Thursday, December 14, 2017

I understand that the THREE ECSTASIES for Heidegger are: Past, Present, and Future, but i need an example please to fully understand his analysis of Dasein through time.

In order to understand examples of the ecstasies in Martin Heidegger’s book, Being and Time, you should keep in mind three things. First, you can only truly be in the present. Being has no other philosophical meaning unless you attach some other characteristic to it, by which you must show how being not-in-the-present is different. Second, Dasein is the fact of being there, but being there right now, in the present. In order to be aware of yourself in the past or imagine yourself in the future, another characteristic must attend Dasein. Heidegger calls these projections for the future and thrown-ness for the past. Third, because ecstasy in the philosophical sense is consciousness of the other, you can only experience it if you have a full awareness of yourself as you are right now. This might come through religion or meditation or exceptional self-awareness, but without a sense of yourself right now, of Dasein, you can’t get a sense of the other, of everything else.
Keeping those two things in mind, an example of the ecstasies of Dasein might be the following. I am here, now. I know this because I am aware of it. My experience of myself in the past or my expectations of myself in the future can only come from outside, through my experience of things which already exist, which have been thrown or cast into the consciousness of others, or from things which others project onto me. Those others are facts or wishes, which can arrive to you via people or books or some other source. I will only know these are true if I feel them so, if I establish emotional links with the others, the sources of my experience, and I will only feel those links if I am sufficiently aware of myself to feel whether they “are me.” This is one reason, according to Heidegger, time seems to pass unnoticed for creatures with no sense of being, no Dasein, and for people with limited self-awareness. They just bump along through life because they have no sense of themselves, then or now or in the future.

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