3 - The null basis-being of a nullity, or between two nothings: Heidegger's uncanniness

Summary

For Bill Richardson

At times, reading a classical philosophical text is like watching an ice-flow break up during global warming. The compacted cold assurance of a coherent system begins to become liquid and great conceptual pieces break off before your eyes and begin to float free on the sea. To be a reader is to try and either keep one's footing as the ice breaks up, or to fall in the icy water and drown.

This is true of every page of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (hereafter Being and Time). But it is nowhere truer than in the discussion of conscience in Division II, which, to my mind, is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. I want to try and show where the ice-flow of fundamental ontology begins to crack, for it is there that the question of the uncanny and the stranger will begin to make themselves heard. At stake will be bringing the human being face to face with its uncanniness, with the utter strangeness of being human: we are the null basis-being of a nullity, a double zero suspended between two nothings.

As everyone who has read Being and Time is aware, what Heidegger is seeking in Division II of Being and Time is an authentic potentiality for being a whole, which turns on the question of the self.