Variagenic collapse—notes on Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger

“Ashby suggested that the cybernetic machine and the organism could be linked by this shared capacity to self-organize in moments of breakdown, a capacity that ultimately could be traced to the tendency to fail—at least temporarily—on a repeated basis.” ¹

No person—tales to the contrary notwithstanding—survives biological death. But Iain Thomson claims, following Heidegger who was following Kierkegaard who was following Paul, that some people do survive existential  death, a state of ‘projectless projecting’ in Thomson's fine phrase. ²   How many?  Estimates vary.  Heidegger claims, says Thomson, “not only that we can ‘die’ in his existential sense without having to undergo mortal demise but also, conversely, that most human beings reach their [biological] demise without ever undergoing his kind of ‘death’.” ³   (And because Heidegger asserts that “Mortals die their death in life,” ⁴  we can infer  that most human beings are not ‘mortals’ as Heidegger uses that term in articulating the Fourfold.   Cf. ‘elect.') Some scholars have concluded that to a first approximation no one  becomes authentic in Heidegger's meaning (i.e. by undergoing existential death), only a handful of world-historicals. ⁵

Anyway, the population of individuals who experience existential death numbers somewhere between ‘all minus most’ and ‘a handful.’ What sense can we—all of us likely non-experiencers (non-philosophers⁶)—make of it? Heidegger says in “The Essence of Ground” that the primary, fundamental character of world (primärer Weltcharakter, Grundcharakter) is the ‘for the sake of’ (das Umwillen, τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα), and is the source of possibility as such (die Quelle von Möglichkeit als solcher).⁷ As Thomson makes clear, existential death occurs when the for-the-sake-of character of world is temporarily lost to the individual. Möglichsein having lapsed, Dasein becomes projectless; yet even projectless Dasein continues projecting, Seinkönnen still functioning. ⁸

Heidegger formulates the overall structure of care, die Gesamtstruktur der Sorge, as “Dasein's being-ahead-of-itself in its always already being into something,” das Sich-vorwegsein es Daseins in seinem immer schon Sein bei etwas.⁹  When Möglichsein, being into things, fails, then occurs the Big Reveal (“Dasein is its disclosedness”¹⁰; Seinkönnen becomes self-aware, like Skynet.  The story thus far:

“In the phenomenon of existential death, our selves get stripped of the positive, worldly contents they ordinarily seem [?] to possess (as we lose all the concretions of self conferred on us by the projects we can no longer project ourselves into in our lives).  When we undergo this shipwreck of our life-projects in existential death, however, we do not simply disappear entirely; instead, we encounter ourselves as (what I am calling) a projectless projecting, that is, as a sheer existing that (at least temporarily) finds itself unable to exist as  anyone or anything (teacher, man, father, and so on).  To encounter death as the existential ‘possibility of an impossibility’ is thus (as Heidegger glosses it) to encounter a positive ‘nothingness’ — that aforementioned ‘utter nothingness of Dasein.’ The nothingness we encounter in existential death is not the onrush of oblivion . . . Dasein's ‘utter nothingness’ is instead the stark condition undergone by what Heidegger calls the ‘solus ipse’ or self alone (BT 233/SZ 188), that is, the utterly desolate core of the self that survives the shipwreck of all its worldly projects.  In this way, existential death discloses to Dasein its ‘ownmost ability to be,’ that projectless projecting  that forms the very sine qua non of the self in Being and Time (and so defines the touchstone of Dasein's definitive ‘mineness’). The ontological core of the self disclosed in the phenomenon of existential death is not ‘alone before God’ (as Kierkegaard has it).  Instead, in existential death, Dasein is alone before its own sheer existing, standing out into a world of possibilities it cannot connect to, and so starkly encountering itself as ‘a naked “that-it-is-and-has-to-be”’ (BT 173/SZ 134).” ¹¹

What happens next?  As Bernard Williams observes, “Philosophy, and in particular moral philosophy, is still deeply attached to giving good news.” ¹²   In further particular, philosophy which is remodeled Christianity.  In accord with this entrenched attachment, “Heidegger's phenomenological appropriation of Kierkegaard,” says Thomson,  “allows him to develop and convey his own sense of the significance of the conversion experience, that is, the experience of death and rebirth in life (an experience polysemically ‘crucial’ to Christianity).  Thus, Heidegger is able to appropriate (and transform) some of the deepest insights preserved in the Christian tradition by expressing them in the secularizing language of existential phenomenology.” ¹³  In conformity with the Christian template existential death turns out to be a Fortunate Fail.  As Thomson puts it, “there can be no mistaking the momentous influence on Being and Time of Kierkegaard's view that confronting the despair intrinsic to the structure of the self can allow us to pass through a kind of salvific death and rebirth to the public world.” ¹⁴

