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Metaphors and the Heideggarian Existentiells

Kent Palmer Ph.D. kent@palmer.name

http://kdp.me 714-633-9508

Copyright 2014 KD Palmer1 All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.

MetaphorAndTheHeideggarianExistentiells20141222kdp02a.docx Started 2013.6.3-6.9; Edited 2014.12.22 Draft Version 02

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5298-4422 http://nondual.net

http://schematheory.net

There is a new interpretation2 of Heidegger’s Being and Time that connects it to the kinds

of knowledge in Aristotle which are related to the Divided Line sections of Plato from the

Republic which we extend:

Limit: Nous Numinous (not considered by Heidegger in B&T)

Ratio -- Sophia Virtue (not considered by Heidegger in B&T); non-representable

intelligible

Ratio -- Episteme Science --> present-at-hand (mode of apprehension of other

than Dasein); representable intelligible

Doxa -- Techne Poesis --> ready-to-hand (mode of apprehension of other than

Dasein) grounded opinion/appearance

Doxa -- Phronesis Praxis --> Dasein (differentiated by Death) ungrounded

opinion/appearance

Boundary: Metis = Morass of Contradiction, Paradox, Absurdity, and

Impossiblity --> Mitsein (Being-with Others)

1 http://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer See also http://kentpalmer.name 2 Sadler, Ted. Heidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being. Also McNeill, William. The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. See also Bowler, Michael J. Heidegger and Aristotle: Philosophy As Praxis. London: Continuum, 2008. And Brogan, Walter. Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

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The idea of this interpretation of Heidegger B&T is that he is going back to Aristotle for

his primary distinctions, and it just happens that Aristotle's kinds of knowledge are

isomorphic to Plato's divided line.

We might be able to think of Trauma as a small death in which one freezes and that

would mean that Trauma like Death differentiates Dasein out of the They (Das Mann).

The nice thing about Heidegger's idea of Dasein is the distinction between categories and

existentialia. In other words categories apply to the differentiation of things that are not

Dasein and existentials differentiate Dasein. He distinguishes between ontic and

Ontological on the one hand and existentiells and Existentialia on the other hand3.

Now if we were to try to give a Heideggarian interpretation of what is happening in

Trauma Therapy we would say that Primary Process talks about the existentiells which

mirror the ontical. Secondary Process relates the Existential to the Ontological.

Heidegger says that there is a difference that makes a difference between Being and

beings. Similarly there is a different but related difference that makes a difference

between Existential and existentiells. “…What Heidegger calls, an existentiell

phenomenon; … means that it is something that can be modified into something else.4”

There is probably also a Tertiary process that talks about subjects and objects in the

present-at-hand set-like mode as if taking an objective view of oneself. That would be the

therapists clinical view, i.e., looking at the Subject of the patient as if one were an

objective observer.

Secondary process would then be ready-to-hand, i.e. circumspective concern in which

both the therapist and the patient are using language to get a handle on the patient's

situation in life in a mass-like mode. But this is still treating the patient in their general

Existential orientation toward the Ontological facts of their situation.

3 “ ‘Existentiell’ questioning (as Marquarrie and Robinson translate “existenziell”) is the type of inquiry into the particular way of life and particular world in which one exists. To be existentiell is to be concerned about ontic possibilities, about what things there are or could be.” John Tietz “An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, p.20 http://kp0.me/11euWK6

"Existentiell" refers to someone's personal understanding of their own existence. “For an individual Dasein, the question of existence never gets clarified except through existing. The understanding of oneself that we acquire along the way Heidegger calls "Existentiell". [ref. ¶ 4, page 33] See Glossary of Terms in Being and Time by Roderick Munday http://kp0.me/17V0az3

See also Withy, Katherine. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. , 2009. U. Chicago Dissertation for an interesting

discussion of how Heidegger mixes existential and existentiell angst and how that doubling plays into the uncanny

(nb. p.94).

4 “Being-with, Authenticity, and the Question of Community in Being and Time” by Jonathan Boddam-Whetham;

Ph.D. Dissertation Essex U., 2012

http://www.academia.edu/2070515/BeingWith_Authenticity_and_the_Question_of_Community_in_Being_and_Time

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Primary process would be at the level of Dasein itself, i.e. with regard to its phronesis, its

judgment, but with regard to existentiells rather than Existentials and ontic things in the

world rather than Ontology.

An interesting aside is that Present-at-hand for Merleau-Ponty is Pointing and Ready-to-

hand for Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception is grasping. If the finger then is

brought close to the thing so it is touching it but has not yet grasped it this can be thought

of as the mode of Dasein itself which is non-dual between pointing and grasping, i.e. the

modes that we use to relate to things. Similarly with respect to Friendship Aristotle

distinguishes between true friendship that embodies the good and degenerative

friendships based on pleasure and utility. We might think of the friendships based on

pleasure as like the present-at-hand and those based on utility as being like the ready-to-

hand but in terms of modalities of being-with in the mitsein. One can see how the

pleasure of good company might then be modified to be sensual pleasure involving touch

and the further modified into usefulness of the other to oneself across a range of

degenerate forms of friendship and how these modifications are bound up with each other

and different from true friendship rooted in the Good which does not want anything from

the friend but only wants to give un-reservedly, and how this mutual giving of Good is

different in kind from these modifications of degenerate friendship. So in this example

we can see how these various existentiells are modifications of experience that can be

dissected and distinguished, and how there is a deeper existentiell relation that is the basis

for the degenerate ones which is friendship based in the good among equals. Heidegger is

always searching for that deeper existentiell upon which all the modifications are based

and trying to make that distinction as we see Aristotle doing with regard to friendship

where it is equals competing with each other to do good to each other that is the measure

of the degenerate modes of friendship. But it is interesting how those degenerate modes

are similar to the distinction between pointing i.e. taking pleasure in someone’s company

on the one hand, and grasping like a tool with is like the usefulness of one person to

another for extraneous reasons. Usefulness and Sensuality get mixed together if there is

bodily contact, as we say that one person is merely using the other for their own

gratification if there is touching without feeling emotions for the other person such as

love.

