Abstand, “distância”; ou, ao contrário, Abstandstilgung, “eliminação da distância”. Com igual originalidade (gleichursprünglich), a vida cobre e ofusca a sua própria inclinação. É levada à dispersão, encontra-se a si própria (pois de alguma forma, inexplicavelmente, encontra-se) como dispersa e dispersa no seu mundo. Assim, a vida está “em ruína” (102-103). A vida perde o seu “em face de”, vê-se a si própria falsamente e numa perspectiva enviesada; como Heidegger repetirá vinte e cinco anos mais tarde, em “Poetically Man Dwells …” A vida persegue a posição, o sucesso e a posição no mundo; sonha em ultrapassar os outros e assegurar vantagens; manobra-se de modo a diminuir a distância, mas permanece sempre distante; dedica-se ao cálculo, à ocupação, ao ruído e à fachada. Aqui Heidegger usa a mesma palavra que empregará em Ser e Tempo (SZ 126), nomeadamente, Abständigkeit, para designar a paixão consumidora de colocar distância entre si e os outros, quer elevando-se para além deles, quer oprimindo-os abaixo de si. Ironicamente, na paixão de manter a distância dos outros, somos arrastados e tornamo-nos precisamente como os outros, que, presumivelmente, estão todos a tentar fazer a mesma coisa. Acabamos assim por não ter qualquer distância dos outros.
2. Abstand, “distance”; or, contrariwise, Abstandstilgung, “elimination of distance.” With equal originality (gleichursprünglich), life covers over and obfuscates its own inclination. It is torn away into dispersion, finds itself (for somehow, inexplicably, it does find itself) as dispersed and scattered in its world. Thus life is “in ruinance” (102-103). Life loses its “in the face of,” sees itself falsely and in a skewed perspective; as Heidegger will repeat twenty-five years later, in “Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” life measures but misses itself (vermißt sich).” Life chases after rank, success, and position in the world; dreams of overtaking the others and securing advantage; maneuvers itself so as to close the distance, yet remains forever distant; devotes itself to calculation, busy-ness, noise, and façade. Here Heidegger uses the very word he will employ in Being and Time (SZ 126), namely, Abständigkeit, to designate the consuming passion to put distance between oneself and the others, either by boosting oneself beyond them or oppressing them beneath oneself. Ironically, in the passion to keep one’s distance from the others, one is swept away and becomes precisely like the others, who, presumably, are all trying to do the same thing. One thus winds up without any distance on the others at all.
The others? Who are they? Heidegger would have admired Henry (373) David Thoreau’s description of the They, had he known it. (If the Heidegger of the 1930s bemoans pragmatic America, how close to him nevertheless is puritan America!)
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I Find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they,”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting any thing quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men.
No doubt the head monkey is headed for a difficult season. Thoreau’s prescribed therapy for the “they,” a kind of baptism by fire, will be a drastic one, and it will be applied in the name of a “they” without quotation marks, a “they” that follows upon the phrase “by the help of men” so effortlessly that we do not believe that the “they” is being invoked (by one of “them”) at all.
… by the help of men. They (sic) would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy.
Yet the effort to isolate maggots from wheat kernels fails. The maggot is hatched of an egg, the living germ from the living ear of wheat. The “they,” if they are men, and if men are human beings, and if human beings are for the time being living, are crammed higgledypiggledy with both uncritical “notions” and genuine food for thought. Are matters any different (374) for Heidegger? As much as he would like to purge das Man of complacent notions, does he not always find the wheat mixed in, so that the “proper” and the “inappropriate” are inextricably intermixed? Is that not part of the sense of the exteriority and passivity that mark Bewegtheit, animatedness? Is that not part of the reason why Heidegger will insist over and over again that the analysis of everydayness in the first division of Being and Time reveals essentially neutral structures, structures that are not to be scorned as “merely” quotidian, purely inappropriate?
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