The longer we live in this world, the more often the phenomenon of time amazes and terrifies us. Time generates and kills, we either want to speed up its run, then slow it down, we dream of drowning some events in its dark waters, while others, on the contrary, snatch them out of its clutches, or we powerlessly try to keep them in the eternal present. Time is, finally, the source of countless paradoxes, incidents and contradictions, and especially among them the mysterious interaction of time and personality. Year after year, day after day, second by second, our life, together with the whole world around us, is thrown into the past in a roaring stream, disappears into oblivion - never to be seen again. The further this stream carries away the events and episodes of the personal history of each of us, the more surprise we, mentally looking back, feel alienation in relation to them, we feel that they are alien to us and did not happen to us.
We look at our own biography as if from the outside and often find that these distant events hardly have anything to do with our present, after which we understand with trepidation that this will soon happen to our life today. Individual periods of life are sometimes so different from each other, so incredibly contrasting that one involuntarily wonders if this happened to one person. How many people had to recall with disbelief “their own” actions in the past, which then seem inconceivable, to radically change their beliefs, habits, lifestyle, interests. Looking at the state of affairs from this angle, we begin to see ourselves not as a single person, but as a long line of people dissolving beyond the horizon, a sequence of deaths without obituaries. Time so stretches the canvas of all life,that it is as if gaps and microtrauma are formed in it, dividing it into an uncountable set of segments that are not similar to each other.
It is this observation that brings us face to face with the phenomenon of death and allows us to see the paradoxical fact that life itself, being continuous change, is also continuous dying. Death is not what awaits us in the future, it is time itself in the flesh - what happens to us at this moment and has already happened so many times (however, whether with us, the question is open). If Heidegger spoke about human being-towards-death, I am more inclined to see in man being-in-death, for life, death, time and becoming are one and indissoluble. Feelings and thoughts, views and affections, impressions, entire biographical eras and our former personalities are carried away somewhere under the measured beat of the clock - all that remains of them is a haze of memories distorted by consciousness and worn out photographs; everything in this world falls under the continuously working butcher's knife. Death in its ordinary sense, as an event, is only the end of this long series of murderous metamorphoses, the continuity between which is shaky and ambiguous.
One of the good ways to get in touch with your own corpse is to meet with a former friend or lover after years of oblivion. With astonished bewilderment, we then clearly notice that neither we nor they are at all the same as before; that, having parted once, we forever lost them and our former selves, and the shared memories appear as something unreal, distant, fata morgana.
It is possible and even necessary to see in this continuous mortal transformation the positive side: the time that takes away the good from us, with the same imperious hand takes with it everything that is bad, one would be impossible without the other. Further, being-in-death allows us to live not one life, but many, to see the world with different eyes and angles, to try on new roles. And yet, and all the same, the constant change of landscapes, visible from a train rushing forward, cannot but leave wounds, cannot but erode us over the years, since it is human nature to become attached, as he longs for it.
The fact that the past will be replaced by a new one sometimes does not comfort us more than as if after the death of a friend we were told: “Why grieve, you will still have a lot of friends, even better than the deceased.” Such a remark, no matter how coldly reasonable they may be, sounds insensitive, outrageous - however, if you think about it, we should experience the same indignation when we are called to let go of the past, promising a future, even a better one. Indeed, to replace each closed door, a new one opens and they will swing open again and again until the light in the corridor goes out completely. And yet these unceremonious clapping, constantly heard in front of our very nose, leave behind a nasty aftertaste and often incline to see any life as a series of irreplaceable losses, even if something bad is carried away into the past, because by its very nature every loss,all the more the loss is continuous and inevitable, full of tragedy.
Time and death are inescapable, and all that we can, boldly meeting their essence with a glance, draw the right conclusions. They are able to teach many lessons, but here I propose to take only two - one, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, the other, reflecting on Heidegger's thought, which choice is not surprising, given how much time I spent with these gentlemen.
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Nietzsche: the primacy of the useful over the pleasant
The more I indulge in retrospection, the more distinctly I notice the confirmation of what previously seemed to be more of an abstract moral teaching. Those pleasures of life, which were only pleasant and devoid of productive content, irrevocably melted away, leaving behind only mental mirages. Having become dusty cards in the archive of memories, they did not seem to exist at all, like the dinner eaten a year ago. On the contrary, those joys that turned out to be both useful at the same time are still with me to one degree or another in their results, in how they changed me, moreover, they continue to delight me with their results. In his drafts (summer 1878), Nietzsche, with a laconicism unattainable to me, summarizes this in the following entry, which I once well and for a long time remembered:
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# 15. Time, death and two life lessons from Nietzsche and Heidegger
The longer we live in this world, the more often the phenomenon of time amazes and terrifies us. Time generates and kills, we either want to speed up its run, then slow it down, we dream of drowning some events in its dark waters, while others, on the contrary, snatch them out of its clutches, or we powerlessly try to keep them in the eternal present. Time is, finally, the source of countless paradoxes, incidents and contradictions, and especially among them the mysterious interaction of time and personality. Year after year, day after day, second by second, our life, together with the whole world around us, is thrown into the past in a roaring stream, disappears into oblivion - never to be seen again. The further this stream carries away the events and episodes of the personal history of each of us, the more surprise we, mentally looking back, feel alienation in relation to them, we feel that they are alien to us and did not happen to us.
We look at our own biography as if from the outside and often find that these distant events hardly have anything to do with our present, after which we understand with trepidation that this will soon happen to our life today. Individual periods of life are sometimes so different from each other, so incredibly contrasting that one involuntarily wonders if this happened to one person. How many people had to recall with disbelief “their own” actions in the past, which then seem inconceivable, to radically change their beliefs, habits, lifestyle, interests. Looking at the state of affairs from this angle, we begin to see ourselves not as a single person, but as a long line of people dissolving beyond the horizon, a sequence of deaths without obituaries. Time so stretches the canvas of all life,that it is as if gaps and microtrauma are formed in it, dividing it into an uncountable set of segments that are not similar to each other.
