Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent 9781107081536, 2015016104

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Heidegger and Politics

In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander S. Duff explains Heidegger’s perplexing and highly varied political influence. Heidegger and Politics argues that Heidegger’s political import is forecast by fundamental ambiguities about the status of politics in his thought. Duff explores how in Being and Time as well as earlier and later works, “everyday” human existence is presented both as irretrievably banal but also as our only tenuous path to the deepest questions about human life. Heidegger thus points to two irreconcilable attitudes toward politics: either a total and purifying revolution must usher in an authentic communal existence, or else we must await a future deliverance from the present dispensation of Being. Neither attitude is conducive to moderate politics, and so Heidegger’s influence tends toward extremism of one form or another, modified only by explicit departures from his thought. Alexander S. Duff was educated in the humanities and history at Carleton University and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fellowships from the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame and from the Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College, and taught at Skidmore College and College of the Holy Cross. He writes widely in the history of political philosophy, and his publications on classical, modern, and contemporary political philosophy have appeared in both scholarly and popular publications.

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Heidegger and Politics The Ontology of Radical Discontent

ALEXANDER S. DUFF College of the Holy Cross

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107081536 © Alexander S. Duff 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Duff, Alexander S. (Alexander Selkirk), 1978– Heidegger and politics : the ontology of radical discontent / Alexander S. Duff. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-08153-6 (hardback) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976 – Political and social views. I. Title. B3279.H49D795 2015 320.092–dc23 2015016104 ISBN 978-1-107-08153-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Catherine and Michael Zuckert

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One ought to state not only the truth but also the cause of the falsehood. – Aristotle There are two types of genius:  those to whom the task of forming, ripening, and perfecting has fallen, and others who have to become the cause of new modes of life . . . like the Germans? – Nietzsche

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Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

page ix xi

Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 1 What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and the Problem of Theory 2 Surpassing Ethics: The Formal Indication of Existence 3 The Ambiguous Everyday: On the Emergence of Theory from Practice 4 The Dictatorship of the They and the Clearing of the Everyday 5 Disclosive Occlusion and the Promise of Nihilism 6 Heideggerian Politics: The Past Is Not Dead, It’s Not Even Past Conclusion: The Paradox of Heideggerian Politics

1

63 91 119 152 185

Bibliography Index

197 213

24 44

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Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank those who have been so helpful during the long preparation of this work. The support of the Earhart Foundation and the Jack Miller Center was instrumental to the preparation of the manuscript. The University of Notre Dame and Boston College were my intellectual homes while I prepared, read, and wrote, and provided me with opportunities to present my work to remarkably receptive and challenging groups. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues who have assisted, one way or another, with the preparation of this work:  David Azerrad, Robert Bartlett, Nasser Behnegar, Brian Bitar, Shilo Brooks, Andrew Butler, Rodrigo Chacon, Jeff Church, Tom Cleveland, Robert Faulkner, Michael Gillespie, Grayson Gilmore, Stephen Head, Matthew Holbreich, John Hungerford, Dino Konstantos, Beth L’Arrivee, Robert L’Arrivee, Walter Nicgorski, Robert Peckham, Danilo Petranovich, Marc Sable, Susan Shell, Ben Storey, Jenna Storey, Brenna Strauss, and Dana Villa. I would especially like to thank Randy Newell and Richard Velkley, whose own work on Heidegger has been inspiring, and who have been particularly helpful and encouraging. My family has been terrifically supportive:  Robert and Joanne Duff, Matthias and Andrea Borck. I also thank Robert Dreesen and Brianda Reyes of Cambridge University Press for guiding the manuscript through to publication, and the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for their helpful suggestions. Most of all I thank my wife, Catherine, for her help and love. Nothing good here would have happened without her. This work is dedicated to two of my teachers in gratitude, appreciation, and friendship.

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Abbreviations

References to works of Martin Heidegger are provided parenthetically in the text. Of these, those indicated “GA” indicate a volume of the Gesamtausgabe included in the bibliography. Other abbreviations are included below; in the text, they are followed by the page number, except where indicated. BH BPP BW CPE EG FCM HCT IM KJPW KPM N4

Becoming Heidegger, ed. T. Kisiel and T. Sheehan, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell, revised edition, New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. W. McNeill in P, pp. 97–135. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews,” trans. J. van Buren, in P, pp. 1–38. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft, fourth edition, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Nietzsche. Volume IV. Nihilism, trans. David Krell, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1982. xi

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xii

P PRL

PS S SZ

TDP

WM

List of Abbreviations Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. [References in the text are followed by the German pagination from GA 60, a slash, then the English pagination.] Plato’s Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Supplements, ed. J. van Buren, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 17th edition, 1993. [Translations in the text follow the MacQuarrie and Robinson edition with minor changes.] Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. T. Sadler, London: Athlone Press, 2000. [References in the text are followed by the German pagination from GA 56/57, a slash, then the English pagination.] “What is Metaphysics?” in P, pp. 82–96.

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Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge

This book began with a question and a hunch. The question was this: how is it that Martin Heidegger has had such a peculiar and varied political influence, when his work is not evidently political, and when his own political judgments were so noxious? Even if we discount his epoch-making influence within the academy, in virtually every discipline of the humanities and social sciences, his practical, political influence is very striking, remarkably widespread, highly varied, and largely unremarked: Heidegger’s thought has inspired Iranian revolutionaries; environmentalists and Greens; dissenters from the Cold War polarity of liberal West and communist East; and, to this day, European fascists. This is a disparate collection of epigoni for a thinker whose own work was never straightforwardly political and who was publicly associated with the National Socialists in Germany. Such observations provoke related questions: if Heidegger himself thought he belonged on the right, then what to make of his influence on the left? Can we reconcile the nonviolence, even pacifism, of certain strains of his influence with another legacy of violence and political revolution? And what of his evident appeal beyond the borders of the so-called West, among political movements in the East? Finally, and most importantly, given that there is no necessary connection between his political influence and his work, is there anything in Heidegger’s thought that should invite this variety, that is friendly to this form of transformation? My hunch was that the contradictions and tensions exhibited in the political opinions of those who were indebted to Heidegger’s thought in fact reflected something true – however dimmed or darkened – about the political import of his thinking as such. If this is the case, then for as long as Heidegger may be read, his thought will continue to receive such political expression. Returning to Heidegger with this varied influence in mind might help us to understand the

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predicaments and fundamental character of politics in our time, at the dawn of the post-Abendland age. Heidegger presents himself as a philosopher of loss, of absence, of “radical finitude” (GA 3 296; KPM 207), speaking precisely to a time of despondence and of destitution. In a perverse and roundabout way, then, such a time is an opportune moment: moment meets philosopher. In his secret, cryptic masterpiece, the Beiträge, he refers to such an event as a “resonating” (der Anklang), in that such a moment should allow the thinker of such a time to speak to such a time (GA 65 107–66; CPE 85–131). He, following Nietzsche, characterizes our age as one of nihilism. For Nietzsche, however, nihilism is a condition wherein “nothing is forbidden.” Nothing is forbidden because nothing is fixed, and what has been revered has fallen. Heidegger, by contrast, characterizes this as a nihilism brought to light by the “abandonment of beings by Being,” that is, everything we thought about the world and the ground of its ordering has been ripped away, exposing an abyss where we had thought there was solid foundation. The exposure of this abyss manifests itself in various ways, for Heidegger sees our time as riven with the “phenomena of nihilism.”1 These phenomena include wars of unprecedented destruction and titanic horror, havoc on a never-before-imagined scale, whole populations displaced, the entire mechanism of great nations being sent to do battle with one another, and the technological ravishing of nature. He begins writing in the shadow of the First World War, a destruction he would come to see as basically continuous with the Second and its aftermath in the sundering of Germany and the beginning of the atomic arms race. The phenomena of nihilism also include, however, the vast expansion of rote, mundane, bourgeois tedium and crushing dreariness:  mass communication, mass transit, pseudo-education, urban business, and purportedly cultivated distractions. Heidegger develops formula for referring to these clusters of phenomena together, both unprecedented violence and novel forms of monotony: he refers to technology, to mechanization or machination, to “greatness” as in “bigness,” as well as anonymity. These phenomena, he contends, cannot be viewed in isolation:  not just massive destruction and war, neither just bourgeois nonsense and inanity, but both together as encompassing and constituting the whole of human existence in our time. The phenomena of nihilism are not, then, just open uncertainty, confusion, and wariness; the “abandonment by Being” also fosters unseemly confidence, swaggering assertiveness, and hasty insistence. As Heidegger understands nihilism, then, his time is our time. 1

“For whom is the resonating? And whither? The resonating of the essential occurrence of being in the abandonment by being” (GA 65 108; CPE 85). “The final entrenchment of the abandonment by being in the forgottenness of being. / The age of a complete absence of questioning and an unwillingness to establish any goals. Mediocrity as status symbol. / The resonating of the refusal – in what sort of sounding?” (GA 65 108; CPE 85–6, emphasis in the original text).

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Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge

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Heidegger sees his task, therefore, as exhibiting the resonance between his thought and the impoverishment that stands behind the bluffing and posturing of our age, the supposed pinnacle of a tradition that prizes wisdom.2 He expresses this enigmatically in the Contributions: To make appear by way of recollection the concealed power of this forgottenness as forgottenness and to bring forth therein the resonating of being. The recognition of the plight. The guiding disposition of the resonating: shock and diffidence, but each arising out of the basic disposition of restraint. The highest plight:  the plight of the lack of a sense of plight (GA 65 107; CPE 85, emphasis in the original text).

Heidegger’s appeal is that he presents himself as a philosopher of finitude to an age in which, because finitude is mostly forgotten, it may be rediscovered. He is a reminder of the spirit of tragedy, appealing to both sides of the phenomena of nihilism. To the war-making, destructive side of contemporary life, his philosophy speaks to the urgent, serious confrontation with destruction and death. To the bored, tranquilized side, his philosophy resonates with the experienced meaninglessness of existence announced in boredom and drudgery. To both, it speaks to a certain contempt for the other side. Heidegger, therefore, can be the thinker both of stormtroopers and the faculty lounge, of Leni Riefenstahl as well as Terrence Malick. Heidegger speaks of finitude in a broad way. It does not simply refer to our awareness of our mortality or our facing up to death, although that is implied in the term. Finitude so understood only looks forward into the future and sees that we are eminently perishable, and that all of our loves, the objects of our desires, and the promises of permanence that we encounter are only ever properly grasped through the most certain aspect of our existence: that we will die. However, Heidegger observes another side of our finitude, our “thrownness.” We did not choose to be born, choose where or when we would exist as who we are. We are thrown into existence, into being rather than not-being, and are given all sorts of “baggage”: people to whom we are related, a community to which we belong, and a history to which we are submitted. Reason and the life according to reason are situated in one sense among the practical things we use and have “handy,” but are more profoundly situated into a whole world

2

Hardt and Negri position Heidegger as a thinker who fails to grasp “poverty” in its most real iteration, namely, economic deprival. They refer to Heidegger’s 1945 lecture, “Die Armut,” as, “one pinnacle (or nadir) of the ideological effort to cancel the power of the poor through mystification” (Hardt and Negri 2011, 46). Their position assimilates some of the substance of the Frankfurt School criticism of Heidegger to the premises of a Derridean appeal on behalf of global democracy or, as they style it in their appropriation from Spinoza, the “multitude.” For a recent appropriation of Heidegger for the sake of a new left-wing political economy, see Vattimo and Zabala 2011.

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that we have been thrown into witlessly. To stress our finitude in this fashion makes Heidegger, by his own lights, “countercultural.” Heidegger thus stands in a rather aggravated posture toward the civilization of the Enlightenment, wherein the entire spectrum of human science has been harnessed for the betterment and improvement of humans, “empowering” them and relieving their otherwise troubled estate. Heidegger in effect testifies to the limits and even the impossibility of this project’s success. Tragedy is not meant to be the final word, however. If Heidegger evokes the spirit of destruction and loss that prevailed, first in the trenches during the war, then in the capitulation and humiliation of the country in 1919 and the years that followed, he also gives expression to a recollection of unity and wholeness that persevered through these trauma, which recollection is itself, he would have it, the surest testimony to its truth and future possibility. As noxious as the word has become, his allusion to the Volksgemeinschaft in Being and Time, was meant to summon up the spirit of classless, divisionless unity, a kind of post-political purity that prevailed at precisely the darkest times of the war.3 That the time of destitution may achieve a resonance first in the thought and expression of Heidegger renders it no longer strictly abysmal. Heidegger presents the confrontation with nothingness as an event of unmatched promise, and therefore the time of nihilism as, perversely, a precarious but possibly liberating epoch.4 He quotes Hölderlin to this effect in his essay on technology: “Yet where the danger is, the saving power also grows.”5 For example, in our time, when nihilism and everydayness are ascendant, we are given to understand precisely that the tradition of philosophy in the West has been nihilistic.6 The occlusion of Being by the now global dominion of the Western tradition of metaphysics is discovered as an event, an event of unmatched promise.

3

4

5

6

On the meaning of this term prior to the Nazis assumption of power, consult Peter Fritzsche 2009, 38–55. Heidegger on the promise of confronting the nothing: “This nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the shallow aspect of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit” (GA 3 291–2; KPM 204). See Iain Thomson’s provocative meditation on this point in Heidegger (Thomson 2009). Jerry Weinberger’s discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of the problem of technology is uniquely attentive to this underappreciated element of Heidegger’s thought:  the present “dark night of the world” is deeply promising; it “tells us that it is a ‘danger that saves’ ” (Weinberger 1992, 113; quoting BW 340). The American Southern writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy both refer in their work to their characters’ experience of the suffocating dreariness of “everydayness.” These writers give a Christian sense of hope pervading the rot that Heidegger brings to light, an inflection that it would be mistaken to assign to Heidegger. On Percy and O’Connor’s relation to Heidegger and Nietzsche, see the most lucid study by Ralph C. Wood (2004).

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Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge

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Objections to Reading Heidegger Two serious objections, however, immediately present themselves if we turn to Heidegger to understand the challenges of contemporary political life. The first of these is moral: why should we concern ourselves with the judgment of someone who revealed the extent of his political sense and humanity by siding with the National Socialists in the German Revolution in 1933 and then, what some regard as even more reprehensible, who never recanted or apologized for the support he gave to the regime?7 The second objection is more strictly intellectual: Heidegger has no comment to offer on political life; he is an ontologist, a historian of philosophy, perhaps a dabbler in logic or epistemology; he is a ceaselessly abstract thinker, with nothing to say directly or of importance about politics. To the first objection, I express some sympathy. My initial interest in Heidegger was not friendly, certainly not in the normal sense of that word. I consider his involvement with Nazism to be a reasonable and, perhaps more importantly for some readers, authentic expression of his thinking.8 At the very least, it cannot 7

8

On the latter point, see Lacoue-Labarthe 1990; and Lang 1996. The recent publication of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (as GA 94–6) has only confirmed what was long known about Heidegger’ anti-Semitism. There is, as one would expect, quite a lot of literature on this. I  mention only a few high points. Zuckert 1990 is the indispensible conspectus of the matter. She responds to the failure of Heidegger’s critics to explain how he, who declined to refer to nature as a standard in politics, would support a regime that placed so much emphasis on biology and race. She locates the confluence of Heidegger’s philosophy and the ideology of the regime in his lectures on Hölderlin, exploring political themes of fatherland and, above all, language. Thomson 2005a surveys the scholarly literature on the matter with great perspicuity and clarity and argues that, when we see that Heidegger understood his political involvement as an auxiliary of his approach to university reform, we can also see that he, in effect, learned from his failure with the Nazis and so revised his approach to the relationship between philosophy and education. If one wishes to see “philosophy free itself from the work of Heidegger” (Faye 2009, 316), whatever that might entail, then a genuinely philosophical, rather than philological-biographical, labor is required. Lacoue-Labarthe’s remark about a previous generation’s Heidegger scandals still applies: “The work of the historians has in fact hardly begun. I doubt, however, that it will be able to contribute anything really decisive: it is not in Heidegger’s minor (or major) compromises, nor even in his declarations and proclamations of 1933 to 1934, that the crux of the matter is located” (Lacoue-Laberthe 1990, 39 n.1). The work of Gregory Fried and Richard Polt provides perhaps the soundest general guide to and scholarly treatment of this topic. See Fried 2000, but for a discussion of the most recent controversies, the latest preface to their translation of Introduction to Metaphysics is helpful (Heidegger 2014). In my view, the matter is clouded by a few misconceptions of the attraction that National Socialism held for Heidegger. The first is the view that he would support the National Socialist revolution out of an “aristocratic authoritarianism” (Rockmore 1992, 72)  or a kind of “racial-biological chauvinism” (Dallmayr 1993, 152). As I will try to show in the balance of this book, Heidegger saw the revolution as one of the outcast versus the privileged. The second misconception sees National Socialism as a principally “conservative” movement. Its core appeal among the dispossessed marks it as a movement of transformation, not of conservation. The Nazis did not represent, in either their personnel or their doctrine, the “nobility, the agrarian

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be written off as a personal quirk or a temporary stage in his thinking that need not therefore be taken seriously.9 At the same time, it can hardly be denied that his intellectual influence has provoked some of the most refreshing attempts to rethink the very tradition that he diagnoses as nihilistic through and through, and to respond to the political challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.10 It seems hasty, therefore, to suggest that his Nazism is coextensive with the political importance of his work, not least for the further reason that he remained not altogether satisfied with the character of that movement.11 What is more, if the political import of his thought reduces, one way or another, to his support for the NSDAP, he poses no serious challenge to the broad political and philosophic positions that constitute the basic tenets of Western civilization.12 If Heidegger is fundamentally indistinguishable from any of the semiphilosophical ideologues who propped up a temporarily threatening, revanchist regime, then what serious reason do we have to trouble ourselves with what he thinks about anything? Dismissing Heidegger by reducing his thought to his political biography lets us landowners, the military, the church, and the old educated and propertied upper class” (Stern 1999, 161). Whatever his preferences for agrarianism, Heidegger was not a “conservative” as that term was understood in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. As Hans Sluga has helpfully demonstrated, there were strong and broad conservative tendencies in German universities, particularly in the philosophy faculties, but Heidegger did not share in them and regarded them as impediments to the ontological revolution he envisioned for German Bildung (Sluga 1993). Harry Neumann’s analysis of the matter is most helpful: Only real nazism is sufficiently courageous to incorporate the apolitical or anti-political thrust of science or global technology. As such it has nothing but contempt for all values (any notion of good and bad, right and wrong, true and false) or wholes or universals (anything political, anything common or communicable). Since politics always is concerned with such things, true nazis are radically apolitical . . . science is the simple realization that whatever is experienced – a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god or anything else  – is nothing apart from its being experienced. . . . It is unscientific illusion to believe that any thoughts or words, “scientific” or unscientific theories, are anything more than empty experiences, empty because nothing – including “experience” – is definable or limited by anything. . . . The reality revealed by science consists quite literally of nothing, of empty, interchangeable nothings. . . . Nothing – and only nothing – exists in nazism’s scientific reality. Nazism’s will asserts itself in the face of its own nothingness (Neumann 1985, 226–7, 29; quoted in Ward 1995, 270 n. 11). 9

10

11

12

Gadamer notes of claims that Heidegger’s “political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy” that “wholly unnoticed was how damaging such a ‘defense’ of so important a thinker really is” (Gadamer 1989, 428; quoted in Thomson 2005a, 33). One need only mention the names of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith. If one looks beyond political thought, for example  – to philosophy more narrowly defined, theology, psychology, or anthropology – the extent of Heidegger’s influence is virtually unfathomable. It is difficult to disentangle Heidegger’s mendacity from genuine disaffection. As Richard Velkley notes, though, with characteristic penetration, “Heidegger never anywhere suggests that another regime or movement, actual or possible, had the possibility for . . . direction from the ‘competent forces’ ” (Velkley 2011, 85). This, I  think, constitutes the most serious objection to Emmanuel Faye’s recent work (Faye 2009, 2012) on Heidegger. The objection applies similarly to Fritsche 1999.

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Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge

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off the hook for rethinking the premises of our own political arrangements and the extent to which they may be implicated by his broadly critical assessment of the nihilism of Western civilization and philosophy.

Heideggerian Political Legacies As an inoculation against the error of thinking that Heidegger’s political import is coextensive with his Nazism, it is helpful to consider briefly the political life of his work beyond this episode. In contrast to his influence in academic precincts, his political influence is generally underappreciated, but in drawing attention to it, I  do not mean to exaggerate its importance for interpreting Heidegger. Four areas of influence deserve some comment: his influence among Iranian revolutionaries, among environmentalists and Greens, among Cold War dissidents, and among contemporary fascists. Here I stress their points of continuity, but one should note their evident diversity and differences from one another. What is more, none of them is a straight Heideggerian in any sense, but evidently mix Heidegger with other elements. Several of the intellectual architects and principal ideologues of the Iranian Revolution were formed by their understanding of Heidegger, drawing on his thought in their diagnosis of the toxicity of Western civilization, the possibility of a future-oriented revolution that would repeat something of a lost Islamic past, and the notion of a recurrent fall necessitating a permanent revolution. Ali Shari’ati, an influential pre-revolutionary thinker, broke with the traditionalist, conservative clerisy by advocating a reinterpretation of the tenets of Shi’ia Islam that stressed radical freedom as achieved through a futural projection of social justice that retrieves and reforms, in a spirit of radical freedom, the truth of Islam.13 He saw this proposed revolution as an alternative to Marxist communism that likewise drew its support from the lower classes. The essence of Shi’ism is its saying “no” to the established religious and political order for the sake of justice and truth. As he conceived of it, “Red Shi’ism changes to black Shi’ism,” a dynamic that he referred to as a permanent revolution. By this he meant that the locus of social justice and martyrdom shifts as it makes revolutionary claims upon the established order, which as established is never capable of expressing them adequately and then tends itself to ossify into structures of oppression. In the process, a new body of the oppressed emerges to make claims of exclusion upon the new ruling element.14 Ahmad Fardid, teaching at the University of Tehran in the period of the revolution, was even more explicit in his recurrence to Heidegger. In a 1979 lecture course, called “The Divine Encounter and Illuminations at the End of Time,” 13

14

On Shari’ati’s relationship to Heidegger, see Mirsepassi 2000, 96–128, 146–55. On his intellectual development generally, see Rahnema 2000. See Ali Shari’ati’s essay, “Red Shi ‘ism vs. Black Shi ‘ism,” at http://www.iranchamber.com/ personalities/ashariati/works/red_black_shiism.php. Retrieved August 2013.

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Fardid identifies “Westoxication” (Gharbzadegi – “Weststruckness”),15 which began with Greek rationality and accelerated in the period of the Renaissance, as the chief enemy of the Islamic spirit of the Iranian Revolution: “The totality of the post-Renaissance world has fallen completely; the exception was Heidegger, who diagnosed the problem” (Rajaee 2007, 183). In the world of “complete darkness,” only the Iranian Revolution, the thought of Heidegger, and the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini represent a brief moment of possibility. He feared, however, that Weststruckness would undermine the Iranian Revolution: “Wherever I see a lack of angered fists and the prevalence of compromise, I will be disappointed. . . . I believe in permanent revolution, and today I am very frightened that the revolution may be undermined and the bourgeoisie will take over” (182, 184). A “permanent revolution” is required to prevent conservative, counterrevolutionary elements in society from returning Iran to the Westernized culture of the “modern cave” of “self-founded nihilism” (182). Fardid’s student, Davari, polemicizes to this day against the reforming, moderating, and modernizing impulses of Soroush and other rationalism-favoring reformers in terms that also invoke Heidegger:  Martin Heidegger, he insists, can help Iranians understand the “inner essence” of “the prison of the West” (188–9).16 Heidegger’s influence among Greens and environmentalists draws on different elements of his thought. The Green movement that has developed in the Western world since the 1970s, in particular that wing of it referred to as espousing “deep ecology,” is closely tied to Heideggerian notions of the nihilism of rationalist, technological civilization. Beginning with Arnold Naess, “deep ecology” rejects a human-centered understanding of “shallow environmentalism” as utilitarian and essentially selfish, and instead adheres to a vision of nature wherein there is no hierarchy among the beings, each life form being connected to every other in a non-dominating process of emergence and decay.17 In an influential codification of the tenets of deep ecology, Devall and Sessions identify three distinct contributions that Heidegger made to the intellectual development of deep ecology:  they write that Heidegger (1)  supplied for deep ecology a certain intellectual and historical ballast, linking the critique of the domination of nature to the tendencies of Western philosophy “since Plato.” He also (2) urged a form of thinking that was more “Taoist” rather than analytical, and (3) enjoined a form of authentic dwelling on the Earth, “parallel

15

16

17

The term Gharbzadeghi can be translated “Westoxication,” “Occidentosis,” or “Westruckness.” It appears to have been coined by Ahmad Fardid, who did not write, but was popularized by the journalist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (Al Ahmad 1982). Soroush has been explicitly critical of the intellectual influence of Heidegger on the Iranian right (Soroush 2006). On Heidegger’s influence on Iranian intellectual life generally, see the extremely valuable chapter in Mirsepassi 2010, 85–128. See Naess 1973. The locus classicus of the Green Heidegger is Zimmerman 1990; see also 1994, 2005; Thiele 1995, 1999; and Jonas 1984.

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to our call to dwell in our bioregion . . . with alertness to the natural processes” (Devall and Sessions [1985] 2001, 98). Heidegger has also had a certain influence among prominent dissenters from the polarity of the Cold War – the Canadian pacifist George Grant, and the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel – seeking a viable alternative to Soviet collectivism and American capitalism. These dissidents echoed Heidegger’s insistence that the United States and USSR were “metaphysically identical.” In the case of Grant, he hoped that after a period of scourging – when formerly independent nations such as Canada had succumbed to the “technological dynamo” of the “spearhead of liberalism,” the United States – the Christian church could reemerge as a promised source for human community.18 Similarly, Havel wrote movingly of the possibility that the “powerless” might “live in the truth” in defiance of the totalizing oppression of the Soviet satellite system. After the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, he also spoke in the West about the fundamentally similar approach to governing in the West on rationalist, technological assumptions about the world: The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the world – and Being as such – is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to scientism, from the industrial revolution to the information revolution, was characterized by rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking. This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that man, as the pinnacle of everything that exists, was capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that exists, and of possessing the one and only truth about the world. It was an era in which there was a cult of depersonalized objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was amassed and technologically exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered by the scientific method. It was an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms, and statistical averages. It was an era of freely transferable, existentially ungrounded information. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era where the goal was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its prosperity (Havel 1992).19

The decay of the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and political liberation has produced  – in both the Soviet and Western blocs  – a desiccated

18

19

George Grant’s “Heideggerianism” is most in play in his Technology and Empire and Technology and Justice (Grant 1969, 1986), but on Grant as offering a Platonic “rejoinder” to Heidegger, see Angus 1987. This quotation is from a 1992 address to the World Economic Forum (http://www .compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Havel.htm, retrieved August 9, 2012). See with it Howard 2011 and Havel’s Letters to Olga (Havel 1989); “Power to the Powerless” (Havel 1985, 10–59); “Living in Truth” (Havel 1990). Havel’s encounter with Heidegger was mediated by the great Czech phenomenologist and moral philosopher Jan Patocka; for the latter’s critique of Heidegger, see Patocka 1998. On Havel’s reading of Heidegger, see Pontuso 2004, 20–43.

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husk of technological rationality, a mode of relating to the world that transcends the merely political differences of regime. In addition to these nonviolent dissenters, Heidegger continues to be influential among fascists  – themselves, in a way, likewise convinced of the interchangeability of communism and liberalism as obstacles to “metapolitics” – in particular in their attempts to distinguish their politics from “traditionalism” or the taint of “conservatism.”20 Aleksandr Dugin is perhaps most remarkable of these figures. He is a Russian advocate for a “Eurasian” counterpole to Atlanticist, Anglo-Saxon liberalism, an imperialism premised on “Dasein” and “Ereignis,” the event of being that emerges from the world midnight of globalization.21 It would be easy to overstate the hermeneutical foothold that these various political stances and movements could afford in our attempt to understand Heidegger. But on the evidence of these political connections, I  hazard two provisional claims. First, Heidegger has a certain importance for thinking at the margins of the Western project – legalistic, secular, technological, capitalist, socialist, or rationalist – where resistance to this imperative seeks some form of “intellectual” support or guidance, be it in Iran, in the shadow of Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, in the immediate proximity of the “dynamo” of the American “technological empire,” amid traditional communities around the globe, or at the level of local and ecological concerns within the borders of the West. These political movements are unified by a diagnosis of the totalizing character of rationalist structures – be these bureaucratic, for example, or technological – which are expressed in the subordination and suppression of nature, but especially human nature or humanity. The homogenizing impulse of this universalizing dynamo of the West extirpates anything local, particular, distinctly individualized, “nonstandard,” or unique in the erection of a stultifying edifice of scientific control. Second, Heideggerian politics, in addition to being unified in what it rejects, may permit of exceptional variety as expressed in the different positive claims made by the figures of these movements: some recur to a particular religion, history, or language; some invoke “nature,” understood in a very particular, “non-Western” way (i.e., not in the 20

21

On Heidegger’s influence among fascists, see the very helpful article by Feldman, “Between ‘Geist’ and ‘Zeitgeist’:  Martin Heidegger as Ideologue of Metapolitical Fascism,” where he assimilates Heidegger to early twentieth-century fascist ideologies (a point from which I express some dissent in the notes to Chapter 1), but then shows his influence on Pierre Krebs and Alain de Benoist (Feldman 2005). See also the discussion by Graham Parkes (2009) of Heidegger’s conjectured influence on Japanese fascism. Victor Farias’s recent study Farias 2010 traces Heidegger’s influence among these diverse groups in considerable detail, even adducing a fascistic Latin American connection. Dugin himself disputes whether his “national bolshevism,” which looks for the “revolution in archaic values,” can be characterized as fascist. For Dugin’s recurrence to Heidegger as supplying an intellectual ballast for the “Fourth Political Theory,” the successor to the three failed political theories of liberalism, communism, and fascism, see his The Fourth Political Theory (Dugin 2012).

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Platonic, Aristotelian, Hobbesian, or Rousseauan way); some refer to “truth,” as in “living in the truth.” Just as striking as the unlooked-for similarity among these movements in their broad agreement about what they reject is the incommensurable diversity of their positive claims.

The Ambiguous Place of Politics in Heidegger In response to the second objection to studying Heidegger – the claim that he has precious little to say about politics – I insist that this misunderstands the breadth and profundity of Heidegger’s project. The standing of “the political” is nonetheless ambiguous in Heidegger.22 One looks in vain for Heidegger’s Res Publica, his Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City, or Spirit of the Laws. It is not an objection to this point, but a confirmation of it, to notice that Heidegger has rather a lot to say about politics and the polis in his Introduction to Metaphysics. In a similar vein, the course where he is most open about the political resonances of his work is entitled “Logic” (GA 38). But for a philosopher of sufficient stature, that is, one who purports to comment on everything and the ground of everything, some bearing and therefore at a minimum implicit comment on politics is entailed. The point can be sharpened for Heidegger in particular. It is the purpose of phenomenology to repair the breach left by the erection of the natural sciences and their establishment as the dominant paradigm of knowledge, and their original derivation from a more primordial “life-world,” in Husserl’s later phrase of the 1930s, whence the subject matters of the different branches of science are more organically interwoven with the lives lived by human beings. The distinctions we accept among epistemology, philosophy of mind, anthropology, biology, and political science are artifacts. In Heidegger’s reformulation of the problem, the development of the sciences has itself proceeded historically, resulting in a “cultivated” society in which culture and philosophy itself are so far removed from grasping the fundamental matters that to abide by the available distinctions among culture, politics, anthropology, and other disciplines is to fail to question deeply enough. Such a formulation of the matter will never lead to any real understanding.23 As we shall see presently, Heidegger understands the distinction between theory and practice to be a false, or at least arbitrary, distinction and therefore occlusive of the more primordial unity of “thinking.”24 In other words, Heidegger’s usual refusal to speak of politics 22 23

24

On Heidegger as a thinker of “the political,” see Strong 2012, 263–324. As we shall see in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2, Heidegger’s dissent from these formulations is so radical as even to refuse the merit of the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, a standard reference point for so many of his conservative revolutionary contemporaries, and indeed for European philosophy since Rousseau. For an extremely insightful discussion of this matter, see Velkley 2002, 11–48. As students of Heidegger will already appreciate, the specific designation “thinking” enters Heidegger’s lexicon later. There are occasionally important distinctions to be made among

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as a subject proves to be central to his political import: in Heidegger, the most essential distinction between theory and practice is deconstructed, leaving all of the traditional barriers that hove off theory from practical, political import in shambles. The disassembly of the distinction between theory and practice surely has some “practical” result. For Heidegger, this distinction obscured our access to the most fundamental phenomenon, namely, Being. Disassembling it, therefore, has the merit of freeing us to confront the question of Being, hence “ontology” and fundamental ontology. To understand Heideggerian politics, therefore, it is necessary to see how the question of Being relates to political life. Heidegger understands politics and culture as epiphenomena that are determined by our deeper shared understandings of what it means to be, or Being. Thus, throughout the convulsive political events that rent the Western world in the twentieth century, Heidegger maintained that the source of our terrible political condition was our impoverished understanding of “Being.” The “forgetfulness of Being,” as he terms it – a forgetfulness that dates from the original prejudice for theoretical philosophy among the Greeks – is the source of the widespread alienation, crass materialism, and ubiquitous technological destruction that characterizes our age. This forgetfulness underlies every cultural form and every political institution, and moreover it informs every currently envisioned aspiration for social reform. Because the forgetfulness of Being characterizes not merely our actions, but also our thoughts, every “traditional” category or concept of political philosophy is, on Heidegger’s terms, inadequate for confronting the political problems of our times. Ethics; natural law; the typology of regimes and the best regime; rights; social contracts of any description; utilitarian calculations; categorical imperatives; deliberation concerning the just, noble, and good:  none of these trite formulations can confront the required rethinking of the question of Being. Without rethinking the meaning of Being, it will be impossible to free ourselves from the awful mixture of tedium and horror that constitutes contemporary political life. There is no political solution to our political problems; for Heidegger, every possibility of beginning again depends on thinking anew the meaning of Being.