As with most things in Aristotle this merely corresponds to the various forms of Love in

Greek. The mixture of usefulness and sensuality involved in touching is Eros. See Eros,

the Bittersweet by Anne Carson for the paradoxically of Eros. On the other hand spiritual

love is Agape which is the kind of love associated with the Good that has no concept of

getting something out of the other person through the relationship. Agape is

unconditional love. Philos is a kind of mental love which is halfway between Agape and

Eros that has give and take with the other of the type that Aristotle talks about between

true friends which is involved with but not overwhelmed by the other as in eros but is not

dispassionate either as with agape. So, for instance, you can have philos for Sophia

(wisdom). Then in modern Greek there is storge which means affection but also signifies

just putting up with a situation, for example loving a tyrant. In a sense storge is closest to

the kinds of relations between friends that are based on pleasure or usefulness but it is

mostly a term used to describe family relations, i.e., of the parents affection for the

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children. But there is definitely a spectrum of love here from Agape, through Philos, to

Storge and then to Eros. Plato is constantly talking about how Philos often degenerates

into Eros. The types of friendship that Aristotle talks about related to pleasure and

usefulness and probably appear between Storge and Eros on this spectrum. So if Eros is

metis then we can see Friendship appear at the level of Dasein related to Phronesis, and

then Storge is like techne, Philos is like episteme and Agape is like Sophia. There does

not seem to be a term for love related to Nous. What this kind of analysis shows is that

the differentiation of experience into its levels is mimicked by other concepts such as

Love. Love and Friendship also describes the various levels of experience. Since Storge

is a modern term, Plato is always talking about how Philos and Eros become confused. It

is also interesting how Apollo would support the Agape end of this spectrum while

Dionysus supports the Eros end of the spectrum of loves. All this is just to point out how

there are modifications of concepts such as Love and Friendships and these modifications

are the existentiells. Understanding these modifications is what we do as humans, we

comprehend these differences in our selves. We make distinctions within ourselves

between these modifications to our comportment in the lifeworld.

Two questions come up when we are talking about modifications of existentiells. One

concerns what is the unmodified original form of something in experience as

distinguished from the degenerations of those phenomena. The other question that comes

up is how we make non-nihilistic distinctions between extreme artificial nihilistic

exemplars of a given phenomenon. Heidegger attempts to try to show us how to do that.

For instance, he locates Dasein as prior to the differentiation of subject and object, so that

Dasein is nondual in respect to that duality. And he distinguishes Death as the measure

of the finitude of Dasein, so that allows him to focus in on the original phenomena of

Dasein different from the modifications of it though its immersion in the They. We

always want to know what the spontaneous, genuine, authentic, essential non-fabricated

non-artificial phenomena is and how that relates to its degenerate modes of appearing.

Heidegger is attempting to work that out in relation to the structure of Dasein without

taking it apart.

We want to relate the existentiells to the metaphors in Metaphor Therapy of David

Grove5 as it continues to be practiced by Cei Daves Linn

6 and Steven Briggs

7. In this

therapy metaphors are elicited by the clinician from the client and then addressed directly

so that the various metaphors which are connected to inner feelings, or memories, or

imaginations are allowed to naturally transform as the information is developed and

matured about the various metaphors that come up in the session. Metaphors tend to

5 Healing the Wounded Child Within. Edwardsville, IL: David Grove Seminars, 1989. Grove, David J, and B I. Panzer. Resolving Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and Symbols in Psychotherapy. New York: Irvington Publishers, 1989. 6 “In Other Words: A Competency Based Training Programme in Theraputic Language”. Cei Davies Linn, David Grove Seminars, Dod House, High Street, Long Buckby, Northants, NN6 &RD. davidgroveseminars@gmail.com 7 http://www.stevenbriggsphd.com/

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transform until they find their natural home in an analogy produced by the client which

resolves their trauma which is the subject of the session.

Metaphor8 might then be a way to relate an existentiell to something ontic in order to get

‘a handle’ on it, but then it treats the ontic thing, the metaphor as if it were existentiell

itself. So, in Primary Process one is watching the existentiell transform from ontic

metaphor to metaphor which are all modifications of the existentiell expressed in terms of

the world of the patient, as they know it themselves distinguished from the Heideggarian

They (Das Mann or ‘One’ as in “This is what One does.”, Lacanian “Big Other”, Joyce’s

“HCE”, i.e., ‘Here Comes Everyone’ in Finnegan's Wake).

So the aliveness of the metaphor is the expression if the existentiell directly. But this

takes place in relation to the background of the They as “One” who knows how the world

works generally which is informed by common usage of language. The mirroring of ontic

and existentiells is where we get the personal cosmology of the patient expressed in their

own words and in their own structure and their own understanding of the meaning of

those words and structures.

The existential or ontological (for Dasein and non-Dasein) are like the concepts of

infinity, continuum and space in mathematics. They are not entities and thus difficult to

deal with in ordinary ways of thinking. Likewise Existenz and Being are not entities, they

are not existentiell nor ontic. But the point is that the entity Dasein which appears in the

world is the source of Being of the things in the world, but also the source of its own

Being. Existenz is that upsurge of Being through Dasein that produces the world of things

that have Being including Dasein itself.

