“Father, Why Did You Forsake Me?”

One can conceive each big break in the history of the West as a kind of “unplugging”: the Greek philosophical wondering “unplugs” from the immersion into the mythical universe; Judaism “unplugs” from the polytheistic jouissance; Christianity “unplugs” from one's substantial community. The big question here is: how are these three unpluggings interrelated? Its consequences reverberate in the details of the history of philosophy – recall the total absence of the reference to Judaism as distinct from Christianity and, more specifically, to Spinoza in Heidegger's opus. ¹ Why this absence? Perhaps the key is provided by the passage from Heidegger I (Sein und Zeit [Being and Time]) to Heidegger II (the epochal historicity of Being). Let us begin with Sein und Zeit: the book's second part in a way REPEATS the first part, accomplishing again the analysis of Dasein at a more radical level. No wonder Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty, and other partisans of the “pragmatist” reading of Heidegger emphasize the first part: focuses on “being-in-the-world,” on Dasein's immersion in its life-world, where it encounters things as “ready-at-hand,” and then deploys other modes of relating to things as arising from deficiencies in our immersion in the life-world: when a tool doesn't function properly, we adopt a distance and ask ourselves what is wrong, treating it as a present object. In the second part, however, the 107perspective is as it were reversed: the immersion in the life-world itself is not the original fact, but is conceived of as secondary with regard to the abyss of Dasein's “thrown-ness,” the state of being-thrown into the world, which is experienced in the mode of anxiety disclosing to Dasein its constitutive nullity and guilt/responsibility – it is ultimately from this abyss that we escape into engaged immersion in the world, where there is always “something to do.”