The Challenge of Heidegger What, then, is the challenge posed by Heideggerian thought and its attendant political ambiguity to the premises of Western civilization? What are these premises? Stated with a measure of generality, they are that our rational capacities may be fulfilled in harmony with our practical and collective lives. thinking, philosophy, metaphysics, phenomenology, and terms Heidegger will employ to refer to both his own activity and that to which he is referring as the fulfillment of human Dasein. In the present study, these distinctions are not central, and I will generally refer to philosophy, thinking, and phenomenology as like matters; when necessary, I will note his varying use of the term “metaphysics” and make appropriate adjustments to my own usage.

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Whatever the tensions between them, our moral, practical, and theoretical capacities exist in a fruitful rather than purely destructive tension with one another. In both ancient and modern approaches to the relationship among morality, theory, and practice, the fundamental strata of reality (characterized as Being or nature) fundamentally favor such a coordination. In his fashion of cruelly summarizing great, sweeping historical movements of thought in one pithy formulation, Nietzsche referred to this hypothesis as “optimism.”25 In its latest iteration, such optimism favors scientific rationalism, the technological mastery of nature, an expansionist economy, the rule of law as understood in the service of individual and group rights, and religion “within the limits” of reason or possibly none at all. This sketch suppresses internal tensions of considerable profundity, for at its core this civilizational conglomerate is meant to include a large measure of self-critique. Nonetheless, it is precisely this civilizational conglomerate (“metaphysics”) that Heidegger, following Nietzsche, diagnoses as nihilistic and therefore points us toward surpassing. As this civilization spreads across the globe  – whether as a pestilence, as a triumph of humanity, or as a conquering empire – it meets resistance from within its own

25

Nietzsche faced Socrates as “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history” within the context of his concern with “the science of aesthetics.” This science as he understood it is both metaphysical and physiologic-psychological; it is “natural science”; according to the suggestions of Beyond Good and Evil, it belongs to the context of a historical physiopsychology. Nietzsche’s concern is not merely theoretical; he is concerned with the future of Germany of the future of Europe – a human future that must surpass the highest that man has ever achieved before. . . . Socrates is the first theoretical man, the incarnation of the spirit of science, radically unartistic or a-music: “In the person of Socrates the belief in the comprehensibility of nature and in the universal healing power of knowledge has first come to light.” He is the prototype of the rationalist and therefore of the optimist, for optimism is not merely the belief that the world is the best possible world, but also the belief that the world can become the best of all imaginable worlds, or that the evils that belong to the best possible world can be rendered harmless by knowledge: thinking can not only fully understand being, but can even correct it; life can be guided by science; the living gods of myth can be replaced by a deus ex machina, i.e., the forces of nature as known and used in the service of “higher egoism.” Rationalism is optimism, since it is the belief that reason’s power is unlimited and essentially beneficent or that science can solve all riddles and loosen all chains. Rationalism is optimism, since the belief in causes depends on the belief in ends, or since rationalism presupposes the belief in the initial or final supremacy of the good. The full and ultimate consequences of the change effected or represented by Socrates appear only in the contemporary West: in the belief in universal enlightenment and therewith in the earthly happiness of all within a universal state, in utilitarianism, liberalism, democracy, pacifism, and socialism. Both these consequences and the insight into the essential limitation of science have shaken “Socratic culture” to its foundation: “The time of Socratic man has gone.” There is then hope for a future beyond the peak of pre-Socratic culture, for a philosophy of the future that is no longer merely theoretical, but knowingly based on acts of the will or on decisions, and for a new kind of politics that includes as a matter of course the merciless annihilation of everything degenerating and parasitical.” Nietzsche himself has said that in order to understand a philosopher one acts soundly by first raising the question of the moral or political meaning of his metaphysical assertions. Hence it would seem that his attack on Socrates must be understood primarily as a political attack (Strauss 1966, 7).

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borders as well as from without, and the thought of Martin Heidegger gives succor and nourishment to protest, dissent, and refusal.26 Heidegger does not merely follow Nietzsche in his diagnosis; he means to surpass and correct even Nietzsche’s understanding of the nihilism of the West, because even Nietzsche’s protest remains “moral” and thus, incipiently, “theoretical.”27 That is, Nietzsche, like Socrates before him, initiated a moral-political investigation and formulated “physiopsychological” doctrines on its basis, one that already presumes an understanding of Being (as presence). Heidegger quarrels with Nietzsche in the following way:  it is not the moralism of the “Socratic culture” that forms the basis of Western civilization, but the theoretical pretensions of that culture that are the source of nihilism. Heidegger’s challenge thus targets the rationalist claims at the heart of the cluster of ways of life that makes up Western civilization, “Socratic” civilization. Both Socrates and Heidegger are distinguished by the priority they give to questions rather than answers; each is aporetic. But Heidegger stands after the tradition inaugurated by Socrates. With Socrates, two distinguishable approaches to thinking are combined: his characteristic question, What is it? and the interrogation of the moral and political principles of human life, the just, noble, and good. With the latter, philosophy was called down from the heavens into the homes and hearths of the cities, initiating what Leo Strauss came to refer to as “political philosophy.”28 According to Heidegger’s diagnosis, however, such philosophy, which is inescapably oriented by the beings, is inherently metaphysical – all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding – and 26

27

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The premises are what Nietzsche identified as “optimism” – the presumption that theory and practice may be coordinated, and that practice is amenable to correction or improvement by theory. As premises, these transcend the distinction between ancient and modern approaches to thinking about politics, inasmuch as this quarrel takes place on the basis of the assumption that practice may be ameliorated. Heidegger stands largely outside of these two approaches, then, though he shares – as I will discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 – elements of each. Valuing as such, even following the revaluation of values, entails an orientation by beings, in this case the value that is the standard for evaluating whether life is enhanced or not. By so privileging beings, according to Heidegger, the will to power is still incipiently ontotheological and thus fails to overcome nihilism (see especially “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead,” GA 5, 209–67; Heidegger 2002c, 158–99). This is not Heidegger’s own characterization of Socrates. In Was Heisst Denken? Heidegger remarks that Socrates is the “purest” thinker in the West, because he wrote nothing (Heidegger 1976, 17). In his course on the “Essence of Human Freedom,” Heidegger praises the Socratic investigation, “What is knowledge,” for in this question, man “places himself in question. Such questioning brings man himself before new possibilities. The apparently innocuous what-question is revealed as an attack by man on his own self, on his proximal persistence in the usual and common, on his forgetting of first principles. It is an attack by man on what he proximally believes himself to know, and at the same time it is a determining intervention in what he himself can be, in what he wants to be or wants not to be” (Heidegger 2002d, 114). Socrates is the initiator of the “What is it?” question, which is reformulated by Aristotle as the guiding question of metaphysics, “What is the being?”; in this respect, Socrates stands at the beginning of the Western tradition of metaphysics. On the intellectual relationship between Strauss and Heidegger, see Velkley 2011; Zuckert 1996.

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hence obscures a more primordial openness to the question of Being itself. To repeat: the problem is not merely the “answers” or the tradition that Socrates initiated; the problem is more fundamental in that the Socratic questions themselves delineate what will suffice as answers to them.29 As Heidegger might characterize it, the Socratic approach presupposes that the question, “What is justice?” may be adequately answered with a presupposed understanding of the meaning of is; it presumes that the question, “What is virtue?” may be answered with the available understanding of is implied by the question. The debate that follows in response to such questions – for example, whether virtue is or is not knowledge, or self-same, or one or many, among other possibilities – overlooks that the debate takes place within a shared understanding of the meaning of Being. This shared understanding is that Being means presence, that to be means to be something, and that answers to questions of the “What is it” variety ought not to be self-contradictory.30 The question of Being and Time, a question indeed pursued through much of Heidegger’s oeuvre, is whether or not presence is an adequate conception of the meaning of Being, or whether presence actually hides the fact that Being happens within the horizon of time.31 Identifying Being with presence, then, or with permanent presence, that is, eternity, flattens and renders static an approach to time that is properly more dynamic. Answering “what is” questions on the basis of such an attenuated approach vastly circumscribes and restricts the possibilities for human life, possibilities to which we could otherwise be open. This is not, of course, perfectly fair to Socrates. Investigating such questions as “What is justice?” and “What is virtue?” led to Socrates’ own hypotheses about the meaning of Being.32 Heidegger’s point, however, is that the very 29

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31 32

Heidegger:  “Every question specifies as a question the breadth and nature of the answer it is looking for. At the same time it circumscribes the range of possibilities for answering” (GA 6.2 344; N4 206). Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: “The essence of time as first put forward by Aristotle in the way that has proven decisive for the subsequent history of metaphysics gives no answer to this. On the contrary:  it can be shown that precisely this analysis of time was guided by an understanding of Being that – concealing itself in its action – understands Being as permanent presence and that accordingly determines the ‘Being’ of time from the ‘now,’ i.e., on the basis of the character of time which is always and constantly presencing, i.e., which strictly speaking is in the ancient sense” (GA 3 241; KPM 169). Heidegger refers to dialectic as a “philosophical embarrassment (Verlegenheit)” in Being and Time because it overlooks that a dialogue proceeds on the basis of the fundamental unity of a shared understanding. To presume, then, that “dialogue” or dialectic will provide more clarity or ascend to a greater insight is mistaken. This points to the fundamental disagreement between Gadamer and Heidegger, a disagreement only very rarely pointed to by Gadamer, though see Gadamer’s citation of a 1972 letter from Heidegger commenting on his studies of Plato and Hegel (Gadamer 1982, 66) and Gadamer’s correspondence with Leo Strauss (Gadamer and Strauss 1978). On Heidegger’s critique of dialectical argumentation and its source in Plato, see Gonzalez 2009; Zuckert 1996. See Pöggeler 1987, 85–6. See Chapter 2, “Socrates’ Hypothesis,” of Stanley Rosen’s The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (Rosen 1993). Rosen’s Nihilism (Rosen 1969) and The Elusiveness of the Ordinary (Rosen 2002) must also be consulted.

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formulation of the matter with reference to the “is,” the copula, privileges a narrow slice of the temporality of Being and also covers up and forgets the now “deeper” problem of the finite temporality of Being.33 Socrates, and certainly the tradition that follows from his initial formulation of these questions, has forgotten and therefore occluded our access to the rest of the question. The answers to these questions constitutive of the philosophic conversation of the Western tradition – answers that are not monolithic in their own terms, everyone should realize – have all, Heidegger insists, been premised on broadly similar understandings of the meaning of Being. And these understandings or presumptions have not themselves been adequately interrogated by this philosophic tradition. It is necessary, then, to distinguish Heidegger’s starting point from that of Socrates and, indeed, the “optimistic” civilization that followed in his wake. Our discontent – disquiet, perplexity, anxiety, nausea, and dread – signals the felt inadequacy of the results of Socrates’ approach (understood as the West itself) and call us to attain to a deeper question than those raised by Socrates. Heidegger’s charge is that these pathê remain unanswered because the theoretical tradition of philosophy in the West is insufficiently “primordial” to account for them, given the flight and forgetfulness of Being. In order to provoke a recollection of the question of Being, Heidegger urges a confrontation with the inextinguishable finitude of our own existence in its various manifestations. Our discontent thus opens a path to discovery. This confrontation may concern several possible phenomena:  the unfulfilling, even embarrassed sense of the poverty of our claims to understand the meaning of Being; the felt inadequacy of our practice to comport always with our projections of it, that is, the breakdown of what Heidegger refers to as the ready-to-hand; the lived experience of the oblivion of our heritage; and more broadly, our sense of horror at our distinctive historical moment, a civilizational project that culminates in the “phenomena of nihilism” and destitution, exhibited in the disjunction between our pretensions to be living in the age of Enlightenment when in fact we know virtually nothing, and make war on one another, on nature, and on ourselves. Our sense of despondency resonates with the moment in which we live, of the destitution and abscondence of Being. Indeed, this moment is uniquely attuned 33

“Like understanding and interpretation in general, the “as” is grounded in the ecstatico-horizontal unity of temporality. In our fundamental analysis of Being, and of course in connection with the Interpretation of the “is” (which, as a copula, gives “expression” to the addressing of something as something), we must again make the phenomenon of the “as” a theme and delimit the conception of this ‘schema’ existentially” (SZ 360; emphasis in the original text). . . . the analysis of the temporal Constitution of discourse and the explication of the temporal characteristics of language-patterns can be tackled only if the problem of how Being and truth are connected in principle, is broached in the light of the problematic of temporality. We can then define even the ontological meaning of the “is”, which a superficial theory of propositions and judgments has deformed to a mere “copula”. Only in terms of the temporality of discourse – that is, of Dasein in general – can we clarify how “signification” “arises” and make the possibility of concept-formation ontologically intelligible (SZ 349).

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or disposed to such resonances, and for its destitution is therefore open to attending to Being as never before in the history of the West. In contrast with philosophy in the history of the West, the question announced by perplexity or anxiety, as Heidegger understands the matter, derives from the confrontation with Nothing. Unlike Socrates, Heidegger does not formulate questions about a being or a something:  the just or the noble, for example. Heidegger thus refuses the starting point of the constitutive quarrels of the history of political thought because each of them arose in a less distraught time and therefore has less purchase on the most disturbing, most profound, question.34 Instead, Heidegger searches for the ground, or Abgrund, manifested by disquiet. This distressed search in itself constitutes the unifying ground of a Heideggerian politics of radical discontent, inasmuch as it is not theoretical and constitutes the basis for human existence as such. Such politics, which are expressed in two principal inclinations, the one a violent and total revolution (such as envisioned by the Brownshirt faction of the NSDAP, which Heidegger supported, and Iranian revolutionaries such as Ahmad Fardid and Reza Davari), the other a quiescent letting be (such as advocated, after a fashion, by George Grant), take as their starting point the position that the present age is fundamentally bankrupt, that we live in a time of the forgetfulness and abandonment of Being.35 Prior to quietism or revolution is the profoundest disquiet, which is retained through both political inclinations as the only testimony we have of the truth of Being. Such profound disquiet in turn provokes a hopefulness that supersedes all previous optimism.

The Methods and Limits of This Study This book contends that Heidegger’s focus on and formulation of how the question of Being relates to human life entail a paradoxical and radically discontented politics. The Heideggerian position tends toward two political inclinations. The first is a revolutionary and incipiently violent refusal of the inauthentic “everyday,” understood as an individual and communal attitude toward time that privileges stability, regularity, and reliability in all human endeavors. Everydayness thus consists in the elevation of theory, “metaphysics,” and forms of communal existence that trade in deceit, despotism, and the most ephemeral and self-satisfied paltriness. The other inclination might be called quietistic, consisting in “letting be” – letting the current situation of nihilism 34

35

As Strauss suggested, what came to be an apocalyptic hopefulness in Heidegger, “accompanied or followed by a return of the gods,” has the character more of a religious openness than of philosophic doctrine (Strauss 1983, 33). See Richard Velkley’s treatment of this topic (2011, 46–7, 55–9). For an interpretation of the politics of Heidegger’s thought that stresses Heidegger’s confrontation with Christian sources, see Rickey 2001. Critchley 2008, 132–53; Dallmayr 2010, 67–81; and Schürman 2008, 116, all use the term “letting be” to express the sort of political stance they see in Heidegger. See Heidegger’s discussion of letting be, Lassen, in the final Le Thor seminar (GA 15 363).

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and the ascendecy of inauthentic, “everyday” vapidity be – on the logic that even the absolute bereavement of meaning is a gift of Being. The attendant political stance is, in effect, an endorsement of the status quo rather than revolutionary violence. The varieties of Heideggerian politics derive from these two plausibly Heideggerian stances toward the question of Being, each of which shares in Heidegger’s understanding of “everydayness.” I argue that Heideggerian politics consists not merely in the retrieval of an autochthonous “rootedness beyond all rootedness,” but also in a formalism and abstraction that supersede the fundamentally arbitrary claims of metaphysics or theoretical rationality and so give expression to a superior universalism. Indeed, when we see that the formal and abstract character of what Heidegger means by “everydayness” – a category of existence conceived of so broadly as to include every possible way of life  – is just as integral to Heidegger’s understanding of human existence as the radical individuation (either of a person or a community) entailed in the “factical ideal” (SZ 310) of authenticity, we can better explain the evidently broad appeal and remarkably varied application of his thought. In this characteristic juxtaposition of the most arid abstraction and the most organic particularity, we can also discern, however, the coarseness of political judgment that such an analysis must encourage. The texture of political life – the multifarious selfish and selfless passions, ambitions and longings for justice, aspirations to nobility and rancorous jealousies, agony, and glories that populate the histories of great polities and characterize the experience of political life even into our time – is therefore reduced to the homogeneity and shallowness of “everydayness.” At the same time, this dreary paltriness needs somehow to be preserved without amelioration for the sake of an authentic attunement to the dispensation of Being. The reading offered here stands, then, in tension with some of the more prominent recent approaches to the question of Heidegger and politics. These approaches tend to focus on his Nazism either to emphasize it or to downplay it. To begin with, it is impossible to assess Heidegger’s importance for politics if we refuse to see that his Nazism was an extension of his thought and not vice versa. If we look at Heidegger simply as a Nazi partisan and try to construe his thought on this basis, we cannot finally understand what distinguishes him from the most vulgar polemicists and hacks who attempted to lend the regime a veneer of intellectual legitimacy. Heidegger, whatever his failings, was no fourth-rate ideologue or cheap, coffeehouse intellectual. The frequently controversial body of work presented by such scholars as Emmannuel Faye, Johannes Fritsche, Victor Farias, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, wherein Heidegger’s thought is presented as though the key to understanding his thought is his Nazism, does not, in the end, provide a route to confronting adequately Heidegger’s thorough and radical philosophic challenge to the premises of Western civilization and philosophy.36 Though this scholarship has brought to light quite a 36

I will engage with these authors as necessary through the notes of the book. For now, their main contributions may be found in Bourdieu 1991; Farías 1989; Faye 2009, 2012; Fritsche, 1999,

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lot about Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis that was otherwise covered up or misunderstood, this approach leaves the philosophic sources of his politics untouched, and therefore Heidegger’s challenge still stands.37 By the same token, however, it will not do simply to dismiss Heidegger’s own noxious politics as a personal flaw or another, otherwise disposable element of his work.38 Such an approach to Heidegger overlooks Heidegger’s view that adequate guidance for the recovery of the deeper currents of radical individuation in our historical existence requires the most formal abstraction. The “practical” correlate of such formalism is in Heidegger’s terms a “violent” (gewaltsam) hermeneutic that wrests us from our everyday complacency, and it is integral to Heideggerian politics. This book therefore offers a contribution to the holistic reading of Heidegger’s philosophy and politics that of necessity gives greater weight to the former.39 To speak to our interest in Heideggerian politics, it is necessary therefore to apprehend first the problems to which Heidegger understood himself to be responding. Put another way, in order to understand Heidegger’s relevance for us, it is necessary first to put his thought in context, where the most important dimension of that context is the problems and questions that motivated his work. The question is sometimes asked whether Heidegger should be understood to be offering a moral critique of modernity or Western philosophy more broadly. As I suggest in Chapters 1 and 2, the answer is a qualified no. More precisely, these are emphatically not the grounds on which Heidegger accounts for the philosophic problem he sets for himself. This amoralism, I suspect, is part of the reason Heidegger’s work is so amenable to appropriation and “application” by such a wide and varied set of readers who retain some version of their own moral commitments. He speaks to the feeling or pathos of moral decay, degeneration, to the collapse and manifest hollowness of the lofty pretensions of Western civilization and culture. And yet Heidegger’s diagnosis and account of these phenomena are muddied if they are rephrased in the language of moral outrage. For as he seems to emphasize in his earliest courses, the moral issue – and with politics and culture  – is epiphenomenal. Deeper and more serious are the mistaken premises of Western philosophy, in particular the distinction between theory and practice. The terminology that Heidegger uses to express this problem shifts considerably, from his early courses to his first great opus,

37

38 39

2009, 2012. On Richard Wolin, another prominent spokesperson for this school of Heidegger interpretation, see David O’Connor’s assessment (O’Connor 2002, 200–1 n. 2). Hans-Georg Gadamer’s remark about Bourdieu’s study is apposite: “Bourdieu’s analysis is an interesting one, but it is based on a presupposition which I can neither grant nor share, namely that philosophy makes its appearance in the world only as a particular arrangement which sociologists would be able to consider from a critical point of view and all of whose pretensions to knowledge they could finally and radically expose” (Gadamer 1998, 4). See Dallmayr 2010; Dreyfus 1993. Such holistic readings are explored by several of Heidegger’s interpreters, prominent among them Karl Löwith (1995), Werner Marx (1973), and Otto Pöggeler (1987).

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Being and Time, and throughout the decades following. My purpose here is not to pick and choose one such formulation and call it decisive – be this one of the earlier ones, or later, or unpublished – but to try to understand the problems to which Heidegger was addressing himself with these formulations. This book presents an argument in several parts that supports this understanding of the relationship between Heidegger’s ontology and political life. I begin by discussing some of Heidegger’s early work where he argues that the problems that confront us are not moral, political, or cultural at their heart and cannot be understood by value philosophy or ethics. Instead, what is required is a fundamental reassessment of such “theoretical” approaches to philosophy that determines those disciplines in order that we devise a method of reasoning about our predicament. A new approach to philosophizing might be able to grasp the “fundamental experience of the ‘I am’ ” or Existenz at the root of consciousness, and then on this basis reassemble an approach to the various phenomena in the world and reconstruct a more appropriate relationship between philosophy and culture more generally. In the next section of the book, I follow Heidegger in exploring why, if theory is such a mistaken philosophical approach, it has been the default in the West since the Greeks. Why do problems present themselves as moral, political, or cultural if, as Heidegger insists, they are more properly and fundamentally existential or ontological? In particular, I look at what Heidegger refers to as “everydayness,” our constitutive attitude toward temporality that inclines us to favor regularity, familiarity, and constancy and to cover over the truth. In our dealings with the articles of use with which we are normally surrounded in the world, everydayness favors the emergence of theoretical rationality. Politically, in our dealings with other people, it favors a form of communal life that is shallow and deceitful. The concept of everydayness points to another dimension of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, however. As Heidegger accounts for how his own investigation is possible, it emerges that raising the question of Being follows from the analysis of Dasein, and that Dasein is to be investigated in its everydayness, that is, how it is “proximally and for the most part.” This is the doubleness of everydayness: that it both occludes the most important question but also thereby points the way toward disclosing it. I argue that seeing this doubleness is key to understanding Being and Time as speaking to a singular historical moment when it is possible to gain unique purchase on the role of Dasein as the “shepherd of Being” among the beings. This moment, nihilism, is strangely resonant with the need that we apprehend Being as other than a being, that is, as “the same” as the nothing. As such, the historical moment of Heidegger’s philosophy, while on the one hand depending on the absolute dissolution of the West, on the other hand holds tremendous promise as facilitating a new understanding of Being as such. In the final section of the book, I  lay out Heidegger’s account of the authentic communal existence that can give expression to such a radically reformed understanding of Being. Given, though, the everyday character of

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our disclosedness, in particular our inability to avoid expressing our disclosures without reference to the beings, and hence our inherent tendency to occlude our own discoveries, I argue that Heidegger presents an account of the “ideal” form of existence that includes an awareness of the obscurity in which it will necessarily be lived. His account of this is given to two forms of political community, one of which, by means of a total and violent revolution, revives a historically bygone community, the other of which awaits this possibility in a new, quietist dispensation of Being. There are as many paths through Heidegger’s works as he has readers. The argument presented in the following pages draws from numerous texts, from all periods of Heidegger’s career, but there are distinctive emphases and ellipses. The first part of the book tarries with some of Heidegger’s earliest mature thought in order to formulate properly his understanding of the problems that would provoke his inquiry into the history of Being as apprehended in the greatest thinkers. While I comment on some of Heidegger’s most important late works, in particular the essay from the Nietzsche volumes called “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” and emphasize themes normally associated with the “later” Heidegger such as letting be, awaiting, and the gift of Being, the weight of the textual studies here comes from Heidegger’s earlier works. My purpose is not to undercut the importance of Heidegger’s work after die Kehre, but rather to emphasize the latency of many of the most important later formulations in his earlier work and thereby to make sense of the unity of Heidegger’s thought.40 Being and Time occupies a central place in my study. It is not sufficiently appreciated how pertinent this text of Heidegger’s is to the problems and philosophical disputes that I  have just referenced. Moreover, Heidegger’s turn to the history of Being shares premises with the arguments he lays out in detail in Being and Time and works published both before and after it; the turn to the history of Being is required by the matter of thought that he treats throughout his career.41 If we wish to understand the political implications of Heideggerian ontology, then an encounter, not to say confrontation, with Being and Time is necessary.42 40

41 42

I thus dispute Gregory Bruce Smith’s claim that in Heidegger’s later work an excess of “theoretical derivation” led him to “abstractions from abstractions” by which he “betrayed his most profound phenomenological insights” (Smith 2007, 206). See Heidegger’s “Preface” to Richardson 2003, xvii. This book does not concentrate on the works of Heidegger’s most evidently political period, the 1930s. For excellent treatments, see Bambach 2003; Fried 2000; Phillips 2005; Zuckert 1990. On the one hand, I do not wish to recapitulate the controversies concerning his Nazism any more than is necessary. These debates have come to obscure the plainest fact, that Heidegger’s Nazism was in accord with his thought. On the other, I think the essentials of this later period, and indeed the still later postwar period, are already given expression in Being and Time, and this needs to be explored. I am rather disposed against the increasingly baroque periodization of Heidegger’s thought, not least because this appears sometimes to be motivated by a desire to “rescue” whichever of his texts can be saved from the taint of Nazism (a strategy Thomas Sheehan describes as, “Admit the Nazism but save the philosophy!” [Sheehan 1993]). More profoundly, I consider the periodization of Heidegger’s thought an inadequate way of confronting

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My hermeneutic method is, in some sense, simplicity itself; in subordinating my questions to Heidegger’s and then returning to the guiding inquiry of this book, I follow the argument of Heidegger’s texts as closely as I can. Against any charge of witlessly preferring the presence of the text to its absence, I follow the judicious reasoning of James Ward: “While Heidegger’s motto for the Gesamtausgabe is ‘ways – not works,’ the ways of his thinking are and must be exhibited as works, and these works have an integrity of wholeness as works, a coherence that is not opposed to their openness or provisionality. . . . We follow a text carefully not because the text is all we have but precisely because it is the best, or even the only, guide to what we do not have, to what is not a text” (Ward 1995, xxiv–xxv). Let me sketch my own position briefly. This book is limited to an inquiry into the ontological basis of politics in Heidegger’s works. It therefore implies without robustly developing a fuller critique of Heidegger. While I have attempted to let Heidegger speak first, this book is meant to point toward such a critique. Socratic political philosophy and Aristotelian political science as rearticulated in the twentieth century by Leo Strauss and others offer a better grasp of the fundamental philosophic questions and so a better understanding of the human situation, in particular our political life. It thereby offers a promising response to the challenge posed by Heidegger. Strauss suggests that the limits of the Heideggerian approach to politics emerge from considering the rather qualified disclosiveness of the passions of disquiet (Strauss 1958, 260). Existenz does not open us up to everything it purports to; we miss out on important ways

the work of a thinker of such titanic stature. I agree perfectly with James Ward’s remark in his study of Heidegger’s Political Thinking: “As the volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe continue to appear, I have become convinced that interpretive questions of precedence and subsequence, of precisely when Heidegger first announced a theme or employed a term, should be given less emphasis than has often been the case. . . . The texts of lectures and unpublished manuscripts, then, allow us to ascertain early, perhaps even the earliest, appearances of a thought in writing but cannot tell us when a thought was first thought” (Ward 1995, xxiii). William Blattner (1999, xiv) argues that one should not treat lecture courses as having the same weight as the magnum opus, when he observes that Heidegger’s audience of students would have been much more familiar with Husserlian and neo-Kantian “forms of expression than those that would make up Being and Time” (xv). Hence, “it is likely that it [Being and Time] is more carefully and directly formulated than classroom lectures.” I agree and retain a bias for Heidegger’ published over unpublished work, though I make considerable use of the latter. James Luchte (2008) dissents in the strongest reasonable terms. He frequently characterizes Being and Time as a “published fragment” (3) and stresses Heidegger’s compulsion to publish it (2). Indeed, he sees even the recent studies of Heidegger’s 1920s phenomenology as being too guided by the “archic” place of Being and Time and attributes a kind of “teleology” to Kisiel (3)! Thus, he writes: “While I am not in any way seeking to diminish the importance of Being and Time, it would be a vast hermeneutical error to disregard the many contemporary unpublished and published works as mere supplements, when in fact, these seek to ‘go all the way to the end’ of this project” (3). On the location of Being and Time in Heidegger’s corpus, see Smith 2007, 83–4.

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that our “existence” is informed by love and laughter if we only take our bearings by the experiences typified by trauma and loss. His implication is that we can disagree with Heidegger about which phenomena are most primordial. This, I  believe, is the correct way to argue with and ultimately against Heidegger. It is impossible to grasp the full texture of human existence, and in particular the mixture of deceit, genuine nobility, and seediness that constitutes political life even at its best if anxiety, for example, is taken as the privileged locus of disclosure. Such an approach fails to distinguish between the most baleful tyrannies and humdrum corruption, let alone actual virtue. If we admit of a broader palette of disclosive phenomena than the pathê of discontent – claims to rule, opinions about right and wrong, reasons to compromise – we might better understand our summons to admiration or awe in the face of sacrifice, or our comic amusement at the human condition, rather than submit to distress at the occlusiveness effected by these aspects of life. This is as much true for those who would follow the politics of Heidegger’s epigone as it is for those, liberals or otherwise, who would oppose them. Political existence is lived out within a matrix of questions about the noble, base, just, good, and bad, and these need not foreclose meditations on the finitude of Being. Since political life is not altogether subsumed within the totalizing matrix of technological rationality, indeed, is apparently resistant to the unchecked rule of reason, it is possible that the consideration of such political phenomena might be a more fruitful response to the contemporary evidence of nihilism and therefore call radically into question its diagnosis by Heidegger. If so, then we need neither uncritically accept miseries nor outlandishly hope for deliverance. We do not need to accept Heidegger’s diagnosis of the West in order to accept his challenge. It is necessary, however, to understand this challenge in order to respond to it. This book is offered as an essay in understanding the challenge posed by Heidegger.