Heidegger is only concerned with the Existentials which are Befindlichkeit (what is

found), Verstehen (understanding) and Rede (talk). Eventually he adds to this falling as a

fourth existential of Dasein. Existentiells are specific phenomena found that appear in

moods, particular understandings, and peculiar talk. The mood brings with it an

understanding of the situation that gets expressed in personal talk. But what is happening

in metaphor is that this is talk about objects in the world that signify the existetiells as

metaphors. The metaphors themselves are addressed and then they are allowed to freely

transform as they express the flux of the existentiells, which is seen as being channeled

by the logic of the metaphors of non-Dasein objects as they work in the world.

What is nice about this way of understanding what is happening in metaphor is that we

can see that it is the existentiells that we are looking at when we address the metaphor

and ask it what it would like to do. The various metaphors that come up express different

existentiells that are active within Dasein at any given time more or less at a structural

level.

8 Corradi, Fiumara G. The Metaphoric Process: Connections between Language and Life. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Epistemological Metaphors do not carry meaning in this scenario, but rather they carry a

fragment of Dasein as an existentiell. This accords with the idea that this fragment might

be an earlier self of Dasein. Heidegger does not take into account that the self of Dasein

might have different forms representing different times in a persons life, like a temporal

onion. But this accords with the idea of Abraham and Torok9 that there can be phantoms

which get sealed off from the ego associated with particular pieces of the unconscious.

Heidegger does not deal with the unconscious except in as much as it can be seen as a

phenomenon similar to the They only deeper and more hidden. The collective

unconscious of Jung is deeper and more hidden than the personal unconscious. But Jung

develops the idea that the Collective Unconscious is objective in the sense that it is about

things that are in the world tied to human finitude like we all have fathers and mothers,

even if we do not know them, and so even if someone does not know their fathers or

mothers they have a relation to that absence just as strong as the relation someone has to

the presence of their father or mother. The archetypes are a summation across all possible

ways of being a father or a mother, not as an ideal that leaves out details and differences,

but as a way of keeping all the possible modifications of that experience together as the

same. In terms of gender differences men have a relation inwardly to the feminine via

their anima and women have a relation to the masculine inwardly via their animus.

Archietypes are any human situation that occurs over and over again which is similar. For

instance Puer Eternis, Eternal Youth is a motif that occurs frequently in different

embodiments. The Archetype is a summary across all possible embodiments of that

complex of psychical currents. Since this situation recurs over and over in the world

though actual embodiments that can become exemplars Jung considers the Archetypes as

being objective because we can study the embodiments. Idealizations would be purified

of the details in each case to give a representation that is general. Archetypes are

unpurified of the details and are specifically a sum of all possible embodied examples

from which we extract the essence. Ideals of Plato and Archetypes of Jung are duals of

each other. The ideal is a systematic representation while Archetypes are embodied

repetitions of the same phenomena in all its multifarious forms and permutations, all its

modifications as a meta-system. Jung generalizes the archetype into a field of all possible

archetypes which is called the Self. The self is the totality of all archetypes and thus is a

meta-systemic field of the archetypes. Ego is seen as a unity within this field. The path by

which the ego realizes its self as a mandala of its archetypal articulations is called

individuation. Because everyone who goes through this process over time churns up

culture the entire field over time as seen in the tradition is called the Collective

Unconscious. You can use art works and other cultural items that express the collective

unconscious in history to help interpret your own unconscious in its individuation process

because it reflects the structure of the collective unconscious in a completely unique and

specific way in each individual. Heidegger similarly talks about the individuation of

Dasein from the They, but does not talk about the unconscious. However, in Heidegger’s

terminology Dasein in its everydayness is lost in the They and thus in a sense

9 Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Also Abraham, Nicolas, Maria Torok, and Nicholas T. Rand. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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unconscious of its own status within the They. And the They is not taken to be conscious,

it is not a collective consciousness, so we can understand it as a partial collective

unconscious formation. So even though their ideas are expressed in different ways the

ideas of individuation are very similar between Jung and Heidegger. In Heidegger Dasein

is itself a meta-system, so one way to think of Dasein is as something archetypal. It is the

archetype of what Jung calls the Self, which Jung relates to the Christ image in the West.

As such like Christ who is also God the Father there is an essential paradox. God the

Father creates the world, and then Christ as mortal god (like Dionysus) finds itself within

that world created by itself. One difference is that Christ supposedly embodies Agape not

Eros. Dionysus is a god who experiences death as a child. Christ is an adult human being

who is also divine who experiences death. So just as Dasein projects the world then finds

itself within that world so to with the idea of the Western Self which is Christ. So we can

say that Dasein is an archetype of the Western Self. As such Dasein is the collection of

what it is to be human in all its forms and all the modifications of its experience within

the Indo-European context. This is because only Indo-European languages have Being

and so Dasein is a very peculiar kind of being, one for whom Being is an issue. But Being

is not an issue for other than Indo-European native speakers except indirectly as the

Western worldview is imposed on them.

Since Dasein is whole and since Dasein's relation to space is deseverence as far as

Heidegger is concerned, whatever set of existentiells are active at a given time express

the wholeness of Dasein, and they tend toward non-separation, and that could explain

why the various metaphors work together to solve the overall problem causing the

symptoms in the patient.

Cei Davies-Lynn in her presentation on Metaphor Therapy mentions three types of

learning relevant to her talk on Metaphor Therapy. One is the whole story. Dasein when

it speaks of itself because it is whole tells a whole story.

But then in that talk there is another kind of learning that ‘bridges’. And one way to

interpret this is the bridges between the ontic exemplars, or between the existentiells and

the ontic exemplars, or between the existentiells. The very fact that the existentiells are

differentiated means that deseverence of Dasein is hung up somehow, and these separate

existentiells naturally get mirrored in different ontic things that can be seen as metaphors

for the existentiells. So there is some distancing in the fact that things are separate so they

have to be bridged, but as you say bridging is a first step in desevernece, i.e. the fusion of

the existentiells which is mirrored by the cooperation of the metaphors to produce healing

at T+1.

