Folder 76
[76:E-2] Beyond all the arcana lies the simple truth expressed in my “Chains . . . Web” essay and in the story itself. To cease to run is to capitulate. And sooner or later one must cease to run. This moment is the only real moment in which one exists. Everything else is an evasion. In this moment one moves deliberately toward one’s fate and fights it, and as a result, one truly lives for the first time or dies; it is sein vs. das nichts. What I call the heroic deed is, in that instant, everything. Thus I am an ontologist and an existentialist and I am willing to risk extinction in order to try authentically to be, since in this moment one has only the choice between extinguishing oneself voluntarily or fighting. I chose to fight and won, and what I won was my own soul.
[76:E-13] Notes on “Chains . . . Web.” The fate that the Christian does not run from or dread will (he knows) defeat him. He knows absolutely, with total certitude; this is the very essence of his ability not to run from it. Because he also knows he can’t run from it, (1) it will defeat him; and (2) he can’t escape it. So he is doubly doomed; its power to destroy him is absolute in two respects: the postulate “it will destroy him” derives from this double source. The double source makes this fate what it is. It is not a threat—not a lethal threat, even. It is something more.
[76:E-14] I am currently of the opinion that (1) there is a connection between original authentic Christianity through Gnosticism to Heidegger; and (2) that 2-3-74 was this particular experience; viz: the inauthentic state that Heidegger describes is the “thrown-ness” into the “fremd” that Gnosticism describes; there follows, then, a series of dire transformations by the “thrown into the alien world” person trying to cope; I comprehend this as flight and evasion from fate (heimarmene), which is a sense that this alien state/world into which one has been thrown torments now and eventually kills (causes nonbeing, das nicht). The unconscious apperception of this creates angst (dread). This running to evade nonbeing manifesting itself as fate generates a pressure time, in which—by which—the person is driven more than driving; that is, he both runs and is made to run; he is caused to flee more than volitionally fleeing. Thus there is caused an endless process of becoming that never turns into being itself; there is no true now—he is projected always into a dreaded next; he is not really here and now for him; he must run into the future and yet paradoxically away from the future; he both runs toward and away from. Thus he is split. Part of him reaches inauthentically into the future to monitor it for peril—he cannot afford ever to ignore the future since it contains his fate which will kill him—and part of him looks away from the future for the same reason; this split may be the basis of schizophrenia. He must both notify himself of what he sees in the future and obscure what he sees from himself. This is another version of the split. But worst of all is—not that he must involve himself continually in the future out of apprehension, while also avoiding it, fearing to move into it, trying in fact to halt time (since time contains his fate) but he fails to be in the now, which is where reality is, and this is what most inhibits Sein; he has to be eternally becoming because he must extend himself eternally into the not yet. What I see in all this is that his sense that this alien world he has been thrown into will eventually ineluctably annihilate him is correct and he knows it is correct; this is not a delusion, this sense of impending destruction that will take away what little being he has. That time might increase or even complete his being does not occur to him because (and here the Gnostic perception is vital) this is an alien world into which he has been thrown against his will; i.e., he is helpless: he did not decide to be here, and the more he reaches frantically into the future (while simultaneously running from the future) the faster time “flows” (or the faster he moves through it). Thus the moment, the now, escapes him perpetually and he has no life he can call his own. But he must never reveal to himself this fact—about his inevitable future doom—lest he disintegrate utterly; again he is split. So he has no idea what he is doing or why, and he is enigmatic to himself; so he is too and for himself as alien as world is to him; he is as if thrown into an alien self on top of everything else!
As I say, the only solution to this is the Christian solution of what I call total capitulation to this fate and an acknowledgment that it cannot be avoided; it will come and it will destroy him. Thus he ceases running, and lives now not future; but at the moment he does this he knows that this anticipated doom exists—so in the normal course of life this sense of the future becoming the now only occurs—if it occurs at all—when the impending doom ceases to be future and is perceived as now: at which point anticipatory dread becomes logically total fear. However (as Heidegger points out) this apotheosis of dread, this being-in-death, carries with it the possibility of authentic Sein.
[76:E-19] It is world that must change to accommodate us, not us to accommodate world. This is such a critical point that its implications simply beggar description. This world is alien to us; it must change to be familiar to us, not us to fit into it.
Folder 84
[84:5] Pay-off:
The introjection of Christ into the system is certainly the epitome of the adding of ex nihilo newness, of revitalizing creation as if from outside. Thus the term “Christ” has to refer to any and all newness choices wherever and whenever they occur; “Christ” is the zero-one binary disjunctive event per se, and so is always now and always here. We see it and understand that we see (and experience) Christ, and this is newness, re-creation (in an unending process of creation). Christ never arises/occurs as a result of the past, as an effect of antecedent causes; he is always born “from outside.” Hence his epiphany can never be induced or predicted (by definition). Christ is that which does not follow mechanically: he always invades world. To see, then, that Causality is not observed, that the “effect” is in fact not an effect at all—of its Cause—but is ex nihilo new is to see—literally, not symbolically—Christ. Hence where there is Christ it is always the case that there has been “a perturbation of the reality field,” something acting on it, intruding on it, invading it, “from outside.” In terms of mechanical cause-and-effect Christ can never be said to be a normal event derived from the antecedent system.*