Dr Koral Ward - Augenblick: The Concept of the Decisive Moment in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy

AUGENBLICK

Augenblick, meaning literally in the blink of an eye, describes a decisive moment in time that is both fleeting yet momentously eventful, even epoch-makingly significant. In this book Koral Ward investigates the development of the concept into one of the core ideas in Western existential philosophy alongside such concepts as anxiety and individual freedom.

Ward examines the whole extent of the idea of the decisive moment, in which an individuals entire life-project is open to a radical reorientation. From its inception in Kierkegaards works to the writings of Jaspers and Heidegger, she draws on a vast array of sources beyond just the standard figures of 19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy, finding ideas and examples in photography, cinema, music, art, and the modern novel.

The Concept of the Decisive Moment in 19th- and 20th-century Western Philosophy

KORAL WARD
Murdoch University, Western Australia

ASHGATE

Koral Ward 2008

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Koral Ward has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ward, Koral

Augenblick : the concept of the decisive moment in 19th- and 20th-century western philosophy. (Ashgate new critical thinking in philosophy)

1. Philosophy, Modern 19th century 2. Philosophy, Modern 20th century

I. Title

190.9034

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ward, Koral, 1958

Augenblick : the concept of the decisive moment in 19th and 20th century western

philosophy / Koral Ward.

p. cm. (Ashgate new critical thinking in philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-7546-6097-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. TimePhilosophy. 2. Continental

philosophy. I. Title.

BD638.W358 2007

115dc22

2007007970

ISBN: 978-0-7546-6097-2
ISBN: 978-1-4094-8607-7 (ebk-ePUB)

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

One of the common meanings of Augenblick or moment is a stage in a progression of something. In hindsight I can see that my progress in considering the moment began long before the process of the PhD thesis from which this book has developed. Notebooks reveal an interest going back twenty-five years, but there was no definite philosophy behind the early thought, just a vague feeling that it was significant, meaningful and beautiful. It appealed to me, and I took notice of it.

It was Dr. Paul MacDonald of Murdoch University in Western Australia, in one of his lectures in Existentialism, who put the Augenblick as a philosophical concept in my path. The discovery of this moment was timely and decisive, and the concept struck me immediately as mine: Eureka! I have (found) it! I am most grateful to Dr. MacDonald for his outstanding scholarly guidance throughout the process of limiting and defining the concept, curbing my natural tendency to get sidetracked by other related and fascinating ideas, of which I discovered many. Reducing its broad scope, however, did not restrict but rather allowed its deeper significances to emerge. Dr. MacDonald reassured me of the value of pursuing what sometimes seemed like minutiae in the texts of the various philosophers.

While lost in a comparison between two differing translations of a key text of Kierkegaard I began to doubt the usefulnesss of such laborious and detailed work. Dr. MacDonald was quick to reassure me of the benefit of such deep endeavours and as a result many fine nuances of the concept were unearthed. The influence of Zoroastrianism was evident in Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Dr. MacDonald persuaded me that a deeper look into its influence on Nietzsches work was worth taking. We discovered that the influence on the imagery of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is strongly Zoroastrian rather than Christian. This endeavour proved very fruitful for extending the metaphor of the gateway named Augenblick and revealed new aspects of the concept.

The process of comparing translations of texts sparked a curiosity about how the translation from a philosophers native language can affect the nuances of an idea. By returning to the original I was able to pinpoint the departure point [ansatzpunct] for myself, having no facility with Kierkegaards Danish and only a small amount of German, made this a labourious but engrossing process. I was brought to an impasse, however, when I found a substantial text of Karl Jaspers, crucial to my investigations, which remained untranslated from the German. With no English version at all to refer to I became quite stuck. I thank Emeritus Professor Horst Ruthrof for coming to my rescue, his enthusiasm for my project and his very generous help in translating this important text into English enabled me to maintain the progression of the development of the concept, it also alerted me to further important ways in which it could be considered.

At Murdoch University I was privileged to have other outstanding tutors and lecturers in literature, writing and thinking, and I am grateful to them as well as to the supportive administration staff of the humanities division and the staff of Inter-Library Loans who were dogged in their attempts to acquire texts for me even managing to acquire one technically too old and fragile for loan. I had the opportunity to present parts of this work in its stages of development in formal seminars run jointly with Murdoch and the University of Western Australia, and at the Walters Caf Work-in-Progress Group at Murdoch where I was able to read and discuss work in a more informal atmosphere. I am grateful to all who took part in those enlightening sessions of academic discussion, for their invaluable comments and suggestions and for their collegial support. I was grateful also, during this period, for an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship.

on the moment of vision of Martin Heidegger would not have found its apocalyptic depths if not for a conference at the University of Adelaide, from which emerged a book: Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th century German Thought in which a good deal of what appears in this text has already appeared. I am grateful to those conference organisers and to ATF Press (Australian Theological Forum), for permission to reuse that material here. I want to thank Professor David E. Cooper for his book Existentialism, A Reconstruction, which first introduced me to this area of philosophy, for his sound advice in regard to improving the text of this work as a whole, and finally for his valuable recommendation of the work to this publisher.

The idea of the moment has broad appeal. Many people have pointed out to me the centrality of the moment in Eastern philosophy [one of our years is as a blink of an eye to Brahma], and particularly in Zen Buddhism there are distinct counterparts in certain aspects of the moment, but I have confined my discussion to Western philosophy. Many have mentioned other Western philosophers who have spoken of the moment in some way, but I deliberately began with Sren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche as the beginnings of existentialism lie with them, and as I traced the development of the concept into the existentialism of the 20th century I came to consider the moment to be one of its core concepts.