Finally, there is a kind of learning that develops information, which either brings the

metaphor into greater focus or allows it to transform into another metaphor. Existentiells

are by their nature amorphous, ambiguous, vague, undifferentiated, indistinct and the

only way we can see them is through the metaphor, i.e. through the ontic mirroring as

related to things in the world of the person that have significance for them. But each thing

in the world is a horizon that you can explore almost infinitely if it is real. If it is not real

then you can only explore it to a certain extent. So this developing information appears to

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be the exploration of the horizon of the thing singled out in the metaphor that stands in

for the existentiell that otherwise could not be singled out and contained as something

specific and determinate. When an ontic thing is singled out as a metaphor that thing

becomes a horizon for exploration that naturally develops the metaphor using the context

in the world as the clues as to how the metaphor could develop.

To relate this to the fourth dimension, when something turns in the fourth dimension it

turns inside out. (See Gospel of Thomas about how all things that are hidden shall be

revealed.) So it is possible to explore something in normal dimensionality and go into it

deeper and deeper as in a powers of ten kind of way, but there is another kind of

exploration in which we rotate the thing in four dimensional space and in that we turn it

inside out. Now this turning inside out of something is perhaps related to the metaphoric

transformations. As we turn the metaphor inside out we get different metaphors revealed

for the same existentiell by its being related to different ontic things, i.e. its self-

representation by different metaphors.

Let us consider that actually ontic things do not transform in this way, but can only be

explored three dimensionally as horizons, but the difference of existentiells is that their

exploration as a horizon causes them to turn inside out and that produces jumps from one

ontic thing to another which they are associated by the person whose existentiell is being

embodied.

Dasein is a whole, but as a whole it is really a situation of being-in-the-world and thus a

meta-system or a whole full of holes. The system is the ego but Dasein is prior to the

arising of subject and object, and so for Dasein the ontic objects it finds in its world are it,

they fit into the niches of its meta-system filling up the holes that make the meta-system

de-emergent which is the opposite of the emergence of the ego.

If this is correct then we can see that a given Dasein would have multiple holes filled by

ontic objects which are significant to it in ways it does not even know, because those

objects have projected value that carries the meanings within Dasein's ownmost self with

respect to the little death of the trauma to which it is continually oriented with a mood,

say foreboding, anxiety, fear, despair, etc. As a meta-system Dasein is de-emergent and

thus has these holes within its structure of being-in-the-world by which it hangs onto

things in its care which becomes concern for things and solicitude for other Daseins.

When we ask the question, “What would you like to have happen?” and then “How do

you know X?” and the person answers with a feeling, or sensation then we are identifying

the holes. But then when the questions about size, shape and color are asked then Dasein

moves to fill those holes. The numbers of metaphors that become active indicate the

number of holes that appear. Each hole is an existentiell that can suffer modification.

Each ontic thing grasped in the world to fill one of those holes becomes a metaphor. Then

there are two horizons. If we explore the object horizon we get more information about

the thing that has been seized upon to fill the hole in the whole of Dasein. But if we

explore the horizon of the existentiell we are turning the metaphorical ontic thing in the

fourth dimension and thus turning it inside out. As we turn it inside out it transforms into

a new thing seized upon to fill the hole that is the existentiell. This is the developing

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information that allows the traversal of the T0 moment from the frozen Be-ING bringing

about Be-com-ING until T+1 is reached via the fourth dimension so that T0 does not

have to be traversed in linear time in the third dimension again re-traumatizing. Thus a

bridge is built across the chasm of T0 (a little death) without going through it, by going

around, over, behind, etc. IT.

The various bridges that are built over, around, under that allow the discontinuity in

experience that is T0 to be avoided give continuity again to experience, and this becomes

a whole metaphorical story, and in the process the objects either work together to give

an outcome, or they merge or they do whatever is necessary to return Dasein to its

wholeness which is intrinsic to it.

The ‘travel amphora’ does not have flat bottoms, they are made to be carried and not set

down. They have handles for carrying which are affordances for handling these

containers. But what we do not see any more are the holders by which they were stored

on the ship that received the travel amphora and allowed them to rest while they were

being transported from port to port. The ships probably had various receptacles for the

amphora.

Because travel amphora do not have flat bottoms they have implicit in their shape a

harkening to the receptacles that hold them as they are being transported.

So the travel amphora implies within it its meta-system of holes into which it fits, and on

the other hand it is a container for some commodity being transported.

So the metaphor is as has been said a container for information, but saying this is already

rendering it present-at-hand.

Rather let us try a different picture. Dasein as being-in-the-world is a situation, which as

a meta-system is a whole full of holes. The holes are the existentiells but they are

undefined, vague, amorphous, and ambiguous within the whole of Dasein because they

are just holes (Something is missing? Don't know what?). When the patient is asked what

do you want to have happen (which suggests a change, a becoming of X) and then asked

how do you know X they identify something that is missing in their Being they would

like filled in or changed. Then when they are asked what size, shape, or color is it then

different ontic information comes in to fill that space for change they have identified.

And when they are asked what it is "like, like a what?" then that information is gathered

together into something that is identified as an ontic object in the world that is the

metaphor. That object as metaphor then carries the existentiell by mediating between it

and the overall whole of Dasein. It is now a container of the existentiell and that separates

it from the Existentials of Dasein which is general but also are a characterization of the

whole of Dasein. The travel amphora has no bottom to sit on because it has no place

outside the transportation and carrying that it fulfills functionally, it is entirely ready-to-

hand and cannot be set up as present-at-hand like a vase with a built in pedestal. Other

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types of amphora are set up as present-at-hand and viewed as art, but not the travel

amphora.

