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[Radiant Heart]

This is a proposal of phenomenological analysis on the Well of Sorrows using Heideggerian terminology. It is my contention that phenomenological analysis of this phenomenon offers an insight into the epistemological consciousness of the people of Thedas (and, indeed, the writers of this storyline) which will have consequences on particularly elven lore. I hope to read people's questions and critiques both on the points I have made, as well as on the way in which they are presented.

 

We begin with how Heidegger shatters the idea of the ‘sovereign subject’ by inaugurating the question of being in Being and Time with this seminal statement, a statement which will have far reaching implications for both ontology and hermeneutics:

 

Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it – all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves. Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being.^[1]

 

Because we are the ones who ask the questions, because we are the inquirers into meaning, we ourselves must be the starting point of meaning. To this clearing of meaning, Heidegger gives the name Da-sein, a composite of the German words for ‘being’ (Sein) and ‘here’ or ‘there’ (Da). This intersection of being and locality is where meaning is revealed to us. Since Da-sein is not the subject, and the world is not an object of knowledge, the source of meaning becomes a question of ontology (in this case, a question into the nature of the inquirer itself).

 

The hermeneutic circle, then, is actually an ontological circle, not an epistemological one. Indeed, meaning is no longer understood as simply a collection of propositions. Meaning, understanding, knowledge, are all intimately tied into the question of being. The very being of Da-sein, and its relation to its own world, is disclosed through the hermeneutic circle.

 

The Well of Sorrows confronts the player as a repository of vast knowledge from ages past. However, what the player quickly discovers upon investigation is that the repository is not offering knowledge-of, but knowledge-as. The knowledge of Da-sein, of any temporal being, is bound within a consciousness which is already intimately in relation with its world (Heidegger refers to this characteristic of Da-sein’s existence as ‘being-in-the-world’). Da-sein always find itself thrown in a world, and so “thrown” into a given cultural context. As a mental exercise, reflect on how much ‘choice’ you had in this regard. Did you choose who gave birth to you? Did you choose your ethnicity? Did you choose the nation you were born in? Did you choose the time period? Did you choose the level of education of your parents? Did you choose what sorts of genetic endowments or impairments you received? These sorts of questions are innumerable. As one reflects on these factors, one sees how entirely qualified our consciousness is, qualified based on factors entirely out of our control.

 

Da-sein cannot avoid such thrownness precisely because delocalized and non-historical meaning and signification cannot, by definition, happen: immanent in the very word happen is the concept of temporality. Da-sein’s authentic being as being-in-the-world must first, last, and always be inherently social, cultural, and historical.^[2]

 

It is when we have accepted this conclusion that we begin to realize the full danger of "accepting" the Well of Sorrows. If we recognize that we are not accepting 'knowledge-of', but 'knowledge-as', we are assenting to radically and fundamentally altering our very being in the process. Even though 'the voices' only arrive intermittently in order to advance the plot, even though we have perhaps not fully appropriated their horizons of meaning, we witness that already Mythal is able to control us effortlessly: as though we were already the willing servants who sacrificed their knowledge to the Well of Sorrows. It seems that the journey towards mental servitude is not far off...

 

I am interested to see what people think of this theory, and curious to see how the Well of Sorrows will play out in the future: whether from Morrigan's side, or the Inquisitor's.

[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 26-27 / H. 7.

[2] Bret W. Davis, ed., Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010), p. 58.

[nightscrawl]

Yes, I did read the whole thing. I honestly don't know if you're trying to show off, you're just a grad/postgrad student so mired in course work that you can't think or write in any other way, or this is just an elaborate troll that I fell for. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume it's the second one.
 
With that in mind, off we go...
 
You write as if the player is able to figure out "on investigation" that whomever drinks from the Well will take on the spirit/being/aspect of Mythal herself, but that isn't accurate. You only discover this after the fact, whether it is you or Morrigan who drinks. We've only been told that some sort of "sacrifice" will be demanded, but not what that means, or what the sacrifice might be. There is no way to make an informed decision.
 
This is one of those decisions that is heavily roleplay dependent. The player can choose who drinks from the well based on any number of factors: trust or distrust of Morrigan, desire for personal power, preservation of elven lore, elf/human race relations, the belief that as Inquisitor you are the most qualified or deserving of such power, your PC has drunk (ha-ha) the Kool-Aid and buys into the whole Herald of Andraste business, the concern from your love interest [Dorian: "I don't want to lose you to a well."], and probably additional factors that I haven't considered.

[Miggs]

I just kill stuff

[Hedinve]

I'm a tad bit confused but heck, I'll bite.

