Trouble

To confront itself with an empty temporality

In the daily existence, when we are occupied by activities, one knows well that these are the finalities which give them direction, that it is in their vectorial direction or their contents of significance. It is in this everyday life which a engine trouble can occur , i.e. a trouble within the meaning of something which would come to stop an activity, which would come to differ temporal continuity from it involving the individual to be occupied with another thing.

But, more generally, we are confronted with the trouble when it is the activity itself which is tedious. In this case, it is the activity into clean which does not hold our attention, it is thus not an external cause which comes from there to stop the process but the activity itself which becomes empty of a worthy end to be interested in it: one seeks from of then to distract by means of a pastime, since it is a question well of making spend time despite everything (cf description in the fundamental Concepts of metaphysics which does Martin Heidegger of a man being bored in a waiting room). In the trouble, one all the time looks at the hour to make sure that time passes because one is exposed there to a temporality empties that one hastens to fill.

Remain that there exists a trouble more radical than these two types of troubles: in this last case, the individual is bored itself and of itself . He has beautiful being surrounded by all the objects which usually constitute for him the means of giving direction to its activities but however nothing any more is likely to fit in any finalized temporality. The individual knows pertinently that it will find the finalized temporality of its daily activities but it is however submerged by a complete absence of craving, worse than that, a true dislike of itself, a despair which brings it back to its own empty temporality. In fact so much the objects rather pose problem than myself confronted with an absence of end and thus with an absence of significance: I am then anything else only this “empty and foolish temporality” ( Fragment 132 in the Thoughts of Blaise Pascal).

Entertainment and the recovery

There is well there something of intolerable, even of nauseating (it is what Jean-Paul Sartre aims in the Nausée ), in this experiment where “our end is never our end”. The man exposes himself then to blackness ( i.e. with the melancholy, with the black bile), with the depression: he thus gets busy to divert himself some. The entertainment is aimed here not only within the meaning of one diverting recreation but also within the meaning of a serious activity by which the individual gives himself ends to be continued to avoid confronting itself with the question of the ontological truth. It is thus well diverts, diverted what appears with the man in the trouble: the misery of its own finitude (" The major trouble, being stretched like a quiet fog in the abysses of the being-there, confuses all things, the men and ourselves with them, in a strange indifference. This trouble expresses being it in its ensemble." , Martin Heidegger in What metaphysics? ). For as much, this misery is even larger when the individual wishes to be diverted some because it is then about a misery which is unaware of and which passes beside the formative potentiality whose the trouble conceals.

It is thus a question well of filling this vacuum of the trouble without to avoid it. For Blaise Pascal, this experiment of the trouble as infinite vacuum is thus necessary and the individual can fill it only by one to be him also infinite: God of Faith. However, this answer is only one among a large range. Several possible answers exist but it is a question of knowing if these activities concern a recovery well on the trouble rather than of an entertainment out of the trouble (what does not imply to judge them but to determine the statute of it well).

There is thus well there an essential difference between the man of the entertainment and the man of the recovery. The man of the entertainment wants nothing to know of what is in the trouble , persuaded not to have of ontological vacuum, it is that which believes being i.e. which believes in its own ontological consistency (“If a man which is believed a king is insane, a king who believes a king it is not less”, Jacques Lacan in Propos on psychic causality ); sure that its project is there only to reveal a deep being which it already has, it lives in the future. It is thus to say that if occurs a trouble (mechanical), the man of the entertainment, incompetent to be faithful to itself because being itself illusory, crumble at once in the total depression. On the contrary, the man of the recovery is that which is begun again after the trouble , it knows that all that it undertakes makes on the funds constant that the trouble reveals to him, i.e. its own nullity ontological. Being exposed to this nullity, it was also exposed to its true end , its death always already imminent or like says it Martin Heidegger to “the possibility of its own impossibility” and it is then a question for him of gaining direction on the nonsense. In other words, the man of the recovery does not estimate himself to have his own ontological consistency, it thus does not aim what it will be but what it will have been, it saw with the former future . There is for him, whatever its activity, a fidelity with itself, this is why it is possible for him to look at the past as connected to its present: because what he undertook in the past composes what he is, that can support its own direction without illusions on its own gasoline always already registered on the funds of the ontological absence of its clean dead revealed in and by the trouble.

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