Now once we have the metaphor we can explore it in three dimensional space and find

out more and more information about the metaphor itself by its relation with other ontic

things in the world. But the real transformation is when we explore its four dimensional

horizon by rotating it in four dimensional space, which turns it inside out, and then the

amphora then begins to transform into different ontic metaphors revealing

transformational information, which is essentially different from the information about a

specific ontic thing in the world. Transformational information is revealing something

essential about the existentiell within the amphora being carried by it, just as it is carried

by Dasein. The different faces of the metaphor all say something about the essential

nature of the existentiell without converting it either to ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.

We address the amphora and it tells us what it would like to do, but indirectly we are

seeing the relation between the existentiell that is singled out as being contained by the

amphora and the context of Dasein both changing in relation to each other. Neither the

existentiell nor the Existential of Dasein is converted to present-at-hand information. So,

for instance, the travel amphora is never converted into the non-travel amphora which has

a present-at-hand face which is its artistic design made to be looked at on the standing

amphora. Rather there is a disclosure and revelation as the metaphors all transform in

relation to each other which capture the various existentiells that are at play within

Dasein in a given happening (ereignis).

What is nice about this way of looking at what is happening is that it gives a very

specific vocabulary that comes from Heidegger that avoids reification. Information is

something present-at-hand. When we look at the art work on a non-travel amphora we are

gathering present-at-hand information. When we say how we know the information, then

we are rendering it ready-to-hand and we are grasping the amphora by its handles. The

travel amphora is unique in as much as it cannot play this present-at-hand role and is only

meant for ready-to-hand use. But when the travel amphora is resting in its receptacle it is

neither present-at-hand, because whatever is inside it is sealed away, nor ready-to-hand,

because we are not picking it up and moving it. Rather when the metaphor which is like

the travel amphora is resting in its receptacle is when it is being rotated in the fourth

dimension, which is a change of the ship as a whole as it travels. When the travel

amphora with its commodity intact is taken from port to port its value changes. That is

the whole idea of taking it to a different place, it will be more valuable there when we

trade it. This value change is like the transformation of the existentiell within its guise of

the ontic metaphor. Of course, the ontic thing is related to Ontology, i.e. to Being because

via Being the two things that are connected by the metaphor become the same thing. But

the secret is that the ontic thing is encapsulating a fragment of the existentiell which

otherwise would not be differentiated but would remain vague, amorphous, ambiguous,

and indeterminate. By encapsulating it in a metaphor and then treating the metaphor as a

subject instead of the person then we get the transformation of the metaphor, which in

turn reveals the inner nature of the existentiell. And this occurs in the context of several

metaphors that are all transforming which gives a picture of the Existential situation of

Dasein itself as a whole.

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Sometimes you hear people talk about “enformation”. Existentiells enform the ontic

metaphors with inner knowledge of their nature as segmented aspects of Dasein.

Enforming becomes transformation and sometimes transmutation as deeper and deeper

levels are revealed, but this all takes place in terms of the language of the world in which

Dasein is embedded as being-in-the-world with things and others. Dasein knows how its

own specific world works and how it works within that world, and Dasein expresses to

itself its possibilities of transformation in that language of the mirroring of itself via the

ontic by the worlds workings. Those possibilities are transformed into potentials by the

differentiation of the existentiells and their revelation of their inner nature indirectly via

the transformation of the metaphors. The existentiells acting together are able to actualize

those potentialities revealed about Dasein by itself. And in that working out of the

metaphoric transformations in concert the wholeness of Dasein, there from the first,

reasserts itself.

This is a Heideggarian interpretation based on Being and Time. Heidegger defines

existentiells but does not really do anything with that term except in his analysis death in

Being and Time because he is looking for general existential structures of Dasein. But we

can use the term “existentiell” to avoid the reification of the elements of Dasein which

cannot really be separated or queried separately. What we see is that Dasein relates to its

existentiell parts via the ontic, and this is precisely what we would expect dealing with

interpenetration, where the Self relates to itself via the Other as Hegel tells us.

To elaborate further, we can use the idea of Pico that says that there are relativistic

frames of reference for each kind of clock, and that there are cell clocks, clocks in the

brain, and social clocks that along with the physical relativistic reference frame give us

four kinds of time. We can see these types of time as associated with the different

existentials of Dasein, i.e. befindlichkeit which is living time, verstehen which is

projective time of consciousness, and rede which is the time of talk which is social. Each

of these reference frames are associated with the special systems, i.e. dissipative ordering,

autopoietic symbiotic, and reflexive social special systems. Thus we can see how it is

possible to have four dimensional time along the lines of that hypothesized by Dunne.

Now every existentiell is some moment in this matrix of multi-dimensional heterochronic

time. So it is simultaneously something physical in relativistic time, something related to

states of mind or moods (befindlichkeit), something related to our projective

understanding (verstehen) of possibilities, something that we speak (rede) about. Every

moment has four faces of its temporal dimensionality, i.e. its future, present, past, and the

mythic moment. These are as Heidegger says eqi-primordial but he does not recognize

the mythic moment which is the virtual co-now. But the co-now is important to metaphor

therapy because it is by means of the co-now that we can navigate around the T0 now in

order to avoid retraumtization and to achieve the healing of the traumatic rupture in the

temporality of the human Dasein. The co-now is what allows us to rotate four

dimensionally outside of the linear or circular time into the heterochonic matrix of time

dimensions. So it is the multi-dimensionality of time, specifically its four dimensionality

that allows the knots of the trauma and the discontinuities within normal time to heal.

Dasein realizes its authenticity by orienting itself toward the little death of the trauma.

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That takes it out of the They, “one does this and one does not do that”, which Joyce calls

HCE, Here Comes Everybody. When Dasein steps out of the They in which the trauma is

endured and realizes his/her own personal cosmology as being unique, it expresses itself

existentially with words, that reflect moods, that reflect unique personal understandings,

rooted in physical reality that is known from living in the world, and these exitentiells are

held by metaphors that become their container and divulge their transformational

enformation.