The world of Thedas does not work as a Heideggerian world as they suffer from the Cartesian ax. If Thedas did work as Heidegger proposed the Well would not be possible as dasein needs a body to be and it needs to be in. The stuff in the Well is no longer in the world, thus cannot exist at all. Dasein cannot be found in that well. If we bypass the the very structure of dasein as being-in-the-world and say it is possible to be in the well somehow, I have no idea what the well would contain or what would happen to the person who drank. The referential whole to a bunch of individuals spanning over thousands of years or something? I can't see how the individual would survive that as a self.

 

And "dasein" should be spelled without the capital d, it's a strange translator glitch that it's spelled that way in English, it's Dasein in German because it is a noun, all nouns are capitalized in German. Said the person who can hardly write English herself.

[Fredward]

Ah yes, but you also really need to consider the aforementioned confluence of bitiarberry and their aeffects on the Peruvian muskrat. Without first considering the confluence of episomilogical abstraction within the sphere of marinated ubeing you really can't make any inferences on the philositude of endogram proximilies and without that we all here, every one of us, knows that the echo of a duck's quack has folded itself somehow between space and time and will only be heard -7136 years from now somewhere in Kutar. It is only then that we can extrapolate the defibriliatory long term aeffects of the Well on either Morrigan's or the Inquisitor's actions.

 

So, in conclusion: kittens.

[nightscrawl]

I'm a tad bit confused but heck, I'll bite.

The world of Thedas does not work as a Heideggerian world as they suffer from the Cartesian ax. If Thedas did work as Heidegger proposed the Well would not be possible as dasein needs a body to be and it needs to be in. The stuff in the Well is no longer in the world, thus cannot exist at all. Dasein cannot be found in that well. If we bypass the the very structure of dasein as being-in-the-world and say it is possible to be in the well somehow, I have no idea what the well would contain or what would happen to the person who drank. The referential whole to a bunch of individuals spanning over thousands of years or something? I can't see how the individual would survive that as a self.

 

And "dasein" should be spelled without the capital d, it's a strange translator glitch that it's spelled that way in English, it's Dasein in German because it is a noun, all nouns are capitalized in German. Said the person who can hardly write English herself.

 

The "stuff in the Well" isn't merely knowledge, but a representation of everything that embodied Mythal, the person, including the actual knowledge (in her head) that she had when she was alive. I kind of assumed that the OP was referring to Mythal having been a person who actually existed in the world, so by drinking of the Well you are taking on her aspect and bringing her back into the world.

 

Scratch all that, I forgot that Flemeth is Mythal, and the Well is the combined knowledge of her servants. (Sigh.)

[StanojeZ]

And that's why you don't let philosophers discuss questions of biology and psychology.

[Cheviot]

There is nothing outside the well.

[aerisblight]

There is no spoon....

[Lynroy: Final Edition]

[Innsmouth Dweller]

They have to do something. Let them be. It's not like they're gonna get employed anytime soon.

you're cruel, cruel person 

[Lebanese Dude]

They have to do something. Let them be. It's not like they're gonna get employed anytime soon.

[Laughing_Man]

Interesting, I think I understand your point. However, how is The Well different from any other repository of knowledge, or indeed, any type of learning at all?

 

Everything is tainted by something, there is no such thing as "pure knowledge", because even the simplest of observations which led to any kind of knowledge had to be made by a person or a group of persons, which in turn must "taint" their observations.

[KaiserShep]

This is a lot more elaborate than my theory that the well of sorrows is basically just a giant pensieve filled with dragon splooge and pheromones.

[turuzzusapatuttu]

 

This is a proposal of phenomenological analysis on the *snipped all the rest of it 'cause I didn't read it (I didn't even try)*

 

[Bob Walker]

Do frogs, fishes or worms dwell int the Well of Sorrows? Is it safe to drink from its muddy waters? What would say a sanitarist? What Bear Grylls think about that?

[turuzzusapatuttu]

Get in line, mate.

 

Y u so mean??????

[QueenCrow]

Heidegger’s philosophical theory as applied to the Well of Sorrows is an interesting concept, one that I would suggest is not mutually exclusive of philosophical and psychological theory contemporary to Heidegger and the Pre-Nazi Weimar world.

 

For instance, if we apply Heidegger’s concept of meaning, understanding, and knowledge as contributory to the concept of being, or Dasein, while also asserting Freud’s applications of conscious knowledge, unconscious knowledge, and repression of fundamental human desires that are unacceptable to the conscious mind, we may come to a complete vision of being, or Dasein, built on a foundation of Lustprinzip, or pleasure principle, and Todestrieb, or death drive.[1]

Applying Freudian theory, we can easily realize the Well of Sorrows as a representation of the womb, and the elluvian behind the well as the birth canal through which one must pass in order to emerge into a world of consciousness, meaning, understanding, and knowledge.

