metonymy4u

If we re-trace Heidegger’s footsteps for a moment and ask ourselves what is the nature of human-being (Dasein) in the west since the beginning of recorded time, one possible metaphor involves the secularization of culture. Secularization in the west appears to involve the journey from the many to the one, both in the human and the divine spheres. Consider our relation to the divine: the classical world did not exactly have the concept of “religion” in the same way that we do. Instead, they spoke of piety. And the divine was created in the image of human society – a pantheon of characters each with their own faults and foibles, none of them even remotely approaching the celestial perfection of a singular Abrahamic deity. Likewise in human affairs, as concern shifted from this singular god to the earthly affairs of humanity, we became increasingly aware of our own singularity and isolation. Descartes’ famous mantra, “I think, therefore I am,” is an expression of this trend. Was he not quite prescient in expressing what Heidegger later called our “facticity” and Sartre termed “abandonment?” Nietzsche declared that god was dead both as a descriptive and a prescriptive metaphor: letting us know that we had moved irreconcilably beyond the point of being able to seek solace in the divine singularity, now trapped in our weak human sphere and reliant on nothing but our own devices. The sweat on Descartes’ brow as he vainly tried to re-discover a lone God through the singularity of the human soul –that being all he could bring himself to know with any clear and unshakable certainty—no longer serves a creature that has unlocked the atom, looked beyond the stars, revalued all valuation and, so proud of its modern sophistication, daily spurns to partake in an old love of magic nights, and day break.