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1 What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and the Problem of Theory

Perhaps the chief difficulty in understanding Heidegger’s relevance for politics, as Tracy Strong among other political theorists has noted, is that Heidegger does not “speak” political. His thought requires being translated into the language of what Aristotle called “practical affairs,” even though it is evidently resistant to such translation. There is no specific need, however, that the only political importance of a thinker be his or her remarks expressly about politics.1 In the case of Heidegger, whose work makes comprehensive claims about the very ground of everything that is, some political import is certainly promised, if not guaranteed. What is more, his numerous remarks on such topics as the decadence of late-modern culture, the character of the Greek polis as a location for thinking, and above all the persistent ire of his critique of contemporary society would seem to ensure that his comprehensiveness indeed touches political matters.2 1

2

Heidegger’s plainest statement of the problem of trying to understand the practical import of his thought is in the Letter on Humanism: “thinking, when taken for itself, is not ‘practical’ ” (BW 218). Tracy Strong puts it this way: “When one comes to Martin Heidegger, the problem is to find the politics in his philosophy, or to find whether his politics are in his philosophy, or, better still, to find whether there is both a concept of the political and a political theory in his philosophy” (Strong 2012, 267). Mark Blitz’s remark, then, that to “confront Heidegger properly and to place correctly his own explicit remarks about ‘the political,’ we must consider Heidegger’s own purpose and goal,” is most apt (Blitz 2000, 169). On Heidegger’s denial of the applicability of his thought to other “disciplines,” see SZ 16, 50, and section 10 (45–52) more generally. On Heidegger’s youthful culture critique, see the essay “Per Mortem ad Vitam: Thoughts on Johannes Jörgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life,” in the collection Supplements:  From the Earlies Essays to Being and Time and Beyond (S 35–9) and Van Buren’s discussion of the “Young” Heidegger in the third chapter of his The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Van Buren 1994, 51–64). On the Greek city, see Introduction to Metaphysics (IM 162–3). Many of Heidegger’s courses in the 1920s treated Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, but after the publication of Being and Time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he undertook

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Numerous scholars have seen the most promising avenue for understanding the practical, and therefore also political, questions that emerge from Heidegger in the possibility of deriving an ethics from his thought.3 There is a certain measure of support for this in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger himself frequently refers to his thinking in terms of a retrieval of the notion of ethos, in what he presents as a Heracleitean sense of dwelling, a deeper meaning of the word that has been obscured by the notion of a science of ethics.4 Moreover, Heidegger’s frequent insistence that he is not providing an ethics shows that he thought it necessary to clarify this common misunderstanding of his position. That is, his own project evidently lent itself to such misunderstanding. After the publication of Being and Time, he occasionally remarked (amusingly) that it should not be taken to constitute an instruction manual in practical dealings; as he says in the lectures collected as Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the purpose of Being and Time is not to provide instruction in the use of “knives and forks or . . . the tram.”5 Even so, to see that Heidegger is not supplying an ethics in Being and Time or in his work is not therefore to foreclose the possibility of developing an ethics on Heideggerian principles, as Lawrence Hatab has noted, and certainly this has been emphasized in the

3

4

5

a much broader investigation of Greek piety and cultural practices (see Safranski 1999, 214–19). Several studies that attempt to derive an ethical position based on Heidegger’s work have appeared in recent years. A sampling of the highlights would include Bernasconi 1993; Greisch 1987; Hatab 2000; Hodge 1995; Lewis 2005; McNeill 1999; Nancy 2002; Olafson 1998; Vogel 1994. Van Buren 1995 and Reid 2005 focus particularly on the notion of ethics in Heidegger’s early work. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this view:  “Heidegger’s thinking conceived of itself, throughout, as a fundamental ethics” (Nancy 2002, 67). The Letter on Humanism, drafted in response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that existentialism was humanism, is the locus classicus of these claims:  the discipline of “ethics” only comes into being when “thinking” has come to an end (BW 219). Prior to the emergence of such an “episteme” in the time of Plato, prior thinkers had no sense of a distinction among ethics, logic, and physics. Heracleitus gave expression to this prior unity in the statement “êthos anthropoi daimôn.” From this phrase, Heidegger appropriates the sense of ethos as “abode” or “dwelling,” the place where thinking may summon gods to presence (BW 256–7). His thinking seeks, not an ethics in the post-Platonic sense, but an ethos, in a retrieval of the Heracleitean sense. It is the purpose of this and the following chapter to show that, despite a certain semantic connection to concerns with “ethics,” the ethos to which Heidegger points entail a denial of ethics as this is normally meant. Herman Philipse expresses this point forcibly:  “there is a crucial difference between Heidegger’s heteronomous doctrine and religious conceptions. Whereas religions provide ethical content to their doctrines of God’s command by spelling out divine commandments, Heideggerian Being never issues moral precepts. As a consequence, Heidegger’s heteronomous doctrine exterminates ethics by investing a transcendent non-entity (Being) with a moral monopoly, but without specifying moral rules so authorized” (Philipse 1999, 441). GA 29/30 262/FCM 117. Karl Löwith remarked on the seeming abandonment in Being and Time of the suppleness of the “hermeneutics of facticity” that had characterized Heidegger’s work before the publication of that book (see the exchange of letters between Heidegger and Löwith in BH 289–303).

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Heidegger scholarship.6 This points to the further notion that if Heidegger’s thought could be used to develop an ethics, then surely it might suggest a political teaching as well.7 The plain meaning of Heidegger’s remarks, however, is that he is not prepared to provide something that would be called “ethics.”8 Such giants of twentieth-century thought as Emmanuel Lévinas and Hans Jonas, each of whom can trace important elements of their philosophic development to Heidegger, declaim the poverty of Heideggerian philosophy precisely on the grounds that it forecloses any ethics worthy of the name. Moreover, they see a direct connection between precisely this lack and the notorious politics to which he committed himself.9 As Lévinas commented in an interview: “the absence of care for the other in Heidegger and his personal political adventure were connected. And despite all of my admiration for the greatness of his thought, I have never been able to separate this double-aspect of his position.”10 It will be the purpose of this and the following chapter to argue for a version of the claim that Heidegger provides no ethics, and in doing so to quarrel with a widespread misunderstanding of it. Heidegger’s thought forecloses any ethics and in doing so articulates an understanding of human existence that entails profound ethical and political consequences. Some scholars have imputed Heidegger’s denial or lack of ethics to a prior commitment to explicitly 6

7

8

9

10

For representative works of this kind, see Freeman 2009; Hatab 2000; Hodge 1995; Lewis 2005; Miyasaki 2007; Olafson 1998. Some readers simply interpret him as providing an ethics unwittingly. This is Lauren Freeman’s claim (2009, 86). For studies that extend a Heideggerian politics from an ethics, see the classic statement by White (1990). For examples more clearly sympathetic to Heidegger, see Hatab 2000, 169–94; Mummery 2002; Vogel 1994, 99–124. The “Green Heideggerians,” as I have styled them, derive certain political teachings from their construal of a Heideggerian ethics; see Thiele (1995, 79–90) with Michael Zimmerman’s problematization of the relationship between Heidegger and environmental ethics (Zimmerman 1993; 2003, 94). BW 219. As Tracy Strong notes, “Those who have sought to find an ethics or morality in Heidegger have grasped at straws or transformed him into a version of Emmanuel Lévinas” (Strong 2012, 373). Gadamer’s comment on the “Letter on Humanism” is helpful. In this writing, Heidegger attempts to distance himself from the ethical claims being made by French existentialists, precisely because these are inadequate to the task of his thinking: “It was the theme of ethics that the French readers missed in Heidegger, as did Jaspers as well. Heidegger defended himself against this expectation and demand, not because he underestimated the question of ethics or the social plight of Dasein, but rather because his mission in thinking compelled him to ask more radical questions” (Gadamer 1994, 11–12). The lead-in to Heidegger’s exploration of the meaning of ethos in the Letter on Humanism is Heidegger’s remark: “Soon after Being and Time appeared a young friend asked me, “When are you going to write an ethics?” (BW 255). For Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger, see Lévinas (1969, passim, but particularly 45–8) and his seminal work, Lévinas 1951. Habermas’ discussions of Heidegger may be found in Habermas 1977 [1953]; 1989; 1990, ch. 6.  Lévinas (1994, 203–10). Quoted in Gordon 2010, 103. “Of course, I will never forget Heidegger’s relation to Hitler. Even if this relation was only of a very short duration, it will be forever. . . . But whatever a serious orientation might be, Heidegger would not be absent from it” (Lévinas 2001, 32).

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National Socialist politics. They have not succeeded, however, in showing that Heidegger’s political commitments actually predate his formulation of the philosophic problems that preoccupy his thought. Emmanuel Faye, for example, identifies the source of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic Nazism in his encounter with Count Yorck in 1923.11 Johannes Fritsche has shown in a provocative and detailed fashion that Heidegger’s Being and Time is steeped in the language not merely of the revolutionary right in 1920s Germany, but specifically in the conceptual terminology unique to the National Socialists as expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf (published for the first time in 1925–6).12 Each of these scholars assigns a priority to Heidegger’s Nazi politics, and they argue that his philosophy merely supplements and is secondary to these commitments. As others have noted, however, if Heidegger’s thought were really no more profound or challenging than that of such figures as Alfred Baeumler or Alfred Rosenberg, or any other fourth-rate Nazi ideologue, he would be as easy to dismiss as they are.13 Because Fritsche and Faye overlook the emergence of Heidegger’s approach to politics from the philosophic problematic with which he concerned himself for his entire career, they in fact understate the challenge and, indeed, the danger of Heidegger’s thought.14 For it is precisely because 11 12 13

14

Faye 2009, 8–15; see also Faye 2012, 257. See Fritsche 1999, 2012. See, for example, Peter Gordon’s review of Faye (Gordon 2010) and Gregory Fried’s “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye” (Fried 2011). Faye’s essay “From Polemos to the Extermination of the Enemy:  Response to the Open Letter of Gregory Fried,” responds to several of the charges brought against him in the numerous critical reviews of his important study, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (Faye 2011). Though Faye’s method is not adequate to the task, he expresses the need for a confrontation with Heidegger in terms similar to those used here: “The problem of Nazi penetration into all the domains of culture – from philosophy with Heidegger to law with Carl Schmitt, for example, to theology with Gogarten and others, but also to medicine, biology, architecture, poetry, history, etc. – has become a planetary problem, and one that is not solved. It is not by interdicts that we will overcome it, but by a fundamental critical investigation without complacency, such as is just now getting underway” (Faye 2012, 262). Emmanuel Faye and Johannes Fritsche are the latest in a series of scholars who take the controversy regarding Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism as the key to understanding the political import of his thought. The latest iteration of this controversy was begun by the publication of Faye’s thoroughly researched recent study (2005). See Gregory Fried’s important response to Faye (Fried 2011). The two other main eruptions of this controversy were the initial confrontation with this question in the French journal Les Temps Moderne in 1946, including such interlocutors as Karl Löwith, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Beaufret, and Heidegger himself. With the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias and in 1988 of Hugo Ott’s studies (Farias 1989; Ott 1988), documenting in still greater detail Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis, the controversy erupted anew. Some of the major contributions to the consideration of Heidegger’s politics at this period were Altwegg 1988; Bourdieu 1991; Derrida 1989; Ferry and Renaut 1990; Lacoue-Labarthe 1990; Lyotard 1990; Pöggeler and Gethmann-Siefert 1988; Rockmore 1992; Sluga 1993; Ward 1995; Wolin 1990; Zuckert 1990. Nolte’s biography of Heidegger should be read in this context (Nolte 1992); see Sheehan’s review (Sheehan 1993) and Nolte’s response (Nolte 1993).

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the philosophic problems with which Heidegger wrestles are central to the premises of modern society as such, and bear on the fate of Western civilization itself, that we cannot simply document his Nazism and dismiss him. An overly biographical approach fails to grasp the genuine breadth and radicalness of Heidegger’s political import, an import that far outstrips his own endorsement of the National Socialist regime in Germany.15 The aim is not to vindicate Heidegger’s thought by showing it to be separate from his horrible, “personal” practice, but to show (a) the logical and temporal priority of this thinking to his practice, and then (b) to understand the political import of that thought. The clearest way to see this is to look at Heidegger’s early thought, both because this predates any of the political associations for which he later became justly notorious and because it shows the continuity of the philosophic problematic with Heidegger’s later work. In Heidegger’s earliest mature work, a visceral and absolute refusal of the tenets of late-modern, Western civilization and culture  – similar in numerous respects to the Kulturkritik of many of his contemporaries  – is articulated as a rejection of the underlying philosophical, rational premises of that civilization, including the worth of the very concept of culture. Heidegger directs his critique primarily at his philosophic contemporaries’ incapacity to ground their theoretical principles. Thus, what distinguishes Heidegger from other late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century critics of modern culture – virtually all of whom are much more direct about the political, cultural, and ethical content of their views – is the combination of comprehensiveness (in terms of what is being rejected) and logical rigor. One looks in vain, therefore, for Spenglerian rhetorical flourishes; one finds instead a rather abstract set of arguments in these early treatments of the impossibility of ethics.16 One finds meticulous and rigorous assessments of the penetration of the moral and cultural phenomena by a long and spurious tradition of theoretical philosophy, a philosophic tradition that has in fact transformed the phenomena being considered. Ethics as such, therefore, is determined to be altogether warped by the motivations and blind presuppositions of theoretical philosophy from which it cannot be disentangled. The deeper problem is that all claims of value are already influenced by a tradition that privileges theoretical philosophy, so even to accept “culture” and “value” as meaningful designations of the different “regions” or fields of human endeavor is therefore to repeat the distorting prejudices that privilege theory. That is, the prejudice in favor of theoretical philosophy determines even the distinction between fields, 15

16

Leo Strauss allows that while Heidegger’s Nazism expresses his thought, it does not exhaust its political import (Strauss 1983, 29–34). Faye insists that his approach is not biographical, and that this is a typical means by which defenders of Heidegger’s thought “disqualify” criticism (Faye 2012, 258). On the unity of Heidegger’s thought, supervening through all periodizations, see the indispensable Olafson 2006, 97. As Kisiel remarks on the summer semester 1919 course: “There is not one hint of the poignantly Spenglerian disenchantment with such things as ‘culture’ and ‘value’ prevalent then in postwar Germany, which Heidegger will invoke in later courses” (Kisiel 1993, 60).

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such as determining what ethics as distinguished from, say, biology, psychology, or aesthetics is. Theory, however, as Heidegger diagnoses it, cannot supply an adequate account of how values might be related to the empirical or historical world: the resulting condition is what Nietzsche referred to as “nihilism.”17 For this reason, theory as such becomes the principal subject matter of these investigations. The relevance of these investigations for the possibility of a Heideggerian ethics, and by extension politics, is therefore principally and in the precise sense negative. Heidegger refuses any orientation by “culture,” any consideration of the ethical or political results of his investigations, which were always and emphatically unconcerned with what appeared to him to be such trivial, peripheral matters. As he understood it, to ask about ethics and culture or to seek any orientation with regard to these was to forgo interrogating deeper matters that were the true concern of genuine, that is to say radical, philosophic thinking. Ethics is superficial; culture is epiphenomenal.18 But as Heidegger himself repeatedly insists, in phenomenology, in genuinely radical thought, there are no merely “negative” critiques: any investigation that attains to the fundament, that apprehends the primordial, will resound with positive “implications.” The key for understanding Heidegger’s meaning for ethics, and then for politics, is to see every purported claim to nonrelevance in this light.19 In this and the following chapter, I show that the unique absence of an ethics from Heidegger’s thought, that is, the specific character of that absence, has the result of demanding an awful neutrality on Heidegger’s part on matters of the most urgent political and moral character. This neutrality, far from permitting the supplementation of his thought with what Hatab calls a “coordination of ethics and Heideggerian ontology,” to produce a new form of ethics, instead expresses the prior consideration and rejection of such sought-after

17 18

19

Heidegger appears conspicuously to avoid using this term through this period of his career. As he writes in a letter to Karl Löwith, dated 1920: “My will, fundamentally, aspires to something else, and that is not much:  living in an actual revolutionary situation, I  pursue what I feel to be ‘necessary,’ without caring to know whether it emerges from ‘culture’ or whether my search will lead to ruin.” Löwith’s gloss on the meaning of Heidegger’s approach is perfectly apt: “Instead of devoting oneself to the general seed for cultivation, as one would upon receiving the command to ‘save culture,’ one must – in a ‘radical disintegration and regression,’ a ‘destruction’ – convince oneself firmly of ‘the one thing that matters’ without bothering with the chatter and bustle of clever and enterprising men” (Löwith 1994, 29). In another letter from Heidegger, again denying any orientation by “culture,” Heidegger writes: “The idea has emerged that our critique must be opposed to something that corresponds in content to that which has just been denied, or that our work would find its destiny in a school or trend, that it could be continued and complemented . . . [that work is instead] something apart from and perhaps out of reach of the bustle of the day” (Heidegger to Löwith, 1924; quoted in Löwith 1994, 30). Such claims by Heidegger express important continuities with some of his later, purportedly post-Kehre thought, as in the claim in the “Letter on Humanism” that thought “touches nothing.” See Hatab on this point (Hatab 2000, 89).

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coordination.20 To put this more sharply: any number of philosophical figures may appear “neutral” on ethical matters, and yet there is no evident cause to search for the ethical or political import of their thought. Heidegger’s reasoning, however, undercuts the very possibility of formulating a rational ethics that may supply any guidance whatsoever for politics. It is the evident seriousness with which he apparently means to treat ethical reasoning itself within the scope of a comprehensive form of thinking that supplied the remarkable potency of the officially “negative” meaning of his work for ethics. In Chapters  1 and 2, I  trace out Heidegger’s exploration of the relationship between value philosophy (including ethics) and “formal indication,” the new mode of philosophizing developed in some of Heidegger’s early works. This relationship is complicated not merely by the inadequacy of the available value philosophies, but by the effect they have had, over time, on the phenomenon in question, namely, culture. The striking claim that emerges from these works is this: what announce themselves as moral or cultural problems cannot be apprehended by moral philosophy or philosophy of culture. They are problems that are profoundly shaped by the character of our deepest opening to the world and its occlusion in our impoverished time. From his earliest period of philosophical maturity, Heidegger is quite clear that we don’t need a better “science of morals” or “ethics.”21 What we need is a sounder science of science, a scientific apprehension of our own turn to science. Any prospective “science of ethics” would depend, therefore, on the possibility of such a more “primordial” (ursprunglich), “pretheoretical science of experience.” Thus, when the problem is framed in these terms, it is clear that Lévinas does not express the difficulty as it presented itself to Heidegger: one cannot “care for the other” if one is not clear really on who is an other, and more fundamentally, who “I am.”

The Natorp Critique and the Priority of Distress In letters they exchanged in the early fall of 1918, Husserl and Heidegger discussed Paul Natorp’s critique of (Husserlian) phenomenology. There is evidence that while neither of them considered Natorp a first-rate mind, they 20

21

According to Hatab, the “coordination of ethics and Heideggerian ontology suggests the possibility of taking up moral philosophy anew once the ontological structure of finite being-inthe-world has been articulated” (Hatab, 2000, 1). The question of periodization in the scholarship on Heidegger’s scholarship is enormous, and I provide only a cursory treatment of the matter in the present study. The reader may consult Figal 1988, 2007, 2009, and Kisiel 1993. By widespread consensus, Heidegger’s first post–World War I teaching, in KNS 1919, represents the initial presentation of his “mature” – that is, no longer youthful – writings. See John Van Buren’s study of the transition from the concerns formulated in Heidegger’s even earlier work to his post–World War I investigations (Van Buren 1994). On the need for a pretheoretical science of experience that could be regulative of other sciences, see TDP 101/78.

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nonetheless were concerned to address themselves to Natorp’s critique.22 Husserl understands Natorp’s later work to be influenced by his own Logical Investigations and “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” His judgment of Natorp’s engagement with these works is expressed summarily:  “it is clear that Natorp was entirely incapable of grasping the clear and readily available meaning of phenomenology as an analysis of the essence of pure consciousness, prior to and independent of previous philosophy and science; and in general he was incapable of allowing for the validity of [phenomenological] seeing and of what is presented in such seeing” (BH 361).23 Husserl understands Natorp to hold the opinion that Husserlian phenomenology is an “unclarified prelude” to Natorp’s Neo-Kantian psychology. But Husserl in turn judges Natorp to have erected an edifice of suspect psychology on an obscure foundation: “For my part, I consider his psychology not even as a prelude, but as an extremely vague premonition – embellished with philosophical constructs – of one problem-level in my phenomenology” (BH 361). Though Husserl is fairly dismissive of Natorp’s critique, Heidegger appears to have found it more impressive. He discusses Natorp at a critical moment in “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” his 1919 War Emergency Semester course. Here Heidegger develops the claim that theory – including Husserlian phenomenology – is unable to account, on its own terms, for the generation of theoretical concepts from their experiential motivation.24 As endorsed by Heidegger, the Natorp critique is that all theoretical reflection, including phenomenological description, generalizes and hence distorts the true character of the lived, moving experience of life: Reflection makes something which was previously unexamined, something merely unreflectively experienced, into something “looked at.” We look at it. In reflection it stands before us as an object of reflection, we are directed towards it and make it into an object as such, standing over against us. Thus, in reflection we are theoretically orientated. All theoretical comportment, we said, is devivifying. This now shows itself in 22

23

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Marvin Farber presents Husserl as being more impressed by Natorp than this letter (Husserl to Heidegger, 10 September 1918) suggests. See Farber 1967, 147 ff. Theodore Kisiel writes of these phrases:  “Husserl’s remarks here become a kind of research program for Heidegger in the first year of his assistantship under Husserl, culminating in a full-fledged ‘destruction’ – the term is first used in this course – of Natorp’s concept of constitution in Summer 1920. The key to Heidegger’s hermeneutic breakthrough to his lifelong topic in Kriegnotsemester 1919 is his resolution of Natorp’s double objection against the accessibility and expressibility of phenomenology’s central topic of description, the immediate pre-theoretical experience in which we always already find ourselves underway” (Kisiel 2002, 30). Stephen Crowell objects to such a characterization of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl, emphasizing the continuity between Husserl’s attempts to express the consciousness that is prior to the subject–object distinction and Heidegger’s understanding of Being-in-the-world (see Crowell 2001). Crowell notes in particular that it is easy to find numerous places (particularly in letters to third parties) where Heidegger is dismissive of Husserl’s “sham philosophy,” but that concentrating on such utterances overlooks the vast amount that Heidegger takes over from Husserl (Crowell 2001, 265 n. 3).

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the case of life-experiences, for in reflection they are no longer lived but looked at. We set the experiences out before us out of immediate experience; we intrude so to speak into the flowing stream of experiences and pull one or more of them out, we “still the stream” as Natorp says (TDP 100–1/78).

Phenomenology thus cannot be merely descriptive, Heidegger claims. Description of particulars as such is always guided by general laws. Indeed, it would be unintelligible if it were not:  “For description also already proceeds via concepts:  it is a circumscription of something into generalities, it is ‘subsumption’ (Natorp); it already presupposes a certain kind of concept-formation and therefore ‘abstraction’ (Natorp) and theory, i.e. ‘mediation’ (Natorp)” (TDP 101/78). To privilege theory, then, is to introduce the mediation of generalities and laws between oneself and the singular experience of the things themselves: “Description is nothing immediate and unmediated, but has a necessary relation to knowledge of laws” (TDP 101/78). The quest, then, for an unmediated “pre-theoretical science of experience” (TDP 95/74) appears doomed, for concepts or laws will always obtrude, distorting one’s access to real experience: “there is no immediate apprehension of experience” (TDP 101/78). To theorize is to obtrude mediating, static concepts (“rules,” “generalities,” or “laws”) between the vital motion of experienced life and the observer. Theory cannot then apprehend the genuinely primordial because the “fundamental experiences” always evade their merely theoretical description.25 A true phenomenology needs to apprehend what Heidegger calls “the primordial.” It needs to account both for the subject and the object, and so to expose the genuine (i.e., “primordial” or “original”) connection between the flux and motion of the world and the reckoning attempted by the investigator, conceptual or otherwise. While Heidegger adopts Natorp’s critique of Husserlian phenomenological description, he judges Natorp’s alternative as inferior to it, for phenomenology has the resources within it to meet the Natorp critique: “The fundamental demand of phenomenology to bracket all standpoints is everywhere overlooked . . . . When the proper fundamental attitude to phenomenology is lacking, all objections to it, however sophisticated and significant they might be, are fallacious” (TDP 109/83).26 In his adoption of the Natorp critique, then, Heidegger signals a shift in the task of phenomenology: not “to the things themselves!” but “bracket all standpoints!” “Bracket all 25

26

Heidegger’s philosophic relationship to Husserl is a vast topic, and I  provide only a cursory treatment of it here. In addition to Crowell 2001, who stresses the continuity between these two phenomenologists, see also Carman 2003, 53–100, and Dahlstrom 2001, 103–30, on Heidegger’s critique of Husserl. To see the extent to which Husserl’s thought relates to questions of political philosophy, see the indispensable Velkley 1987. For further consideration of Heidegger’s response to Natorp, consult Heidegger’s statement upon the Natorp’s death, the “Nachruf auf Paul Natorp,” in Platon:  Sophistes GA 19:1–5. Additionally, letters published in Kisiel and Sheehan 2007 show some of the complex personal and intellectual relationship among Heidegger, Husserl, and Natorp, which revolved for a time

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standpoints,” or as Heidegger rephrases this goal in his “Comment on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews,” a small work that represents his most polished and complete piece of work from this period, “thinking without presuppositions” then requires that the presupposition to equate “thinking” with “theorizing” be suspended.27 Thus, the key to genuine thinking, thinking that grasps the “primordial,” is ceaseless, radical, and thoroughgoing critique; it requires what Heidegger refers to as a program of “radical suspicion” of every inherited or received notion. In the “Comment,” he expresses this with particular clarity: “An incessant enactment of our concern [or “distress” – Bekümmerung] for achieving primordiality is what constitutes primordiality” (KJPW 4).28 Thus, the very distress caused by refusing to relax one’s refusal of any standpoint or presupposition is the only worthwhile evidence that one has begun to think. This, then, is the original meaning of Heidegger’s repeated emphasis on anxiety, disturbance, distress, and “anxious concern.” Such pathemata are the markers of an appropriate rejection of theoretical stasis and, implicitly, comfort, and are evidence that the investigator is genuinely attaining to a primordial thinking.29 This approach entails a distinctive attitude to the surrounding community, which has already been shaped by the cultural ascendance of theoretical

27

28

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around Husserl and Heidegger’s interest in having the latter assume Natorp’s chair at Marburg upon his retirement, a scheme in which Natorp ultimately concurred. Heidegger and Natorp engaged in a fruitful exchange on Aristotle, culminating in Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle:  Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation” (BH 372–411). On Natorp and Husserl, see Luft 2010. “In seeing the lectern I am fully present in my ‘I’; it resonates with the experience, as we said. It is an experience proper to me and so do I see it. However, it is not a process but rather an event of appropriation [Ereignis] (non-process, in the experience of the question as a residue of this event). Lived experience does not pass in front of me like a thing, but I appropriate [er-eigne] it to myself, and it appropriates itself according to its essence. . . . A science of experiences would have to objectify experiences and thus strip away their non-objective character as lived experience and event of appropriation” (TDP 75/60). Parenthetical citations are to Heidegger’s “Comment on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews” in Pathmarks (Heidegger 1998), translation occasionally modified with reference to GA 9.  Kisiel and Sheehan write:  “Its precursors [Sorgen] are the biblical Bekümmerung (1920) and Augustine’s cura (1921)” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 438). Of Bekümmerung, translated “anxious” or “troubled concern,” they write: “This term is used in the 1920 and 1922 essays as well as in the courses held in this period to convey the original motivation to philosophize in the face of the very facticity of life. It is replaced by the distinction that ‘angst reveals care’ as the development approaches Being and Time” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 430). John Van Buren remarks of the term Bekümmerung, in the context of Heidegger’s summer 1923 course on ontology: “In the present section of Heidegger’s course, Bekümmerung is used not only in connection with Dasein’s “caring” (Sorgen) about itself (i.e., about its ‘existence’ or ‘possibility’) and with its ‘unrest’ (Unruhe), but also in connection with its ‘wakefulness for itself,’ . . . contrasted to the ‘carefreeness’ in which ‘care is asleep.’ However, in this course Heidegger is already in the process of replacing Bekümmerung with the perhaps less clumsy and more sophisticated Kierkegaardian term Angst (‘anxiety’ or ‘anxiousness’), which eventually becomes a central term in Being and Time” (Heidegger 1999, 113).

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philosophy. A  philosophy that is not radically suspicious enough of the culture amid which it finds itself will be determined by this culture. This includes determining what philosophy is, how it relates to other areas of human life, and therefore how it philosophizes about these areas – including (in particular) philosophy of value. Moreover, the extent to which these other areas have been shaped by the influence of theoretical philosophy makes their influence, in turn, on a mode of philosophizing that is insufficiently “suspicious” all the more determining. Thus, Heidegger writes that “when phenomenology first erupted onto the scene” – that is, in its earlier, Husserlian form – it was too oriented by other, already theoretically modified spheres of life in its formulation of the aim of philosophy. Husserl’s retention of the theoretical attitude in his pursuit of “an unspoiled seeing” similarly depended on misunderstanding both the character of philosophy and the extent to which the “phenomena” it was looking at had already been modified by a long cultural and philosophic history (KJPW 30). For Heidegger, contrary to Husserl, philosophy must refuse the understanding of it shared by the other domains of human life, cultural, political, and religious, in order to be truly revolutionary and faithful to its task: “But if we are to understand the philosophical sense of the tendencies of phenomenology in a radical manner, and appropriate them genuinely, we must not merely carry out research in an ‘analogical’ fashion on the ‘other’ ‘domains of experience’ (the aesthetic, ethical, and religious domains) that we, following one philosophical tradition or another, have partitioned off from one another” (KJPW 30). The very distinction among these domains already privileges objectifying theory and obscures the more fundamental task of philosophy. At this point, the correct philosophic response is not description, but destruction. Any philosophy less radical than what Heidegger proposes would only reinforce the ethical and cultural status quo because it has begun from and takes its bearings by its cultural milieu. Heidegger thus sketches an approach to philosophy that deliberately refuses an ethical or cultural mission. A genuine “bracketing of all standpoints” will refuse to take its bearings from any established understanding of the character and task of philosophy. Though any “earlier form of intellectual industriousness” (KJPW 5) might have confused trivial matters of culture for fundamental problems, such a mistake will now be avoided. In particular, the accepted cultural and educational responsibilities of philosophy – “an unspeakable hustle and bustle in our concerns for the preservation of culture” (KJPW 5)  – will distract philosophy from its true task. Only an insistence on “taking firm hold of the most important questions” and refusing “peripheral matters” will preserve the philosophic enterprise, which “is neither mere sport nor prophetic pageantry that promises the salvation of the world” (KJPW 5). The concern of other philosophers to satisfy the “hustle and bustle of an avant-garde culture” leads them to mistake what should possess the philosopher (KJPW 24–5). This is not to say, to be clear, that philosophy will have no effect on culture, but that

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it should not, prior to the most searching, radically thoroughgoing critique, take its bearings by the established culture, above all with respect to the very purposes and character of philosophy. Heidegger refuses the commission that philosophy should be responsible for supplying guidance for the accepted or perceived needs of society because he judges it impossible that philosophy can properly do this and still remain philosophical.

Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Value What, then, is the relationship between philosophy so understood, on the one hand, and the philosophy of value, on the other? In Heidegger’s summer semester course in 1919, “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value,” he works out the relationship between “philosophy of value”  – that is, the branch of philosophy that includes ethics (and aesthetics, culture)  – and the task and character of philosophy as understood by Heidegger.30 He shows that the same problem with theory manifests itself in the attempt to understand ethics and value philosophy more generally. Theoretical approaches to questions of value – such as are characteristic of every contemporary philosophic position, according to Heidegger – are insufficiently “original” or primordial to be able to capture the real connection between the investigating “subject” and the realm of values under consideration. That is, in the absence of such a primordial understanding, the reason for distinguishing between values and for ranking some higher than others is altogether obscure. This increasingly prominent character of the problem of form. . . the transcendental consideration of form, leads to the problem of categorical divisions into regions. Efforts in the philosophy of history, culminating in the philosophy of culture, make obvious the necessity of a cultural whole and its possible total interpretation. Interpretation is possible only in and through the totality of cultural values; their connection and rank-order becomes problematic (TDP 124/94–5).

In Heidegger’s estimation, his contemporaries’ expression of the way that ethical problems, or factual questions concerning the “ought,” may be systematically formulated was inadequately “original” (ursprünglich) in the sense of reaching the roots of the problem, the “primordial” (Ursprung). In Heidegger’s understanding, any primordial formulation needs to understand not merely the materials being considered (the object), but the very motivations of the subject 30

Kisiel treats this course very briefly (Kisiel 1993, 60–3) and expresses what is perhaps the consensus view of the course (explaining its only very rare discussion in the literature): “The subsequent exegesis of the texts of Windelband and Rickert displays some moments of depth and insight, but is by and large shallow and pedestrian. . . . In this first of many courses which we have from Heidegger on the history of philosophy, he outlines a new and powerful method of ‘critique’ which promises to go more deeply into intellectual history than the old-fashioned factual history of surface ‘influences,’ and then by and large gives us precisely that!” (Kisiel 1993, 60).

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conducting the investigation. To be primordial, an investigation must consider that something about the matter or topic must already be connected to the investigator, must be moving the investigator in the first place; the subject, at some level, must already be connected to the object.31 In the case of the study of ethics, Heidegger insists, the problem of value must motivate the investigator, and therefore any properly philosophical understanding of ethics needs to include an understanding of this motivating connection. In the absence of an apprehension of the primordial, then, a science of value is impossible. Heidegger’s attention to the history of the philosophy of value appears, therefore, very different from a mere catalogue of errors in understanding. He introduces his treatment of the history of the philosophy of value by insisting on the fundamental identity of historical investigations and phenomenological investigations. His point may be put this way: if genuine study seeks and reaches the primordial, that is, the ground from which both the “object” of study and the “subject” conducting the study (the investigator) emerge, then an understanding of the primordial must also inform our appreciation of previous philosophic attempts to grasp the same supposed “object.” Other philosophic attempts – from the “history” of philosophy – will express a relationship, even if a confused one, to the primordial and may therefore assist us in coming to our own adequate understanding. A  further implication of Heidegger’s approach to history, developed more extensively in the “Comment on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldview,” is that earlier theoretical philosophies that have not adequately apprehended the primordial have, in turn, affected later and current attempts to do the same. Indeed, they may well have impeded subsequent attempts by bequeathing a too “meager conceptual inventory” (KJPW 4) for understanding the primordial from which each of our failed attempts to understand the matter, the matter itself, and any successful attempt to understand the matter emerges. That is, by investigating failed attempts from the history of thought, we may come better to understand, in their detritus, the inherited presuppositions and confusions that immediately confront us. The historical and phenomenological modes of investigation are identical, according to Heidegger, because they each need to apprehend the primordial from which they and the matter for study emerge, namely, “the history that we ourselves are.”32 As Heidegger understands it, his contemporaries’ approach to the philosophy of value is determined by nineteenth-century ideas about ethics and culture. This approach could be characterized as the superintendence of theoretical rationality over all aspects or regions of life – by force of analogy – and the corresponding impossibility of including within such a theoretical order or 31

32

Heidegger characterizes the hermeneutic circle at SZ 152–3. On the circularity of Heideggerian phenomenological science, see Crowell 2001, 132–3. “No genuine historical understanding can occur without returning to the original motivations, nor is such a system scientifically possible” (TDP 125/96).

