ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Authentic Dasein and the Anxious Uncanny Chapter Two: Heidegger and Munch: Anxious Dasein “Munch is a painter of ghastly masks, shattered by life’s horrors, of heads which seem gnawed off and wasted away from within. He is a painter of skulls which have been burnt and shrunk in the fires of modern hells.” (Salda, 149) Throughout his life, Edvard Munch suffered from a deep, powerful anxiety, which he believed was pivotal to his existence.

In his private journals he wrote: “Still I often feel that I must/ have this life - angst - it is essential/ to me - and that I would not exist/ without it - ” (18). The exact reasons behind his constant feeling of angst cannot be truly defined, and according to most scholars, the blame is to be placed on his troubled childhood.

The latter explanation, however, is contradicted when one considers with Heidegger that “the face of which one has anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere . Anxiety ‘does not know’ what that in the face of which it is anxious.” Although anxiety does not have an object, we cannot infer on this basis that is it a mere vapor.

In Being and Time , Heidegger goes on to say that anxiety in not being there “is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet it is nowhere” (231). One cannot claim to have found the reason behind the artist’s anxiety when such a claim would go against the definition of the feeling itself. Heidegger believes that “anxiety [. . ] is the basic state-of-mind of the finite Dasein” (Cassirer, 162).

Anxiety defines authentic Dasein’s being-in-the-world as well as its segregation from inauthentic Das Man , who fall under “the kind of Being of everydayness” (Heidegger, 164). Several elements contribute to expressing the artist’s anxiety. The titles of Munch’s paintings, such as Anxiety (1894) and The Scream (1893), speak for themselves. Furthermore, the dominant colors in his works - indigo, blues, and reds - also aid him in terms of projecting his powerful angst.

His choice of subject matter, especially in his earlier paintings that were finished prior to his psychotic episode ending in 1909 (Steinberg and Weiss, 409), along with his highly developed hestekur technique, further serve as an important tool of expression. Munch himself , as well as certain figures in his works, is the epitome of the anxious Dasein.