are relatively perfect as they serve us with our current awareness can be called “epoché.” People of the past all existed in their own epochés and wrote from the basis of their accepted norms as they suspended their judgment and had to accept certain rules, laws, and conventions since violations could result in death. These people’s flaws do not invalidate their contribution, although there are those here in the early 21st century who are risking making a clean break with what they see as the moral failures of our ancestors.
Herein lies a problem of living in our epoché without Dasein but also being unaware or unable to harness the noetics of invention where we map our future. Why are we here? We are wallowing in a bizarre moment of disintegration of the fabric that holds one generation to another. The roads of capitalism, industrialism, technology, climate science, greed, racism, and the need for education have all converged, though some of these trajectories are at their dead-end while others are hampered from moving forward by fear. Without our embrace of systemic change, our Dasein is frozen without knowledge or a plan for how we transition to what comes next. We are sadly stuck in this epoché while those who embrace Dasein and cherish the noetic process are marginalized by an economic system that doesn’t concern itself with intellectual capital as it’s blinded by material accumulation that demands the complacency of those who have not.
To even ask me what the hell I am talking about is to acknowledge that we do not care about the experiential knowledge found in the study of language, mind, intellect, education, and real human progress. We now measure ourselves by how adroitly we manipulate relatively primitive digital tools using gestures and voice commands as though we were communicating with the Gods and downloading gnosis. We further this in our vulgar displays of normalized greed, the indignation of those who desire progress against the degradation of the environment, and continued racism that results in death and institutionalization. This situation risks damaging 2,000 years of progress as a generation sees the failures of their parents and the controllers they’ve given power to as being so fundamentally broken that nothing of the past is really worth carrying forward.
Difficult to see in all of this is that the epoch we’ve been living in where we’d normalized the tools, paradigms, economics, and various habits we’ve been enjoying during my lifetime, is over. That normal, without consideration of thought about what comes next, is what being in an epoché means to me. All that we knew in the 20th century is losing relevance. Its logic or reasons behind why things were the way they were have not been conveyed to the next generations who are failing to see any sense in it all or are ignoring those conventions as they perceive them as hostile. So, the young are living in an epoché where they accept that nothing will change and that nothing can be done about it, while previous generations accepted that their epoché required war and violence to bring change and clarity to those too locked in paradigms that were unacceptable to the ruling class.
We are in a stalemate unless the older generation can somehow, at this late stage, force upon their children a way of life they so far have failed to impress on them. In lieu of that, their directionless offspring can wait for a generation or two of these oldies to die out and then somehow magically turn on the spigot of intellectual consciousness instead of reactionary disdain. One side cannot fathom the other, and yet neither side has any valid ideas for progress as we’ve slid into the post-industrial digitized world of the socially connected universe that is yet to receive new rules and paradigms to build dreams for the future we are entering.
Dreams of the future are where I find my idealism, but recently, I feel that the door is opening once again on the fall of humanity. Dark ages of despair seem to be the elixir of reform and harbinger of real change, as making our way into the future requires us to step over more than a few bodies. Self-awareness and building anew on Dasein are exciting times when a convulsion of circumstances propels us to leave the past behind, and no matter how foolhardy I’d like to hope that my life would not play witness to tragedy on a vast scale, I grow ever more resigned to the idea that only through a global cultural contortion of ugly consequence will a new generation be catapulted into the demands of being there.