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system the “theorizer”  – the investigating subject or consciousness  – itself.33 “The historical effect of the philosophy of value was a strong emphasis on the idea of value in all spheres of life, a broadening of the axiological by analogy to theoretization, partly also a prevalence of both in variegated penetration” (TDP 124/95). As such, the concept “culture” (Kultur) has come to “function in a vague and multivalent ferment of ideas to guide all general reflection [Besinnung] on the totality of particular life-regions and on life as such” (TDP 129/101). Culture thus refers to the cultivation of each region or sphere of human endeavor in accordance with the dictates of theoretical rationality or “reflection,” or following the model of theoretical rationality. Culture is – contrary to the wishes or claims of its counter-Enlightenment boosters – indistinguishable from civilization! In its theory-privileged definition, culture means both history and accomplishment, signifying the historical progress out of the natural condition of savagery as well as the assumption of the various attributes of a technological society (TDP 130/101–2). In the Enlightenment, among the likes of Pierre Bayle, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and the Baron de Montesquieu, culture really does mean “civilization,” standing for “the perfection of history on its way out of barbarism, superstition, deception, and disorder” (TDP 132/103). This notion of culture, however, is too oriented by theoretical objectivity and overlooks the need to understand the problematic from which ethics emerges: the consciousness or investigating subject, that is, the real individual, and its relation to values that give ranking or order to the world. The Enlightenment “regards the individual as but an instance of the species,” and thus altogether lacks the needed first-person, empirical, or historical subject. German Idealist thinkers thus correct, in Heidegger’s estimation, the understanding held by the Enlightenment by attending more to the distinctive uniqueness of the individual. Herder introduces the category of “ownness” (what we know as authenticity  – Eigenheit); makes it “meaningful and . . . related to all formations of life, i.e., these for the first time become visible as such” (TDP 134/ 104); and prepares for the accomplishments of Schlegel, Niebuhr, Savigny, and Schleiermacher. This individual-apprehending trend reaches its apex in Fichte and Schelling: “The historical in its individual multiplicity and uniqueness is now seen in terms of the creative deeds and activity of the subject, the self-worth of the person” (TDP 134/105). As Heidegger presents it, the speculative enthusiasm of German Idealism provoked a more “tangible” countermovement of scientific empiricism, on 33

Heidegger’s earliest treatment of the inadequacy of analogy is in his Habilitation, published first in 1916, and available as Harold J.  Robbins, “Duns Scotus’s Theory of the Categories and of Meaning” (Robbins 1978). In summer semester 1931, he restates the problem: “The analogy of being – this designation is not a solution to the being question, indeed not even an actual posing of the question, but the title for the most stringent aporia, the impasse in which ancient philosophy, and along with it all subsequent philosophy right up to today, is enmeshed” (GA 33, 44/Heidegger 1995a, 38).

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the one hand, and historicist empiricism, on the other. Among Ranke and his successors, who attend to the “ever accumulating empirical material of historical life,” and among whom “empirical mastery gains its priority and rank,” the formation of the conditions for the notion of culture as progressively refined, technologically competent individuals accelerates. The “philosophers . . . dedicate themselves to history, the tangible reality,” and in the correspondingly empirical natural science there is “a turning away from philosophy and an immersion in experience, the tangible reality” (TDP 135/105). Almost immediately, as Heidegger accounts for it, upon the philosophic development of the historical consciousness, the “first moment of the culture concept,” a second moment emerges, characterized by “the orientation of modern life to particular achievements in the area of practical empirical life, the development of technology in the widest sense” (TDP 136/106). This second moment is characteristically more practical, more empirically minded, and “scientific” in the sense of technological. In England and France, it received, according to Heidegger, expression in an especially “brash kind of metaphysical materialism” (TDP 136/106).

The Neo-Kantian Acceptance of the Problem The problem, then, that confronted Neo-Kantian philosophers of value was how to reconcile the insight into the priority of the individual attained by German Idealism with the accomplishments of the scientific and historical schools that succeeded them. As more and more was accounted for by empirical sciences and historicism, there was less reason to be confident in the distinctiveness of the individual as such. The work, then, of the Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband may be understood as an attempt to relate coherently the empirical, material content of the natural and historical sciences to the theoretical, speculative insights of German Idealism. It was with a view to accomplishing this that they looked to Kant and his various critiques. Between them they inaugurated what Heidegger identifies as two strands of Neo-Kantianism.34 Heidegger credits Cohen with rediscovering the proper significance of Kant’s First Critique, which is to see that the problem of knowledge is not concerned with the physiological-psychological process by which a subject gains knowledge, nor with the external world, but with “the structures of objectively given mathematical natural science,” that is, “logical foundations” (TDP 142/110). Objectivity can be seen as the connection between the elements that constitute objectivity, “as the unity of the multiplicity of appearances” (TDP 142/110). As such, it cannot simply be reckoned by the accretion of more and more 34

Much of the most recent literature on Heidegger and Neo-Kantianism focuses on his debate with Cassirer and the related Kant book of 1929:  see Peter Gordon’s major study (Gordon 2010), Carman 2010, and the response of Schwarz 2010. The relation to Neo-Kantianism is an important theme in Kisiel 1993; Crowell reads Heidegger as joining Husserl in a response to the Neo-Kantianism of Lask in the first several chapters of Crowell 2001, 23–114.

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empirical data, whether that be external stimuli or internal biochemical brain reactions. Objectivity cannot be reduced to an overwhelming preponderance of evidence. Its unity, in turn, is identified by Cohen as “nothing other than the law, the rule of consciousness” (TDP 142/110). Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism, however, remained “exclusively occupied” with the theoretical foundation of the natural sciences, rather than value philosophy as such, and did not develop a systematic ethics.35 Windelband’s strand of Neo-Kantianism thus distinguishes itself from Cohen’s by applying the logical rigor of the foundations of the natural sciences in Cohen to value philosophy and thus construing an ethics on this basis. Windelband, taking inspiration from Fichte, interprets critical reason as “in essence practical” (TDP 143/111). That is, he follows Fichte as he understands him in shifting the “ethical motive” to the center of all philosophy, and conceives of the laws of thinking (i.e., the “rule of consciousness” in Cohen’s terminology) as laws “which thought should conform to, if it wants to become knowledge” (Heidegger quoting Windelband, TDP 144/111). Thus, the logical law has, in itself, an ethical dimension of “normative apriority” (TDP 144/111). Theoretical philosophy is thus construed to have a practical, ethical imperative; it is “no longer to be a copy of the world, its task is to bring to consciousness the norms which first lend thought its value and validity” (Heidegger quoting Windelband, TDP 144/112, emphasis added). Validity itself becomes the basis for an ethics that is grounded in logic. Theory, having assumed unto itself now the practical, ethical norm of validity, assumes a certain leadership in a wide range of human endeavors, “regions” as Heidegger usually refers to them, designated now collectively as “culture”: In the totality of spiritual life philosophy has a specific task that cannot be disputed by any empirical science, a task that fits into the character of nineteenth-century cultural consciousness, i.e. which avoids all exaggerated metaphysical speculation and seeks its firm foundation in experience. In universally valid values it possesses the systematic scientific framework, the field from which culture can be interpreted and obtain its own meaning. Philosophy of value is the authentic scientific philosophy of culture, which does not have the presumptuous ambition of creating new values, but interprets factually existing culture in terms of universally valid values (TDP 146/114).

35

Heidegger’s treatment of Cohen, most strikingly, does not consider Cohen’s development of a transcendental philosophy of ethics, which Leo Strauss would later note formed the “center” of Cohen’s system of philosophy (Strauss 1989, 28). Heidegger limits his discussion to Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871) and says nothing about Cohen’s further development of Kant’s Foundations of Ethics (1877). At this juncture in Heidegger’s argument, he instead shifts to discuss Windelband’s appropriation of Fichte’s – “the greatest of all Kantians,” in the words of Windelband’s student, Heinrich Rickert – critical interpretation of theoretical reason “as in essence practical” (TDP 143/111). That is, ethics is implicitly treated as merely derivative from practice, i.e., as a region that has no free-standing dignity of its own, or as underlain by the more fundamental problem of the distinction between theory and practice as such. This is consonant with Heidegger’s approach to ethics as such.

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Thus, in Windelband, the gap between the empirical-historical sciences and the speculative enthusiasm of the philosophy of German Idealism purports to be bridged by understanding theory as essentially practical and thus inherently involved with and indeed regulating the empereia of history and the materialist, technological sciences. Culture thus constitutes the development of the various regions of human life along the lines of the theoretical sciences, or analogously to theory. Theory, by supplying a logical grounding to both the natural sciences and to value philosophy, assumes the spiritual leadership of “culture.”

On the Breakdown of Neo-Kantian System As Heidegger develops this account, however, he shows the inadequacy of Windelband’s position, which establishes the limits of the problem as inherited first by other Neo-Kantians such as Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask, but then also as confronted by Wilhelm Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger himself. Windelband and his successors must establish – but prove unable to establish – the connection between the formal and rationalistic, on the one hand, and the empirico-historical, on the other hand, in the unity of consciousness. In order to secure the vision of philosophic leadership of culture and ethics against “the growing penetration of empirical psychology” (TDP 113), Windelband found it necessary to establish more clearly the difference between judgment (Urteil) and evaluation (Beurteilung).36 That is, it is necessary to establish value philosophy separately from the encroachments of the empirical sciences, which, as is particularly evident in the field of psychology, make ever more bold presumptions about the derivation of all value claims from empirical, factual bases. According to Heidegger, Windelband was looking to secure more than simply the rules of logic that the empirical sciences necessarily employ (and which cannot simply be derived from empirical experience), namely, “judgments” (Urteil), but also such “judgments” as actually make claims about the worth, for example, of science or philosophy, or the worth or goodness of anything (such as making valid rather than invalid scientific statements). Such “judgments” of worth or value are of a different order than assessing the soundness of scientific logic, hence their designation “evaluations” 36

This, of course, is very similar to the problem motivating Husserl’s phenomenology:  the encroachment of what he referred to as “naturalism,” or the power of the positive sciences, into the domain of logic, thus threatening the soundness of both science and philosophy. His critique is developed in several works: the Logical Investigations (1900/01), where the target is more specifically psychologism; “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (1911); and the Crisis of the European Sciences (1936). Heidegger takes up the theme in another course from the summer semester of 1919, “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” and again, rather more famously, in both his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929, “What Is Metaphysics?” and his Rektratsrede in 1933, “On the Self-Assertion of the German University.” On the importance of the theme of education for understanding the relationship of Heidegger’s thought to politics, consider the superb study by Ehrmantraut (2010).

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(Beurteilung). It needs to be shown that evaluations cannot simply be derived from empirical experience. Is there a logic that can secure both of these types of statements, judgment as well as evaluations? Judgments, according to Heidegger, statements such as “the thing is white,” express the “belonging together of two representational contents” (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). The predicate (white) is a “ready-made determination taken from the content of the objective representation” (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). Thus judgments are objective statements, whose content is taken from the object. Evaluations, statements such as “the thing is good,” express, on the other hand, a “relation of judging consciousness to the represented object (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). That is, they contain within themselves in a hidden fashion an apprehension of intentionality; the predicate of the evaluation (good) is a “relation referring to a goal-setting consciousness” (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). Evaluative statements about the object thus include the subject  – the “consciousness” referred to – implicitly in their claims about the object: “In evaluation there is expressed the feeling of approval or disapproval, ‘with which the judging consciousness relates to the represented object’ ” (TDP 152/116). Evaluations thus express a feeling, either of approval or disapproval. As subjective statements of feeling, they do not, therefore, “widen objective knowledge” (TDP 152/116). Objective knowledge must, therefore, be “finished” for such statements to be meaningful and not merely arbitrary preferences. The evaluation, to make any sense, must presuppose a measure of purpose with respect to which it expresses its feeling of approval or disapproval. Such statements, in turn, are meaningful only to those who share this sense of purpose. The implication here is that prior to any affirmation’s being meaningful – including the “goodness” of validity – the nonevaluative dimension of philosophy, all of its truth claims, must be “finished,” that is, be shown to be true. The paradox is that their validity would seem to depend on the “goodness” of truth. What is or should be the relation between the empirical sciences and philosophy, on this basis? In fact, all propositions of knowledge are combinations of judgment and evaluation; they “are representational connections whose truth-value is decided by affirmation or denial” (TDP 152/116). The sciences – mathematical, descriptive, and explanatory – have as their task “to establish the entire range of content of what is to be affirmed” (TDP 152/116, emphasis in original). Philosophy, however, being neither mathematical, descriptive, nor explanatory, is seemingly left without a field. Windelband suggests that, whereas most evaluations simply result in facts – such as, “I feel this thing is good,” or, “We like this thing” – which may then become objects of the empirical sciences, such as psychology or the history of culture, some evaluations make claims to being “absolutely valid” regardless of whether they are universally accepted, or even accepted at all. The province of philosophy, then, is the possibility and coherence of such claims. Claims to “absolute validity,” that is, claims that purport to be universally true – as distinct from the “hedonistic”

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evaluative claims derived from feelings of pleasure or displeasure that “no one” supposes should be universally applicable – necessarily imply nolens volens an absolute standard. Such claims to absolute validity come in three forms, corresponding to which there are then three basic philosophic disciplines: logic, ethics, and aesthetics. It is at this point that Heidegger thinks the incoherence of Windelband  – and successive Neo-Kantian positions – shows through. Heidegger thus adumbrates the problem in the form in which he would inherit it: Philosophy has to “establish” the principles of logical, ethical, and aesthetical judgings (thus to “test” critically the claim, the criteria of statements of validity). But one does not discover “a criterion of what is supposed to be valid” (unclear!) through research of psychology and cultural history into factually existing evaluations. On the other hand we are all convinced, “we all believe. . . that. . . there is an entitlement of what is necessary in the higher sense, which should be valid for all”. Everywhere, accordingly, where empirical consciousness “discovers in itself” this ideal necessity of the ought, “it comes upon a normative consciousness”. Philosophy is “reflection [Besinnung] on this normative consciousness as the scientific investigation into which particular determinations of content and forms of empirical consciousness have the value of normative consciousness.” As the science of normative consciousness, whose recognition is its presupposition, it “researches” (?) “empirical [!] consciousness in order to establish [!] at which points that normative universal validity emerges.” “Consciousness in general” is therefore a system of the norms which first make possible universal valid evaluations (TDP 154/117–18, punctuation in Heidegger’s original).

It is necessary that philosophy derive standards that may plausibly apply to evaluations, in order to be critical of actual, empirical evaluative statements. Such standards, however, may not themselves be derived from any empirical research, no matter how broad or discerning. Such a reliance on empereia would forfeit all of philosophy’s claims to be critical, and indeed, since philosophy does not have the attributes of science – being neither mathematical, descriptive, nor explanatory – it would have no function whatsoever. Here is Windelband’s chief deficiency or error. His recurrence, to solve this problem, to “researches” into “empirical” instances of consciousness in order to discern the general norms (oughts) that could orient a universally valid philosophy of value is, Heidegger indicates, a dead-end as well as a shocking error. It amounts to a collapse into scientific empiricism and forfeits the needed critical, formal basis for evaluating such researches. As he confesses earlier in his elucidation of Windelband’s position, in a profession of hermeneutical modesty, “I cannot make Windelband’s account more intelligible than he has himself” (TDP 151/ 115). According to Heidegger, Windelband is correct to see that the unity of the empirical and the normative must be sought in the consciousness – this is the necessary point of contact between the empirical sciences and the normative function of any philosophy of value. In Heidegger’s reckoning, however, neither Windelband nor his philosophic successors Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask have got the philosophic resources to develop this insight. This returns,

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therefore, to the problem with which Heidegger began, namely, the problem of form, whence it might be discerned whether it may not be derived from its empirical instances (TDP 94–5). The philosophic task for any ethics is to apprehend the motives that impel the investigator to take up the problem. Only in the understanding of these in consciousness may one see the intersection of the “empirical” – the real-world facts and problems that demand “evaluative” judgment of which ethics treats – and the “formal” – the normative or critical criteria by which these facts are ranked, categorized, and valued. These criteria cannot, however, be apprehended merely at the level of the “general consciousness,” but must be understood in their application to each particular consciousness for itself, as the motives for each will be quite radically individual and particular. The further problem that this poses, as Heidegger diagnosed it in the KNS 1919 course, is that theory itself is incapable of grasping its own motivating impulses and so cannot attain a sufficient grasp of the motivated consciousness. The impossibility of doing so dashes any possibility whatsoever of any ethics on the basis of theoretical philosophy. The historical development that Heidegger traces has led to the current condition, the difficulties of which are as follows:  (1)  Values are seen in everything, or in every field of human achievement, so understood analogically to theory. (2)  Values are thus understood formulaically, but they in fact need empirical content. (3) To understand the relationship between the formal values and their empirical content, it is necessary to have an understanding of consciousness. (4) Such an understanding is not available, however, on the model of theoretical philosophy. What would be required is a grasp of the motives that drove the consciousness in question to undertake a study and to arrive at formal values, and this primordial connection cannot be apprehended by theory. (5)  Any adequately philosophic apprehension of this would entail calling into question all of the accepted categories and rank ordering of values, as these have permeated and saturated the culture at large, including even the categorization of philosophy and kinds of philosophy.

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2 Surpassing Ethics: The Formal Indication of Existence

Heidegger’s Contemporaries and the Problem of Theory The main finding of Heidegger’s 1919 summer semester course on value philosophy is the requirement that a philosophic ethics have an account of the consciousness in order to connect the subject pole of the subject–object divide to the objects of study.1 In his “Comment on Karl Jaspers’ Psychlogy of Worldviews,” Heidegger restates his critique of his Neo-Kantian contemporaries and also applies it to life philosophers and certain other nonhistorical phenomenologists (such as Husserl and Scheler) in terms of their incapacity of apprehending the “I am” at the root of “consciousness” thanks to their “prejudice” for theoretical or objectifying philosophy.2 The “I am” is the “fundamental experience,” that is, the primordial that needs to be apprehended. Jaspers is different, though. Like Heidegger’s other contemporaries, he misses 1

2

The priority of the study of consciousness emerges clearly at SZ 212 as well in a crucial passage that Heidegger later reflects on in the Letter on Humanism (BW 237–9). In the early 1920s, the “Comment” circulated among Heidegger’s colleagues and students, and before the publication of Being and Time in 1927 it was the most polished written work of his philosophical maturity. For years it was the only widely available document from this part of Heidegger’s career. It is distinctive among the written texts of this period – mainly consisting of courses prepared for delivery – for its unique deployment of “existentialist” language that otherwise is absent from his work until the final draft of Being and Time. (Kisiel [1994, 232, 275, 316, 489] has shown that that the existentialist language that does appear in these early courses consists mainly of later interpolations; see also Crowell 2001, 116 on the “slovenly editorial policies of the Gesamtausgabe.”) Jaspers, who was included in the small group among whom the piece was initially circulated, found it nearly incomprehensible, so little concerned is the “Comment” with the book he actually wrote (Heidegger 2002b, 179 n. 16). See David Farrell Krell’s splendid essay on the “Comment” (Krell 1986, 11–26). Kisiel reasons that Heidegger’s frequent reference to “situation” as the fundamental substratum of life in KNS 1919 might be owed to the influence of an initial reading of Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldview (Kisiel 1994, 64).

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the basic inadequacy of theory, but in Heidegger’s reading, his Psychology of Worldviews does suggest a way to grasp the problem. Jaspers’s book shows how to apprehend the fundamental experience of the “I am” by pointing to those experiences of the “subject” that distinguish it from the ceaseless experiential flow of everything else, in Jaspers’s terminology, “life.” Heidegger, appropriating the term from Jaspers, refers to such experiences as “limit-situations” (Grenzensituationen), moments where the ceaseless flow of “life” folds back on itself or is interrupted, such as death, antinomy, or contradiction. Heidegger sees that if such situations are made central – which cannot be done within a theoretical approach to philosophy – then one can begin to understand the distinctiveness of the experience of the “I am” at the root of consciousness. Such a philosophic approach would necessarily be resistant to inherited cultural understandings. Indeed, Heidegger expects that it is so resistant to the surrounding cultural milieu that it cannot orient itself to this milieu. He repeatedly insists that he cannot say what effect an investigation such as his would have on society and culture. To refer to the results of such a philosophic undertaking as an “ethics” would be to obscure the character of the underlying thought. Perhaps the principal defect of Heidegger’s contemporaries’ reliance on theory is their blindness, as he sees it, to the massive role of history in shaping their philosophical prejudices. As in his assessment of Cohen, Windelband, and others in “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value,” Heidegger sees other schools of thought as being hopelessly determined by their historical antecedents precisely because they fail to see that thinking is historically determined (TDP 91–152). To put this another way, the confident reliance on theoretical objectification blinds Heidegger’s contemporaries to the extent to which theory itself – and its attendant subject–object divide – is determined by its own historical inheritance, the conceptual detritus of millennia of Western philosophy. They are left blind to “the history that we ourselves are” (KJPW 4). In identifying the urgent need to comprehend the consciousness by adequately limning the primordial experiences from which both the subject and object emerge, Heidegger is also pointing to the need for historical excavation of the “self” (such as he himself performed in the “Value Philosophy” course in attending to the “motivations” in play at each juncture in the history of ideas which he surveyed). As Heidegger emphasized in the “Value Philosophy” course – and as Husserl himself was later to consider in his doctrine of “desedimentation” – phenomenological and genuinely historical investigation are, at root, identical.3 Heidegger’s contemporaries, in his assessment, simply do not appreciate the extent to which there is a screen of uncomprehended, conceptual distortions between themselves and the phenomenon for which they purport to 3

See Husserl 1970. Comparing Husserl and Heidegger on this point, see Rosen 2002, 69–70. On the concept of desedimentation in Husserl as further developed by Jacob Klein, see Hopkins 2011; and Cosgrove 2008.

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be accounting. In his “Comment” on Jaspers, Heidegger expands on his earlier critique of Neo-Kantianism. As he puts it in a brief critique of Heinrich Rickert, Neo-Kantianism depends for its assessments on the premise of a “finished philosophy,” but it lacks both sufficient purchase on what Heidegger terms the “fundamental experiences,” which are the only sufficient source of rigor. As such, it cannot account for the genesis of “concepts, about the way in which philosophical concepts get their structure, and about the basic intention of conceptual explication in philosophy” (KJPW 11).4 It cannot account for itself; surely, then, it is not finished. Lebensphilosophie, in turn, lacks the aspiration to rigor of the Neo-Kantians and relies instead on an “indulgent” syncretism of the various but all too “meager inventory of concepts” (KJPW 4). It cannot, therefore, separate itself from the currents of its time and so it too fails to make adequate claims about the “fundamental experiences” that are the measure of primordiality (KJPW 4). Lebenphilosophie is thus in the same troubled position as the supposedly “finished philosophy” of Neo-Kantianism, in that it is too uncritical of the pedigree of its own concepts, and so is altogether saturated in the residue of what Heidegger here calls, derisively, the “history of ideas” (KJPW 3). The principal deficiency of these two approaches is their adoption of “standards” or “concepts” without subjecting them to a critical interrogation of their own history, that is, of the motivations that generated them and that must be accounted for in any attempt to refer to them. The investigator’s own history influences the judgment of what standards apply, and so “presuppositions” influence even the most rigorous “objectivity.” Nonhistorical phenomenology – such as that of Husserl or Scheler, to whom Heidegger appears to be referring here  – aspires to avoid such errors by employing the rigors of the phenomenological method in service of “essential intuition,” but Heidegger is doubtful that this succeeds.5 He objects to “the excessive liberties taken recently by many phenomenologists in their use of essential intuition” (KJPW 4) because its claims to transcendence are themselves unwittingly historical. One of the aspirations of such theoretical phenomenology is that it shed itself of presuppositions in its quest for immediate access to the thing itself. In Heidegger’s view, however, the shedding of unreflective perceptions obscures the phenomenologist’s own motivations and presuppositions. The method of nonhistorical phenomenology (i.e., Scheler or Husserl) is

4

5

“This . . . cannot but meet with approval whenever they in principle affirm the need for the rigorous ‘formation’ of concepts, i.e., whenever they see it from the vantage point of an ideal of philosophical knowledge that is incontestable in the formal sense that it stresses the importance of rigorous conceptuality” (W 11). Heidegger treatment of his interlocutors here is highly allusive. He appears, though, to be referring critically to Max Scheler, the phenomenological “fellow traveler,” and his doctrine of “essential intuition” as applied to the development of an ethics where love of persons is most fundamental. See his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Scheler 1973).

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thus inadequate insurance against attributing the status of the “thing in itself” to whatever happens to be nearby, because “one turns what is immediately ‘on hand’ in one’s objective historical intellectual situation into the in-itself of the ‘things themselves’ ” (KJPW 4). Such phenomenologists mistake what provisional access they have to things at all with genuine access to the things themselves. All theoretical “intuition” as such is beset by the problem that its claims to immediacy actually, though accidentally, fasten upon the merely proximate; the mediate is confused for the immediate. Without understanding the history constituting its own motivation, theory – essential intuition here refers to theoretical intuition – fails to see that this colors the perception of the things themselves, that is, mediates their apprehension. Theoretical intuition always takes place within a context unaccounted for, as such, by theory.6 As with the problems Heidegger diagnosed in the Neo-Kantian value philosophy, a turn to the subject thus appears as the necessary route to the primordial. Here, though, Heidegger amplifies the interference posed by history. An unmediated “turn to the subject” is no more available than is any unmediated, presuppositionless access to the “objects” or the “things themselves.” What is needed to approach the subject is a “genuine confrontation” with or a “radical destruction” of “the history that we ourselves are” (KJPW 4).7 This is the source, then, of the historical dimension of Heidegger’s phenomenology: the deconstruction of the subject conducting philosophical investigations, “ourselves,” in order to apprehend the root of consciousness. But even such a study of the self, as suggested by Heidegger’s critique of Neo-Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie, must be guided by some “fore-conception” of a standard. That is, it is necessary that an initial apprehension of what is being sought after supply the standard that guides the historical deconstruction. Given the 6

7

Heidegger writes: “one’s intuition can all too easily fall prey to a certain blindness regarding the fact that its own motivational basis is itself in the end not primordial” (KJPW 4). He does not “name names” in any of these three implicit critiques. On Heidegger’s relationships with his contemporaries, see the very insightful Smith 2007, 15–34; on his critique of Neo-Kantianism and engagement with life philosophy, see Bambach 1995. The failings Heidegger diagnoses in his fellow phenomenologists are shared by the other two approaches as well: theory cannot grasp the motivation of the theorizing subject, and so cannot make adequately primordial claims. Essential intuition can be misled in its assessment of the “things themselves” – its objects – by the very motives of the investigator – the subject. And this is so despite an ostentatious claim to be investigating “without presuppositions” (KJPW 4–5). The Neo-Kantian and Lebensphilosophe positions are likewise driven to apprehend the things themselves as though in isolation from the distortions of the subject’s role in the investigation. Far from being “established on some secure foundation,” the “fixed standards” adopted by Neo-Kantianism are derived from “a long, degenerate, and spurious tradition” (KJPW 2–3). Lebensphilosophie, for its part, is attentive to the history of philosophy as a source of useful concepts, but it selects from this conceptual array uncritically and thus expresses its “basic motive” only in a “hidden manner” (KJPW 3–4). Like Neo-Kantianism, it remains blind to the role of the subject in pursuing a complete, supposedly objective, account. Heidegger speaks of a “radical kind of deconstruction and reconstruction, i.e., a genuine confrontation with the history that we ourselves ‘are’ ” (KJPW 4).

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inadequacy of theory for supplying or discerning such a standard, what might guide the deconstructive excavation of our consciousness, “the history that we ourselves are”?8 What, then, betokens the primordial? How can one tell that “all standpoints have been bracketed” or that “thinking without presuppositions” has been achieved? The very distress caused by refusing to relax one’s refusal of any standpoint or presupposition is the only worthwhile evidence that one has begun to think. In the “Comment,” he claims that the “meaning of primordiality does not lie in the idea of something outside of history or beyond it; rather, it shows itself in the fact that thinking without presuppositions can itself be achieved only in a self-critique that is historically oriented in a factical manner. An incessant enactment of our concern (Bekümmerung) for achieving primordiality is what constitutes primordiality” (KJPW 4). The principal evidence that primordiality is being achieved is the bare but recurrent sense that one exists, which Heidegger refers to as the “fundamental experience” of the “I am” as apprehended in the condition of anxiety, or as it is styled here, in “the enactment of our distress.”9 The “I am,” the fundamental experience Heidegger is seeking to retrieve from behind the theory- and objectivity-privileging legacy of Western philosophy, consists in its own recurrent, incessant disquiet about its very being. Heidegger turns to Jaspers, therefore, with this suite of philosophical problems: (1) A philosophic ethics requires an account of consciousness that can reconcile the empirical-historical with the critical-formal, but (2) none of the available philosophic schools have the wherewithal to understand the subject or consciousness, because (3) being theoretically oriented, they (a) are unwittingly determined by their historical situation, and (b) cannot grasp the experiential motivations that constitute the “I am,” that is, bare existence. Heidegger is in the position of undertaking a radical deconstruction and reconstruction of the self, but one that cannot take its bearings by theory. He finds in Jaspers the promptings to a philosophic orientation that does not “still the stream,” and that may, therefore, provide the needed orientation for the historical investigations.

8

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James D. Reid likewise identifies the difficulty in apprehending what the standard is by which historical excavations may be oriented: “what sorts of experiences provide the measure? How are they to be approached and criticized and under what description? What guarantees their ‘originality’? Where does the phenomenologist discover the criteria that guide concrete studies of an extant philosophy?” (Reid 2005, 35). Kisiel and Sheehan write in their annotated glossary:  “Its precursors [Sorgen] are the biblical Bekümmerung (1920) and Augustine’s cura (1921)” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 438). Of Bekümmerung, translated “anxious” or “troubled concern,” they write:  “This term is used in the 1920 and 1922 essays as well as in the courses held in this period to convey the original motivation to philosophize in the face of the very facticity of life. It is replaced by the distinction that ‘angst reveals care’ as the development approaches Being and Time” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 430).

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Jaspers and Limit-Situations Jaspers, Heidegger claims, presses as far as possible from within the theoretical, objective philosophic framework. Jaspers’ indispensable contribution is the insight that one senses one’s subjectivity  – experiences one’s own self-possession  – in experiences of antinomy, such as chance, contradiction, and facing death. That is, in such situations one is uniquely capable of distinguishing oneself as an existing “I am” – emphasis on the “am” rather than the “I” – distinct from any other sense of the ceaseless flow and flux of “life.” Because it is impossible to give a theoretical account of the subject that reliably distinguishes it from the swirl of flux and motion that makes up the whole of life, as such, the subject is typically not distinguishable from the vital currents in which it is submerged. And yet, Jaspers points out, in “limit-situations,” the flow of life itself seems to hold out the subject as a separate unit, as a point distinguishable from everything else. Such situations illuminate, for Heidegger, the radical finitude of the subject and therefore of all of the subject’s apprehensions of the objective. What is needed is a philosophic method that does not mask this finitude or ignore it – thus, which breaks with the theoretical tradition of “generalization” and every other object-oriented approach – but which seizes this finitude in its radical particularity and makes such finite particularity central to the self-understanding and therefore the task of philosophy. If the primordial, fundamental experiences that need to be apprehended are moving events, too radically particular to be grasped by the generalizing, hence static, objectifying character of theory, then Jaspers’ method of zeroing in on limit-situations, moments where the flow of life itself comes briefly to a stop, is a most promising development. In limit-situations, Jaspers proposes a unique avenue to the primordial source of the subject–object distinction. The life of the human soul is described as a vital process. Our existence (Dasein) arises when this vital process has its boundaries established, as happens in the encounter with “limit-situations” (KJPW 6). This focus of Jaspers’ discussion is identified by Heidegger as the “solid core that sustains the whole work” (KJPW 10). Following Jaspers, he calls them “antinomies,” such as arise “as soon as human beings attempt to attain certainty about the totality of the world and life, [when] they find themselves faced with ultimate forms of incompatibility” (KJPW 10). They are junctures in the flow of life itself where the subject emerges distinctly from objects, and thus where subjective experience gives rise to the concepts that apprehend the objective “fundamental reality” (KJPW 15). The principal incompatibility with which Heidegger is concerned is the inevitable failure of any attempt to provide a complete account of both the objective and the subjective at once, “our Dasein,” that is, “the world and we ourselves” (KJPW 10). The “subjective” side of this failure is experienced as struggle, death, chance, and guilt. In such experiences, our finite existence attempts to extend past such oppositions to apprehend what is just beyond them in analogous terms:  “Antinomies destroy and bifurcate, and our experience of them

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amounts to standing within limit-situations, only because all this is initially viewed from the vantage point of our approach to the flowing stream of life as a whole. Regarding the genesis of meaning, even concepts have their origin in the whole of life” (KJPW 11). Thus the primordial shows itself in those situations of antinomy where the ceaseless flow of life interrupts and contradicts itself, and the genuine source of the distinction between the subject and the object, and therefore the existence of the “I am,” shows up. Heidegger finds, however, that Jaspers has not adequately developed his notion of limit-situations to elucidate the primordial experiences because he has retained a prejudice in favor of theory. Jaspers presents limit-situations as antinomies or oppositions, but they appear as such “from the point of view of the Absolute” which is the whole of life (KJPW 22 – emphasis in original).10 The whole – life – is thus regarded as the primal or greatest object (KJPW 18). From this perspective, limit-situations are contradictions of the whole: “death contradicts life” and “chance contradicts necessity as well as meaning” (KJPW 22). Heidegger juxtaposes such experiences as seen with respect to the “Absolute” object with the encounter with such experiences in the course of a human life: “struggle, death, and chance are . . . limit-situations; i.e., we can experience struggle and death as limits in our consciousness of that whole which somehow exceeds life” (KJPW 22). Owing to his “observational” orientation, Jaspers makes an analogy between human finitude and the finitude of objects or things that “break forth into the light of day from out of this whole, pass through it, and return to it” (KJPW 18). Heidegger insists, however, that there is no such analogy, that the finitude of human existence, as experienced, is radically distinct from what is observably finite. The difference between Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s use of limit-situations shows itself, for example, in their difference approaches to death. There is no analogy between death as a universal instance of the finitude of objects emerging from and receding into the moving flux of life, on the one hand, and the first-person, experienced approach of one’s own death: a “ ‘lived relation to death’ is not to be confused with ‘universal knowledge about death’ ” (KJPW 22). Neither its ubiquity nor its general familiarity is what is uniquely disclosive about death. The experience rather than observation of death is radically particular, and so the latter is a reflective generality that brings phenomena to a stop which otherwise remain in motion, whereas the former is a promising moment in 10

Here again Heidegger is critical of Jaspers’ ad hoc adoption of a variety of intellectual motives from his immediate intellectual tradition:  “This concept [the Absolute] represents a syncretism in which the Kantian doctrine of antinomies and its guiding concept of infinity are combined with Kierkegaaard’s concept of the Absolute, which has been ‘cleansed’ of its specifically Lutheran religious sense and its particular theological meaning in this regard . . . transplanted into that vagueness that arises from the concept of life we described above” (W 23). Heidegger’s implication is that one cannot adopt concepts from another thinker without apprehending the problem that they were initially devised to respond to, and therefore without apprehending the experiential motivation that is expressed in that problem.

