I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In The Spirit of Hope, philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes of Heidegger’s concept of everydayness, the habitual mode of existence where Dasein, human beingness, is absorbed into the world and into the They:
According to Heidegger, anxiety arises when the edifice of our familiar daily patterns of perception and behaviour, which we do not usually question, collapses and gives way to a ‘not-at-home’. This tears Dasein [being-there, presence] out of its ‘everyday publicness’, out of ‘the way in which things have been publicly interpreted’. Everydayness interprets the world along conformist lines. Everyone unquestioningly follows the already established forms of apprehending and judging. The ‘they’ represents this conformist behaviour. It dicates to us how we should act, apprehend, judge, sense, and think….
The core argument of Being and Time is that it is only when experiencing anxiety that Dasein has disclosed to it the possibility of abandoning the ‘they’, taking hold of its ownmost self and realizing its ownmost potentiality-for-being. Only the experience of anxiety puts an end to the self’s alienated relationship with itself.
But, writes Han, Heidegger is missing an important concept:
Being and Time fails to complement ‘everydayness’ with a concept of festiveness. Outside of ‘everydayness’, there is only anxiety. Festiveness is the exact opposite of ‘everydayness’. Heidegger’s Dasein is ceaselessly working. Its world, its environment, is ultimately a workshop. Festivities, the other of work, are unknown to it. The festive feeling is a mood, a mood of elation, in which even ‘care’, which Heidegger takes to be an essential trait of Dasein, is suspended. During a festivity, the human being is without care.
We are coming up on an important festival, the rites of spring, enacted in Christian society as Easter.
I will be recovering from major surgery, but my father wants to make it festive anyway, and has asked what he can provide for me and my caregivers (my mother and my daughter) to make it so. A quiche? he asked. A box of Enstrom toffee? A cake? I didn’t tell him what yet, but that he thought to make it festive for me feels so nice.
Easter, like New Year’s Day, is one of my favorite holidays, because it represents newness, rebirth, a leaving behind of the old and a moving towards the new. On Easter, you don’t need to manage your investment portfolio or clean your house or pull weeds from the garden.
I’m not sure how festive I’ll feel on Sunday, two days after surgery. I’m glad still to have the opportunity.