Metamorphosism

Gamma on Sartre

While Alpha is in Japan this week, Gamma gets to sleep in the big bed and kick the covers off all night. Last night, I read her a story and turned on the lava lamp as a sort of nightlight for her and tucked her in and she said, "Sartre's slogan derives from a sentence in Heidegger's Being and Time: 'Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz,' which Macquarrie and Robinson translate, 'The "essence" of Dasein lies in its existence'. In 1946 Heidegger maintained that Sartre had totally misunderstood the meaning of the claim, but certainly some of what Sartre develops from it can be found in Heidegger too. For the latter, the question of existence is not first of all a philosophical one but rather the question raised by any human being: 'Who am I?' The fact that we raise such a question is not, for Heidegger, an accidental feature of our psychology but a essential feature of our being: I am such that 'in [my] very being that being is an issue for [me]'. A philosophical inquiry into existence, then, is a kind of meta-inquiry into 'that which one inquires into when one asks the question "Who?"' This, in turn, leads him to distinguish sharply between 'categories' and 'existentialia' — i.e., between the philosophical concepts used to characterize entities that answer to a 'what' question and those that answer to a 'who' question: 'Existentialia and categories are the two basic possibilities for characters of being. The entities which correspond to them require different kinds of primary interrogation respectively: any entity is either a "who" (existence) or a "what" …'."

Of course, being eight, she didn't phrase it exactly like that. The above quote is from here.

What she said was, "I don't know who I am."

Alpha had been telling me about this. Gamma has been very distracted in school, and I had been thinking ADD, short attention span, that sort of thing. Cut back on the sugar, maybe. Then Alpha told me Gamma had said, "I always have to think about who I am. My head is full all the time of wondering who I am." Maybe you could call that EDD, for Existential Distraction Disorder.

"I know about this much about who I am," she told me last night, holding index finger tip and thumb tip close together. "Mom says she knows about this much," she said, fingertips a little further apart. "Maybe you know this much," she said, fingertips yet a little further apart.

"Nah," I said, "about this much," and my fingertips were no further apart than hers had been the first time.

"I mean," she said, "I know my name is Gamma and I live here and I am eight and I like dancing and I am learning piano. But who am I? I always have to wonder about it."

"You're not alone. It's a fundamental human question."

"Of course, some people don't even know that they are," she continued. "They just sit in front of the mirror all day, looking at themselves. Saying, 'Oh, a tangle in my hair, I have to brush that out.'" She pantomimed brushing her hair. "'Oh, just look at my fingernails. I have to file them.'" She filed her fingernails.

"Yes, they have it even worse," I said.

This morning, getting out of the shower, I looked at myself in the mirror. "Just five more pounds," I thought. "Or, maybe, five more kilos. And a little exercise to firm things up."