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the torrent of life where life itself stills itself. This is true not just of individual humans, but of “experiences, individual human beings, a people, a culture – all of these fall prey to death” (KJPW 22); in this sense, death is a universal.11 Heidegger’s objection is not simply that Jaspers is mistaken; it is that his fundamental approach to the phenomena, guided by the “observational foreconception” of theory, is wholly unsuited to them. Jaspers retains the prejudice – in Heidegger’s precise terms, the “fore-conception”  – to treat life theoretically. Strictly speaking, prior to his investigation of life, he foreconceives of it as an object which will be observed, “looked” or “gazed” at, that is, “theorized” about. When Heidegger refers to this as an “aesthetic” orientation, he means to emphasize the original meaning of “theory,” which understands it as a sort of looking, or an ocular attitude toward the thing looked at: “The actual motivational basis from which this preconception thus arises is a fundamental experience of the whole of life in which we keep this whole before our gaze in the form of an idea. In a very formal sense, this experience can be defined as a ‘fundamental aesthetic experience’ ” (KJPW 20). Such a foreconception implies a distance between the “object” being observed and the “subject” doing the observing. That is, it already presumes the subject–object distinction and so cannot, therefore, apprehend that very distinction. The implication of Jaspers’s position is that life exists, “is there” (Dasein), as something that “we have” only or especially when we look at it, that it is the sort of thing that is in such a way as we have it principally or exclusively by gazing upon it. Since it retains the theoretical prejudice, Jaspers’ work thus also repeats the error diagnosed by Natorp and fails, therefore, to provide the basis for a pretheoretical grounding for philosophy. Because Jaspers treats “life” as an object, he cannot fully account for the distinction between the motion of life and the static concepts he employs to understand it: “Every attempt to understand life is forced to turn the surge and flux of the aforementioned process into a static concept and thereby destroy the essence of life, i.e., the restlessness and movement (again understood more as an occurrence [Ereignis] than as a directedness to something) that characterize life’s actualization of its ownmost [eigentlich] qualities” (KJPW 16). Life in Jaspers is treated as a flowing whole, but this whole is exterior to the concept-forming person, who stands outside the flow and observes it as a region. This leaves unanswered how it is that concepts that “still the stream” of life either emerge from flowing life and

11

Their respective understandings of death illuminate an important difference between Heidegger and Hegel. For Hegel, the fear and therefore contemplation of death are instrumental for the introduction of human existence to the universal (PhG 148); similarly, in politics, the occasional recurrence to war reintroduces the universal to human life (see Taylor 1975, 155). That is, death is a universalizing element of human existence, that illuminates our shared, general humanity. For Heidegger, and from his earliest remarks on the theme, death is unshareable and radically particularizing. There is no analogy between one’s own death, anticipated in the first-person, and another’s death, seen in the third-person.

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connect to the observer or how they emerge from the observer and connect to life.12 Jaspers, despite his promising insight into limit situations, like the other contemporary philosophers discussed by Heidegger cannot resolve the problem of motive. He too, therefore, succumbs to the Natorp critique: theory cannot understand the phenomena because it is static and the phenomena are in motion. Another approach is required. Jaspers’s aesthetic foreconception is thus actually hostile to his own intention, as understood by Heidegger. The foreconception at work treats life as something out there, a region to be observed, rather than as something that flows from within, or that includes the “observer” and the observer’s motivations and experience. This puts the “understanding” at a remove from the intended “phenomenon of existence,” which cannot be formulated or classified in “regional” terms (KJPW 32). Moreover, the orientation of this foreconception does not allow “the self’s anxious concern [Bekümmerung] about itself to emerge” as a clue to the genuine mode of grasping the experience of life (KJPW 32). Because theoretical observation is blind to the subject’s motivations, Heidegger attempts to appropriate Jaspers’ intention and “free” it up, by making Jaspers’ own insight into the importance of limit-situations central rather than peripheral to his own investigation of the fundamental experiences and allowing “the self’s anxious concern about itself to emerge” as a precious clue to the primordial question of the “I am.”

Formal Indication Jaspers’ suggestion that limit-situations might be moments inviting the apprehension of the “I am” is taken by Heidegger and made central in his method of “formal indication,” thus supplying the sought-after means of apprehending “the self’s anxious concern about itself,” that is, the “consciousness” or subject as required for an ethics. Formal indication is Heidegger’s method for thinking philosophically outside the constraints of the objectifying, theoretical tradition.13 He presents the “formal indication. . . [of] Existenz” as his 12

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Heidegger writes: “The other features exhibited by Jaspers’s method, namely, the treatment of the question of conceptual expression and the question of ‘systematics,’ are also based on his underlying preconception, i.e., on the initial approach to life as a region and the observational attitude toward this region. Life is an infinite flowing whole, but since concepts are forms that bring life to a standstill, it is impossible to grasp life and truly understand it” (KJPW 34). The preeminent Heidegger scholar, Theodore Kisiel, has reconstructed the central importance of formal indication for Heidegger’s philosophy in his masterful The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Kisiel 1993). In that work, he reconstructs from sometimes misleadingly edited materials the importance of “formal indication” in Heidegger’s early lecture courses and publications. Kisiel’s scholarship has made formal indication a focus of Heidegger scholarship, in particular for its role in distinguishing Heideggerian phenomenology from Husserl. On formal indication, see also Dahlstrom 1994, Gadamer 1994, Kisiel 1994, Pöggeler] 1987, Streeter 1997. For critiques of Kisiel, see Burch 2010; McEwen 1995; Sheehan 1995. In the following discussion of formal indication, I deemphasize – as against, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer – the

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appropriation of Jaspers’ most fundamental intention and the superior way to reference the phenomenon referred to by Jaspers as “life” (KJPW 9). The formal indication is superior because, unlike theoretical observation, the formal indication provisionally “points out” the subject matter while still including the “subject” in the disclosure. It includes the fundamental experience of the “I am,” obscured by the theoretical legacy. Though he refers to it in the “Comment,” and as crucial as it clearly is to his thinking, formal indication is not fully elucidated there.14 In Heidegger’s lecture course on “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (Winter Semester, 1920–1), he supplies a fuller account of formal indication (PRL 57–65/39–46). Looking at this course is necessary to see how formal indication both appropriates Jaspers’ insights into the centrality of limit-situations while responding to the Natorp critique and refraining from “stilling the stream.” As such, formal indication can supply the needed guidance for the deconstructive, historical excavation of the self.15

14

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“pointing” element of formal indication, and stress instead Heidegger’s use of this method to reinvolve the “subject” in philosophy: “The inheritance of phenomenology’s concepts of ‘seeing’ or, respectively, of ‘evidence,’ and the ‘fulfillment’ towards which phenomenology, working the way it does, is under way, takes a new turn here into the ‘existentiell’ as well as the historical. Plainly, the expression ‘indication’ tells us that here no claim is being made to have found a concept, to have grasped something conceptually. The concern, then, is not eidetic universality in Husserl’s sense. An indication [Anzeige] always stays at the distance necessary for pointing something out [Zeigen], and this, in turn, means that the other person to whom something is pointed out must see for himself” (Gadamer 1994, 33). Also, see Hatab on formal indication, who misses the inclusion of the “subject” in the formalization (Hatab 2000, 12–13). As Heidegger remarks, “The formal is something relational” (TDP 63/43). A  recent study that surveys and helpfully categorizes the discussions of formal indication is MacAvoy 2010. Heidegger writes: “Using formal indication (a particular methodological level of phenomenological explication that will not be dealt with further here, though some understanding of it will be gained in what follows)” (KJPW 25). See Dahlstrom 1994, 780. Cf. Reid 2005. Dahlstrom’s discussion of the course Phenomenological Introduction to Aristotle draws out Heidegger’s adumbration of two dimensions of formal indication:  its “referring-prohibitive” function and its “reversing-transformative” function. He reads the former as Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl’s bracketing, the latter as “theological” (Dahlstrom 1994, 783). The latter function is what provides guidance through the obscuring “ruinance” that characterizes Heidegger’s attitude to contemporary culture. Gadamer sketches the role of formal indication in guiding the historical deconstruction: “Here we detect traces of the basic attitude in phenomenology which Heidegger amplified with his concept ‘destruction.’ Taking down whatever covers something up, whatever has rigidified, whatever has become abstract – this was the great passionate appeal in Heidegger’s beginnings and his defense against that ‘ruination’ of life which he was later to call the proclivity to decadence and fallenness [Verfallenheit] in our being-there. The task is to resist the tendency to turn something into dogma. Instead, we are called upon to grasp in our own words, to put into words, that which we are shown when we are given an indication of something. The ‘formal indication’ points us in the direction in which we are to look. We must learn to say what shows up there and learn to say it in our own words. For only our own words, not repetitions of someone else’s, awaken in us the vision of the thing that we ourselves were trying to say. . . . But when we have immersed ourselves in these things and taken to heart that what formal indication is describing in this way is itself a formal indication, then what was important to Heidegger comes into view; namely,

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For Heidegger, formal indication avoids the distorting effects of being oriented by objectivity. He argues that this method is appropriate to the matter being studied, of which the most that should initially be said is that it relates to the bare existence of the investigator. The differences between Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ approaches to the same, as it were, subject matter, lead Heidegger to claim that the “object actually investigated in Jaspers’ work [life] can be defined in formal indication as our existence [Existenz]” (KJPW 9).16 The different terminology points to the importance of the “subject” undertaking the investigation, the “I am”: “Having such a formally indicated meaning, this concept is intended to point to the phenomenon of the ‘I am,’ i.e., to the sense of being in this ‘I am’ that forms the starting point of an approach to a context of fundamental phenomena and the problems involved there” (KJPW 9). “Life” is out there, an object of sorts, whereas Existenz, formally indicated, includes in the indication the claim that “I am.” The claim being an “indication,” Heidegger emphasizes its non-final, provisional, but therefore also disquieting character: “the question of how we should enact our initial approach and access will constantly stand before us in the starting point of our approach to this problem of existence whenever we have understood it in a genuine way” (KJPW 31). Formal indication thus keeps the question of the appropriate initial approach in view, satisfying Heidegger’s insistence that the search for primordiality be characterized by the perpetually renewed anxious distress about achieving primordiality. Shortly before aborting the methodological introduction to a course of study on Paul’s letters at the behest of disgruntled students (see PRL 65/45; Kisiel 1993, 171–2), Heidegger sketched what he intended by formal indication by distinguishing it from theoretical generalization. In generalizing, the intellectual procedure that typifies theoretical philosophy, one is, as Heidegger puts it, bound to a certain “material domain” (Sachgebiet), the “what” under investigation (PRL 59/40). This means that one’s thinking is always determined, at least in part, by the matter about which one thinks. Generalizing always generalizes with respect to one direction or another, and remains within the “material region” in question. That is, it is oriented by what comes to be referred to as the “object.” Formalization, on the other hand, “is not bound to the particular ‘what’ of the object to be determined” (PRL 61/42). Thus one’s thinking is freed from the thing (Sache) being thought. In formalization, I see the determination of its “what” not from out of the object; rather I read the determination “off’ ”the object. I must see away from the what-content and attend only to the fact that the object is a given, attitudinally grasped one. Thus, “the formalization

16

that it remains for each and every one of us to carry out individually our own fulfillment of the thing of which we are given an indication” (Gadamer 1994, 33–4). Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time is continuous with this theme:  “Only if we take our orientation from existentiality as interpreted in an ontologically positive manner, can we have any guarantee that in the factical course of the analysis of ‘consciousness’ or of ‘life’, some sense of ‘Reality’ does not get made basic, even if it is one which has not been further differentiated” (SZ 212).

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arises out of the relational meaning of the pure attitudinal relation itself, not out of the “what-content as such” (PRL 59/40).

Formalizing, then, is not determined at all by the “content” or “what” the way that generalizing is; it refers to the relation between the thing and the person knowing the thing. Not being ordered by the thing (Sache), the formal indication is wide open in terms of meaning, and “meaning only in relation to the phenomenological explication” (PRL 44). Formal indication takes place within this disclosure without the distance between subject and object implied by generalizing. Thus, in a formal indication, it is given that the “I am” is within the disclosedness that includes the “object”: “The formal is something relational” (PRL 43). Formal indication is therefore, in principle, universalizable in a way that no generalizing method truly is. As Heidegger implied in his critique of the Neo-Kantians, Lebensphilosophers, and nonhistorical phenomenologists in the “Comment,” in theorizing they happened merely to privilege that aspect of whatever occurred most proximately to them and determine that this was its “essence,” not realizing that they were privileging accidental qualities. Formal indication is not less abstract than generalizing, but in fact so abstract as to include every possible particular without distortion.17 What Heidegger envisions is a nontheoretical, thus nonobjectifying, sort of philosophizing that is able to understand the motives of the investigator because it does not succumb to the narrowing falseness of objectifying generalizations. Objectifying generalizations fasten onto one aspect of a thing (Sache), its whatness or content, and on this basis abstract to the rank of species, then to the rank of generalities, without allowing that it was a peculiar quality of the thing and a peculiar foreconception of the investigator that allowed it to be treated like an object. As such, the generalizing was always governed by the objectivity – by one narrow aspect – of the thing. This, in turn, is determined by the subject’s motivation to look at this one narrow aspect of the thing, the subject’s preference for objectivity. Formalization answers the problem of theoretical motivation by including motivations in the disclosure. Thus, formalizing aspires to be, in a sense, even more abstract than generalizing, but by doing so it avoids being determined by any qualities of the thing and any prejudicial foreconceptions of the investigator. It can thus more properly claim to be free from determinations and thus to “bracket all standpoints.”

17

Cf. Dahlstrom 1994, 785:  “Heidegger’s emphasis on the formality of philosophical concepts is somewhat misleading. Philosophical concepts are clearly not understood by him as being so devoid of content that they are unable to preclude errant presumptive determinations of their meaning” (1994, 785). Heidegger’s purpose, though, is to devise a philosophic method that is sufficiently “formal” as to supply a nonarbitrary account of the primordial, i.e., that is more universal than any generalization. In Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, he characterizes formal indications as empty: “The empty content in its sense-structure is at the same time that which provides direction toward the actualization” (GA 61 33/Heidegger 2001b, 26; see MacAvoy 2010, 85).

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In the “Comment,” formal indication allows Heidegger to make Jaspers’ limit-situations central and thereby to respond to the problem of theoretical motivation. Heidegger refers to “the formal indication of Existenz” as his appropriation of what Jaspers refers to objectively as “life.” By so indicating Existenz, he purports to take his orientation from the bare “thatness” of the “I am” as opposed to the false analogy between its thatness and the whatness of finite objects in the flow of life. Existenz thus refers to the unsurpassable first-person orientation of the investigator as revealed not by object-oriented theory, but by situations that expose the perilous, tenuous life – or, more precisely, Existenz – of the existing inquirer, namely, “limit-situations.” Antinomies such as struggle, death, and chance reveal more transparently the “I am” by enflaming the “self’s anxious concern with itself,” finally allowing only this anxious sense of self-possession as the marker of primordiality. Whereas theory could not guide the historical excavation that Heidegger sees as the necessary response to our historical situation, formal indication supplies the needed grasp of the primordial phenomena, the “fundamental experiences” and the “fundamental question.” It may therefore, in turn, orient a historical deconstruction. Heidegger’s philosophic method has as one of its results the claim genuinely to apprehend each distinct, unique “subject,” without falsifying each of them as an instance of a species, but as a discrete, self-possessed “I am.” In refusing the traditional orientation by the object, formal indication does justice to the unique character of “subjects,” namely, that they possess themselves distinctly. In this context, then, the prospect of a theoretical ethics emerges clearly as an affront to the radical particularity of each “I am,” indeed as a frightened flight from such facticity that entails the denial of the distinctiveness of each particular person in each particular situation. The “consciousness” sought for in order to satisfy the problems bequeathed by value philosophy has been discovered, but as radically distinct and untouched in its distinctness by anything like the general rules or norms of ethics. Its formal qualities are apprehended so abstractly as to transcend any ethical rules or norms whatsoever. A theoretical ethics would appear, then, to provide an illusory gloss on those in fact most revealing experiences that constitute our existence, based on generalizations that cannot, in either the first or final analysis, account for themselves. This much may be true, but it leaves the question, indeed it reinvigorates the question, What ought we to do?

History and the Future Past In formal indication, Heidegger has found a philosophic method that fulfills the task he set for himself in his programmatic courses of 1919:  the adumbration of a nontheoretical (KNS) mode of philosophically apprehending the unity of both the historical-empirical consciousness and the formal consciousness (SS), or as he put it in the “Comments,” the fundamental experience of

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the “I am,” the location of the generation of concepts from within history. The philosophic procedure for grasping the “I am,” however, and its essence as recurrently disturbed, anxious grasping for its own self-possession, make it impossible that the procedure should be the basis for a philosophic ethics. Any ethics that deserves the name requires the coordination of more-or-less formal rules of conduct with particular experience. The decisive characteristic of the “I am,” however, is that its self-possession is impeded and obstructed by any of the necessarily theoretical attempts to formulate such rules, no matter their level of generality. This is not, however, to say that Heidegger’s formulation of the matter is without “practical” consequences. Though what he lays out in the “Comment” (and elsewhere) is not a philosophy of ethics, the deconstructive hermeneutics he outlines do require a reorientation toward the most particular material of history that is inescapably “practical,” or nontheoretical; his own term for it is “enactmental.” Contrary to a common reading of Heidegger, the summoning up of the past that he has in mind is shaped most fundamentally by the future. The approach to history that he develops is not simply a backward-looking, nostalgic traditionalism, attempting to re-create a lost moment of communal heritage. Heidegger’s recurrence to the past is not primary, but is first prepared by formal indication. This most thoroughgoing abstraction allows for the appropriation of the most radical particularity sought by Heidegger’s deconstructive historical investigation. Heidegger’s rejection of theory is prior to and guides his turn to history. It is undergirded, however, by the conviction that the individual is more primordial than the genus, not just ontically, but ontologically. It is not sufficiently appreciated, however, by either his critics or his epigoni that the practical effect, more than simply choosing a preferred moment from the past to relive, is potentially much more totalizing and revolutionary.18 This is not to say that the future is an open field, to be determined in its content by the will or free choice of each “I am.” The future is indeed limited by the past, but it is not determined by the past. Rethinking the “I am” and understanding the priority of the “am” has consequences for orienting ourselves with regard to what “is,” that is, with regard to everything that is. Heidegger urges a “radical suspicion” of all foreconceptions, concepts, and accounts of the generation of such concepts that privilege objects, regions, objectivity, or classification in their thinking in order to avert the tendency of thinking of the “I” as an “object that can be ascertained and classified by inserting it into a region” (KJPW 26, emphasis in original). The

18

Pace Fritsche, who provides the most detailed argument for the priority of the past to Heidegger’s political understanding (See his 1999, as well as follow-up adumbrations of the claim in 2009 and 2012). Wolin (1990) and Faye (2009) each develop versions of this argument. Nolte (1992), ironically, provides a structurally similar interpretation of Heidegger – where the past is, in the decisive sense, primary – in defense of Heidegger’s politics. Each of them misses the priority of the future and the necessary role of philosophic abstraction in apprehending it.

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very formulation of the verb, “to be,” falls under such suspicion: “When it has the sense of ‘is,’ the sense of being [Seinsinn] has developed from objectively oriented experiences that have been explicated in ‘theoretical’ knowledge, and in which we always somehow or other say of something that it ‘is something’ ” (26). That is, with the development of the sense that something “is” rather than that something “am” – so to speak – the requirement is already such that one must be theorizing objectively, thinking of the thing in question as being of something else, a region or field. Already this is to privilege the objectifying, theoretical, observational foreconception. One can have an “am” as a thing uniquely irreducible, but something “is” only as something in common with other things. The classical formulation, traceable to the Socratic school, that “to be is to be something” is already, on this account, a deviation from the original, in the sense of more primordial, sense of being, the sense that “I am.”19 The fundamental experience that Heidegger is pointing to, marked by having oneself in an anxiously concerned manner [bekümmert], is prior to its formulation in terms of the third-person.20 To approach knowledge of the ‘is,” objectifying knowledge, one necessarily comports oneself in an observational attitude, and thus sets oneself at a remove from “existence and from a genuine having of it (anxious concern)” (KJPW 26).21 The approach to history Heidegger has in mind is designed to uncover the radically particular and unique “history” of each, existing “I am,” to retrieve it in its particularity from beneath an objectively oriented historical residue. Once objective-theoretical regions and prejudices are rejected as suspect, the possible meaning of what is being sought in the “I am” really flourishes. Therefore, it may be emphasized, the “I am” being sought is not a radically isolated individual in either the Lockean or Cartesian sense; rather, Heidegger characterizes the “I am” as being related in its essence to itself, to its world, and to others.22 19

20

21

22

Stanley Rosen (1993, 70–1) develops a Platonic riposte to Heidegger that argues for the primacy of the claim that “to be is to be something.” Remi Brague, Aristote et la question du monde (Brague 1988) explores how the Greeks missed the phenomenon of “world.” Heidegger writes: “this having is enacted prior to whatever knowledge about it we might later acquire by objectifying it with the ‘is,’ and such knowledge is in fact inconsequential for this enactment” (KJPW 26). Kisiel and Sheehan (2007) write in their work’s annotated glossary: “Its precursors [Sorgen] are the biblical Bekümmerung (1920) and Augustine’s cura (1921)” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 438). Of Bekümmerung, translated “anxious” or “troubled concern,” they write: “This term is used in the 1920 and 1922 essays as well as in the courses held in this period to convey the original motivation to philosophize in the face of the very facticity of life. It is replaced by the distinction that ‘angst reveals care’ as the development approaches Being and Time” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 430). This is also true of Being and Time, contrary to certain prominent misconceptions that it presents a radically isolated “individual” as the locus of Being. Cf. Habermas 1977, 161:  “the quasi-religious choice of the private, self-individuated existence”; Adorno 2003: “To be sure, Dasein is constituted in Historicity, but Heidegger focuses on individuals purged of the hidden and not so hidden injuries of their class, their work, their recreation, purged of the injuries they suffer from their society” (Marcuse 1977, 32).

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What is uncovered there is not “the ‘I’ as something located in a region, as an individuation of a ‘universal,’ or as an instance of something.” The “I” discovered there is “mine,” directly; “this experience is the experience of the ‘I’ as a self” (KJPW 25). In a very important sense, then, it is one’s own past. The past of each “I” is interpreted relative to the possibilities of its own particular future. Because the past is not a region or field to be apprehended objectively, the content of each past is highly relative and variable, dependent on the particular circumstances toward which each “I” is directed. Recurring to one’s past self, then, on this scheme, is not a revival of a lost age, or a simple repetition of a past version of “oneself”  – say, from the age of the Greeks, or of a lost, Germanic, völkisch communal Gemeinschaft  – but depends on the future being faced currently: “This past is not like an appendage or baggage that the ‘I’ drags along with itself; rather, it is experienced as the past of an ‘I’ that experiences it historically within a horizon of expectations placed in advance of itself and for itself” (KJPW 27, emphasis added). The content, so to speak, of what is being retrieved and reenacted is changeable. As each “I” orients itself toward the finite horizon of its future, this sets the boundaries for reconsidering its history. History and historical studies, on this model, are established within the task of hermeneutical phenomenology and become “the task that is most important for us in the whole complex set of problems we face concerning phenomena of existence” (KJPW 27).23 Historical study aims perpetually  – in a condition of recurrent distress or anxiety regarding its primordiality  – to attain to the deepest phenomenon, as required by the ever-shifting possibilities of each future. Heidegger designates the material uncovered by such future-oriented historical studies “facticity” (Factizität).24 Facticity refers to the movement from the “am” to the “is,” which is not genuinely susceptible to theoretical accounting.

23

24

The reason for focusing on this set of early works is to show that prior to and determining his excavation of Aristotle, Heidegger is alive to these concerns. The character of the problem and therefore what would be required to respond to it determines the character of Heidegger’s investigations of Aristotle. For a challenging alternative account of Heidegger’s turn to Aristotle, see Chacon 2010. As Heidegger elaborates in Being and Time, history rather than knowledge of nature provides the appropriate means of navigating the hermeneutic circle (SZ 152). This term owes its first usage to Fichte and was adopted by Neo-Kantians to refer to the “brute, irrational” underside of transcendental structures, having their source in the “unexplainably new, unprecedented, and creative” entry into history, associated with both the work of the individual genius as well as divine, miraculous intervention (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 433–4; Kisiel 1993, 28). In post-Kantian philosophy, it is the “irrational hiatus” between the a priori and the a posteriori. Heidegger appropriated it from Emil Lask’s study of Fichte around the time of writing this review. In Heidegger’s usage, differing importantly from the employment of the term by Neo-Kantians, who distinguished it from Logizität, Faktizität is characterized as having its own hermeneutic “logicity”; the Neo-Kantian distinction is thus collapsed (Kisiel 1993, 496–9). In Heidegger’s own autobiographical recollections, he connects Faktizität with his studies of Duns Scotus, and Scotus’ attention to what he called haeccitas (“thisness”) (see Kisiel 1993, 19, citing a 1927 letter from Heidegger to LöwithFacticity is the “pretheoretical primal something” (Kisiel 1993, 23), ever resistant to adequate theorization and objectification.

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It expresses the articulation of the world in which human life occurs, which is apprehended by means of what Heidegger calls “enactmental history,” as opposed to “object history” (Wirkungsgeschichte and Objektgeschichte). History so understood is not oriented by the standard “objects” of history – dates, events, timelines, and such – but rather by the intention to apprehend the radical particularity of each acting “I am”:  “the ‘historical’ is here not the correlate of theoretical and objective historical observation; rather it is both the content and the ‘how’ of the anxious concern of the self about itself, from which the former certainly cannot as such be detached” (28). The enactment-historical, in its intention of grasping the motivations in play, is not a record of or simply a description of the “history of ideas,” but rather an appropriative “reenactment,” so to speak, of the generation of those very ideas. Only such a study can satisfy the possibility opened up by formal indication to include the radical particularity of the investigating subject in the study itself.

The Sources of Heideggerian Politics in His Early Thought How then does Heidegger’s formal indication of Existenz and its attendant reconsideration of history – that is, his philosophic method of apprehending the fundamental experience of the “I am” – resonate with the possibility of a philosophic ethics? Is there an ethics or a politics of facticity, historically excavated, actively appropriated, oriented by the horizon of the future? To respond on the basis of these early works requires extrapolating some from Heidegger’s intimations and suggestions, but these give sufficient warrant to follow out his argument. Ethics involves, in its broadest sense, the relationship of one thing to another:  either the relation of one person to another; or the relation of one person to the things around one, and these in turn to another person; or the relation of oneself to a standard or an ought. In Heidegger’s terms, it is therefore inherently “theoretical,” as it requires espying these other things in order then to relate to them. Heidegger implies that knowing how to act in a situation requires having a grasp, in advance, of what these things are, what I am, what the things are in their relation to me and to the other person or people involved. To put it this way, though, is already to restrict the breadth of the Being of the things under consideration, for we must apprehend not only what they are, but how they are and that they are. That is, Heidegger implies, understanding how to get along in the world, in life, implies a prior understanding of the Being of the beings or somethings one encounters, including what one’s own Being is. Existenz thus needs to be grasped as bare existence, that point at which one (barely) is rather than is not and so in which being or existing is stripped of all adornment and accoutrement. It is exposed in moments when the aspects by which we normally orient ourselves break down, such as when theoretical rationality is shown to be inadequate. This anodyne formulation understates

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the shocking, intentionally bracing character of what Heidegger is trying to communicate: taking our bearings by an ethical grasp of or relation to other beings is to presuppose an understanding of those beings. What really exposes to us the truth of our genuine relations to these others is the grievous, anxious sense of our own bare existence as communicated to us in a broader context of impoverishment or destitution. That is, in such an experience of trauma and disruption, the world is revealed to us as it genuinely is. As such, “ethics” that orients itself by presuppositions about what other things are prior to evaluating their desert will never apprehend the real meaning of anything, and will therefore provide no real guidance at all. In order to discern what other things are prior to a consideration of their desert, Heidegger insists on the necessity of the “radical suspicion” of every available concept or preconception, in other words, the customs or opinions of the surrounding community. This is what establishes the fundamentally “negative” attitude toward society, both in refusing its available orientations but also, therefore, in calling radically into question the likely effect of Heidegger’s “pointing out.” In calling for such radical suspicion, Heidegger repeats a mode of relating to society that was previously urged by the founders of early modern political philosophy (Hobbes, Spinoza), and repeated by nineteenth-century figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In advocating, therefore, such a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” to use Ricouer’s apposite term, Heidegger reiterates what can be called a “modern” approach to the relation between thinker and society, as opposed, for example, to the Socratic orientation by “opinion.” Heidegger also takes over the Enlightenment notion that the philosopher is the paradigm for aesthetic and ethical judgment. That is, in Heidegger’s development and presentation of this line of thought, his philosophy retains what he attributed to the Neo-Kantians of a fundamentally practical character. As such, the praxis of the philosopher himself (one need not say Heidegger personally, though a certain dimension of this is implied) becomes the paradigm of practice. Thus, one receives the impression from Heidegger’s Neo-Kantians that to be ethical one must be a philosopher. Heidegger carries this over into his own consideration of the matter.25 This dimension of Heidegger’s thought is thus, wittingly or otherwise, continuous with another important dimension of the Enlightenment project. The purpose or goal of practice is to serve “truth.” For Heidegger, philosophy is no longer theoretical, but it continues to lead if 25

As Richard Velkley has remarked of Heidegger’s thought from the 1930s, in seeking to have philosophy provide educational and political leadership to the country, Heidegger in fact echoes Fichte and later German Idealists who saw the prospect of philosophy assuming a national pedagogical role as salutary. Here in Heidegger’s early thought we see anticipations of this aspect of the Fichtean relationship between theory and practice, where “theory” is nonetheless demoted in priority. This dimension of Heidegger’s thought is sometimes erroneously referred to as “Platonic,” as in “philosopher kingly” (Rockmore 1991, 56). The continuities between Heidegger and the German tradition of philosophy have, in this respect, been generally underemphasized (though see Bambach 2003; Newell 1984; Sluga 1993; Velkley 2011; Villa 1995).

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only initially in redetermining what is and the attendant boundaries of the community as such. Heidegger himself refers to his activity in the “Comments” as a “calling something to the attention of others” (KJPW 5; see 36).26 The strictly political, as distinct from ethical or practical, implications of this early work remain obscure. It is worth stating what Heidegger is not doing at this point. He simply is not propounding a specifically Nazi vision of politics, pace Johannes Fritsche and Emmanuel Faye. What he lays out in his earliest mature thought has the potential for political radicalism, no doubt. Indeed, as Heidegger treats it, political-practical radicalism is very possibly a correlate of the nontheoretical philosophic radicalism he calls for. So it is certainly plausible to claim that Heidegger’s earliest thought on such matters is broadly compatible with an idealized form of Nazism, but not identical to and certainly not, in its political implications, exhausted by it. More prominent in these writings, however, is a disdain for politics as such. Heidegger’s contempt for the “hustle and bustle” of culture, and the culturally accepted understanding of how a philosopher ought to relate to the surrounding community, is expressed in his conviction that the most he can expect of his own work is that it “point out,” not that it enjoin, direct, or deliberate out of a concern for any moral or political matters.

