I Heart Huckabees: Concept of Dasein Essay

This is one of my attempts to bring out a few of the connections between the thought provoking scenes of this movie and the empirical move manhoodpowert in 19th and 20th century Philosophy. I do list and describe a few scenes and quotes, so ill flick on a SPOILER alert just in case. cardinal of the most prominent concepts in I (Heart) Huckabees is that of Martin Heideggers Dasein. Dasein, liter tout ensembley essence initiation-there, is Heideggers method in which he applies an differentwise prominant Existential philospher, Edmund Husserls phenomenology to valet de chambre existences themselves.What it does is instead of defining a thing and putting it into a preconceived category, one waits for the thing to reveal itself in its own time. The funny thing about Heidegger is that he never calls human beings man, exclusively instead we be Dasein in other words, we be simply in a sphere of being where we atomic number 18 free to define who we argon for ourselves. Our be ing Dasein is our thrownness into life(a prominant theme to the Existential movement), and we argon thrown into life with other Dasein(you and I).This then leads to mitdasein (with-there-being), meaning we are still being-there(Dasien), but now we are there with other Dasein. I (Heart) Huckabees demonstrates Heideggers Dasein and mitdasein multiple times, usually emphasised by Dustin Hoffmans character, Bernard. In the first few scenes of the movie, Bernard come up tos of infinity and the blanket. He holds up a blanket and asks us to imagine that it is the entire creative activity. individually part of the blanket is a different person, fructify, or thing whether it is a hammer, or Paris, or you, the reader of this review.The point he makes is that everything in the universe is interconnected and we keept tell where one person begins and some other ends. Bernard also tells us, The universe is an space sphere, the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. This is a wonderful example of Heideggers Dasein our being has no outside to speak of, it is totality. The blanket re fall ins mitdasein, demonstrating that we are not alone in our infinite field of being, but instead are accompanied by every other Dasein, all overlapping.Another of Heideggers Existential ideas is tossed about in I (Heart) Huckabees, though not as defined as the illusions to Dasein. When Tommy (Mark Wahlberg) and Albert (Jason Schwartzman), meet the French nihilist, Caterine (Isabelle Huppert), she introduces Heideggers concept of authenticity and inauthenticity. In the scene, Caterine has Tommy and Albert repeatedly bash for each one other in the face with a large ball they touch on to hit one another until the one being beaten ceases to call up for a brief period. They have discovered what Caterine calls unalloyed universe. In ceasing to think, Albert and Tommy are allowed to simply be free to exist (Dasein, again), but they are in short pulled back in their minds , which Caterine names human turn. Though they think they sens teach themselves to stay in a state of Pure Being all the time, Caterine explains that it leave behind always be a cycle, going from Pure Being to human drama and back again. According to Heidegger, before we suck in our selves, we are in a state of Verfallenheit, or fallen-ness. In this state, we are slaves to what Heidegger calls the One (human drama), or rather the public life.We are part of this public creature and we are categorized for being as such. This constricts us as Dasein and doesnt allow us to realize our in force(p) potential. It is during this state of Verfallenheit, and being part of the One, that we are inauthentic. We are not being true to ourselves as Dasein, and therefore not allowing ourselves to rise to the train of existence we need to reach. It is only when we break free from the One and enter the level of Self that we become authentic, true selves.Heidegger understands, however, that some times we are pulled back into Verfallenheit, and moldiness then go back through the One, or human drama as Caterine puts it, and back into the level of self. As Heidegger explains our cycle of inauthenticity and authenticity, Caterine explains much the same thing in her description of the cycle between Pure Being and human drama. Another I (Heart) Huckabees scene with high existential type is the short poem about a carry which Albert has written for his rude spaces campaign Nobody sits like this rock sits. You rock, rock. The rock just sits and is.You appearing us how to just sit here and thats what we need. The poem brings to open-eyed the confines Being-for-itself (etre pour soi), which is most closely associated with famous Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Because of our consciousness, this term is most often applied to human beings and states that we are always beyond ourselves, thinking thoughts of ourselves, obsessively thinking of our pasts and futures, etc. This caus es alot of pain and suffering for human kind causing us to view ourselves in the future or judge ourselves according to the past failing to be in the present moment, in the NOW.Unlike the rock which is always in the present moment, or, being-in-itself, Sartre believes that we can never possess ourselves fully. We can posses the rock, however, because it is a thing. The rock is not conscious, it is what it is at all moments but this is something impossible for humans because of our capability to go beyond ourselves in consciousness. In the final scene of the movie, Albert and Tommy are sitting on the rock and Albert claims that The interconnection thing is definitely for real. Heidegger would smile at Alberts newfound discovery of mitdasein, that we are not alone in our infinite field of being, but instead are accompanied by all others. Everything is the same, even if its different. In this closing scene, in the same place as when the movie opened, seeing them both there on the ro ck made it hard not to think of the characters Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Becketts delay for Godot, a famous Existential play in which deuce men wait endlessly in the middle of nowhere for a man named Godot. The Existentialism that gave birth to many of the scenes in the movie, I believe to be numerous.I have only touched upon a fraction of these. For example, two very famous philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard can be seen as represented by the characters of Caterine and Bernard. Nietzsche, most well known for his claim that God is dead, may very well be an incarnation in the philosophy shown by Caterine. Kierkegaard on the other hand, who believed that God is not dead, but trully being tightlipped requires a leap of faith, is brought alive in the enlightening and downy teachings of Bernard and his wife.I wont go into further detail about the plant of these two men, but encourage anyone interested to read deeper into their two philosophies you will c ertainly find more connections between the movie and the Existential movement. I hope this has helped share some light on those both baffle by the movie and those interested in knowing the deeper historical and philosophic aspect of I (Heart) Huckabees. If you take some time to educate yourself on the background of Existentialism, you may find that I (Heart) Huckabees prooves to be a completely different experience when viewed a second time around.