Of interest, is the concept that the aspects of Being, i.e. Truth, Reality, Presence, and

Identity are related to the Peircian philosophical principles such that on the background

of the Zeroth (emptiness, or void of existence) there is the firstness (isolate) of Identity,

the secondness (relata) of Truth, the thirdness (continua) of Presence, and the fourthness

(synergy) of Reality. Beyond these there are further philosophical principles of the

fifthness (integrity) and sixthness (poise). This suggests that there is an emergent

ordering to the aspects of Being. We also know that these aspects transform at each meta-

level of Being, so the aspects are significantly different when thought about in terms of

Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra Being. The kinds of Being give us the modes of

Dasein:

Ultra Being = “look ma no hands”

Wild Being = out-of-hand, encompassing

Hyper Being = in-hand, bearing, differance (differing and deferring)

Process Being (becoming) = ready-to-hand, grasping

Pure Being = present-at-hand, pointing

If the ten Schemas are in meta-dimension zero, then the seven standings which includes

the kinds of Being are in meta-dimension one, and the four aspects are in meta-dimension

two. What is in meta-dimension negative one are the sixteen arche as shown by Jung in

Aion. Archetypes are the inverse of ideas.

Jungian and Heideggarian relations of Dasein to mitsein is very similar to the relations of

the ego to the collective consciousness which is expressed as a general economy ala

Bataille as the collective unconscious. Archetypes are objective in the sense that

everyone has a father or mother even if they are absent, and as something everyone has in

all its permutations as fatherhood and motherhood these become archetypal. Their

abstract gloss is an ideal, and expression of ideology, but the concrete reality of the

permutations that are possible is the archetype against one sees one’s own father or

mother or lack thereof. The archetypes are objective in the sense that we can go out and

find out what each father and mother is like and all those endless permutations of the

possibilities of those roles become archetypes as the way that finitude can factically exist

which becomes the measure of our own relation or lack thereof with respect to our own

father and mother.

Now everything we do and think is an existentiell in as much as it participates in multiple

reference frames for different dimensions of time. So each adumbration of our Dasein has

its element that is physical, that is a state of mind, that is an understanding that is

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projected on the situation that is referenced in language via speech or silence with respect

to our linguistic capability. In trauma we move from a linear timeline of development to a

circular timeline of traumatic repetition, which becomes inescapable repetition of the

traumatic situation. The linear timeline has a discontinuity in it, and the time of the

person revolves back on itself into a knot. The only way to resolve this is to move away

from circular time via multi-dimensional time back into a timeline, which has no

blockage at T0. This means that we are going to make use of the fact that there is a

mythic moment of time that was lost in the move from the mythopoietic era into the

metaphysical era, and which returns in the heterochronic era.

What Grovian Metaphor therapy does is it invites a happening (ereignis) for Dasein.

When Dasein brings an existentiell (what it would like to have happen) related to its

physical finitude, its mood, its understanding of its situation, its languaging then we ask

an epistemological question… How do you know X? Dasein then points to a sensation,

feeling, affect, as evidence for its knowledge. That affect is then invited to express itself

as a metaphor by taking on shape, color, size, and then becoming what it is like Y, like a

what? This Y is the metaphor which is the amphora for the differentiation of the

existentiell. The existentiell is experienced as a lack within the context of the situation

that is Dasein in the world. It backs the existentiell content out into something ontic that

can be seen as present-at-hand or ready-to-hand within the world and thus something that

is known, making what is a lack something positive. But that positive metaphor is a sign

of the existentiell. We can explore that ontic metaphor by looking deeper and deeper into

its horizon, but ultimately what we want to happen is to rotate the existentiell in the

fourth dimension so that the metaphor transforms itself giving us enformation. Multiple

metaphors may be necessary to relate the various existentiells expressed by Dasein as a

situation in the world, which is a whole full of holes. Each hole is a niche in which there

can be a metaphoric receptacle of an existentiell. Each of those serially or in an

orchestrated manner can be rotated in the fourth dimension and thus experience the

mythic moment of time that is the co-now that frees us from the tyranny of circular time

as ‘becoming’ which is the only alternative to a disrupted linear developmental timeline

in our lives. Using mythic time we can rotate ourselves around the discontinuity in time

without retraumatizing the patient and get past it to the wholeness that is already always

inherent in Dasein itself.

An existentiell is a specific concrete possibility that is factical for a particular unique

Dasein. But Dasein as a potential to be as well and thus it may be not a mere possibility

but an actualizable potential that is what Stuart Kauffman calls an adjacent possibility. It

is unknown how existential possibilities become potentials and then actualities but we

have an idea that it has to do with the fact that in Wild Being there are propensities,

tendencies, dispositions and that these interact with the possibilities that appear in Hyper

Being to produce actualities on which probabilities are based in Process Being. What is

determinate and necessary appears in Pure Being. Impossibilities appear in Ultra Being.