 

Morrigan’s presence, however, is not a non-synchronous one.  The act of Morrigan using the Well of Sorrows is a philosophically congruent one, since the metaphorical womb and birth passage leads her to realization that knowledge and being are derived from her mother.  Morrigan’s association with the Well of Sorrows may be considered, in terms of her Dasein, a natural and progressive act.

 

When the Inquisitor accepts the Well of Sorrows, the act may well be treated as an attempt by the Inquisitor to falsify being in the presence of repressed desire and manifest drives of libidinal pleasure formed during fifth stage of psychosexual development, in which the individual develops a strong sexual interest in people outside of the family.[2]  To pass from the Well of Sorrows, through the elluvian and emerge from the metaphorical vagina is a conscious acknowledgment of complete psychosexual development and of being.  On the contrary, a failure to pass from the Well of Sorrows, through the elluvian and into the world may be considered a manifestation of death drive and a task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state.[3]

[1] Boag, S. (2006). "Freudian repression, the common view, and pathological science". Review of General Psychology 10 (1): 74–86.

[2] Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams Chapter V "The Material and Sources of Dreams" (New York: Avon Books) p. 296.

[3] Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id", in On Metapsychology (Middlesex, 1987), p. 380.

 

[WillieStyle]

And that's why you don't let philosophers discuss questions of biology and psychology.

As an applied physicist, I emphatically disagree. This is why it's fun to see philosophers discuss all sorts of questions.

These sort of meta-discussions are crucial to developing or reinventing fields of inquiry. It's no surprise that it was Descartes - one of the fathers of modern physics and applied math - who wrote, "I think, therefore I am."

[Radiant Heart]

The world of Thedas does not work as a Heideggerian world as they suffer from the Cartesian ax. If Thedas did work as Heidegger proposed the Well would not be possible as dasein needs a body to be and it needs to be in. The stuff in the Well is no longer in the world, thus cannot exist at all. Dasein cannot be found in that well. If we bypass the the very structure of dasein as being-in-the-world and say it is possible to be in the well somehow, I have no idea what the well would contain or what would happen to the person who drank. The referential whole to a bunch of individuals spanning over thousands of years or something? I can't see how the individual would survive that as a self.

 

Thank you for your response, Hedinve. I concur: insofar as Heidegger understood dasein (I appreciate your suggestion here on the spelling of Da-sein, even though I like keeping it as a capital letter for non-linguistic reasons) as the human being, which is characterized as being-in-the-world, there is no way dasein can satisfy this property without having a body.

 

This is what I find so fascinating: it appears as though there are sentient/conscious minds communicating themselves within the Well. How is it that these beings exist? In what state are they existing? More importantly, are they communicating with each other? Or are each of these consciousnesses isolated frames of reference? Your incredulity is justified: the fundamental being of any individual who would to take upon themselves the collected consciousnesses of generations of individuals spanning thousands of years would be cataclysmically threatened. However, if these consciousnesses have been allowed the opportunity to dialogue with each other, there may have been the opportunity for fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung).

 

Here I hearken to the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. It is impossible to entirely divorce oneself from one's own cultural/historical context when one encounters another (this, Gadamer refers to as the 'historically effected consciousness', wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Any individual, when confronted with alterity, with the other, has the opportunity to genuinely listen and come away from the encounter with their horizon of meaning broadened. I am wondering which philosopher might best describe the encounter with the Well of Sorrows: Heidegger or Gadamer. If Heidegger, it appears, as you say, to be nearly impossible to imagine the damage the Well might do on the individual. If Gadamer, perhaps the dasein of the individual who partakes of the Well may enter into some manner of 'dialogue' with these beings: we wouldn't see the destruction of an identity, but the broadening of the horizon of meaning.

 

I hope I have addressed your points, and I look forward to any feedback and/or questions.

 

Incidentally, you mentioned a Cartesian bent in relation to the world of Thedas? I would ask you to clarify your meaning here. Descartes was a philosopher who used skepticism as a tool, not as a belief system, in order to clarify his thoughts on the nature of reality. To be honest, the people of Thedas do not seem like skeptical people at all, but perhaps I am missing something. It seems like each group is placidly content with the mythologies being propogated within their own faith traditions... The player is able to explore storylines which call into doubt these mythologies, but there does not seem to be any wide-ranging philosophical movement which advocates skepticism of one's own inherited biases.