Don't get delirious, Professor Müller! Being and Time is a treatise on ontology. A book written to open us up to ask the question of being and has nothing to do with war. And least of all this war, a civil war in cities, a chaotic massacre.

I'll cite you, Rainer. You said: "Killing in this way, looking at the victim, it makes one a warrior. It confirms who you are. You feel authentic". Need I remind you of the texts, many certainly, that the Master dedicates to authentic existence?

It's not the same. Being and Time doesn't address war.

There is nothing Being and Time doesn't speak for. Listen, Rainer: when you go out to your war, when you load your Luger, do you think you might die that day in battle?

Of course! I'm an ex-istent. I am thrown into my possibilities. But I know there is one possibility out of all my possibilities. Or that in my possibilities beats impossibility. I know, because I am an authentic being that in all my possibilities is the possibility of my death. Dieter, what is this? An exam? We evolved studying Heidegger. I know, when I go out to battle, that I have the possibility of killing a thousand enemies.

A thousand possibilities.

But I know that each of those possibilities contains the other. My enemy will be the one who kills me. I know, too, that there are other possibilities; less bellicose, ordinary, banal. In them all, in all those possibilities lays my radical impossibility. The possibility of dying inhabits all my possibilities. I know that and don't need to deny it to be brave, to fight. I know it because...

Because you are an authentic existent. And every authentic existent assumes that being is being-towards-death. That's the difference between an SA and the miserable inauthentic beings, who live by denying death through their "they say", their novelty for the new or submitting to the "state of interpreted". An SA is a Dasein who looks the possibility in the face, that possibility behind all the other possibilities: that of dying. In a Dasein that accepts finitude. That accepts his being-towards-death. And this makes him different from the rest, from the inauthentic, from the mediocre, from those afraid to die. So much so, that they live denying death.

Rainer Minder drank his last beer. He was no longer red, but pale, shaken. He watched me for a time without time. A time that was closer to the eternal than the historical. He said:

Dieter, I hadn't thought of it like that.

The cost of abandoning the reading of Being and Time is high.

I don't know what to tell you. I am frozen by my amazement. Dieter, if it's as you say...

It is as I say.

Then...it is for Being and Time that we are fighting in our cities. Listen, this won't last long. Soon we will win. We have the government. We'll make Heidegger Rektor of Freiburg. And men like you would be indispensable: philosophers. Teachers to show our troops what is authentic existence and being-towards-death.

We continued talking. I left as it was dawning. Everything was imminent. Everything was about to occur. Sometimes the future is so real, so powerful that it keeps us from seeing something else, it blinds like the desert sun.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 5:01 AM