It is this observation that brings us face to face with the phenomenon of death and allows us to see the paradoxical fact that life itself, being continuous change, is also continuous dying. Death is not what awaits us in the future, it is time itself in the flesh - what happens to us at this moment and has already happened so many times (however, whether with us, the question is open). If Heidegger spoke about human being-towards-death, I am more inclined to see in man being-in-death, for life, death, time and becoming are one and indissoluble. Feelings and thoughts, views and affections, impressions, entire biographical eras and our former personalities are carried away somewhere under the measured beat of the clock - all that remains of them is a haze of memories distorted by consciousness and worn out photographs; everything in this world falls under the continuously working butcher's knife. Death in its ordinary sense, as an event, is only the end of this long series of murderous metamorphoses, the continuity between which is shaky and ambiguous.
One of the good ways to get in touch with your own corpse is to meet with a former friend or lover after years of oblivion. With astonished bewilderment, we then clearly notice that neither we nor they are at all the same as before; that, having parted once, we forever lost them and our former selves, and the shared memories appear as something unreal, distant, fata morgana.
It is possible and even necessary to see in this continuous mortal transformation the positive side: the time that takes away the good from us, with the same imperious hand takes with it everything that is bad, one would be impossible without the other. Further, being-in-death allows us to live not one life, but many, to see the world with different eyes and angles, to try on new roles. And yet, and all the same, the constant change of landscapes, visible from a train rushing forward, cannot but leave wounds, cannot but erode us over the years, since it is human nature to become attached, as he longs for it.
The fact that the past will be replaced by a new one sometimes does not comfort us more than as if after the death of a friend we were told: “Why grieve, you will still have a lot of friends, even better than the deceased.” Such a remark, no matter how coldly reasonable they may be, sounds insensitive, outrageous - however, if you think about it, we should experience the same indignation when we are called to let go of the past, promising a future, even a better one. Indeed, to replace each closed door, a new one opens and they will swing open again and again until the light in the corridor goes out completely. And yet these unceremonious clapping, constantly heard in front of our very nose, leave behind a nasty aftertaste and often incline to see any life as a series of irreplaceable losses, even if something bad is carried away into the past, because by its very nature every loss,all the more the loss is continuous and inevitable, full of tragedy.
Time and death are inescapable, and all that we can, boldly meeting their essence with a glance, draw the right conclusions. They are able to teach many lessons, but here I propose to take only two - one, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, the other, reflecting on Heidegger's thought, which choice is not surprising, given how much time I spent with these gentlemen.
Nietzsche: the primacy of the useful over the pleasant
The more I indulge in retrospection, the more distinctly I notice the confirmation of what previously seemed to be more of an abstract moral teaching. Those pleasures of life, which were only pleasant and devoid of productive content, irrevocably melted away, leaving behind only mental mirages. Having become dusty cards in the archive of memories, they did not seem to exist at all, like the dinner eaten a year ago. On the contrary, those joys that turned out to be both useful at the same time are still with me to one degree or another in their results, in how they changed me, moreover, they continue to delight me with their results. In his drafts (summer 1878), Nietzsche, with a laconicism unattainable to me, summarizes this in the following entry, which I once well and for a long time remembered:
"The useful is higher than the pleasant, since it indirectly achieves the pleasant, and for a long time, and not for a moment, or it seeks to create a basis for the pleasant, for example, health."
Since productive joys are tangibly present in the present, we can say that they in some sense resist the power of time and represent a continuous thread of continuity on which our multiple personalities are strung, stretching back in succession into the past years. To paraphrase Epicurus a little, pleasures are pleasant and useful, pleasant and useless, pleasant and harmful. Do not fall into maximalism and think that you should strive to exclude the last two types. For all of them, undoubtedly, there is a time and place in our lives. Art consists in finding the proper measure, a harmonious balance between them, and priority should undoubtedly be given to the first type, since only they have a long-term cumulative effect, since only they can soften the feeling of constant loss described above.which is the fate of a person who is in time.
Heidegger: death as a path to authenticity
In Being and Time, Heidegger calls the realization of being-to-death, its thinking and opening, the path to the authenticity of existence. The reason lies in the fact that death as a final, in its second meaning, is its own, most unique of all the possibility of human existence, in which no one can replace us. Death can happen only to us, phenomenologically, someone else's death is a secondary, derivative phenomenon. Our death is a unique, inevitable and most intimate event that no one will share with us, in which no one will help us, therefore the experience of being-to-death separates us from other people and separates us among the things of the existing world. The comprehension of death raises the question of who we are, exactly as we ourselves, it allows us to feel, experience our lonely separateness, uniqueness,Thinking through it is capable of opening for the first time our authentic “I”, which does not follow from others and is not able to hide in them from our freedom. Exposing our independent self, it is able to establish us as free, authentic “individuals” whose existence, whose location in time and space is unique and, therefore, our spiritual, worldview position should also be independent and unique.
The experience of death pulls the “I” out of the element “They”, from what Heidegger calls das Man, from the impersonality of the crowd. Being towards death means, therefore, caring for human freedom and authenticity, which originates in the awareness of its uniqueness, originality, detachment, then moving on to a new, but already genuine and independent inclusion in being. To realize being-to-death is not to allow yourself and those around you to dissolve in others, in das Man, to help yourself and them to find and know their “I” exactly as their own; to open up their true interests and desires, to form their views, not being blindly guided by tradition, ideology, public opinion, to live their own life, as well as to die a natural death.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky
