Here
is yet another variation on the old Marxian wisdom Dasein
Bestimmt Bewußtsein. What happens, we may ask, when the original Dasein
changes dramatically in one person’s life? How does this change affect the
old Bewußtsein? As far as my understanding of this goes, the altered Dasein
cannot suddenly result in a brand-new Bewußtsein. It rather expands
the old one.
As
the memory of the old Dasein cannot be erased by the new Dasein experience,
there is no substitution of the one by the other, but only an accretion, that
is, a dramatic enrichment of the aggregate Bewußtsein. In a certain
sense, a multiplicity of Daseins is beneficial to the life of the
philosophical mind, which alone, by the way, is capable of handling such a
change without being devastated by the crushing blow that such a change
entails.
Now,
how does this relate to my personal experience? For some reason, I am of two
minds about this. In one of them, the philosopher rejoices; in the other,
the “normal man” weeps.
How
often do I lament about the treasures of my new Bewußtsein being wasted
within the new Dasein, as if it were possible to travel back in time
into my old Dasein, carrying back with me my new Bewußtsein… And
so, I wish “if only” I could have my new “me” in my old life,
without enough sense to admit that this is a theoretical and logical
impossibility, and, even worse, an outright nonsense. My old life had been that
old Dasein, and it was inextricably tied to the old Bewußtsein, with
all its silly, but logical limitations.
Now,
the only serious question outside such senile-infantile fantasies would be,
whether it may be possible to use the new-improved Bewußtsein to somehow
affect that new and essentially alien and hostile Dasein,
altering it sufficiently, so as to benefit from the new understanding within
the confines of a new being?
Metaphysically
speaking, this may also present itself as an impossibility. Remember the
stories of Aristides and Themistocles?! There is, apparently, some kind of
balance in the aggregate value of the Dasein and the Bewußtsein. It
seems as though any increase in the one must be leading to a decrease in the
other. In other words, having taken the original Dasein-Bewußtsein correlation
as a given, the rest becomes the ultimate zero-sum game.
Let
me illustrate this point by a few examples. A young person of eighteen abandons
the sheltered life of a small town and plunges into the new college life in a
big city. If that is a life of sacrifice and learning, the Dasein of our
student goes down, while the Bewußtsein climbs up. But as soon as the
student, with the help of the money from home, establishes a ‘better’ Dasein,
the attention to the minutia of the better life reflects negatively on the
student’s capacity to sponge up learning, and so, the Bewußtsein goes
down accordingly. Incidentally, no wonder that in common parlance the capable
student is always depicted as a poor student, whereas the money which
the student obtains by various means has come to be closely associated with
wild parties and a dissipated life in general, where there is no place left for
learning.
In
my own painful experience in America, had I at any time succumbed to the
pressures on the responsible man with a wife and two small children and sought
to improve my family’s pitiful Dasein by the available means of
compromising my conscience for a ‘successful’ career, rest assured that my
precious Bewußtsein would have collapsed as a result, not just because
of the instant detriment to my intellectual independence, leading to a warped
capacity to absorb my experience (malabsorption), resulting in its poor
digestion, and assimilation as knowledge, but also because of an enduring sense
of guilt at the compromise, resulting in a bad conscience and an
inevitably handicapped Bewußtsein.
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