Being as Onion: A Heideggerian Parable
Mark C. Watney watches Martin Heidegger’s kitchen encounter.
Tears seeped through the onion’s flaky skin as it sat in misery before Herr Heidegger. “I just cannot seem to find myself!” the wretched root cried out.
“What is it you wish to find?” Heidegger gently asked.
“The purpose of life!” whispered the vegetable.
“And where have you been looking?”
“Well, I’ve been peeling back the layers over the years…”
“And?”
“Layer after layer…”
“I see…”
“…After layer. After layer!”
“And?”
“And I found…”
“Yes?”
“I found…”
“Say it!”
The onion was in desolation on the couch, overcome at last by the deep sobs which shook his peeling bulb, a picture of ontic-centered misery: “Nothing! I found nothing!” he declared.
“Herr Onion,” Heidegger replied. “You have discovered an incredible truth!”
“What do you mean?”
“You ARE nothing – that is the truth. You have peeled yourself to the core and found no thing there. It is the greatest and hardest of truths, to discover our own fallenness and emptiness as ontic-roots. As individual bulbs, we are all quite meaningless.”
Is this Dasein come down out of the intellectual clouds? In other words, "I" ontically...historically, culturally? Our individual lives unfolding out in a particular world socially, politically, economically. Do we then all end up being basically the manner in which we have either been indoctrinated by others or by ourselves to believe that the existential layers themselves are in fact the Real Me?
And that, in fact, much of how we construe the world around us is derived from the Benjamin Button Syndrome. And that, in the absence of God, our individual lives are essentially meaningless? Prompting many to embrace one or another secular font in order to properly distinguish between rational and irrational, moral and immoral, authentic and inauthentic behaviors.
“Where then is meaning?”
Here I always cue Michael Novak:
"I recognize that I put structure into my world....There is no 'real' world out there, given, intact, full of significance. Consciousness is constituted by random, virtually infinite barrages of experience; these experiences are indistinguishably 'inner' and 'outer'.....Structure is put into experience by culture and self, and may also be pulled out again....The experience of nothingness is an experience beyond the limits of reason...it is terrifying. It makes all attempts at speaking of purpose, goals, aims, meaning, importance, conformity, harmony, unity----it makes all such attempts seem doubtful and spurious." The Experience of Nothingness---Michael Novak
Only he blinked. He took his own existential leap of faith to Catholicism, to Capitalism. You tell me in which order.
“You must throw yourself, Herr Onion, into the finest pot of soup you can find. As an onion-in-the-soup, you will discover your true identity. As you care for the soup, as you fill the entire pot with the flavor of onion-ness, you will experience an incredible authenticity.”
In other words, if you were around when the fascists were coming to power in Germany, you might have chosen to be the onion in the Nazi soup. You might have found your true identity as "one of them". And, ironically enough, this "true identity" no doubt will be derived existentially from your own unique experiences. As with Hitler, you come to acquire [ontically] a set of moral and political prejudices. But these subjective biases are easily subsumed in one or another of these "soups":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy
“But… but… I just want to be me!”
“Ah, but it is in-the-soup, Herr Onion, that you will become your truest self. Out-of-the-soup you are an angst-riddled, wretched little root, of no value or purpose – an ontic-oddity.”
Indeed, check out the ingredients in this soup:
https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora
“But… but… the knife! The boiling water!”
“If you want authenticity, you must face your fears, Herr Onion. You must have, as Herr Tillich says, ‘The Courage To Be’!”
In other words, for some, the courage to subsume their own individual complexities into this or that "soup"? Think of all the objectivists chefs here with their own one size fits all recipes. It's not what they believe in, it's that there had better be
something to believe in that allows them to anchor their Self to the Enlightened Path in order to transcend an essentially meaningless and purposeless No God world.
The courage to be...a Nazi?
How about a moral nihilist?