Time and Dreams in Political Unrest
With every tick of the clock I
awake, escape the shock as I
exit the dark of my dreams, as Jung would
remark. Yet not understood.
They say time flies. With age, the days feel shorter. Life speeds up, and it doesn’t slow down. The years start coming, and they don’t stop coming. However we look at it, we can understand how our perception has sped up in making these observations. It may be the result of memory. Every moment that passes and feels faster in our lives lets us view the present and the near-present with greater and greater detail while losing the memories of what has gone long ago. We watch time speed up as we remember less.
Writing and other forms of immortalizing our words can fight against this. Whether its art, music, poetry or any other way of recording the tangible and conceivable into permanence, we can escape the fleeting visions of this world. As though we were waking up from a dream and recounting what had just happened, we can recognize dream states are part of our reality as Heidegger’s “Being-there” of the Dasein would describe.
The Dasein is what makes our existence more than a point in space-time that brings being from nothing. With death distinguishing existence, Dasein is the “being-toward-death” that gives our lives temporality. When Heidegger examined classical metaphysics with the hopes of creating a new ontological philosophy, he differentiated between the being and reality. All things have being while reality does not exist. Reality does not have the awareness of the world around it, and existing is what lets us determine what lies beyond ourselves. He described the technological advances of the 1930s and 1940s as threatening the world of ideas — poetry, intellectual thought, forms of art, and whatever we need to preserve who we are. Humanity becomes an object with an instrumental purpose through information and communication. Appreciating art and posing questions of who we counteract these forces.
Much the same way Dennett wrote about his own dreams taking a long time, yet, in retrospect, seemed to have not taken any time at all, we may hypothesize that there is no dream experience. Instead, when we awaken, our memory banks play the dreams to us. Heidegger might respond to this claim by arguing that the times of dreams are consistent with the experience of dreams themselves.
With time moving faster, the present and the near-present become punctuated by events with less and less time between them. We find disparate events — whether its a meme about raiding Area 51 or the dispersion of fake news — coming and moving closer to one another. Our near-present perception enters a hypersensitive state that responds to the chaos and frenzy, and we can pick our poison: international turmoil, threats to the planet’s climate, the rise of fringe political groups, or whatever keeps us from falling asleep, as though we were trying to wake up from a nightmare. Even something as benign as a mock competitions between YouTube channels can turn messy when a shooter tells his audience to “subscribe to PewDiePie” before massacring a mosque.
It’s possible, though, that things had always been like this. The rise of Nazism during Heidegger’s time would lead historians to associate the philosopher and his views with the fascist movement. Heidegger watched rationalism, scientism, and market-centric forces overtake wonder, liberation, and freedom. Machines themselves reduced humans to the darkness they had created, and the fascists began attacking the mind-body dualism of Jews and liberals. The alt-right echoes Heidegger’s yearning for certainty and fixed values in modern life as well as nationalism and the interconnectedness of humans and the land. Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon held up a biography of Heidegger and said “That’s my guy,” when he was interviewed by Der Spiegel.
Heidegger soon denounced Nazism. After he saw Hitler’s worship of efficiency and mythologized machines as though they were part of nature itself — part of who we are and how things should be — he condemned the anti-intellectualism running rampant. The racism and anti-Semitism followed an “I do not think, therefore I am,” inversion of Descartes’s famous proclamation.
When Horace wrote Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt (“those who rush across the sea change the sky above them, not their soul”), our souls still desire a connection to something permanent and fixed. Even Aristotle’s observation that we can only benefit from studying ethics when we already have “noble habits,” the philosopher must already have an idea of what she wants to learn. Heidegger believed that the philosopher with a main idea that she is a rooted being, tied to time and place and living within and through a land and language, her only interest is that she was born, worked, and died.
If only modern political discourse could heed the guidance of Aristotle. The philosopher’s first treatise on politics described a middle class that would lead to liberalist ideals by later intellectuals like Locke. The free rule because of their virtue and responsibility to rule. The commitment to philosophical thought, at the very least, eases the burden of time.
Published
Originally published at https://hussainather.com on September 13, 2019.