26

Cf. Van Buren 1994, 159, who emphasizes the Kierkegaardian sources of this approach.

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3 The Ambiguous Everyday: On the Emergence of Theory from Practice

The question to which the discussion in Chapters 1 and 2 points is, Why are we seemingly presented with moral, ethical, or cultural problems, to be treated in the manner that Heidegger characterizes as “theoretical,” when according to him they are more properly understood as “existential,” in the sense of relating most profoundly to our Existenz in its facticity? Restated: Why are we inclined to theoretical “solutions,” such as devising an ethics or a more comprehensive philosophy of value, if this is so misleading?1 In Being and Time, Heidegger articulates a response of sorts. In this, his professedly incomplete magnum opus, he treats at numerous junctures the emergence of the theoretical from the practical, or in the specific terms of this treatise, the present-at-hand from the ready-to-hand.2 Being and Time frequently describes how the present-at-hand, our comportment toward the other things in the world, the beings, as though they relate to us principally by means of knowledge as communicated by reflecting on their stable essences or “looks,” emerges from our otherwise prior, pragmatic involvement with them, as instruments of use to which we relate by our shared interest in their functions and purposes as these are illuminated by our intentions. The “astonishing torso” never supplies – at least to Heidegger’s satisfaction – an adequate or complete account of this emergence.3 1

2

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“One ought to state not only the truth but also the cause of the falsehood” (Aristotle, EN 1154a22–6). On the difficulties with assimilating “theory” to Vorhandenheit or (especially) “practice” to the Zuhandenheit, it is worth consulting Schürmann’s sound mediation of the differing positions of Pöggeler and Tugendhat (Schürmann 2008, 126–7). Theodore Kisiel frequently quotes this remark of Herbert Spiegelberg’s (Kisiel 1993, 1). Heidegger concludes the book by remarking that his account so far has not yet settled the matter: “It has long been known that ancient ontology works with ‘Thing-concepts’ and that there is a danger of ‘reifying consciousness.’ But what does this ‘reifying’ signify? Where does it arise? Why does Being get ‘conceived’ ‘proximally’ in terms of the present-at-hand and not in terms of the ready-to-hand, which indeed lies closer to us? Why does this reifying always keep

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Of the treatments Heidegger gives of the emergence of theory from practice in Being and Time, his discussion of what he refers to as “everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit) is the most germane to our understanding of both the political import of his thought, and inasmuch as everydayness is the medium within which the analytic of Dasein takes place, his thought as such.4 The word alltäglich means “everyday” in something like the sense of “prosaic” or “quotidian,” even “normal” or “ordinary.” Everydayness is the way we are “proximally and for the most part,” and is typified, Heidegger says, by its average, fallen mediocrity. In the portions of Being and Time where he draws nearest to political matters, Heidegger details our “everyday,” easy submission to the dominance of our collective self-understanding identity as “the They” or “anyone” (das Man). As such, we in our everydayness privilege the comforting, reliable, and easily communicated clarity of theory at the expense of holding ourselves together as beings who more “authentically” (eigentlich) exhibit our own true essences as the being among the beings that is open to the question of Being. This most easily overlooked way that Dasein exists in fact typifies it so completely that it is the declared starting point for the instauration of genuinely philosophic thinking represented by raising again the question of the meaning of Being. As Heidegger presents it in Being and Time, therefore, everydayness is both a philosophic obstacle – that is, it privileges theory of the kind validated by Neo-Kantians and his other contemporaries at the expense of a deeper form of thinking – as well as the necessary starting point for philosophic thinking. This dual character of everydayness assumes political consequences for two reasons. The first is that in our everydayness, we are so thoroughly “in thrall” to das Man, ourselves in the aspect of our relating to the public community at large, that it determines our entire existence. The second is that, as he develops the matter more fully in other writings, but implicitly even in Being and Time, philosophic thinking itself is not strictly an “individual” activity; to some

4

coming back to exercise its dominion? What positive structure does the Being of ‘consciousness’ have, if reification remains inappropriate to it?” (SZ 437). In this and the following chapter, I concentrate on “everydayness” rather than the concept he develops in greater detail in the years immediately following the publication of Being and Time (GA 24, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, for example) and after, “presence” (Präsenz), despite the latter being retained through several of Heidegger’s other works as a more comprehensive mode of Being that includes both the “presence” of theoretical and the “presence” of practical (ready-to-hand) objects. The tradition of metaphysics, so understood, privileges “presence” over against “absence.” See Mark Blitz’s very helpful discussion of this matter in relation to Being and Time (Blitz 1980, 185–187). As I interpret it, the incomplete character of Being and Time prevented Heidegger from developing his argument that what is initially given to us as two separate modes of Being, the present (vorhanden) and the handy (zuhanden), in fact both presumes a deeper sameness in their Being, namely, presence (Präsenz). In the present study, my focus is on “everydayness” as the comportment of human Dasein with respect to time that invites or privileges the orientation by presence in this larger sense, and that constitutes the way of Dasein’s Being by which Heidegger conducts the Daseinanalytik.

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extent but inextinguishably, it is a possibility of a community, and indeed represents the most precious expression of the community.5 That the community at large in its normal doings is characterized as such as das Man, everydayness is, then, both an obstacle to authentic communal existence as well as a necessary dimension of authentic communal existence. In this chapter, my intention is to establish, on the basis of the text of Being and Time, occasionally supplemented by other relevant texts when illuminating, Heidegger’s understanding of the character of everydayness as both occlusive, and therefore a kind of obstacle to genuine philosophy, and also as disclosive, and therefore the necessary starting point for such philosophy. In Chapter  4, I  will turn to a consideration of the more broadly communal dimensions of everydayness and das Man and there flesh out more broadly the political implications of Heidegger’s analysis. The reading I propose takes these two preliminary iterations of everydayness that Heidegger lays out in Being and Time – represented by the image of the craftsman in his workshop and the social existence of das Man  – and shows how Heidegger means for both of them to be understood as functions of time, that is, as expressions of our everyday attitude to temporality and the meanings of Being that this temporality favors. In addition, I read the treatment of everydayness in light of Heidegger’s own account of its place in the philosophic project in Being and Time proper. That is to say, I  emphasize two dimensions of Heidegger’s account of everydayness, each of which occupies an important place, it is fair

5

See GA 36/37 3–8 for an astonishingly forthright presentation of this. A recourse to baroque periodizations of Heidegger’s thought should not obscure that a fundamentally similar account is present in Being and Time, as well, though the terminology of the presentation is rather more technical. This is the plain meaning of Heidegger’s clear statement that Dasein “is” Dasein-with, and therefore the implication that the understanding and thinking of Dasein involves its communal character. The details of this are explored further in Chapter 6. The interpretation I  develop in this study, then, disputes the soundness of one of the main tenets of the Frankfurt School’s critique of Heidegger, common to the otherwise rather distinct critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. This tenet, to speak generally, is the claim that Heidegger treats principally of “individuals” in his discussion of Dasein, either to the exclusion of a consideration of the social situatedness of human existence (as in Habermas’s assessment of “the quasi-religious choice of the private, self-individuated existence” [1953, 161]) or else rendering it so abstractly as to be meaningless (see Marcuse 1977, 30–1: “As to Heidegger himself, he seems to use his existential analysis to get away from the social reality rather than into it . . . this philosophy cannot provide a conceptual basis for a social and political theory . . . . To be sure, Dasein is constituted in Historicity, but Heidegger focuses on individuals purged of the hidden and not so hidden injuries of their class, their work, their recreation, purged of the injuries they suffer from their society. There is no trace of the daily rebellion, of the strinving for liberation. The Man [the Anonymous Anyone] is no substitute for social reality.”) Though I dissent from their interpretive emphasis on the “individualism” of Heidegger’s thought (in the period of Being and Time), these interpreters nonetheless offer a wealth of perspicuous insights. In this connection, see Günther Stern’s superb study from 1947, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” which is the clear antecedent to the interview with Marcuse, cited previously. See Adorno 2003 [1964].

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to say, in the literature on Being and Time, but both of which are not usually read together.6 These two dimensions may be expressed as its “disclosedness” and its “occlusiveness.”7 In Heidegger’s understanding, our everydayness is the necessary starting point for the interrogation of Being which he sets as his own task (its disclosedness), and it is also precisely that which has blocked off or occluded our openness to this most fundamental question, indeed, to the deepest possibilities of our existence.8 A word on occlusiveness and politics. In Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution, an account the German thinkers who follow Rousseau and the 6

7

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A remarkable and – despite my several disagreements with him, which I will note – most illuminating exception is the scholarship of Hans Bernard Schmid. See his 2005, 2004. Whereas I read Heidegger’s account of the practical and social dimensions of everydayness as mutually illuminating, Schmid contrasts them, and sees a “division of labour” between the “positive” (meaning favorable) practical aspect of it and the negative, deprecatory treatment of its social form (2005, 4). He proposes to “reformulate” Heidegger’s account of the sociality of everydayness in order to rehabilitate Heidegger’s discussion (2005, 15). As such, I disagree with Schmid, who associates the craftsman image, the account of practice or the ready-to-hand, with the “disclosive” and the account of sociality with occlusion. My point is that each of these treatments share in the ambiguous duality of everydayness. My reading stands at odds with the main discussions of everydayness in the literature on Heidegger’s thought, therefore. Hubert Dreyfus (1991), perhaps most prominently, but also Mark Okrent (1991), John Haugeland (2013), and Robert Brandom (1983) have developed an account of Heidegger’s everydayness that virtually elides the distinctions between the ready-tohand, Being-in-the-world, and everydayness, strictly emphasizing the disclosive qualities of everydayness. Everyday practices are thus understood as the “background” against which a theoretical apprehension of the world takes place and from which it is derived. As Schmid ably details, however, these “normative pragmatist” Heideggerians do not account for Heidegger’s evident “deprecation” (Schmid’s terms: 2005, 3) of everydayness, what I refer to as its occlusiveness. On this understanding of everydayness, see the still pertinent critique by von Schoenborn (1972). The reader should also consult Robert Dostal’s exploration of Heidegger’s ambiguous usage of the term Indifferenz and its sometime coordination with everydayness (Dostal 1982, 43–58). Heidegger’s evident disdain for everydayness as the location of inauthenticity – despite his avowals that this is not a moral category (see SZ 43) – is central to the most prominent interpretations of him as a conservative revolutionary. For references to “inauthentic everydayness” (uneigentlichkeit Alltäglichkeit), see SZ 178, 313; reference to the “proximately and for the most part” inauthentic, SZ 326; emphases on the connection between everydayness and inauthenticity, SZ 232, 252; reference to “the inauthentic temporality of everyday Dasein as it falls,” SZ 424. See Wolin 1990, 44–53 for a representative discussion of everydayness as the realm of inauthenticity. Figal identifies the They-self as the “basic concept of unfreedom” in Martin Heidegger: Phänomenologie der Freiheit (Figal 1988, 141–53; reprinted in Polt 2005, 105–16). The They, das Man, will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter  4, as will the considerable debate in the literature on the character of inauthenticity and its relationship to authenticity. The chief political expression of the reading of Heidegger offered by Dreyfus and Haugeland, where the everyday supplies the pragmatic background texture of our meaningful existence, as Schmid notes, is developed more explicitly by such philosophers as Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty. See Taylor’s “Overcoming Epistemology” (in Philosophical Arguments 1995, 1–19), “Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger” (2006, 202–21), “Interpretation and the Science of Man” (1985, 15–57); to see Taylor’s assimilation of the “Heideggerian” position

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revolutionary violence engendered by that tradition of thought, he argues that it is necessary to see the importance of their conceptualization of an obstacle as a source of social discontent rather than any specific goal.9 He identifies three attributes of the obstacle that point toward “total revolution”: (1) that the full humanity of human beings be understood as an achievement rather than a natural endowment (Yack 1992, 20–2);10 (2) that this achievement be blocked by an obstacle which itself had come into being historically, that is, that it be seen as changeable (Yack 1992, 22–5); and (3), that this obstacle be seen as “subpolitical” or in some sense suprapolitical and so not being amenable to a “merely political” revolution in order to remove or to change it, but a “total revolution,” to put an end to its frustration of the achievement of the full flourishing of our promised common humanity in the immediate future (Yack 1992, 25–7).11 When the obstacle is understood as having these three characteristics, it does much to explain the unrestrained, chiliastic violence that characterized movements influenced by such thinkers as Marx and Nietzsche. The revolutionary impulse was motivated by the destruction of a profoundly frustrating obstacle that touched all aspects of life, not just the narrowly political – such as the capitalist mode of production, in the example of Marx (Yack 1992, 252) – rather than by a (confused) pursuit of a shared and frequently vaguely articulated goal.12

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to his own, consult Taylor 2007, 558–9. For a felicitous discussion of these themes in Taylor that sheds light on the connection to Heidegger, see Abbey 2000, 151–194. On Rorty’s pragmatic appropriation and critique of Heidegger, see Rorty 1991, 9–26, 27–49. “Most attempts to characterize and account for the social discontent of modern philosophers and the intellectuals they have influenced have focused on new ideals rather than on new obstacles. This approach has proven somewhat problematic with regard to the figures studied here, especially Marx and Nietzsche, since they have so little to say about the content of the good life. How could such a weak and undeveloped image of the good life inspire such intense longing?” (Yack 1992, 6). Likewise, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, Heidegger specifically prohibits considerations of the good life in his refusal of a philosophic ethics, a prohibition that carries through to the thought of Being and Time as well. Yack allows that there is considerable variety in the definition of what constitutes such humanity. As is well known, Heidegger denies that his thought should be considered a “humanism,” i.e., focused principally on human concerns rather than Being as such. It is nonetheless the case, however, that his analysis of “human Dasein” (see GA 64, 4–5) can be more or less “itself,” i.e., “authentic” (SZ 42–3), and therefore as the being that discloses Being, Being itself is ministering to the disclosure of Being. “The obstacle to the overcoming of the dehumanizing spirit of modern society is located by these social critics in some fundamental, sub-political sphere of social interaction which shapes human character. The removal of this obstacle requires a total revolution: a revolution which transforms the whole of human character by attacking the fundamental sub-political roots of social interaction” (Yack 1992, 9). “Total revolution thus designates in this study a revolution in what is perceived as the definitive sub-political sphere of social interaction, rather than a comprehensive and simultaneous attack on all social institutions. All who long for total revolution recognize that political institutions are secondary obstacles to human satisfaction” (Yack 1992, 10; emphasis in the original text). The thinkers he studies did not, Yack is at some pains to show, simply adopt a political

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The occlusiveness of Heidegger’s everydayness may be contrasted with Yack’s understanding of the role of the obstacle in these other thinkers.13 Heidegger himself invites such a reading because of (1) the way he characterizes everydayness as inherently occlusive of philosophic thinking, (2) his understanding of the task of philosophy as not exclusively but essentially communal, and therefore (3) everydayness constituting an “obstacle” to bringing into being the sort of community that would be most conducive to the flourishing of philosophy. Unlike the obstacles as diagnosed by Yack, in Heidegger’s account everydayness is “constitutive” (Verfassung) of our Being. There is some ambiguity about this in the text of Being and Time, inasmuch as the transhistorical, “transcendental” claims he makes about Dasein stand in some tension with the profoundly historicist character of his thought.14 Does everydayness, then, characterize all of Dasein’s dealings and doings? Or is it more in force at some times than at others? As we shall see, Heidegger understands everydayness to be constitutive of Dasein as such, but it is more or less ascendant in our make-up at different times. The present age, however, is characterized by the dominance of everydayness, but along with the alienation and distress that this entails, this dominance also allows us to have a particularly keen insight into its character, into that of Dasein, and therefore into re-raising the question of Being.

What Is Everydayness? To understand how everydayness is an obstacle to authentic communal existence, it is necessary first to see the privileged place it occupies in Heidegger’s argument in Being and Time.15 That the stated aim of Being and Time is to reopen the question of the meaning of Being implies not only that the question has been forgotten, but also that something has drawn our attention to

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messianism or a secularized Christian hope of transforming the world (pace Löwith 1949). Yack disposes quite ably of misleading religious analogies to modern discontent (10–18), such as Norman Cohn, Jacob Talmon, and Karl Löwith. Yack is not arguing anything so coarse as that these are the only or necessary political “results” of the thought of these thinkers: “I do not mean to suggest that the longing for total revolution is a necessary consequence of the new concepts I examine. Every new conceptual perspective opens up far more lines of inquiry than can possibly by actualized. That some possibilities rather than others are actualized often depends on factors external to the concepts themselves” (Yack 1992, 18). This is a tension on which he remarked in some of his later comments on the limits of Being and Time. See GA 9, 328 f., on the constraints of the metaphysical language of Being and Time, with, e.g., the title of Part One of the whole work, “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being” (SZ 41); see also Heidegger’s remark on the anthropological, subjectivist, and individualistic shortcomings of the work, where he comments, “and yet the opposite of all that was in my sights” (GA 65, 295). Heidegger expresses his developing understanding of the everyday and everydayness through the series of courses he offers in the 1920s at Freiburg and Marburg. The pertinent courses are published as GA 61, GA 62, GA 63, GA 64, and GA 20.

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this forgetting, and furthermore that it is possible to re-raise such a question. Heidegger identifies a widespread perplexity (Verlegenheit – “embarrassment”) about Being as that which has drawn our attention to the need to renew the investigation of the question (SZ 1). Heidegger’s “perplexity,” Verlegenheit, is his translation of Plato’s Greek, d’êporêkamen (the verbal form of the noun, aporia, which means without a path, or more literally, without a bridge).16 We begin, then, with a profound sense of waylessness, as engendered by the awareness that the meaning of Being is purportedly widely understood, and yet we are gripped – embarrassingly – by a sense of ignorance: “Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’? Not at all” (SZ 1). Here at the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger surveys three current definitions of Being, none of which is satisfying: that it is the most universal concept, that it is indefinable, and that it is self-evident (SZ 3–4).17 In a parallel discussion in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger glosses this provoking perplexity with an illustration. We regularly refer to being in a variety of ways that we cannot reconcile either to one another or to the obvious fact that we go around acting on apparently sound understandings of what Being means. We cannot square the different meanings of our use of the verb To Be, on the one hand – of What-Being (Wassein – i.e., what something is, or what we refer to as essence), with That-Being (Dassein – i.e., that something is, or what we refer to as existence), with True-Being (Wahrsein – i.e., a claim that x is y, such as, “this coffee is hot,” or what we refer to as the copula) – with, on the other hand, our obvious grasp of the unified meaning of Being evidenced in, for example, the cry, “Fire!” (KPM 159). Being is universally, “really” (eigentlich), understood in its meaning, yet sufficiently elusive that we have now become perplexed (SZ 1): this is the experienced impulsion to re-raise the question of Being that orients Heidegger’s investigation in Being and Time. Our very perplexity is our only, or at any rate, the most reliable, clue to the meaning of Being. As such, the investigation in Being and Time takes the form of a Daseinanalytik: “We are ourselves the being to be analyzed” (SZ 41). The investigation has as its topic the being that worries about its own Being, that has a “comportment,” therefore, “toward Being,” as Heidegger often puts it. Perplexity, aporia, thus appears perversely as a kind of openness: it betokens that Being is “an issue” for us. Confusion is, if only most tenuously, an expression of interest. It is our marker of our own Being and therefore it connects us to Being.18 We, then, are the openness to Being, or we are where Being opens

16

17 18

See Robert Denoon Cumming’s elegant, rigorous interpretation of the opening of Being and Time in Phenomenology and Deconstruction:  The Dream Is Over (Cumming 1991, 79). See also Michael Davis’s discussion of this opening section of Being and Time in the first chapter of The Autobiography of Philosophy (Davis 1999, 13–29). Compare Heidegger’s related discussion at BPP 180–96. See Heidegger’s discussion of the hermeneutic circle, SZ 152–3.

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into the world, however obscurely, however strangely. Therefore, Heidegger refers to us, each, as Da-Sein, “There-Being,” or Being-there.19 Dasein is the being that is open to Being. As it happens, we are quite closed off at present, but we are sufficiently possessed of disquiet that we may take our bearings by this. The only being that is open to Being – us, Dasein – is the one that is least well-accounted for, least well-understood, by the available definitions of the meaning of Being. The failure of our self-accounting, on this score, is the chief evidence of our finitude, but this should not be reckoned as principally a matter of “ignorance” in the Socratic sense.20 Rather, this finitude is our way, our pore, by means of which we may approach the question of Being. Heidegger singles out two dimensions of our finitude, already anticipated, as we have seen in the previous chapter, in his earlier “Comment on Jaspers”: Our existence is prior to our essence, and our Being is “mine,” or has the character of “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) (SZ 42).21 First, our openness characterizes us to such an extent that to speak of an essence prior to our existence is to foreclose altogether the meaning that Being has for us. Thus, we choose our “to be” on the basis of our Existenz. Our essence – what we shall be – is a function of our possible choosing, given that we already and continue to exist. Second, for us, our Being is not “a matter of indifference,” but is something we are invested in, we might say; we care about it, in Heidegger’s terms. It is not, therefore, apprehensible in the same manner that the Being of any other sort of being is apprehensible. Heidegger accounts for these two dimensions of the finitude of the being who is open to Being (viz. Dasein) by focusing on its temporality. Dasein is the being that is concerned for its own (mineness) continued being (Existenz) itself as itself, from beginning to end, stretched out through time for a finite spell, from birth to death (SZ 373). As a result, Dasein is the root and source of time as such, being the one thing for whom its Being (its being itself, its being in existence) is deeply bound up with its own continuous stretching along in time. Being is a function of temporality, and Being’s finitude is rooted in our temporality (SZ 335). Finitude has multiple forms of expression (KPM 154), meaning not just our death, or our awareness of our death, but our (sometimes

19

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See William Richardson’s discussion of Being as “manifesting” in his magisterial study, From Phenomenology to Thought (Richardson 2003 [1963], 20–1). See Olafson on unity of Heidegger’s thought in the singular importance of Dasein (Olafson 2006, 98–9, 101–2, 106–8). On the various expressions of our finitude, see KPM 15 and especially 154: it is not “the sum of all human imperfections.” We see here, then, the evident continuities between Heidegger’s formulation of this problematic and his formal indication of the existence of the “I am” in the Jaspers review: “Because Dasein has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: ‘I am,’ ‘you are’ ” (SZ 42; emphasis in the original text). This being said, the character and nature of the continuities between Heidegger’s earliest work and Being and Time are much disputed. Compare Kisiel’s emphasis on the developmental continuity (1993) with Van Buren’s claims of a sclerosis in Being and Time (Van Buren 1994).

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perplexed) sense of ourselves as particular individuals (in one sense or another – mineness) whose mortality (death) is, to be sure, the future end of our perishing finitude, but for whom such mortality makes any sense only when it is seen to be connected, looking backward along our once-chosen path toward our unchosen beginnings.22 Because, then, Being and Time takes the being Dasein as the only available clue to understanding anew the question of Being, and because Dasein is the being who, at root, is time, then we can understand why Heidegger’s “provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being” (SZ 1, author’s italics).

Temporality and Everydayness Heidegger’s discovery of everydayness emerges along with his attention to Dasein’s temporality. Dasein is the being that cares about its finite existence as itself, stretched out temporally from birth to death. Yet it never sees itself this way, or almost never: occasionally our obscurity to ourselves is interrupted by some momentary clarity, which is then immediately obscured again. Obscured by what? Why is this so? Dasein typically understands itself, Heidegger claims, as a being like all the other beings, the other beings whose existence is a matter of indifference, for whom time is not an issue. It does this because in its everydayness (Alltäglichkeit), it (a) privileges the stable, visible, reliable, publically discerned aspect of the beings it encounters, and (b) understands itself in the light of these aspects of the beings. Heidegger characterizes this self-concealing of Dasein from itself, its rendering itself a stranger unto itself, as a “flight” and our condition of being in flight “first of all and most of the time” (zunachst und zumeist) is “everydayness” (SZ 16, 184).23 It is “first of all,” zunachst, or nearest, Heidegger says, in its publicness (SZ 16). That is, this is what is accessible, visible, to others, in the first place or initially. It is zumeist, “for the most part” or “most of the time,” “usually,” meaning, “as a rule” (SZ 370). The everyday is the way of Dasein that is regularly “dominated through and through” by the public (SZ 370). So far from being a distortion of the normal human way of 22

23

Death or our awareness of our death should not be mistaken for what Heidegger means by “finitude” simply. Death, in Heidegger’s understanding, is the one, given, future, certain testimony of finitude on our part, and for this reason has what might be called an existentially heuristic function in alerting us to our finitude as such: it can bring us up short, and inasmuch as it cannot be shared with anyone else, or shirked in any respect, having it brought to our attention in this way might alert us to the real character of our “individuality,” and thus to other dimensions of our finitude. And an awareness of our own finitude, moreover, is the key to apprehending the finitude of Being. On the place of death in Heidegger’s thinking about finitude as such, see Gadamer 1975, 124–5. On the distinction between death and demise, see Smith 2007, 129–30, though Smith’s account is muddied by his introduction to Heidegger’s position an alien distinction between the “philosophic few” and the non-philosophic “many.” See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Preface, sec. 1. Macquarrie and Robinson iconically render zunachst und zumeist in their translation of Being and Time, “proximally and for the most part.” Joan Stambaugh renders it “initially and for the most part” (see her SZ 16).

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being, this distorting tendency is the “normal” way of being, which is to give a certain privilege to the publicly visible in its regularity and incipient stability. As Heidegger discusses it late in Being and Time, the very term “everydayness” designates a measure and therefore a sense of time that is comfortable with regularity.24 From the perpetual diversity of events, it culls a soothing, familiar uniformity. Heidegger vividly depicts it as a tomorrow of eternal yesterdays (SZ 371), consisting in a “pallid lack of mood” (SZ 345). Anything shocking or novel today will be old news tomorrow, immediately assimilated into an averaging regularity. Time in everydayness is made familiar and issues in nothing but “the comfortableness of the accustomed” (or “pleasantness of the customary,” Behagen in der Gewohnheit – SZ 371; Stambaugh calls it “being comfortable in habit”). This comfortable familiarity, however, hides an enigma. In its regularity, it suppresses the very character of Dasein as a finite stretching along in time. It disguises the identity of the open possibility of the future and the seemingly completed past by subsuming them both within a seemingly ever-present present. It proffers the sense that Dasein is now as it will be tomorrow and always has been, a tedious eternity. This attitude toward time determines the being, as in the character, of Dasein. “Who” Dasein is, in Heidegger’s preferred formulation of the question of its identity, who each one is, is not simply who I am now. Dasein is a unified stretching along, with its identity constituted by its past, present, and future as a unity of sorts (an “ecstatic unity”). Therefore, because it is “proximally and for the most part” inclined to see its future possibilities in terms of pallid, comfortable regularity, an eternity of yesterdays, then this attitude becomes more than an inclination; it becomes determinative! Dasein remains its past, present, and future, but its shall be in the future is open and not yet completely determined. Dasein, the choosing, open being, determines itself with reference to its future possibilities, by choosing what the being will be, and therefore, what it will become. These possibilities, in their turn, are limited by the particular past of each Dasein. In privileging the temporal “present,” everydayness privileges that aspect of things which is present to us, that is, the stable “looks” of the other beings in the world.25 Indeed, inasmuch as (a) these “looks” are also how other people see the beings, and (b) we tend to project our futures with regard to these beings, so understood, then everydayness inclines us to be “ourselves” with regard to how we are understood or would be understood by others. It inclines us to project ourselves into the future – otherwise quite open and free (though finite) – in such a way as would be comprehensible and indeed reliably comforting to others. The publicness of everydayness consists in what 24

25

“ ‘Everydayness’ manifestly stands for that way of existing in which Dasein maintains itself ‘every day’ . . . what we have primarily in mind in the expression ‘everydayness’ is a definite ‘how’ of existence by which Dasein is dominated through and through ‘for life’ ” (SZ 370). For a detailed and sound treatment of the theme of temporality in Being and Time, see Blattner 2005, in particular the conclusion (277–310).

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is commonly, constantly shareable between others. As such, it occludes the distinctive and possibly individuated character of each Dasein.26

Everydayness and the Traditional Beginning of Philosophy In orienting the project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time by interrogating Dasein in its everydayness, Heidegger is not repeating the classical orientation of philosophy, which begins with opinion, but is instead trying to distinguish his approach from the entire tradition of philosophy that extends from Aristotle (and earlier) to Husserl.27 He is also, though, trying to account for the source of its error as well.28 This intention comes out both in Heidegger’s contrast of the traditional concept of “category” with his own designation, “existential” (existentiale), and also in his dispute with Husserl over what really is “present” to us. In attempting to discuss Dasein, a being unique among the beings in that its Being cannot be captured by theoretical accounts of the meaning of Being, 26

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The differences between Heidegger and Arendt are cast into sharpest relief here, where Heidegger completely assimilates the public and publicness to the everyday preference for familiarity, constancy, and routine. Arendt, of course, identifies it as the location of the new, and therefore as the location of liberation and individuation of the actor from the means-end calculation of work, which Heidegger would think of as characterizing theoretical rationality and publicness both (see Arendt 1958). For a detailed and thorough treatment of the intellectual relationship between Heidegger and Arendt, see Villa 1995. There are numerous comparisons of Heidegger to Socrates that refer to both as practicing a philosophy that starts with the human being, as Graeme Nicholson put it, “the pathway followed by Socrates, Plato, and Heidegger” (Nicholson 2005, 48). One prominent Heidegger scholar even draws parallels between Socrates’ trial for impiety and Heidegger’s political activity (Kisiel 2002, 1–35). On Heidegger’s “Socratic hermeneutics,” see Gonzalez 2009; Kirkland 2007. For an extremely illuminating account of the relationship between Heidegger and Socratic philosophy, see Chacon 2009. By reading Heidegger’s everydayness as an expression of the “comfortableness of the accustomed,” I emphasize, instead, a “counter-Socratic” dimension in Heidegger. Heidegger is thus, in an important way, much closer to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of “Socratism” being a moralizing expression of the desire for comfort. See chapters 17 and 18 of the Birth of Tragedy. For an excellent, though brief, consideration of the contrast between Heidegger’s philosophic approach and that of classical, Socratic political philosophy, see Ehrmantraut 2010, 21, 165–6. Richard Velkley (2011) makes the relationship between Heidegger and the revival of Socratic philosophy by Leo Strauss the central theme of his superb recent study. The relationship of Heidegger’s own thought to this “tradition” is more clearly thematic in the several courses Heidegger devoted to the study of such figures as Aristotle and Kant. Nonetheless, as has been widely noted by Heidegger scholars, Being and Time expresses some of this explicitly and a great deal more implicitly. Moreover, the intended argument of the work as a whole was to have an element that deconstructed the history of philosophy, with major treatments of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle. There are numerous fine works of scholarship relating Heidegger to individual figures from the history of thought. The best single discussion of Heidegger’s relation to the Western philosophic tradition remains Werner Marx’s Heidegger and the Tradition (Marx 1973).

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we are, Heidegger says, in “a peculiar phenomenal domain” (SZ 43). As such, he will not speak of “categories” when accounting for Dasein, but rather of “existentials” (existentialia), because Dasein is the being with Existenz (SZ 42). As with his critique of Jaspers and contemporaries, “formal indications” and “existentials” are meant to be supracategorial, avoiding the theoretical prejudices implied in the use of “categories.” We, in our everydayness, have heretofore privileged the categorial and so understood the human in terms of our general qualities. This generalizing, categorial approach has obscured the very existence of existentials. No wonder we are perplexed! By contrast, everydayness, unlike any set of opinions, has no determinate content that may be taken as an intimation or reflection of the truth. Everydayness might be thought of as the condition of all opinions. It does not express or reflect any particular opinions about the just, the noble, or the advantageous, and thus no implicit (or explicit) accounts of the best way of life. It is sufficiently formalized to account for the way human beings are everywhere and always, meaning that the determinate content is sufficiently drained of particulars as to be capable of accounting for every possible human setting and way of life:29 At the outset of our analysis it is particularly important that Dasein should not be interpreted with the differentiated character [Differenz] of some definite way of existing, but that it should be uncovered [aufgedekt] in the undifferentiated character which it has proximally and for the most part. This undifferentiated character of Dasein’s everydayness is not nothing [nicht nichts], but a positive phenomenal characteristic of this entity. Out of this kind of Being – and back into it again – is all existing, such as it is. We call this everyday undifferentiated character of Dasein “averageness” [Durchshnittlichkeit] (SZ 43).

