2.94
We grasp for security with our stories of social, technological, scientific, and even individual (developmental) progress: we tell ourselves these stories that subtend practical comportment (§2.87). But they’re ruptured because the gods war amongst each other (§2.21, §2.49), for there’s no unitary standard for measuring progress (§2.53).
In providing answers regarding what things are for and how we fit in, these stories answer questions about the meaning of being. This means, more primordially, these stories have addressed the mystery of being.
When stories lose traction, we’re faced again with the mystery of being. This is a unique opportunity. But this mystery isn’t properly addressed when Heidegger speaks of the mystery of Being and beings.[1] Nor is it properly addressed when we ask stale, prefabricated questions: what’s (our) existence for? what’s the point of (my) existence? These questions too quickly band-aid or dress up the way we were before (teleology, use-value): in Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist sits on the beach and wonders: “What is this earth and sea of which I have seen so much, whence is it produced, and what am I, and all the other creatures, wild and tame, human and brutal, whence are we?”[2]
In the face of the one God, we were all called to a path of development: the same path for all (where variations are modulations of the universal). Every human had this possibility, which unfolded in a particular way, guaranteed by the Creator: the soul turned from deviance and creation towards its Creator and proper telic unfolding: guilt, sin, repentance, and rebirth. Now, with the absence of the one God, the path changes, but continues in our accounts of unitary progress.
To wedge open possibilities, to open us to the multitude of gods, and to better address the mystery of being, we turn towards what Heidegger calls being-towards-death—for death has a way of exposing us to our situation, a situation of the tenuousness of ourselves and others—and his notion of the clearing, which speaks to the temporary and temporal opening, lighting up, and revealing of things around us in a ‘space’ of responsivity and mutual clearing.
The mystery of being isn’t just that things are, that they are the things they are, or that there is ‘isness’ at all, though it does involve these. The mysteriousness is our placedness in this vastness, where things are connecting-diverging, in their mutual exposures and exposing, decaying and transforming, shining and seducing from their placedness—i.e., in their meaningfulness—in the midst of the warring of the gods; the mysteriousness is that Beings flash out (§2.51, §2.52) — that there ‘are’ ‘isnesses.’ The mysteriousness is the standing forth of things. It’s that we come to think we know how to be here.
[1] On the “wonder of all wonders: that beings are” see Heidegger, “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill, p. 234. On the enigmatic — “What is more enigmatic: that beings are, or that Being ‘is’? Or does even this reflection fail to bring us close to that enigma which has occurred with the Being of beings?” — see Heidegger, “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’,” in Pathmarks, trans. Walter Kaufmann, p. 290. On the mystery of “the concealing of what is concealed as a whole, of beings as such, i.e., the mystery” see Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 148–51 and also “Letter on ‘Humanism’,” p. 253, 255.
[2] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2013), p. 91, “June 28.”