NPPF: re: footenote to Lines 131-132

[Michael Joseph]

I thought this brief excerpt from a discussion on Heidegger keenly
relevant to understanding the sense of Nabokov's world in "Pale Fire,"
particularly with regard to the structural "I" in the statement "I was the
shadow of the waxwing slain," but also with special regard to the coming
back of lines 131-132.

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"Prior to analyzing the structurees of temporality, Heidegger describes
teh structure of human consciousness or awareness in terms of
prepositions. Human beings are essentially concerned about theri being, a
fundamental characteristic that Heidegger called "Care" and the theologian
Paul Tillich later called "ultimate concern". Care and being concered are
made possible by the fact that we are essentially ahead of ourselves. That
is the prepositional description of the future of anticipation.

     The fact that this referential totality, of the manifold relations
     of the in-order to, is bound up with that which Da-sein is concerned
     about, does not signify that an objectively present 'world' of
     objects is welded together with a subject. Rather, it is the phenomenal
     expression of the fact that the constitution of Da-sein, whose wholeness
     is now delineated explicitly as being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in
     . . ., is primordially a whole. (BEING and TIME p. 118)


     Basically, future-orinted, human beings project into the future; they
are ahead of themsleves. There is an aspect to this that Heidegger does
not see or is not intereted in: that fact that sometimes being ahead of
myself can preclude my being where I am. In this limited sense, the animal
has the advantage; it always is where it is.
     In projecting ahead of myself, I do not just wander endlessly into
infinity, but come back to my already-being, my having-been or, as
Heidegger calls it, my 'thrownness'. I am always already 'in' something.
what am I in? I am in a world. Thus, when the ahead-of-itself comes back
to having-been, the present, being-in-the-world is engendered.

     Future, having-been and present show the phenomenal character-
     istics of 'toward-itself, 'back-to', 'letting something be
     encountered'. The phenomena of toward . . ., to . . ., together
     with . . . reveal temporality as the ekstatikon par excellence.
     Temporality is the primordial 'outside of itself in and for itself.
     Thus we call the phenomena of future, having-been and present, the
     ecstases of temporality. Temporality is not, prior to this, a being
     that first emerges from itself; its essence is temporalizing in the
     unity of the ecstases (Ibid, par 65)

     Far from being locke dup within 'the cabinet of consciousness', we
are always already outside of ourselves, outside in teh world disclosed to
us. This is the meaning of being there, of existence."

Joan Stambaugh, "Existential Time in Kierkegaard and Heidegger." RELIGION
AND TIME, edited by Anindita Niyogi Balsley and J.N. Mohanty (New Hork:
Brill, 1993) 57-58.
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Michael