But as in his elaboration of the nontheoretical, nongeneralizing method of formal indication, Heidegger here does not mean to assimilate each particular within a more general rule, as would be characteristic of a science of sociology or politics. The everyday tendency to elevate and secure the most general or universalizable is not to be followed, but rather refused in order to be appreciated precisely as the typical tendency of everydayness.30 29

30

“The Dasein is not to be taken by setting some sort of aim and purpose for it, neither as ‘homo’ nor even in the light of some idea of ‘humanity.’ Instead, its way to be must be brought out in its nearest everydayness, the factic Dasein in the how of its factic ‘to-be-it.’ But this does not mean that we now give a kind of biographical account of a particular Dasein as this individual Dasein in its everyday life. We are reporting no particular everyday life but we are seeking the everydayness of everyday life, the fact in its facticity, not the everyday of the temporally particular Dasein but to be the everydayness for its particular while as Dasein is what matters to us” (GA 20, 208/ HCT 154–5; emphasis added). “Dasein in its everydayness, a highly complicated phenomenon, regards and defines it more authentically when a life is more differentiated. When we analyze Dasein in its everydayness and its being in everydayness, this should not be costrued as saying also that we want to derive the remaining possibilities of the being of Dasein from everydayness, that we want to carry out a

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In distinguishing existentials from categories, Heidegger displays some of the etymological dexterity he employs as a means of retrieving long-obscured possible understandings and for which he would become famous. Given that its own Being is a concern for Dasein and that it comports itself with respect to this Being, its characteristics need to be understood as possible ways to be, not as properties of a thing.31 Moreover, because the existence in question “is in each case mine,” then it is not to be grasped in its being a member of a species or genus, for whom Being cannot be an issue (because in such a case, Being is properly located in the genus). As such, the characteristics of Dasein are not properties, designated according to categories, but possible ways to be, or existentials (SZ 42). Categories, by contrast, are characteristic of beings that, in Heidegger’s distinctive argot, “do not have the Being of Dasein,” that is, every sort of being except for humans. They apply to beings for which Being is not an issue, for which their Being is already settled, and about which their Being is really never a question. For Dasein, however, such things are always “up in the air;” even when they purport to be settled, they are not. Heidegger derives the term “category” from its Greek, katêgoreîsthai. It signifies “making a public accusation, taking someone to task for something in the presence of everyone” (SZ 44). In the ontology of the ancients, a logos is premised on such a katêgoreîsthai, though it is not “someone” who is accused, but rather a being that is accused of “whatever it is as a being . . . that is to say, letting everyone see it in its Being. The katêgoreîsthai are what is sighted and what is visible in such a seeing” (SZ 44–5). Category reinforces the everyday tendency of Dasein to understand itself in terms of the things of the world as they are presently and publicly. It privileges the visible, the present, the publicly evident, and the general over the particular. All of the sciences of man – anthropology, political science, ethics – that take their bearings by such categories mistake the character of Dasein and thus forfeit from the outset its purchase on the only distinction worth attending to, the distinction between Dasein and every other being (SZ 45–51).32

31 32

genetic consideration on the assumption that every other possibility of the being of Dasein could be derived from everydayness. Everydayness persists everywhere and always every day; each is a witness as to how Dasein has to be and how it is in everydayness, even though in a different way. It is easy to foresee that everydayness is a specific concept of time” (GA 20, 209/HCT 156; emphasis in the original text). Blitz 1981, 45. This is what Olafson emphasizes in his account of the “unity” of Heidegger’s thought through all its stages and periodizations (Olafson 2006). Heidegger thus saw the other sciences as more meritorious to the extent to which they had begun to suffer “crises.” Heidegger saw, for example, the developments in physics in the early part of the twentieth century that called the premises of Newtonian science into question as extremely hopeful, and so regarded the work of Einstein and Heisenberg as promising developments (see Heidegger’s discussion of Heisenberg (GA 41); Heidegger later changed his mind about Einstein, reading him instead as remaining within the Galilean framework (a view that he had expressed earlier, in his 1915 Habilitationschrift). Heidegger’s intention was that upon laying out the “foundations” of a fundamental ontology

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Our constitutive, everyday privileging of regularity and stability is what stands behind the ascendence of the categorical sciences of generalization, including the human sciences.33 Heidegger’s discernment of existentials is done in opposition to this everyday tendency. The predominance of categories in philosophical thinking over the never-before-discovered existentials returns us to the situation from which Heidegger began in perplexity. Categories are indicative of the tradition of theoretical philosophy in the West. They altogether disguise, however, the role of everydayness in their very formation, to say nothing of their propagation. Their very dependence on our predisposition to see time as a homogeneous, stable continuum is utterly incomprehensible on their theoretical basis. Aristotle stands at or near the beginning of this tradition, as Heidegger indicates by appropriating the characteristic phrase “proximally and for the most part” to refer to how Dasein is in its everydayness. For Aristotle, the corresponding phrase expresses his taking for the basis of theoretical metaphysics that which appears to be so “generally and for the most part,” hôs epi to polu.34 Yet these phrases should be taken less as equivalents than as showing the difference between Heidegger’s approach and Aristotle’s, and therefore Heidegger’s

33

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in Being and Time, they would be able to supply a new basis upon which the now formerly categorical sciences could be redeveloped. This is the meaning of his references to fundamental ontology “running ahead” of the other sciences in Being and Time (which language is echoed, furthermore, in his account of authenticity as consisting in “anticipatory,” that is, “running ahead,” resolution, and his account of the positive mode of circumspective Being-with being a “leaping ahead”). In his inaugural address at Freiburg University, “What Is Metaphysics?” he proposed a version of this “leadership” of the other sciences. Likewise, notwithstanding its notorious political connections, the ambition to supply the needed leadership to the sciences is given expression in the 1933 Rectorial Address. As R. Philip Buckley has argued, Heidegger saw the university as supplying something of a “middle step” between the philosopher and the authentic community (Buckley 1992, 218). Thomson (2005) and Ehrmantraut (2010) both develop this theme, that is, Heidegger’s vision for education as the key to his politics; Thomson argues that Heidegger’s retreat from the expectation that philosophy should lead the university sciences, and therewith also the political community, constitutes a clear and discreet lesson that he learned from his foray into political activity. On the political context of the German universities in Weimar, and the tension between “conservative” and “progressive” approaches to education (Heidegger fit into the latter camp), see the indispensable Sluga 1993. “The fundamental character of this entity, that it is in my ‘to be it in each particular instance,’ must be maintained. In what follows, an abbreviated form of expression will be used for it. The theme is the Dasein in its way to be – the being of Dasein – the constitution of the being of Dasein. By way of abbreviation, we shall speak of the constitution of Dasein and always mean by it “in its way to be” (GA 20, 209/HCT 155; emphasis in the original text). Aristotle frequently refers to this, the “as a general rule,” as the correct orientation of certain philosophic inquiries. References may be found in the Posterior, the Prior Analytics, the Topics, De Gerneratione et Corruptione, the Parts of Animals, the Ethics, the Politics, and De Interpretatione. What happens “as a general rule” is distinct from the “universal” (ta katholou) and the “necessary” (ta ex anangkês), on the one hand, and the “particular” (ta kath’ hekaston) or “the contingent” (to sumbebêkos). What happens “as a general rule” refers to claims that, though given to exceptions, usually hold true. See Michael Winter’s discussion (Winter 1997) and the helpful survey of Aristotelian usages in G. E. M. Ste Croix (1992, 24–7).

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imputed critique of Aristotle. Heidegger says “proximally,” zunachst, meaning what is nearest; Aristotle, on this view, mistook what was nearest, or his initial and determining impression, for what was most general. That is, the theoretical approach pioneered by Aristotle anticipates the error Heidegger attributed to Scheler’s recurrence to “essential intuition” in the “Comment on Jaspers.” Mere looking gives what has come to be as what “is” present and misses the hidden, temporal dimension. This comes out more in the second part of Heidegger’s phrasing. The expression “for the most part,” zumeist, refers emphatically to time: “most of the time.” In Aristotle’s case, the determining place of temporality is obscured:  polu refers to what is many or multiple, hence “generally.” In Heidegger’s phrasing, he brings out the temporality that underlies regularity. He thus underlines the highly provisional basis of the traditional approach – derived as it is from Greek, “ancient ontology” (SZ 26) – to what is most permanent and the ineluctably temporal root of our involvement with the world.35 Heidegger’s attention to the everyday, and his peculiar understanding of it, is also a correction of Husserl. Some, including at times Husserl, have read it as a rebuke. The dispute concerns, in Heidegger’s terms, the relationship between presence and everydayness. In Husserl, the natural horizon is vorhanden, a word that in German means “present.” Philosophy then consists in “describing” it. Husserl is trying to dismantle the subject–object distinction by describing what is present to our consciousness. That is, there is no gulf between interior and exterior; things are “present” to us, are there to our consciousness.36 Phenomenology thus consists in describing the consciousness of what is present. The word in German, vorhanden, could not be more innocuous or inconspicuous. For Heidegger, however, this “natural horizon” is only “seemingly self-evident” (SZ 371, emphasis added); the true horizon is “everydayness.” By distinguishing presence from everydayness, Heidegger is saying, in effect, that the starting point is not what is present (vorhanden), as such, but the predilection of humans to refer themselves first to, to orient themselves by means of, the present.37 Prior to presence is our privileging of presence. The everyday is full of accounts and understandings that privilege the present-athand (vorhanden), but to identify everydayness with presence (vorhanden) is to misconstrue something as such with the conditions that must obtain for something to be something. Dasein draws its “pre-ontological way of interpreting . . . Being” (SZ 130)  from everydayness. This is the source of the elevation of the present-at-hand as the predominant interpretation of Being. Hence, most “ontological” interpretations of Being mistake the character of everydayness and are themselves oriented by the tendency to favor stability and permanence given such varied expression in everydayness: Heidegger would number both 35

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Heidegger takes up his critique of Aristotle’s conception of time in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, his summer semester 1927 course (GA 24). See Husserl 1931, section 31, 56–9. See Cumming’s discussion of Heidegger’s objections to Husserl (Cumming 2001a, 165–9).

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Aristotle and Husserl among this group. Such “present-at-hand” interpretations understand Dasein as a being like other beings in the world (SZ 130), yet in doing so pass over the phenomenon of everydayness and misunderstand their own beginnings in everydayness. The present-at-hand “proximally misses itself and covers itself up” (SZ 130; emphasis in the original text).38 Heidegger begins Being and Time disquieted, “perplexed,” at the end of the tradition of “ancient ontology” that began in everydayness, elevated the categorial account of things, privileged the present-at-hand and theoretical metaphysics, and disguised having done so. The principal doctrine of this tradition with which Heidegger is concerned in Being and Time is the subject–object distinction as attributed to Descartes: the sense that objects are “out there,” in the world of res extensa, whereas subjects are “in here,” in the mind. Some interpreters of Heidegger take this narrative as evidence that Heidegger urges us to dispose of the rationalist dead-end of Cartesian objectivity and instead recover our more primordial involvement with instruments and tools with which we “cope” pragmatically. What Heidegger shows us, according to these interpreters, is that we are better understood when we see that we are not separate from the world, but are immersed in it in an involved “engaged agency,” “coping” with pragmata.39 Authentic communal existence, as an extension of this reading, may be found by jettisoning our theoretical, cognitive prejudices and simply “dwelling” in our place.40 According to this view, the obstacle to our authentic communal existence is the present-at-hand as such or the attendant doctrines of theoretical metaphysics. Such interpretations point to a redemption or retrieval of the invisible and overlooked, pragmatic background, which they identify as the “everyday,” as the key to a more wholesome flourishing, a more connected way of Being with one another and with nature. Everydayness, though, is not our promised hominess among the pragmata in our dwelling. It misleads us; it is occlusive. Everydayness is expressed in our inclination to privilege the reliability at work in our use of articles of use, a reliability that is not as certain as it seems in the light of theoretical clarity about the purposes toward which we direct ourselves. Seeing the distinction between everydayness and the present-at-and, and indeed seeing everydayness as our inclination to privilege the present-at-hand, we are now in a position to see how these interpreters fundamentally mistake its character. They overlook 38

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To put this in terms of the phenomenological debate about the character of the “given,” we could say that what is given is not presence, but a prior perplexity or confusion about what really is present and a corresponding inclination to privilege the stable and regular as “present.” See Jean-Luc Marion’s engagement with and critique of Husserl and Heidegger in Being Given (Marion 2002). “Engaged agency” is a reference to Charles Taylor (2006). “Coping” is Dreyfus’s term (see Dreyfus 1991). Dreyfus, of course, explicitly refers to Heidegger’s work as a hermeneutics of everydayness. For an especially clear statement of this approach, see Nicholas Dungey, “The Ethics and Politics of Dwelling” (Dungey 2007).

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the distinction between readiness-to-hand – our pragmatically heterogeneous situation among articles of use, “equipment” (Zeug) – and our temporal everydayness. Dreyfus, for example, refers to the use and handling of equipment as the “background of everyday practices into which we are socialized,” which must be retrieved (Dreyfus 1991, 3). This causes them to misconstrue the very role played by the occlusiveness of these “everyday practices” themselves. Indeed, they miss the role that everydayness plays as an obstacle, and the role that the ready-to-hand plays in the elevation of the present-at-hand as the predominant interpretation of Being.

The Everyday Emergence of the Present-at-Hand from the Ready-to-Hand In the argument of Being and Time, Heidegger spends the first part of the book showing how the Cartesian distinction of the subject “I” from the res extensa is in fact derivative from our initial involvement with things of various descriptions – not just Things or Objects, but articles of use (to which we relate practically and purposively) and other people (“Dasein”) more or less “like” us in their Being. Our involvement is with articles of use that are for us with reference to meaningful purposes inherent (in a sense) to them inasmuch as they relate through us to the rest of the world. Such articles always “manifest,” to use William Richardson’s apt term, themselves to us within a “world” of more-or-less coherent meaning or sense, and into which we “fit” as well.41 Dasein is thus in the world, immersed within and party to the very organizing structures with regard to which we sense meaning. Dasein “is,” therefore, Being-in-the-world (SZ 54). That is, Dasein is in some sense all of its

41

The “existential” of world is central to Heidegger’s thought, as noted by Gadamer referring to “his exceedingly unconventional and profoundly revolutionary lectures. There he used the phrase It is worlding [es weltet], for example. Now we recognize that that was a magnificent anticipation of his later thinking. At the same time, one could not hear such things from a Neo-Kantian – or from Husserl. Where is the transcendental ego? What kind of word was that? Is there such a word at all? Ten years before the so-called turn, when Heidegger overcame his own transcendental conception of the self and his dependence on Husserl, he had found here his first word, one that did not assume a subject or transcendental consciousness at all. Worlding, expressed like an early herald of the event of the “clearing’ ” (Gadamer 1994, 169). What principally distinguishes “world” in Heidegger’s sense from the natural cosmos of classical philosophy, to speak broadly, is that the purposes  – the “toward-which,” and “for-the-sake-of-which”  – as construed by Heidegger are not natural but “Daseinish,” as he puts it in Basic Problems (GA 24, 237/BPP 166), that is, free and undetermined by causal necessities. In the classical vision of the natural cosmos, purposes are either teloi or are intelligible in the light of the good. This is not without qualification, but should stand as an appropriate initial point of contrast for understanding Heidegger’s intention. As he remarks in one of his lecture courses: “Nevertheless – the world is not nature and it is certainly not the extant, any more than the whole of all the things surrounding us, the contexture of equipment, is the environing world, the Umwelt . . .” (GA 24, 235/BPP 165).

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employment and navigation of things in the world. By contrast, in Heidegger’s characterization of Husserl, humans are essentially consciousnesses to whom the things of the world are present, and only subsequently are the things used or employed. For Heidegger, human Dasein’s immersion in its use of articles for future purposes, with reference to the past and what has come to be, exhibits our fundamental temporality. Our primary way of Being-in-the-world, Heidegger says, is “everydayness”: this is how we “operate preeminently” in the world. And since we never cease to be “Being-in-the-world,” everydayness can be said to be “constitutive” of our Being. In our normal (or “proximal and for the most part”) involvement with the articles of use, “handy” tools or instruments “ready-to-hand,” we privilege the temporality of everydayness and its attendant elevation of the stable, regular, and publicly visible. Such an inclination toward the regular and stable is reinforced by the reliability evinced by our use of tools and instruments: they accord with our purposes, and so our present is brought into alignment, as it were, with our chosen future. Moreover, when the path between present and future in our use of handy articles “breaks down,” even in these moments, Heidegger claims, we remain oriented by the possibility of regularity or reliability, perhaps even more so in these moments. Heidegger thus lays out two routes by which everydayness elevates presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) as the determinate meaning of Being from within the context of our immersion in the world of tools and things-of-use that Heidegger refers to as Zuhandenheit, “handiness,” or readiness-to-hand. I will refer to these two routes as breakdown and comfort. Numerous scholars have discussed, and it is now perhaps one of the best-known motifs of Heidegger’s thought, that when the articles of use with which we are concerned fail, we are confronted with a moment of distress in which we are then tempted to “see” the world more theoretically; Hubert Dreyfus aptly refers to this as the “breakdown” story.42 The other route, however, by which the vorhanden assumes a priority over our otherwise closer situation among the pragmata is in our simple habituation to the basic coherence of our purposes and our means, the easiness of our relationship to the world and the things in it, in light of the mainly coherent, intelligible goals by which we are usually oriented. While in the deepest sense we are uncanny – not at home in and among the items of use in the world – in a broader and much more common way, we are at home, we are cozy in and among things, comfortable using them, and familiar to ourselves in light of these things and their utility. This is why we, “proximally and for the most part,” are happily absorbed in our doings in the world, as well as in the considerate reflection upon these doings that emerges from them “naturally.”

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Dreyfus 1991, 70–83. See Gerald Prauss, Knowing and Doing (Prauss 1999) and again Robert Denoon Cumming’s account of “relational analysis” (Cumming 2001a, 137–74).

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Dasein at Home in the World In attempting to provide a broader, more formal account of the relationship between humans and their worlds than is possible within the restrictive conceptual legacy of the subject–object distinction and the present-at-hand language of the Western philosophic tradition, Heidegger claims that man is “Being-in-the-world,” In-der-Welt-sein. This is the “basic state of Dasein” in which Dasein “operates (bewegt) . . . pre-eminently (vorzüglich) in the mode of everydayness” (SZ 59, 366). The precise character of our “in-ness,” or in-hood, requires, however, clarification. It, as it turns out, is the source of our being at home in the world. Man is not in the world the way that oranges are in a bowl, or chocolate chips are in a cookie. Heidegger stresses the purported etymological connections between “in” and “inn,” conjuring something of a cozy sense of the belongingness of people within their environment. Men dwell in the world, making it their home, and making their home there.43 Dasein makes a home, dwells “inn” the world, but next to or alongside, bei, other stuff there. Thus, the world is not made up of a subject set at some remove from a collection of strange, alien objects – “thrown out” there – but an environment that one inhabits, within which one fits comfortably where one belongs.44 The mistaken line of thought that would locate man elsewhere than in the world – either an isolated mind or a soul fallen into a body – fails to appreciate that man is in the world as a series of engaged, involved, and practical set of attachments. Husserl had argued against the subject–object distinction through his concepts of consciousness and intentionality. For Husserl, the thinking subject is not separated (inside) from an object (which is outside), but consciousness is always consciousness of something that it intends. Something is thus present (vorhanden) to the mind as a mind. In Heidegger’s telling, however (and as he intimated rather directly in the “Comment on Jaspers”), Husserl is still too accommodating of the traditional privileging of theory and thus unwittingly retains the subject–object distinction. One important consequence of this privileging is the failure to solve the question of practice or the manner in which practice is joined to theory. Heidegger expresses the engaged, involved 43

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The “in” that is characteristic of beings that are not Dasein – that is, other things – is a category (SZ 54) and is correctly applied to beings that are present-at-hand. Our in-hood, however, is an existential. The existential “in” clearly designates something of the how in which Dasein might be anywhere. That is, Dasein is “in” the world; it is not “elsewhere.” Heidegger’s stress on in-the-world is meant partly to circumvent false lines of questioning prompted by the detritus of the theoretical tradition. Man is not elsewhere like a soul in the heavens or a being somehow separated from the world. He is not principally a mind or spirit and then only secondarily stuck in this material world. Even if this were the case, Heidegger argues, one would still have to account for the Being-together of the soul or spirit and the material body, and the Being-in of the soul-body (SZ 56). Dasein’s spatiality is itself based on its Being-in-the-world. On the relationship between Dasein and things present at hand, the commercium, see SZ 132; also, §69.

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orientation of Dasein’s involvement with the world with the term besorgen, “concern.” The term expresses Dasein’s Being as it relates to the multiplicity of practical matters, the manifold of dealings, with which man is occupied: “having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining . . . leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing, taking a rest” (SZ 56). These are just examples of the way that man fundamentally is in the world, tied up in a dispersion of dealings and undertakings. It is not that man, as an isolated consciousness, and then as an extra, has a variety of relationships to things in the world. Man is not a “mind” somewhere else, that needs to be directed toward his dealing with some motley assortment of less mindly things. Rather, the Being of man fundamentally is these “relationships”; in concern, human Dasein is in this multiplicity of connections. Heidegger’s deploys the striking term Zuhandenheit, “handiness” or readiness-to-hand, for this array of technico-practical involvements in the world.45 Humans always already find themselves in an environment surrounded by things, produced or not, inviting use or further production. Such “things” must not be confused for Cartesian res, objects thrown at a distance from a subject (SZ 363). Rather, in our concern, the beings are not “present” to us, they are handy (Zuhanden), to hand, in their possible utility. Heidegger recurs to the Greek term pragmata in order to summon up primordial, pretheoretical use-interaction (SZ 68). He calls such items “equipment,” Zeug, nicely capturing the sense of both of tools and supplies. And the thoughtfulness, the thinking, that guides our concern with these pragmata is “circumspection” (Umsicht), a generalized, pragmatically oriented savvy, the location of “common sense.” Circumspection is a sort of technico-practical reasoning and the source, Heidegger insists, of other, derivative forms of reasoning; indeed, this 45

I say technico-practical as simply a gloss on Heidegger’s appropriation of this terminology from Aristotle. I will also at times simply refer to “practice,” in particular when drawing the contrast between theory and practice. In his lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which of course begins with hundreds of pages of exegesis of book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger lays out the connections between his own distinctive terminology and Aristotle’s:  “Technê is know-how in taking care, manipulating, and producing, which can develop in different degrees, as for example with the shoemaker and the tailor; it is not the manipulating and producing itself but is a mode of knowledge, precisely the know-how which guides the poiêsis. Epistêmê is the title for what we call science (Wissenschaft). Phronêsis is circumspection [Umsicht] (insight) [Einsicht], Sophia is genuine understanding [Verstehen], and nous is a discernment [Vermeinen] that discerns by way of perception” (GA 19, 22/PS 15–16). In his own work, in Being and Time, Heidegger assimilates both technê and phronêsis to the ready-to-hand, as is indicated by his designation of Umsicht, the form of sight that he designates as providing practical knowledge, as it were, to concern (Besorgen) in our ready-to-hand use of things. In his “Martin Heidegger’s Aristotelian National Socialism,” Michael Gillespie argues that Heidegger rereads Aristotle to extract pronêsis as against sophia as the principal faculty of wisdom, but reads it as precisely the apprehension by Dasein in the Augenblick of our historical temporality and thus not, as I claim, subsumed within the Zuhanden as such (Gillespie 2000).

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is his gloss on Aristotle’s phronêsis.46 Circumspection guides Dasein’s engagement with ready-to-hand things and affairs, from tool usage to deliberation about political questions (SZ 359–60). The ready-to-hand is the kind of Being characteristic of Dasein’s equipment usage in the course of its concernful, circumspective dealings. Heidegger sketches a picture of a craftsman absorbed in the activity of his work, employing a thoughtfulness about it – circumspection – and simply immersed in the task at hand. His classic example is that of a hammer, which is known more appropriately through its employment in the activity of hammering than as an object to be “looked” at with a kind of reflective, theoretical distance (SZ 69, 360–2). Circumspection apprehends not just the narrow use of equipment ready-to-hand, but also grasps the connections between various articles of equipment, to the point of appreciating the entire complicated, in Heidegger’s terms, set of assignments and references. As Heidegger stresses, before any individual article of equipment shows itself as distinct, it is preceded by a circumspective awareness on the part of Dasein of this network of tools, materials, work, and users, the “totality of equipment” (SZ 68). In and among this network, Heidegger distinguishes the true purposiveness of human undertakings, on the one hand, and nature, on the other. That is, nature itself does not give purposes to human activity, and so we are not really at home in nature.47 Though circumspection governs the handling of tools, it would not be strictly accurate to say that circumspection is interested in tools: a carpenter qua carpenter in the midst of his work is never fixated on his nail gun or piles of sawdust in isolation. Rather, circumspection envisions the end of the job in the future; it looks toward the work, the finished product, from within the present working and orders the array of minor or more immediate tasks with this longer view in mind. Considerations include the materials from which the work might be composed or which the tools might require, further purposes implied by the character of the finished work, and the fittedness of the product for its further purpose or future users. Whatever echo there is here of Aristotle’s four causes, Heidegger distinguishes the end 46

47

“By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in the understanding (the circumspection of concern is understanding as common sense [Verständigheit]), we have deprived pure intuition [Anschauen] of its priority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the present-at-hand in traditional ontology. ‘Intuition’ and ‘thinking’ are both derivatives of understanding and already rather remote ones” (SZ 147). On the place of nature in Being and Time, Heidegger would later write this: “Yet if nature is apparently missing – not only nature as an object of natural science, but also nature in an originary sense (cf. Being and Time, p. 65 below) – in this orientation of the analytic of Dasein, then there are reasons for this. The decisive reason lies in the fact that nature does not let itself be encountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor in general primarily as something toward which we comport ourselves. Nature is originarily manifest in Dasein through Dasein’s existing as finding itself attuned in the midst of beings. But insofar as finding oneself [Befindlichkeit] (thrownness) belongs to the essence of Dasein, and comes to be expressed in the unity of the full concept of care, it is only here that the basis for the problem of nature can first be attained” (EG 370 n. 59).

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toward which circumspection aims, and therefore the form that it takes, from a function of nature.48 Rather, Heidegger singles out the products of work as indicating or, in a manner of speaking, discovering nature inasmuch as they protect against nature or render it more usable.49 Additionally, nature appears as a principal source of the materials that circumspection might light upon in the pursuit of the task at hand. In Heidegger’s language of assignments, nature is never a “toward which” (Wozu), and certainly not a “for-the-sake-ofwhich” (Worumwillen), it is only ever a “whereof” (Woraus). It is initially discovered in a ready-to-hand manner, not as something present-at-hand. It is characterized neither by the formalism of the ancients, the matter in motion of the early moderns, nor – inasmuch as it is useful rather than sublimely beautiful – the overwhelming force of the Romantics (SZ 70). Assignments and references are free from nature. They are, in a certain precise sense, transcendent of nature, in that they belong to what Heidegger refers to as the world and therefore share in the character of Dasein. That is, the goals “toward which” or “for-the-sake-of-which” Dasein works are not of a fixed, permanent, “otherworldly” character – that is, “natural” or “objective” – but are ends that, inasmuch as they are shared by Dasein, have the same kind of existence as Dasein. If man is most typically involved to the point of saturation with a meaningful, rich network of technico-practical, “pragmatic” undertakings among handy things with purposes and wherefores, then why is it that the world is not constituted exclusively by such a plenum of busy, satisfied Dasein? There 48

49

A full treatment of Heidegger’s interpretation of and relationship to Aristotle would require multiple volumes in its own right, and is well beyond the scope of this book. I  emphasize Heidegger’s intention of reading Aristotle in order to depart from him. Gadamer’s critique of Strauss, that he mistook Heidegger’s extremely vivid interpretations of Aristotle for evidence of the possibility of reviving Aristotle (as though Strauss were trying to emulate the work of Heidegger on this point), though perhaps misplaced in the case of Strauss, is apt as a critique of a possible misreading of Heidegger (Gadamer 1993, 251). Walter Brogan presents a reading of Aristotle focused on EN which stresses the elevation of possibility and potentiality in Aristotle’s account of virtue. In a very elegant reading, he argues that in Aristotle virtue very largely consists in holding oneself together as a distinct whole in the face of possible choices, activities, and pathe. In my view, the limits of Brogan’s reading of Aristotle are shown in the necessity of his concentrating on courage as exemplary of virtue in Aristotle, to the exclusion of the several other ethical virtues. As illuminating as the example of courage is, particularly as deployed by Brogan, it is necessary to understand that part of Aristotle’s purpose in enumerating and breaking down the virtues in his analysis is to show that courage is not the whole of virtue, or that virtue as a whole is not identical to courage (Brogan 2005, 141–8). By praising Heidegger for appropriating Aristotle’s courage and fashioning it into the whole of his own account of the individual’s resoluteness in the face of death, Brogan in fact credits Heidegger for approaching Aristotle where he most illuminatingly departs from Aristotle. For studies that see something of a Heideggerian Aristotle, in addition to Brogan 2005, see Sadler 1996; see also McNeill 1999. Nature in this sense is ready-to-hand, possessed of motions and directions of its own:  “the environing nature [die Umweltnature] is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some definite direction” (SZ 71).

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are two ways this comes out. First, the articles of the world and the relations between them “break down.”50 In such a situation, Dasein’s characteristic immersion in its technico-practical involvements is interrupted when these involvements – the equipment on which they depend – break down. Second, and more importantly, Dasein is simply not satisfied by activity in accordance with the tools and instruments that it is capable of using, as familiar, comforting, and constant as this activity is, precisely because we are more profoundly perishing, finite, beings. Comfort is somehow discomfiting for a being unlike all the other beings.

Dasein and Breakdown Heidegger discusses three ways that the web of pragmatic dealings that constitute the ready-to-hand is interrupted and therefore breaks down: conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. By conspicuousness, Heidegger refers to the ordinary experience of circumspectively navigating among pragmata – handling tools and so forth, executing one’s tasks – and then being brought up short by coming upon a damaged or otherwise unsuitable piece of equipment. In such a moment, Heidegger says, we “see” the missing tool distinctly because it has interrupted our otherwise smoothly functioning work. This, then, is a juncture between the theoretical and the practical. Heidegger stresses that the unusable, “conspicuous” tool was originally discovered as such “not by looking at it and establishing its properties,” but rather in the mode of its being used circumspectively. In conspicuousness, however, circumspection presents the once handy equipment as somehow “un-ready-to-hand” (SZ 73). In not being used, the broken equipment “just lies there.” In this capacity to see equipment in such a removed way, Heidegger identifies one location of the genesis of the present-at-hand: “it shows itself as an equipmental Thing (Ding) which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand too. Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in such equipment” (SZ 73). In the interruption of the normal mode of use, the slight jarring or distance created brings the thing before one’s eyes to be looked at. In this moment, theory emerges. The two other modes of breakdown follow this pattern. “Obtrusiveness” is when concernful dealings yield to the circumspective discovery that something is missing,:  “The more urgently we need what is missing, and the more authentically it is encountered in its un-readiness-to-hand, all the more obtrusive does that which is ready-to-hand become” (SZ 73). Unlike conspicuous things, obtrusive things lose their readiness-to-hand altogether, and become completely  – in the mind’s eye, so to speak  – present-at-hand (“Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more”). The third mode is “obstinacy,” something that is encountered in one’s concernful absorption in one’s task as 50

See Dreyfus 1991, 71.

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an obstruction to the performance of the task. It thus interrupts the task and attracts one’s attention to something that is standing the way. Each of these modes brings the present-at-hand out of the ready-to-hand. The ready-to-hand loses its usefulness; it slips out of the realm of concern: “It does not vanish simply, but takes its farewell, as it were, in the conspicuousness of the unusable” (SZ 74). In the emergence of the present-at-hand, the ready-to-hand is obscured from being seen. But Heidegger also claims that in this moment, where the distinction between the two kinds of Being announces itself, something of the real character of the ready-to-hand, which as such is not to be known in the mode of circumspection, is also discerned. Breakdown points toward the present-at-hand occluding our more primordial technico-practical involvement with things of the world, but it also points to a still more profound grasp of the character of the world as such. The breakdown shows that our relation to the things in the world is not exhausted by readiness-to-hand. While breakdown does open Dasein up to the “worldliness” of the world, the exposure of our perishingness does not then “undo” our everydayness. The shocking realization that the world is not altogether amenable to our intentions and projects still happens “within” the basic state of Being-in-the-world, and this “basic state” is still “operated” within “in the mode” of everydayness. Everydayness absorbs and comprehends and thus coopts the shock in question. Not finding your keys in the morning or having your car quit on the way to work does not change your life altogether: you still have to show up for work; indeed, you might need to make and follow better plans for making sure you can do so. The breakdown in our use of articles in the world telegraphs and forecasts our own mortality, and thus illuminates the basic unfittedness of the world for our calculations and planning, but our response to this is not to give up living in the world; we plan more, we calculate more carefully. As ever, being-in-the-world remains our basic state, and everydayness is how we operate there preeminently. Thus even moments that expose our true situation as finite beings amid a finite world, thanks to our everyday privileging of regularity and stability, are immediately occluded.

The Priority of Comfort to Breakdown The superintendence of everydayness even through moments of breakdown shows that instances of breakdown are not the most important way that Dasein comes to privilege the present-at-hand as a disclosure of the meaning of Being. Most importantly, and governing both the breakdown route and the comfort route, Dasein in its everydayness comes to understand itself as reflected in the world.51 The multifarious attachments and undertakings, the 51

“Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light” (SZ 21).

