Three minutes

I went on a work workshop where people were asked to perform a three minute talk on a topic that would reveal something personal, something interesting.  One man did an moving portrait of his father, and read one of his father's poems on his wartime experience.  Another told of how he responded when terrified by a large shark while scuba diving.  Everyone revealed something interesting, something personal, something funny, and became a likeable human being for a time.  It was a very quick and effective way to build some trust, break the ice and really, one of the high points of the workshop.  

My talk was probably less personal, but it went over OK.  I toned it down a lot from this that I prepared, because the audience reaction (from a room full of middle-aged and older men) when I said 'toilet' was nervous tittering and anxious exclamations of 'ooh look out!' So I could tell they were in the picture, and didn't need or want it spelled out.

Martin Heidegger & Ontological Guilt 

I want to talk about my favourite topic (not subject), Martin Heidegger, in an example applying his philosophy to my experience.
 But first, I want to tell you about my first week in my new job. I had been very lucky to be accepted from uniform into a research organisation in July 2009. I had previously worked in uniform, outposted to the research organisation.  After appearing around the building in uniform for two and a half years, I was wearing civilian clothes.  Everyone was asking me how I was going with the change.  I was, I recall, using the urinal (holding my penis, as one does) when the Boss (about 4 rungs up from me) stepped into the neighbouring spot, and glanced over to show he'd recognized me. Wanting to welcome me, he very naturally asked, as anyone might - ‘How does it feel?’
 I’ve always been disappointed that I didn’t have the courage to subvert the big guy’s welcome, but it was very well meant and I didn’t want to be that new guy who embarrasses people.
 The second time, I used the urinal on the ground floor. The Boss’s boss came in.  Seeing me out of uniform, he very naturally, as anyone might, also asked me ‘How does it feel?’
 Why does everyone keep asking me that?

 Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher – and famously, a member of the Nazi-party who got promoted several times during his association with them, and then never talked about it after the war.  An odd man. But an important philosopher. 

 Anyway, his philosophy was trying to get away from the subject-object formulation by pointing out that every mind we’ve ever known was ‘always already’ in a world. There is no value in Descartes doubting his reality – because who he was had formed in continuous participation in that world.  For example, the idea of doubting are built up from long familiarity with the world, not independent from it.  “Not even wrong”, we might imagine Heidegger harrumphing. 

 Another ‘always-already’ is being in a community.  We have other people around us from the time we are still coming together as a person, forming in the womb.  We lever off their familiarity rather than learn by our own experience. As such, Heidegger believed our kind of being relied on what he termed ‘das Man’ – usually translated ‘One’.  As in, ‘anyone’.  One does what anyone might. As in ‘One wonders if one hasn’t overstepped the bounds of propriety with one’s anecdotes.’ 'One' in Heidegger is how we apprehend and organise an awful lot of practices and information - an absolute necessity at one level, but the very devil if you want to live authentically responding to the situation you are in, not the general or typical situation that it is like. 

 The world we are always-already in (including what one is like) is one we don’t choose. We arrived in the middle, had most of our lines shoved in our hands and got thrown on the stage. If we consider a larger stage, we only find more things that could be otherwise but aren’t.  My choices about what I’ll eat for breakfast might allow originality, but my choices about my work allow less. I have still less choice about my nationality, and less again about participating in the system of competing nations. There are a lot of things I wish were otherwise, but I can’t get there from here. This is Ontological Guilt.  Heidegger says we have some freedom, freedom to live authentically, but we have to start by acknowledging that the problem is constrained by who we are - always already committed to a lot of things we might not agree with. There are realities that mean that we might not be able to get There from Here, and never without effort.

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Ontological Guilt got a huge laugh.  I think because I'd strayed out of the terminology that they felt they had to take seriously.