literature

The Question

Deviation Actions

Published: Mar 24, 2013

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Literature Text

Each of us finds himself, one day, maybe several times, further and further, scratched by the hidden power of this question, incidentally not knowing what's going on. At times of grand distress for instance, when things lose their consistence and every meaning falls into obscurity, the question emerges. Maybe it only touched us once, like the dampened ringing of a bell seeping in our existence and then fading gradually.

Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1935

Chapter I (personal translation from German)

I was standing there, in my kitchen, a kettle boiling water, steam bubbling its way out of this liquid chaos in a trembling noise, in the gloom obscurity of a March evening. I was standing there, still. I was motionless, absorbing the repeating image before my eyes, the uniform sound, the mellow atmosphere, the unmoving scenario. Then it hit me. A sudden, intense, deep, unshakable feeling of being present. Being present, being there, in the very place I was in, located in my kitchen, on that floor, in that building, in that city, in that country, on that continent, on that planet, in that universe... Being present, being now, at that time, performing this very activity of being, being being, existing. All of a sudden impelled to the uncompromising and unfamiliar realm of metaphysical confrontation.

That insignificant being present that I am, ingredient in the soup of humanity, held in the claws of my habits and beliefs, hit to the core. Like a shadow hanging beside my conscience, infiltrating the hollow surface of my image with that whispering voice, with that obsessing vacuum, that call coming from the abyss, dizzy with thoughts larger than I can embrace, nauseated by the striking, undeniable, unfathomable, incomprehensible existence of anything at all. From the spaghetti in my hand to the flickering lightbulb, everything stood out. Worse, things themselves lost their identity as things, ultimately broken down to a shapeless treacle of billions of atomic and meaningless puzzle pieces... The present moment is magnified to the extreme, frozen, petrified, silent, dead, as if the last note of a sonata had been played and its echo faded, eternally. Being there, being now, being being.

I was standing there. What then, awaits? The impossible dilemma between the indelible stain of that realisation and blissful ignorance? Numb exhaustion through mindless activity into a dopey state, endless distraction, avoidance? Putrefaction and enslavement of the mind through religious faith or mysticism? Running, running... escaping this instant, this now, at all costs, this there, this world, this universe, this reality... running in agony, running from agony... until scythed by surprise by some reaper? Artificial unification, grouping together, making sense of this absurdity, conceptualizing, negating life, negating now, negating there, negating the obvious by diluting oneself in a big whole or fantasizing an underlying and invisible organization to everflowing chaos? Giving up, internalizing chaos to the extreme, becoming the herald of sheer destruction in an attempt to destroy oneself with the rest? At the end of the day, the world hasn't become more meaningful. The experience of an inscrutable world is the same for a Neanderthal hunter enthralled by dancing flames as it is for a 21st century American teenager fiddling with her phone -- both see the use, both articulate their life around the mastery of their tool, both ignore the ephemeral essence of that fundamental part of their life, both feel there is something more, a rough idea of something abysmal and unknown that's powering things underneath, an intuition of this metaphysical freefall they might encounter one day.

But when this feeling, this unescapable now and there that follows our experience of being, any experience of being, not merely being human, this gigantic parasite that sticks to us as long as we are, that bolts us to the ground, that makes us the heavy flesh we are... when it pervades us from part to part... at that moment, we ask that question... the question: why is there anything at all?

Let's picture the earth in the universe inside the dark immensity of space. It is, in comparison, a minuscule grain of sand, and more than a kilometer of emptiness stretches to the next grain of sand of similar size ; on the surface of this minuscule grain of sand survives in a moronic state a muddled and crawling heap of supposedly reasonable animals. And what's the span of a man's life on the path of Time's millions of years? A mere twitch in the big hand of the clock, a short breath jolt. Inside the Being as a whole, no reason can be found to place this focus on this specific region of Being that we call man, to which we belong by accident.

Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1935

Chapter I (personal translation from German)

The almost nothing we are wonder why we are instead of not being, and desperately so. And we won't be satisfied with easy answers. Not looking for an "explanation", that would merely explain things in terms of other things, or any being that would create other beings, and therefore fail to answer the question, but looking for the foundations -- with a revolted, uncompromising attitude.