Kairos
Kairos
Chapter three pursues the motif of decision more explicitly, showing that it is absolutely bound up with Heidegger’s disastrous political engagements, but that it too harbors an element of undecidability which parallels the risk of the pseudos that we explored in Chapter Two. This undecidability shows up in the form of the danger of what is called psittacism, the necessary possibility that one’s ownmost decision be merely mouthed or parroted. Decision also demands a thinking of time in terms of the kairos, the right or opportune moment, what Heidegger calls the Augenblick, which is inseparable from the famous analyses of Entschlossenheit and Entscheidung, but which is in fact, as is argued drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy, operative in the most basic or originary decision of thought to think. The somewhat disavowed relationship Heidegger's thinking here has to Kierkegaard (and via Kierkegaard to Saint Paul), as well as to Aristotle, is explored along with the complex internal tension Heidegger’s Augenblick has to the recurring motif of dispersion or scatter. Criticisms are offered of attempts to simplify what is at stake here by Stephen Mulhall and more especially by Hubert Dreyfus.
Keywords: Augenblick, decision, Dreyfus, kairos, moment, Nancy
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