5 - Polarity and agency

Summary

In the preceding chapter, a first step was taken to move beyond the concept of presence toward an explicit account of the kind of entity to which what is present is present. Instead of devising a special name for such entities, I have been referring to them simply as “human beings”; but, following Heidegger, I have chosen to call their mode of being “ek-sistence.” The concept of ek-sistence presupposes that of presence; and at every point, an account of ek-sistence is an account of the presence of entities to the entity that ek-sists. At the same time, however, ek-sistence is a concept richer than that of presence as such, and it subsumes under itself a number of features of human being of which this is also true.

Some of these features progressively made their appearance in the preceding chapters, which were mainly devoted to giving an account of presence as such; but with the exception of a fairly detailed discussion of error, their special status vis-à-vis presence has been only briefly acknowledged. With the account of particularity, unity, and reflexivity in Chapter 4, however, a discussion of the features of human being that are central to its ek-sistence was begun. Even so, perhaps because these three features have a somewhat static character, it may not have been fully apparent that the discussion was crossing a watershed from presence to ek-sistence. If that was the case, then the present chapter should remove any uncertainty on this point. It introduces another, quite different side of ek-sistence that has nothing static about it at all and that finds its fullest expression in human agency.