Phenomenological Obstruction

“The individual, [Schleiermacher] maintained, was a self-determining, self-authenticating product of the creative reason the image of God, the mirror of the universe, the midpoint and centre of finite being. Here, in man's rational will, he discovered not only a sure basis for the ethical, but the true explanation of the entire cosmical process” (Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative, by Robert Munro B.D., Pub. Paisley, Alexander Grardner, 1903, p. 139) Not Copyrighted, [Pdf].

According to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, Dasein’s “originary” ontological structure is to project entities onto existential possibilities that it finds itself thrown. The “unowned,” or inauthentic Dasein carries out its life in a temporal mode of “everydayness” absorbed by daily tasks (career, family, friendship) so that Dasein’s time directional sense (TDS) is that of pursuing instrumental projects in a never-ending cycle of busyness, (see ‘unownedness’). This TDS is characteristic of unowned Dasein as it seeks to avoid the fact of its own finitude and future death.

In extreme anxiety Dasein’s time directional sense is disrupted, paradigms fail, and reinterpretation of being becomes urgent. Dr. Boedeker Jr. calls such disruptive traumatic events “phenomenological obstructions.” The demand for reinterpretation would not come about in Dasein’s fixed unowned anxiety-free temporality of everydayness, nor would the full field of possibilities for Dasein’s self-actualization (self-ownership) become known without the appearance of an obstruction that gives access to Dasein’s underlying ontological structure of freedom:

“Ontological phenomena, then, are structures in one’s own particular encounters of entities that can be glimpsed only when something out of the ordinary occurs that disrupts the smooth flow of apophantic interpretations [*paradigms], instrumental activity, or living one’s life. Only when such disturbances of the ordinary occur does it first become possible to see what had really always been going on already, only unnoticed, or unthematized"(“Phenomenology,” Edgar C. Boedeker Jr. in A Companion to Heidegger / edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathal, 2005, p.169)[Pdf].

*“Apophantic interpretation” is the same as our use of the concept “paradigm interpretation.”

What could become noticed and thematized by Dasein in time of crisis? For the ancient Greeks, it as “phusis” (or Nature, or physics) characterized as both logos (Reason) and of what-is (all things). Phusis gives what-is the ability to manifest itself, but does not show itself as the activity of manifesting. Only authentic Dasein can comprehend the One in the Many unlike inauthentic Das Man. (see “Heidegger and the Greeks,” by Dr. Carol J. White, p. 127)[Pdf].

“In the form of feeling, known as " immediate self-consciousness," [Schleiermacher] finds that the idea of God is immediately given...consequently concludes that the "indwelling being of God " is the final principle both of knowledge and of volition... Schleiermacher accepts the conclusion that all knowledge of reality is limited by experience”(Munro, p.143).

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