enowning
Monday, December 05, 2011
 
Michael P. Sipiora on therapy's need to care for veiled mortal uncanniness.
The thing, the phenomenon to which both therapist and client must be devoted is the client's discourse, not its conversational or functionally informative dimension but its hidden or latent quality. What has to be cared for is Dasein's own most self, its uncanny being-in-the-world which is covered-up in its everydayness.

In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts the fundamental uncanniness of being-in-the-world. This uncanniness, this not being at home in the world, is Dasein's state of being thrown into the uncertainties of a finite existence. As finite, Dasein's very being is at issue both in terms of "who" it will be and even that it will be at all (its impending death). In the face of this profound uncanniness, Dasein flees into the superficialities of daily life, loses itself in the busy activities of the "they" (being as everybody). "Uncanniness," writes Heidegger, "is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up". The strangeness of human existing, its uncanniness, is what makes us, as Sophocles' chorus in Antigone says, "the strangest of the strange". Heidegger described the movement of the call of conscience as a calling back which calls forth. In being called back to its uncanniness, Dasein is called forth to exist as the very being which it is: mortal. Uncanniness cites our mortality. In its disruption of everyday life, the eruption of this latent uncanniness refers us to the radical finitude of existence that is covered over in our preoccupation with practical affairs.
 
Comments:
So maybe the 'paranoia' people can feel while under the influence of cannabis is actually a philosophical alertness?

I have never had an LSD experience, but friends who have also describe a measure of Jamaican 'dread.'

I have not read the texts on Daseinanalysis. Any related commentary there?
 
"Uncanny" a ...mistaken translation, IMHO (and....quasi-freudian, PC, ugly, etc). Unheimlich like...homeless, unrooted--was it "forlorn" a few decades ago? I suspect some psychological types wanted a parallel to something like "alienation"--ergo, uncanny.
Ungeheuer is the monstrous, strange, huge.

Jan---try 'shrooms. Not quite as ....ungeheuer as el es d and have a certain....native authenticity. And a few shots of cuervo, a vicodin and you can wipe out the effects.
 
Daseinanalysis appears to have been a decade or generation too early, as I've never come across their comments on psychedelics.

Arguably, the paranoia induced by psychedelics comes from tearing away the curtain of everydayness, forcing users to confront the abyss, and consequent discomfort.

Unheimlich, directly "unhomely", has been translated as uncanny for so long, pre-MH, that it's the common translation now, when I search the internet. There are many alternatives suggested, but they are usually proposed as alternatives to "uncanny", so searching for "uncanny" is the easiest way to gather the literature. To me this is similar to "authenticity" for Eigentlichkeit; no one's quite satisfied with "authenticity", but its the common thread through through the secondary literature.
 
The wortbuch gives sinister, weird,creepy, along with "uncanny". But...literally unheimlichkeit is homelessness.

Haugeland used "unsettled" (IMO, closer to the ..forlorn aspect). The Stambaugh broad sticks with the freudian "uncanny"
 
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