Thomson remarks the key difference between Heidegger's phenomenological and Kierkegaard's Christian account of rebirth to the public world, viz. : “Kierkegaard's version of conversion seems to leave the world just as it was . . . whereas Heidegger's core self (the solus ipse) can (but, pace White, need not) choose quite different projects, and so a quite different world, for itself.” ¹⁵   Heidegger's variety of existential death potentiates variation. (Variation, selection, transmission.  And the greatest of these is variation. ¹⁶ )  Thomson describes this potential using Heidegger's notions of ‘liberation’ (überliefern, in the sense of ‘freeing up;’ das Freisein für, ‘being-free for;’ etc.) and ‘transformation’ ( Verwandlung):

“On those occasions when we reconstitute our living worlds (transforming central aspects of our embodied self-understandings) by, for example, sloughing-off an outdated, arbitrarily restrictive, unsatisfying, or otherwise unfree or no longer liveable way of being a father, man, teacher, philosopher, etc. (before taking up a more liberating or otherwise meaningful embodied self-understanding), existential death plays a crucial role in such transformations, as the very moment of that old world's collapse.  Indeed, such periodic personal deaths and rebirths to the publicly intelligible world are precisely what Heiegger means by ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ or, in a word, ‘authenticity’.” ¹⁷

Thomson characterizes the status quo ante Verwandlung as ‘unquestioned existential inertia’— “I pursue my anxiety to the point where all my life-projects, foundering on the reef of their own contingency, forfeit their unquestioned inertia and so temporarily break down or collapse.” ¹⁸   That foundering, if we stick with Christian structures, would be in the nature of a mercy, a blessing, a stroke of Grace ab extra.   But, to anticipate a bit, such exogenous fiddling is the kind of thing Alan Turing would refer to as ‘screwdriver interference.’ ¹⁹  

There's plenty of Gunst und Gnade in later Heidegger,²⁰ in Being and Time not so much.  In that work Angst is a Grundbefindlichkeit, a frame of mind which makes evident ‘how one is,’ macht offenbar, »wie einem ist«.²¹ Interpreting this uncanny state of mind from an existential-ontological point of view, Heidegger says it is the threat, die Bedrohung, which proceeds from Dasein itself, die das Dasein selbst von ihm selbst her trifft;²² that is, ab intra, endogenous.  Adopting Thomson's trope, there is an internal force—an existential impetus—acting upon existential inertia so as to bring the latter's trajectory to a halt, to founder.  What is that irruptive existential impulse?   Why is there such an impulse anyhow? In the existentials-economy of Being and Time that irruptive impetus is the call, the appeal, of conscience, der Gewissensruf — “an appeal to the they-self in its Self”—whose receptor site is the wanna-conscience, Gewissenhabenwollen. “To the call of conscience there corresponds a possible hearing. Our understanding of the appeal [Anrufverstehen] unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience.” ²³

What stands in the way, Heidegger says in the Introduction to Being and Time, “of the basic question of Dasein's Being (or leads it off the track) is an orientation thoroughly coloured by the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world.”²⁴ Although the Gewissensruf -complex originates in Christian anthropology Heidegger retains it for the sake of autarky of the Soteriad, the solus ipse's progress to Entschlossenheit-Eigentlichkeit. “He needed the assurance of a call, and so he called himself” (Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away).²⁵

David Bates documents the questions of interest here—What is that irruptive existential impulse?   Why need there be such an impulse anyhow?—in the form they took in the history of cybernetics.  Bates writes, for example, of W. Ross Ashby (whose day-job was psychiatry),

“It was exactly this problem of reorganization in crisis that Ashby faced head-on in creating his cybernetic model of the adaptive organism, the Homeostat machine.  Ashby knew that by definition a machine was fixed [sc. inertial], and its operations wholly determined.  A machine, in its ideal operating state, had only one form of behavior and therefore could not change its fundamental design. . . . Ashby had to figure out a way to model the behavior of a genuinely open system, one that could assume a determinate structural organization, like any machine, but at the same time not be eternally bound to any one particular order. . . . he thought deeply about how to create mechanical systems that could not only respond to environmental changes [like a thermostat can], but in fact actually change its very organization as a way of finding new paths to stability and equilibrium.” ²⁶

Alan Turing knew Ashby's work and corresponded with him.  Bates shows that the two theorists labored at the same coal-face, the problem of how to get plasticity to emerge from automaticity.  Turing, writes Bates,

“made an important connection between the idea of intelligence as break or deviation from routine and the concept of error and risk.  The challenge was to imagine a coherent machine that could, at one and the same time, be open to determination and, when necessary, liberate itself from determination to become organized in a productively new way.” ²⁷

In the course of his work imagining such a machine Turing came up with a succession of philosophemes to name the liberating agency. ²⁸  ‘The residue’ is the one most promising as an alternative to Heidegger's ‘call of conscience.’

