ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the totality-Gestalt corresponds to Martin Heidegger Gestell, and to the metaphysical representation of being as Vorhandensein, and that the wholeness-Gestalt corresponds to Heidegger’s Geviert, and to the experience of the presence of being in so far as it can twist free of the metaphysical tradition and avoid the temptation to totalize and reify. It attempts to illuminate, in terms of our experience with hearing, that is. as auditory Gestalten, the connection between Heidegger’s history of the metaphysics of being and the psychopathology Erik Erikson. Hearing in this rudimentary phase is global, holistic, syncretic, synergic, ek-static; it is an elementary hearing, deeply, symbiotically embedded in the elemental ecology of nature. Erikson conceptualized the difference between wholes and totalities in the terms of Gestalt psychology as a way of reaching some understanding of totalitarianism.