Kinds of Being collude to bring possibilities into the realm of potentials and then further

into the realm of actualities that can be said to be factical for Dasein. What is determinate

appears at the level of present-at-hand related to subjects and objects. Thus we can say

that an existentiell is a specific arc by which something becomes actual out of potentiality

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and possibility and propensity for Dasein such that it is expressed as an actuality. Dasein

to the extent that it has an inner life has existentiells. It does not know except indirectly

that it is ontic as well. Thus the ontic aspect of Dasein is its outer life as seen by other

persons and bumped into or touched by other things. Because Heidegger does not offer a

coherent story about the relations of the modalities, and because we cannot find it in

Modal Logic either then we are left speculating about it with regard to the existentiell arc

of experience factical by Dasein in terms of a specific stream of consciousness and its

modifications based on its place in the world. As such Dasein in terms of existentiells is

being-in-its-own-world. It is some ecstasy that is prior to ready-to-hand of techne and

present-at-hand of episteme as ontological modes of apprehension of things that are not

Dasein, or ontified Dasein of other persons. And prior to the other modes of Being as

well (in-hand and out-of-hand) which are the contraction and expansion of being-in-the-

world. Dasein according to recent interpretations is engaged in phronesis or judgment and

specifically is located in the ungrounded appearance or opinion. We note that opinion

expresses itself as rede of Dasein, and appearances are understood (verstehen) by Dasein,

and the groundlessness (befindlichkeit) of the doxa appears as moods of Dasein. Thus

Dasein’s existentials have all the characteristics of ungrounded doxa from the platonic

perspective. For Aristotle phroneisis is how you deal with ungrounded doxa by exercising

judgment within praxis (action, behavior). It takes time to weigh the alternatives and thus

judgment gets caught up in time. It takes time for Dasein to become what it is but it does

that concretely with every action and every judgment. Dasein is distinguished as

authentic from the They which is lost in the morass of Metis being embroiled in

contradiction, paradox and absurdity by facing its own death, and this appears in specific

aspects of its life as the little deaths of trauma. So every conflation or juxtaposition of

physicality or embodiment, moods of that appear in consciousness, understandings that

are projections, and words that we might speak whereby propensities become possibilities

are filtered into potentialities and become actual as facticities are existentiell for Dasein

as they express the existentials which are the various intersecting heterochronic and

orthogonal reference frames of time within which we express ourselves as embodied,

living, conscious, social beings. When something becomes determinate for Dasein then it

expresses itself as a facticity. One of the things that can be determinate for Dasein is to be

treated as an ontic being by other Dasein, or to treat oneself in that manner. Only the

ontic fixes Dasein as a determinate subject in relation to objects. Other than that it is free

by dint of its continual openness to possibilities. But in terms of its existentiell existenz it

must continually manage the arc of propensities with possibilities becoming potentials

and then actualities about which there are probabilities which externally can be seen as

determinations of its being. In its relation to the They there is an externalization,

objectification, and internalization dialectic such as that described in the Social

Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann. But what they miss in the description

of the Social as that dialectic of reification is what is happening (ereignis) for Dasein as it

experiences its existential openness to possibilities that it attempts to realize each moment

of each day. There is another dialectic by which each Dasein decides what it is and acts

on it in the course of which specific unique existentiells appear as realized physically

though embodiment, with respect to life, with respect to consciousness, and with respect

to the social situation it finds itself in. We can perhaps accept that there is an overall

structure to Dasein with specific existentails due to the fact that there are these specific

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reference frames related to specific sets of clocks that govern the multidimensionality of

time within which Dasein exists. But it is not possible to accept that factical Dasein has a

given structure that is set for all human beings. Factical Dasein has its own personal

cosmology and way that it fits into its world and the rest of the schemas. It has its own

exploration of the standings at the level of meta-dimension one and the aspects at meta-

dimension two and the rest of the transcendental structure of the worldview. Factical

Dasein in its singular nature and uniqueness expresses that personal cosmology in the

metaphors it chooses to encapsulate its existentiells and which it enforms as they

transmute and transform as it dree’s it’s weird.

Let us agree to distinguish Existenz as the integra that contains the various levels of the

aspects where reality is synergetic, presence is an continua, truth is a relata, and identity

is an isolata. Existenz is completely different from what we call existence which is a

zeroth background on which the isolata appears. Existence in the sense of Zeroth can be

interpreted nondually as emptiness as by Buddhists or as void as by Taoists. Ultra Being

is the difference between these nondual interpretations of existences. Existenz is human

being as projector of Being. The next philosophical principle up is Poise toward the

world of the being-in-the-world that has Existenz. What this gives us is a criteria for

understanding what is happening in relation to the existentiells as they traverse from

propensities, to possibilities, to potentials, to actualities to determinate facticities. Out of

the Zeroth of nondual existence we are expecting isolata to appear as identities and for

relations between these to take on the mantle of truth, and for continuities to give rise to

presences of syntheses and for synergies to realize themselves in reality. All these various

layers of the aspects of Being come together in the integrity of Existenz within the field

of Dasein as a situation within the world and that translates into a poise of Dasein with

respect to the world.

It should be noted that the relations between identity, truth and presence are the

properties of the formal system that are consistency, completeness and wellformedness.

When we add reality to that we get three more properties, which are verifiability,

validation and coherence. This is the world soul and it appears as in one form in Logos as

the master tropes and in another form in Physus as the four causes of Aristotle. But we

can also split open this system into a meta-system and get the field of impossibilities of

Lacan and Zizek. This configuration at meta-dimensions three and four is the world soul

that appears in the existentials that come from Egypt and Sumeria that are discussed in

the essays on the nature of the Western Worldview which underlie our worldview.

Why is this important for Grovian Metaphor Theory and Practice? Heidegger gives us a

way to avoid reifying human facticity by treating it as onticity and by allowing us instead

to speak of existentiells. This is important from a theoretical point of view because

metaphors use objects in the world as the stand-ins for existentiells and there is a danger

of objectification as we explore the subjective realm. This gives us a deeper level of clean

approach to the subject. We don’t subject them to their own subjectivization by self and

others. And we don’t objectify them either even though metaphoric objects stand in for

existentiell characteristics of a given person. Dasein just means person. But “person” is a

loaded term that is culturally fixed. Dasein because it comes from an esoteric German

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philosophical vocabulary is not fixed already in our understanding of it. It frees us to

think about something prior to the arising of the difference between subject and object.