 We can think of the residue as psychic neoteny.  For Turing,

“the very programs and routines that define the possibilities of human behavior are themselves acquired from outside of our thinking apparatus.  This is why determination through interference [experience and training, Mitdasein] must always presume a prior indetermination.  We can suggest in this context that it is this foundational indetermination that Turing is alluding to when he writes of the ‘residue’ that always accompanies a disciplined and trained intelligent individual.  As  Turing remarks, ‘A large remnant of the random behavior of infancy remains in the adult.’  The plasticity of the cortex never totally disappears; in being determined from the exterior, the interior always retains the possibility of not  being restricted by that determination, to move without cause (‘randomly’) into a new state.” ²⁹

Human infancy is polymodal perverse and its remnant in the adult is das Unbewusstsein, the antinomian unconscious. Ça rêve, ça rate, ça rit (Lacan); and the greatest of these for present purposes is ratage, failure; or rather, the precipitation of failure, as manifested e.g. in Fehlleistungen, ‘parapraxes.’ This unconscious—erregt Unbewusstsein, the excited, agitated unconscious—is the road rejected by Heidegger as early as 1912 when he denied its having ausschalggebende Bedeutung for philosophy of religion and empirical religious psychology. ³⁰   No surprise that in Being and Time he kept to his last and continued to tinker with Christian structures to build the result he wanted: Glad Tidings.  For some.

Thomson's takeaway from the good news can be captioned ‘profusion of variety.’ “This seemingly disastrous loss [existential death] of our ‘actual self’ turns out to be our salvation . . . because when despair alienates us from the world of our ordinary projects, we discover that what survives this expulsion from the world is our true or ‘infinite’ self.” ³¹   With the result that after existential death, “as I find my own ways to take up, stretch, and transform this garb of worldly actuality, doing so also enables me to articulate and develop aspects of myself in ways I would not otherwise have been able to do.” ³²

For Thomson, this phenomenon—collapse or failure or aporia  followed by profusion of variety—scales.  The failure of the project of Being and Time  was for Heidegger a kind of existential death, which stalled his inertial path within the Tradition and thereby opened up for him a vista onto the plenitude of the many-visaged Ur-phenomenon.  “Instead of trying to deliver a fundamental ontological understanding of ‘the being of entities’ that would finally answer  the question of being, Heidegger recognized that all such answers are but temporary metaphysical dams in the ontohistorical river that shapes Western history.  . . . Heidegger came to see that these [various] metaphysical ontotheologies are themselves made possible by something . . . that they can never render fully intelligible and so permanently stabilize in the light of our historical worlds.” ³³   The Ur-phenomenon is the ‘zero-’ or ‘floating’ signifier underwriting the profusion of variety of beings, of meanings. ³⁴

If existential inertia, automaticity, determinateness, etc. are constraining, then what disrupts them is deconstraining.  Deconstraint potentiates profusion of variety. ³⁵  The essence of technology, if we care to go there, is deconstraint.³⁶   So Thomson takes later Heidegger's vision of the Ur-phenomenon as deconstraining (he doesn't use the word) on a broad scale.  “Today,” Thomson wonders, “are we not witnessing the dramatic historical spectacle of a historical return of the repressed  by the Enlightenment, that is, a multifaceted reemergence of numerous differences of parochial belonging and tribal identity that continue stubbornly to resist cosmopolitan assimilation — and for good as well as for bad reasons?”  For Thomson, signs of a “burgeoning resurgence of difference and particularity [sc. profusion of variety] follow from and feed back into a deeper ontohistorical transformation from late-modernity to postmodernity.”  Thomson writes with passion of “the proliferating phenomenological rainbow of ontological pluralism,” “the irreducibly plural truth of postmodern phenomenology,” “a never entirely conceptualizable phenomenological excessiveness,” “the emerging plenitude of particularities — in their irreducible diversity.” ³⁷

One heuristic for thinking about variety is ‘Shannon entropy.’  Thomson is persuaded in effect that the transformation from late-modernity to postmodernity is characterized by increase in Shannon entropy, better expressed as ‘Shannon variability,’ an index of “variability of the elements within a distribution, how diverse the objects are from each other within the collection.” ³⁸    Consider three sets of geometrical shapes.  In the first there are 10 circles, 1 star, and 1 triangle.  In this set almost all the elements (10 of 12) are similar to each other.  In the second set there are 6 circles, 2 stars, 1 triangle, and 1 square.  More variability, yet more than half the elements are similar to each other.  In the third set there are 2 circles, 2 stars, 2 triangles, and 2 squares, no predominating species.  “The Shannon entropy of the first set would be lower than the second set, which would be lower than the third.” ³⁹   Our intuition tells us that intra-set variety is clumpy in the first set and fully smoothed-out in the third set; entropy as diffuseness of intra-set variety increases across the three sets.

In these terms later Heidegger was persuaded that—Ur-phenomenon notwithstanding—the Shannon entropy of Welt is decreasing, that Ge-Stell by way of constraints and orderings and regimes is producing a Borg planet.  An inertial path which we are evidently not capable of deflecting.

DCW 03/23/2025

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