Waking Up to the Gift of ‘Aliveness’
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Stephen Hoffman
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25 December 2017 at 11:47 delete

According to the great art critic Kenneth Clark, the aesthetic pleasure a viewer inhales in the presence of a great painting lasts about as long as the scent of a newly-sliced orange (about six seconds, according to the art critic Peter Scheldahl). Not surprisingly, since beauty, according to Kant, is (true) being made visible, and (true) being fades before the eyes like a cherry blossom. Aliveness—or simply “being,” as Hubert Dreyfus’s great master Martin Heidegger called it—has a similar duration. Being is not what is most lasting but what is most transient. Heidegger characterized being as das Fragwürdigste—the object most worthy of a thinker’s pursuit. The most thought-provoking thing about being, said Heidegger, “is that we still are not thinking.” The tantalizing source of a thinker’s “aliveness” remains out of his tingling grasp like a golden apple—making all of us what Heidegger called “die Sterbliche,” i.e., mortals, the not-yet alive—those poor, but fortunate, beings constitutionally exiled in three different dimensions of time.

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