And at that already always lost origin from which subject and object duality arise there is

mindbody wholeness signified by ‘mood’ in Old English. Our tendency will be to use

Old English displaced words like Mood as signifying nonduals. Heidegger brings us

several tools that come in handy in trying to understand the action of metaphoric

transformation and transmutation that occurs in the therapeutic process and as well in the

development of personal cosmologies which is the positive explorative vision of the

efficacy of Grovian metaphor as practiced by Cei Davies and Steven Briggs. We want to

understand the patterns of transformation and transmutation of metaphors that occur in

concrete metaphoric practice. But we cannot really understand that unless we have a

more general theory of what is happening in the metaphoric session itself as a happening.

Heidegger gives us a theory by which we can sort out many of the features of the

therapeutic or personal cosmological journey. We say cosmology only because it is the

widest schema we can comprehend and it allows us to connect the world schema with the

underlying physus from which many of the metaphors arise. When we say metaphor we

are never excluding the other master tropes as playing a significant role, and we note that

the metaphor is called up by means of a simile by saying, “What is like X, Y, Z, like a

what?” which is a chiasmic phrase. The fact that metaphors tend to arise more often is

merely taken the fact that this is the dominant trope in our tradition and statistically very

common. The Heideggarian theory is extremely clean as a framework because basically

Heidegger has little to say about existentiells. But they give us a way to talk in a non-

objectivizing way about Dasein’s experience even as the he/she objectify their own

experience by converting it into tropes many of which refer to objects out in the world to

represent existentiells within their experience.

Dasein is merely the falling Alice going down the rabbit hole. She falls like Dasein as

thrown into a situation which signifies the entry into the fourth dimension. As she falls

she picks up books and other objects off the shelves and looks at them, placing some of

them back and throwing others away. These others are ejects, they are the traces of the

objects before the objects are distinguished from subjects which are other than Dasein.

When Dasein encounters a trauma there is a lot of ejecta, some of which are child

fragments. But when development is stifled by trauma we sometimes enter circular time

of repetition in which symptoms appear. This is where the gerund appears as belying the

‘stuckness’ just prior to the T0 scene at T-1. It is the symptoms that accumulate in this

cycle of eternal return that is a response to the will to power that produced the trauma

which tends to be the basis from which the metaphors spring. But with the view of

Dasein we can say distinctly that the person is just a situation, a being-in-the-world, or

whatever schema we are operating with. As such Dasein is a meta-system not a system, a

site not an entity with unity and totality like a object. And we know that a meta-system is

a whole full of holes like a sponge, while a system is a whole greater than the sum of its

parts like the ego is projected to be. We see great congruence between Jungian

Psychology and Dasein Analysis. Both of these assume a whole Self. But the wholeness

of the Self is different from the idea of ego as a unity and totality of experience normally

thought about by psychology as a present-at-hand reification of the person. So if we

construe Dasein as a meta-systemic situation with holes then we can characterize those

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holes as existence either as emptiness or void, i.e. as having the nondual quality of Zeroth

as the background against any identified isolata might appear as a gestalt on the

background of. As a Zeroth the existentiell is in fact like a domain wall in a Bose-

Einstein condensate. And we know that there are different types of singularities in

condensates including point singularities, vortices, domain walls, and domains as three

dimensional volumes within the condensate. What the domain wall idea gives us is a way

to distinguish the existentiell from the rest of Dasein without making a separation

between parts of Dasein because Dasein is always spatially deseverant. We want to

continue to follow Heidegger and Peirce in using prescission as a way of looking at

wholes and their articulations without taking them apart in a reductive way. But as soon

as we think of the existentiells as niches or holes in the fabric of Dasein as a situation that

is situated in the world with its inherent tendencies, then it is possible to use the concept

of the amphora to imagine how Dasein might identify the existentiells which are by

nature indeterminate, vague, amorphous, indistinct, ambiguous, etc. by filling them with

the amphora of metaphor. But now just because the existentiell is marked and

distinguished by the metaphor and we are treating it as a first class citizen by addressing

it directly, does not mean that the existentiell is any more differentiated from the rest of

Dasein. However, what it means is that it is temporarily taking on the mask of the

metaphor and beginning to transform and transmute that metaphor giving us enformation

rather than information which can deepen our understanding considerably. The number of

simultaneous metaphors that are transforming directly translates into the number of

existentiells that are distinguished within Dasein and are in play in the happening to

which we are privy as Dasein works out its own wholeness which is already always there

to begin with and merely needs to be realized concretely. Clean questions draw out the

metaphors and we can watch them transform and transmutate. This shows that the

existentiell is rotating in four dimensional space and thus the metaphoric object involutes.

Various objects in the field of the situation of Dasein will transform together and they

may combine to solve the original stuckness that led to the symptoms. Dasein is like a

macro-quantum mechanical condensate in four dimensional space. Merely being in that

space allows for the healing which was always available. Dasein needed to find an

authentic way to access its own wholeness to experience that as healing. Since that four

dimensional realm can be seen as temporal as well then it is easy for Dasein to change

fluidly to compensate for the trauma within limits that Dasein imposes on itself. When

Dasein operates as a macro-Quantum Mechanical condensate in four dimensional

timespace it utterly avoids its own subjectification of itself and any objectification as

well. But this is expressed concretely as specific existentiell inspired metaphoric signs

that come to mind and play a specific role in the healing process. At that level every

Dasein is unique and singular and its own personal cosmology will be unique to its own

metaphoric stance within its own world of which it is unconscious. We ask Alice what

are the six impossible things she dealt with before breakfast in a game of six iterations.

Each one will be unique to Alice embodied in the here and now but bringing her whole

panoply of temporalization and spatailization with her, and then relating that to here

moods, her conscious projections, and here socialization in a way that concretely

exemplifies who she is within her world such that her own wholeness reasserts itself such

that the existentiells blend back into the rest of Dasein as if they never needed to be

singled out for special treatment.

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