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very busyness of concern, give some hint of the manner in which the structure of Being-in-the-world makes itself liable to be misunderstood. Dasein handles and deals with things in the world; these become the terms in which Dasein understands itself, and indeed, supply an “ontological foothold” for reflections about Being (SZ 59). More precisely, Dasein begins to understand itself and the world in the narrow terms of its own reflections on its relationship to the world. Dasein does not cease to be itself, nor is it more in Being, when its involvements with the world function smoothly, nor when they are disrupted. The world is all there is, and for this reason it remains Dasein’s “ontological foothold,” the only initial clues to which Dasein has access by which it may make any sense of Being. The “breakdown route” shows that Dasein’s tends to respond to disruption by overlooking everydayness as an “ontological foothold.” In disruption or trauma, when the seemingly tight, secure fabric of the busy world shows signs of tearing, we, in our everydayness, respond by reinforcing the fabric by recurring to by the present-at-hand: planning, organizing, coordinating, and so on. Our everydayness obstructs our openness to Being by shutting it up at even its initial appearance in such disturbances as conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. Even amid breakdown – especially, all the more amid breakdown – we seek everyday comfort and regularity. The present-at-hand does not just emerge and secure itself through disruption, however, but also by subtler, easier means. Heidegger illustrates this by showing the genesis of the present-at-hand notion of the subject–object distinction. As Heidegger accounts for it, Dasein’s familiarity with the world becomes knowledge, which in turn becomes the subject–object distinction. He denotes this shift through his use of the language of knowing (kennen). Emerging out of our homey familiarity with the world, “knowing” and “addressing oneself to” the world come to be Dasein’s primary modes of Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is already cozy and familiar (bekannt) to Dasein. Dasein is “in” the world as though it were an inviting “inn,” after all. Familiarity slips into presumed knowledge, in particular as what becomes known (erkannt) is one’s connection to the world, which is taken as paradigmatic for knowing the world (Welterkennen). One looks, on the one hand, to one’s self or soul, and on the other hand, to the world for the source of the relationship between the two. In doing so, they both stand out as objects present-at-hand while Being-in-the-world recedes into the background, becoming “invisible” (SZ 59). Our initial nontheoretical immersion just dissolves, and what is left is the now “obvious,” even commonsensical, distinction between a subject and an object, somehow “next to” each other. Everyday familiarity thus eases us into taking knowledge (Kenntnis) as the primary mode of our relating to the world. In the mode of knowing the world, we begin from the split between the subject and the object. This modification and narrowing of Being-in-the-world becomes the seemingly self-evident starting point: the subject and the object. Elevating knowledge in this way signifies

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a determinate stance toward the world.52 In this attitude, objects stand out according to their stable, permanent aspects, discernible in theoretical reflection. The most distinctive object among objects, and in a sense the totality of objects, is then referred to by the designation, “nature.” Nature can be grasped by thought, but does not itself think. The thing that thinks is the subject. The subject stands out as the being with thoughts; that is, as that being among the beings that are thought about, which seems thus to have an interior. Being the active source of thinking rather than something that is merely grasped by thought is what distinguishes the subject from nature or the collectivity of objects. By this means, Heidegger shows the bewitching transition from habitual familiarity to knowing, from knowing to the easy elevation of knowing as the principal mode of relating to the world, from such elevation to the separation of the subject from the world, and from the separation of the subject and object to the representation of the world as nature. Familiarity and knowing beget interiority and the seeds of alienation. In one small etymological analysis, Heidegger sketches the origin of Western philosophy, beginning with the preference for knowing as the privileged way of relating to the world and leading to the stark separation of the subject from the object and theory from practice. Heidegger characterizes this theory-privileging, derivative attitude as a “holding back” from one’s normal engaged involvements in the world and from “any kind of producing, manipulating and the like.” It is a “tarrying alongside” (SZ 61, 361). Heidegger describes the attitude that produces such a tarrying as not merely a “fixed staring” but a “fascination” with the world of one’s concern. Such tarrying is not initially a direct removal of oneself from the world of one’s dealings or a “looking away” (SZ 361 – absehen), but is rather an overdone absorption in a single aspect of those dealings. In particular, tarrying absorbs itself in that aspect that remains stable through the regular patterns or rhythms of activity and change: “This kind of Being towards the world is one which lets us encounter beings within-the-world purely in the way they look (eidos), just that” (SZ 61). That is, the present-at-hand tarrying emerges from an absorbed engagement with the world, not simply from its collapse or breakdown.

The Emergence of Theory from Practice Let us pause at this juncture to review Heidegger’s claims so far, before turning in the next chapter to the social, communal aspect of everydayness. Everydayness does not merely consist in our “background” practices such as coping with articles of use whose meaning and purposes are determined by our social embeddedness. Everydayness has two functions in Being and Time, what I have referred to as its disclosedness and its occlusiveness, or 52

This stance is what Heidegger calls, “Being-already-amid” (Schonseinbei) or “Being-by” (Seinsbei) the world.

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in other words, it is both the necessary starting point for philosophy and it tends to represent an obstacle to philosophy. To expand, everydayness at its most elementary is the way that Dasein is “proximally and for the most part,” that is, usually or normally. The way Dasein is normally, though, is in the way of closing itself off to the truth of its existence. It does this by privileging a false regularity in time, which in turn leads it to privilege the beings in their stable, visible aspect. In practice, this means thinking of ourselves primarily as we relate to tools and the purposiveness that they exhibit while blinding ourselves to the fact that we are the source of that purposiveness. Furthermore, as we shall explore in the next chapter, our everydayness inclines us to a shallow and ephemeral form of sociality, relating to other people as though they too should be understood in light of the tools and things of the world. Thus, everydayness is occlusive in that it prevents us from understanding our true place in the world in our relation to things and other people. But this ignorance and paltriness points to the way that everydayness is disclosive, as well: the fact that Dasein is “usually” like this is the indispensable clue to the meaning of Being, however, because Dasein “is” the way that Being is in the world. Being is in the world through the confused, covered-up, theory-privileging, inauthentic sociality, and occlusiveness of Dasein. To characterize everydayness as our practice is not, it should be emphasized, to provide a neutral “phenomenological” description of what might be called our “normal,” “ordinary,” or “pretheoretical” life. It is, rather, to claim (1) that what is “normal” or “ordinary” about our life is to disguise our finitude by privileging that aspect of our life that is most comforting, namely, the habitual preference for regularity and stability that inclines to refer to the passage of time as “every day.” Pretheoretical existence is characterized by the preference for comfortable habituation, according to Heidegger. It is also to claim (2) that the more genuinely disclosive approach to life is one that privileges our temporary, openly perishing, finite, radically particular and nothing-attuned, anxious Existenz as our-radically-distinct-from-everything-else-selves. That is, if what is “normal” or “ordinary” is the privileging of homogeneity and regularity, philosophic investigation such as Heidegger is undertaking in Being and Time is abnormal and extraordinary, in the precise sense of being radically finite. These two claims are inseparable. Heidegger begins Being and Time in perplexity, and indeed insists that this is the appropriate beginning for raising the question of Being because he positions himself in opposition to the everydayness that he argues Dasein has in so many ways and for so long privileged. Perplexity, aporia, and embarrassment are avatars of a profound sense of waylessness. They ensue from the misdirected civilizational elevation of accounts of the most fundamental matter, the meaning of Being, that privilege the clarity, reliability, and presence of theoretical reflection at the expense of an apprehension of our finitude as the key to Being. Everydayness covers itself over and cannot

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then adequately satisfy the extent of our perplexity. We remain anxious, or potentially anxious, despite and throughout the elevation of the reliable and visible, and purportedly exhaustive, account of the beings of the world. As such, our anxious perplexity, variable as this must be in each case, remains to disclose the inadequacy of prevailing, everyday accounts of our existence and Being. As in the “Comment on Jaspers,” our own anxious, disquieted sense of the incompleteness or inadequacy of available accounts of the matter remains our most illuminating path to the most primordial matters, and requires a “ruthless skepticism” of such presentations. As he put this later: Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend] and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunderstanding if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy. We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept, man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack – driven out of everydayness and driven back to the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Dasein in man launches the attack upon man (GA 29/30 31; FCM 21; emphasis in the original text).

We must now examine how our understanding of everydayness informs our “social” or communal essence.

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4 The Dictatorship of the They and the Clearing of the Everyday

In our everydayness, our handling, use, and manipulation of tools within a coherent, meaningful world of goals, purposes, and accomplishable intentions conduce to the tools being understood as a field of objects confronted by a more or less isolated subject. That is, the subject–object split emerges from our practical, handy immersion in the world. Such a vision of the world both alienates and numbs us, Heidegger suggests, as the effect of the everyday ascendance of theory is at once soothing, disturbing, and tranquilizing. Similarly, sharing the world with other humans – other Dasein – is prior to relating to each other as individuals; we share together a world of meaningful and richly constituted social patterns. And yet, as in the case of our use and manipulation of “beings that do not have the Being of Dasein,” the very functioning of our getting along with these others dulls our awareness of our own profound distinctiveness from them. The chapter that follows will extend the analysis of Heidegger’s complex account of the duality of everydayness from Dasein’s relationship to the articles of the world to Dasein’s relationship to other Dasein. In its everyday existence, the full breadth of Dasein’s communal possibilities tends to collapse into a diminished commerce of, at best, peaceful, mutual suspicion and, at worst, open hostility. As with our relationship to tools, theoretical rationality encroaches on other ways of relating to people and reckons the instrumental relationship of each Dasein to Dasein. Hence, as Heidegger puts it in the introduction to Being and Time, we are not only inclined to understand ourselves rationalistically in terms of the “objects” in the world, but also in those terms that are ratified by our fellow human Dasein, which Heidegger refers to as “tradition”: Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light, but also that Dasein simultaneously falls prey to the tradition of which it has more or less explicitly taken hold. This 91 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Queen Mary, University of London, on 07 Aug 2017 at 19:51:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139963169.005

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tradition keeps it from providing its own guidance, whether in inquiring or choosing (SZ 21).1

In both of these respects, Dasein tends in its everydayness toward seeing itself as a determined, unfree being with a nature, either formed by its surroundings or else in need of mastering them, rather than as a thrown, open, free project, capable of being true “to its ownmost self” in community with other Dasein.2 Moreover, in each of these respects, “everydayness” covers itself over, exhibiting its character as what Heidegger would later refer to as “concealed unconcealedness.” Everyday “community” is thus founded on mutual suspicion, deceit, and misanthropy, composed of ill-disposed, dull, catty, cruel, bored individuals, all yoked to one another by means of “tradition.” Tradition, however, does not attach them meaningfully to the shared origins from which they collectively emerge, but rather functions primarily to ensure that the world and the things in it are disclosed in a fashion that is hostile to inquiry and thoughtfulness. By means of tradition, the whys and wherefores into which one might otherwise inquire are presented as already settled and decided: When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it “transmits” is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial “sources” from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand. Dasein has had its historicity so thoroughly uprooted by tradition that it confines its interest to the multiformity of possible types, directions, and standpoints of philosophical activity in the most exotic and alien of cultures; and by this interest it seeks to veil the fact that it has no ground of its own to stand on (SZ 21).3

Tradition – “lies agreed upon,” as Napoleon referred to history – supplies the main content informing our everyday sociality either to be superficially accepted 1

2

3

In the interview “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger offers a rather contradictory assessment of tradition: “From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition” (Heidegger 1991b, 106). His characterization of being “rooted” in a tradition in the 1966 interview bears more resemblance to his account of “heritage” in Being and Time, rather than his disparagement of “tradition” there. More on this in Chapter 6. Günter Figal accounts for das Man as the primary locus of “unfreedom” in Dasein’s existence (Figal 1988). This is an important element in Heidegger’s broader political influence. He is critical both of conservatism-traditionalism as well as progressive-rationalist positions. Ali Shari ‘ati and Ahmad Fardid, for example, distinguished their retrieval of an authentic Shi’ism from the traditionalism of the conservative clerisy as well as from liberal and Marxist elements in Iran. See Mirsepassi 2011. Aleksandr Dugin makes favorable references to “tradition,” but his emphasis is on refusing every recent variation on tradition, and even recurring to premonotheistic religion as the true source of tradition (Dugin 2012).

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or shallowly rejected. I will argue, then, that on Heideggerian principles, both conservatism, as the preserver of tradition, and any progressive orientation to politics are oriented by the everyday elevation of security, conformity, comfort, stability, and regularity. Both of these attitudes toward community are premised, in Heidegger’s analysis, on a fundamental alienation from one’s fellow Dasein. In fully reckoning with Dasein’s everydayness, it emerges that none of the available political forms bestowed by the history of political philosophy in the West can break out of the homogenizing conformity diagnosed by Heidegger.

The Structure of Being-with Just as Heidegger understands Dasein to be not merely an isolated subject confronted with a world of objects, but instead as a tool-using being, situated amid articles of use (pragmata) that it is in the business of getting along with, so he also understands Dasein to be other than an isolated individual, but situated amid and with other beings like itself, other Dasein; Dasein is an essentially communal being. So much is this so that Heidegger expresses it with the formulation, Dasein is Mitsein: Being-there is Being-with (see SZ 114, 121). Just as the subject–object distinction constitutes a misleadingly partial and derivative account of the relationship between Dasein and the beings with which it finds itself in the world, Heidegger rejects its social-theoretical correlate – namely, the individual subject or self, the “I” – as a basis for understanding the roots of community. The rationalist conception of the self, defined in the everyday understanding as “what maintains itself as something identical throughout changes in its experiences and ways of behavior, and which relates itself to this changing multiplicity in so doing,” is rejected as excessively disconnected and disconnecting (SZ 114).4 In the very constitution of its being (Seinsverfassung), Dasein “is” with other Dasein.5 As with our relationship with articles of use, both authentic and inauthentic forms are possible: both authentic communal existence and everyday communal existence are possible ways of Being-with. Whatever the potential for authentic communal existence implied by the fact of our being Being-with, in our main involvements with other people we fail to distinguish them from the “tools” and the “work” with which we are usually absorbed. Dasein first really encounters “others” as they become distinguished from the background of the world in which Dasein is busy working. Just as Dasein does not really notice even itself as Dasein at first – it initially understands 4

5

The source for such an understanding of the self is usually claimed to be Locke, the continuity of consciousness discussed in Essay II. 27.12, who influenced Hume and Kant. For a penetrating and politically astute discussion of the difficulties in retaining notions of the individual in later modern thought, focusing on Hegel and Nietzsche as paradigmatic cases, see Church 2012. Whether or not it happens to be the case that a person is proximate to another person in any given “ontic” situation (as Heidegger would put it), it is nonetheless more profoundly the case that we are essentially bound to others (“ontologically”) (SZ 121); i.e., even being alone “in fact” is a definite derivative modification of Being-with.

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itself in its work, as a working-thing – similarly it does not really notice other Dasein distinct from their own participation with itself in the work environment.6 Other Dasein are initially encountered, not presumably as tools in their own right, but as intimately bound up with, unseparated from, the work that they do or that is done to them; initially in the environment (Umwelt), “they are what they do” (SZ 126). Handicrafts may be “cut to [the] figure” of the expected recipient of an article (SZ 71). They constitute part of a well-fitted whole: “when material is put to use, we encounter its producer or ‘supplier’ as one who ‘serves’ well or badly. When, for example, we walk along the edge of a field ‘outside it,’ the field shows itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and decently kept up by him” (SZ 117–18). It is not simply that others are discovered as a ready-to-hand coat rack or hay baler – their distinct kind of Being shows itself, too: “Thus along with the work, we encounter not only beings ready-to-hand but also beings with Dasein’s kind of Being – beings for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-tohand; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours” (SZ 71). This is all to reiterate that Dasein encounters the world as something shared with other Dasein and as more or less orderly, which accommodates Dasein’s technico-practical purposes fairly seamlessly and includes the placement of other Dasein within the world as part of that well-fittedness. As with Dasein’s normal immersion within the cycles of work and the use of ready-to-hand tools, Dasein’s normal way of Being-with-others is more-orless comfortable and easy. Hence, our initial encounter with others is not with a hostile “not-I,” but with something roughly similar to ourselves: “They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself” (SZ 118; emphasis in the original text). The Being of Dasein is not, then, principally an isolated “I,” but includes, in its deepest roots, the existential “with” of Being-with and the too of Being-there-too (Auch-da-sein) in our shared existence with others. Thus, what is formally indicated with the term “I” (SZ 116) refers equally to each Dasein’s shared identity with others. Thus Heidegger – like Rousseau, for instance, and unlike Locke and Hobbes – understands the beginnings of human sociality to be an unreflective similarity of groupings with other people. In the case of Rousseau, however, this beginning condition is given a much more precise (though imagined) historical location, and it becomes important to locate the timing and character of the deviation from it, and entrance into a society of atomized individuals.7 It therefore continues to stand as a model or ideal of sociality throughout his account of human history, 6

7

“Others are encountered environmentally . . . even one’s own Dasein becomes something that it can itself proximally ‘come across’ only when it looks away from ‘experiences’ and the ‘centre of its actions,’ or does not as yet ‘see’ them at all. Dasein finds ‘itself’ proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids – in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally concerned” (SZ 119). See Rickey 2001, 267–8, who argues for the moment of vision as the basis for Heidegger’s “communitarianism.”

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whereas for Heidegger our essential sociality does not, of its own accord, provide a model. A similar contrast with Aristotle is warranted: for Aristotle, our essential communality derives from our political “nature,” which includes within it a specific, purposive goal. For Heidegger, Dasein’s essential sociality is a “transcendental” ontological condition, and overlaps totally and always with the more familiar, “fallen” everydayness. For Heidegger, even though social wholeness may be completely obscured ontically, its condition in ontological possibility, Mitsein, is never altogether vanished in a past epoch, but characterizes Dasein as Dasein even at its most socially deprived. Social wholeness is therefore an ever-attainable potential achievement, but it does not itself refer to a specific model or form that would actualize it.

Modes of Solicitude Heidegger also signals the extent of his departure from the models of social and political structures proffered from within the tradition of political philosophy in his description of care.8 Heidegger argues that the Being of Dasein is “care” or “trouble” (Sorge), which is open to being involved with other things and people in the world in a quasi-passionate way. Our reflecting on and thinking about the world follows the pathways or possibilities opened up in care.9 Care is structured, moreover, such that we care differently, in modes appropriate to the different ways that things and people “are.” To wit, our care for tools as they relate to purposes that we share is discussed as “concern” (Besorgen). Our care for other people, and thus our inherent openness to the possibilities of community, is referred to as “solicitude” (Fürsorge).10 He identifies two extremes of what he calls “positive” modes of solicitude and a “deficient mode.” The deficient mode is characteristic of everyday Being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein).11 But as his slightly complicated discussion brings out, one 8

“Concern is a character-of-Being which Being-with cannot have as its own, even though Being-with, like concern, is a Being-towards beings encountered within-the-world. But those beings towards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of Being which belongs to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein. These beings are not objects of concern, but of solicitude” (SZ 121). See GA 21, 225f for an expansion of this point. 9 This is the context for Heidegger’s standing interest in such Christian figures as Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Augustine, and St. Paul, as expressed only indirectly in Being and Time (and, obviously, in the Kierkegaardian terminology that infuses that work). His students at Marburg, and scholars of his courses, have long known of his extensive and profound interest in Christian theology and mysticism. See the chapter “The Marburg Theology” in Gadamer 1994, 29–44. 10 In addition to his discussion of it in Being and Time, Heidegger treats Fürsorge at considerable length and detail (and with some helpful examples) in his courses Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time (GA 20) and Logic: the Question Concerning Truth (GA 21). To say that Heidegger conceives of care as articulated with different modes that relate differently to tools, to people, and so forth is to speak to the difficult matter of Heidegger’s “idealism” versus “realism” (and to give this a realist emphasis). I will discuss this matter further in Chapter 5. 11 Johannes Fritsche speculates that the meaning of the “negative” mode of solicitude is to be discovered by seeing that Hegel referred to liberal, as in capitalist, society this way (Fritsche 2012,

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of the “positive” modes is quite definitely implicated in our everydayness as well.12 Examining Heidegger’s detailed account of solicitude points to the tendency of everydayness to elevate more regular and familiar, but also more rigid, ways of relating to the world. In its normal, indeed “everyday,” German usage, Fürsorge designates the state-run welfare systems of pensions and poor relief, that is, care for the poor. This usage, according to Heidegger, and by implication the normal bureaucratic politics to which it refers, represents deficient modes of Being with one another, characteristic of the entrenchment of the everyday. The deficient modes of solicitude follow the pattern of the deficient modes of ready-to-hand concern. Whereas deficient solicitude is “Being . . . against or without one another, passing one another by, not ‘mattering’ to one another” (SZ 121), so deficient concern is “leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing, taking a rest,” where “the possibilities of concern are kept to a bare minimum” (SZ 57).13 In normal, everyday social life and political arrangements, an unremarkable inattention characterizes deficient solicitude and deficient concern. Deficient modes privilege anonymity over intimacy, inattention rather than attentiveness.14 Heidegger suggests that a certain “urgency” attends Fürsorge in its normal, everyday usage, implying a kind of hastiness or busyness. Such urgency is owed, it must be understood, to an underlying mixture of inconspicuousness and obviousness (Unauffälligkeit and Selbstverstandlichkeit), where the needs and cares of fellow Dasein are so obvious as to be always passed over and passed off to the available institutionalization of “deficient and indifferent” modes of solicitude. In this respect, everyday solicitude is continuous with our initial encounter with others in our work. In such a mode of solicitude, other Dasein, Heidegger implies, are as unobtrusive and, quite literally, uncared for as equipment or tools, which are always functioning and thus never noticed. Everyday “solicitude,” as in welfare, seems urgently to be caring, but this only seems so because caring for others is typically so deficient. Dasein, who is Being-with-others, is genuinely capable of much fuller interactions with others, but in the fecklessness or indifference that is afforded by everyday orderliness and familiarity, it passes off the care of its fellows to someone else. Our everyday solicitude of others involves basically not noticing them, passing them over, feeling busy with regard to them but not really attending to them. Inasmuch as Heidegger calls this “everyday,” this inclination to inattention typifies our

12

13 14

260). He tries to count four modes of solicitude, even though Heidegger explicitly refers to three (259). Heidegger’s text here is notoriously complex and arguably confused. Dostal’s treatment of the (possible) confusion within the context of the whole argument of Being and Time is very helpful (Dostal 1994 with Dostal 1982 on “indifferenz” and everydayness). “Only where there is care is there neglect” (GA 21, 225). Cf. 223, on Fürsorge. Though Freeman errs in deriving an ethical, normative meaning from Heidegger’s account, her attention to the possible place of “love” in this part of Heidegger’s account is helpful (Freeman 2009).

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dealings with other human beings “always,” or “proximally and for the most part,” that is, this is the mode of Being-with in which we “pre-eminently” (vorzüglich) operate (bewegt). Both authentic and inauthentic modes of communal Being-with are characterized by this undertow of deficient, inattentive overlooking and not-noticing. That is, once again, authenticity is not an escape from everydayness. In contrast to this deficient mode of solicitude, Heidegger sketches two “positive extremes” of solicitous Being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein), only one of which merits approval.15 One of the positive “extremes” involves one Dasein solicitously taking over or coopting the concerns of another. Precisely, it means that one Dasein replaces another  – “leaps in” (einspringt)  – in the other Dasein’s ready-to-hand circumspective activity. Here it is well to recall that by ready-to-hand concerns, Heidegger does not only mean such mundane activities as brushing one’s teeth, mending a shoe, fashioning barrels, or piloting a ship. The ready-to-hand also includes what traditionally would be understood as political activity such as deliberation (SZ 359). In the second “positive extreme,” one Dasein “does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him [ihm vorausspringt] in his existentiell potentiality for Being, not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically for the first time” (SZ 122). That is, unlike leaping in solicitude, where one takes over the circumspective (besorgen) concerns of the other Dasein, “helping” him by relieving him of any “trouble” or “care” (Sorge), here one clears a path for the other Dasein and assists him in assuming his cares authentically. In his course Logic: The Question Concerning Truth, Heidegger illustrates this sort of solicitude with the example of a lecture:  “Communication and directing towards the seeing of a matter is never a taking-care, insofar as the seeing of the matter cannot actually be produced by the lecture, but can instead only be awakened, released.”16 Leaping-ahead solicitude is not oriented by the worldly 15

16

Though he refers to them as “positive,” this should not be taken to mean that they are both “good”; they are positive in the sense that they do not lack and are not characterized by inattention as in the case of the deficient modes. Kathleen Freeman simply refuses to follow Heidegger’s strictures on reading the obviously less appealing “positive” mode in a moral sense (Freeman 2009). Johannes Fritsche (1999) reads these passages differently from me. Of the three modes of solicitude  – one indifferent, and two positive extremes (one dominating and one liberating)  – Fritsche reads my description of the indifferent mode as a description of one positive mode of domination, and thus reads Heidegger’s allusion to state welfare Fürsorge as an example of an indifferent, domineering mode of solicitude. Fritsche thus sees the political lines of Heidegger’s reading here as being much closer to the surface. See Fritsche 1999, 25. In a later reconsideration of these passages, Fritsche (2012) discerns a fourth mode of solicitude. I take his discovery as evidence of the difficulty in maintaining his initial position in the face of Heidegger’s complex account. GA 21, 222; Heidegger 2010 187. Quoted in Figal 2000, 145. Figal identifies this as Heidegger’s account of “the art of Socratic dialogue.” One need not accept Figal’s characterization in order to approve of Heidegger’s understanding of the example: a Socratic dialogue is oriented precisely by the “what” of the “thing” being discussed, not the “existence” of the interlocutor qua Dasein.

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“what” of concern (the object, to speak loosely) but by the existence of the other, by the future possibilities of that person’s Being: “it helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (SZ 122; emphasis in the original text). In short, whereas the first “positive” mode of Fürsorge expresses an instrumental “concern” for people, by treating them like pragmata, so to speak, and amplifying the everyday inclination to think of the people we customarily treat as tools or even objects, this extreme of solicitude does not mistake solicitude for concern.17 Rather, this solicitude treats other people as equally open to disclosing the world, co-ministers to Being. These various modes of Fürsorge – positive and deficient – relate to each other much as the present-at-hand emerges from the ready-to-hand. Heidegger’s point may be expressed as a ratio: the “leaping in” solicitude is to the “leaping ahead” solicitude as the present-at-hand is to the ready-to-hand. The everydayness of Dasein provokes the drift toward theoretical stability, purposive order, tradition, and a more predictable and regular mode of Being-in-the-world in both cases. In the case of solicitude for other Dasein, our everyday inattention and obliviousness inclines us toward treating our fellow Dasein as problems to be solved, toward treating them “instrumentally” in light of their concerns, that is, their practical dealings and the goals toward which these are oriented. For Heidegger to say, as he does, that “leaping in” signifies this degradation of the solicitude of Being-with into ready-to-hand concern raises the prospect of a further narrowing and sclerosis of the present-at-hand coming to predominate altogether. This is altogether different from that mode of solicitude that treats other Dasein with respect to their very existence, their standing out freely from the beings like us and with us, and jointly tending our shared responsibility for disclosing Being among the beings. An authentic communal existence would involve the solicitous “leaping ahead” of one another for the sake of the shared existence of each.

Models for Community Heidegger takes these deficient and positive modes of solicitude to delineate the ontological bases of two different sorts of community.18 In one, constituted by leaping in (einspringen), the other Dasein are handled with a view 17

18

Freeman sees in the mode of Fürsorge that facilitates the authentic existence of the other a transfiguration of Hegelian “recognition,” following to some extent upon the reading of Honneth and Brandom, wherein the dignity of each person is acknowledged and given the respect owed to another human being. What such a reading fails to apprehend, however, is that even treating other Dasein as belonging to the species “human being” is to subsume each particularity within a theoretical whole that does not give proper appreciation to the unique difference of each. For a similarly “Kantian” reading of Heidegger that acknowledges its departure from Heidegger’s own texts, see Vogel 1994, chapter  4. Nancy 2002 is a critique of Heidegger’s insufficiently robust formulation of the “we” in his doctrine in Being and Time of Mitsein. This comes out more definitely in the lecture course History of the Concept of Time (GA 20).

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to another end or purpose:  “In such solicitude the other can become one who is dependent and dominated (Abhängigen und Beherrschten), even if this domination (Herrschaft) is a tacit one and remains hidden from him. This kind of solicitude . . . is to a large extent determinative of Being with one another, and pertains for the most part to our concern with the ready-tohand” (SZ 122). Sharing instrumental concerns – other ends or purposes, the worldly whats – is not an adequate nor is it a fulfilling basis for community. So oriented, Being-with-one-another “is based proximally and often exclusively upon what is a matter of common concern in such Being” (SZ 122). Heidegger’s reference to the “what” with which leaping in solicitude is concerned should be taken as a reference to the models of community favored by the theoretical tradition that takes its orientation from the “what,” the visible object, rather than from the existing Dasein.19 Heidegger does not specify the matters of “common concern,” but when they are defined so as to account for the broadest circumspection, they would include contracted agreements of the sort by which Hobbes and Locke envisioned humans establishing civil society; prudential deliberations about questions of justice and nobility, as in Aristotle; and political calculations of better and worse with regard to the common good, as in Plato. Indeed, Dasein in communities oriented by such “circumspective” purposes, are only one small move away from slitting each other’s throats:  “a Being-with-one-another which arises [entspringt] from one’s doing the same thing as someone else, not only keeps for the most part within the outer limits (Grenzen), but enters the mode of distance (Abstand) and reserve (Reserve)” (SZ 122).20 Communities based on contract, such as modern rights-oriented civil societies and markets, are particularly hostile: “The Being with one another of those who are hired for the same affair often thrives only on mistrust” (SZ 122). In understanding the foundations 19

20

Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the world of work is an appropriate point of comparison here, where work is seen in light of the product, the ends toward which it aims; work is thus distinguished from action, which takes place in public and is, in quasi-Aristotelian fashion, an end in itself (Arendt 1958). In Heidegger’s characterization of leaping-in solicitude, however, it is precisely publicity and its alignment with theoretical reasoning that constitutes the domination (on the further connection to publicity, see SZ 126, 169). As Heidegger characterizes it, at precisely the point where Aristotle would refer to the distinction between dominating or “despotic” forms of rule, as typified by the master–slave relationship, and genuinely “political” forms of community in the first book of the Politics, Heidegger denies the very possibility of the distinction, subsuming publicity and political forms to the rule of domination. Likewise – and the explorations of Brandom 1992, Freeman 2009, and Honneth 2012 notwithstanding  – at precisely the moment in the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel would discern the beginning of the dialectic of recognition, wherein the master and slave begin struggle as the first step to rational self-consciousness, a journey that ends in mutual recognition of the equal dignity of the other, Heidegger denies that reason so construed is capable of discerning the other in its genuine, full individuality as distinct from its membership in a theoretically reified class or category, namely, a “what” rather than a “who.” Fritsche reads this as a reference to capitalist competition (Fritsche 1999) as against Dreyfus (1991, 143, 154, 157).

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of such communities this way, Heidegger recasts the bases on which all of the major debates within the history of political thought have taken place as being exclusively one form of inauthentic pseudo-mastery quarreling with another for dominance. Heidegger indicates only a sketch of what genuine community might consist of within the section on Fürsorge. This model of community rests on a joint sharing in “leaping ahead” on the part of several Dasein: “when they devote themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of. They thus become authentically bound together [eigentiliche Verbundenheit], which frees the other in his freedom for himself” (SZ 122; emphasis in the original text). That is, the community is not oriented by the shared object of its members, but by the members’ attention to each other. The affinities visible here between Heidegger’s two modes of positive solicitude and Tönnies’ notions of Gesellschaft (“society”) and Gemeinschaft (“community”) are often noted.21 The deracinated, commandeering, “leaping-in” community of calculation, means-end reckoning, and goal-oriented striving echoes Tönnies’ sketch of a self-interested “society” of heartless schemers, particularly in Simmel’s appropriation of it for his account of urban, as opposed to rural, life. Likewise, the Gemeinschaft of holistic belonging, where the corporate body (the term Gemeinschaft originally referred to the congregation of a church) takes precedence over the individual, seems to parallel Heidegger’s framework of a “leaping-ahead” form of community based on solicitude for the existence of others.22 In a “leaping-ahead” community, one’s own devotion to the group prepares that of another Dasein, which in turn reinforces one’s own commitment. However, the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft distinction fails to capture what is at stake for Heidegger in the distinction between “leaping in” and “leaping ahead,” inasmuch as it is possible to conceive of (indeed, the mainstream of ancient political theory is usually oriented by) a form of community where the common good of the whole is prior to the individual. An orientation by the common good, as goal- or end-oriented, would still be a “leaping-in” community. That is, ancient modes of community might well satisfy the notion of a Gemeinschaft, inasmuch as the whole is prior to the parts, but they are still 21

22

Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which distinguished between the organic, customary morality of tightly knit “communities” and the contractual, more impersonal forms of “society,” was first published in 1887, and is perhaps the foundational document of German sociology. The likely more proximate source of Heidegger’s association of Gesellschaft-type existence with urban, metropolitan life is Simmel’s reconstruction of Tönnies’ theory. On these two as intellectual sources for some of Heidegger’s formulations, see de Beisteigui 1998, 21; 2005, 167; ; Fritsche 1999, 296; Safranski 1999, 168. Though Christopher Rickey does not draw the connection to “congregation,” see his study, Revolutionary Saints (Rickey 2001). Rickey provides the account of Heidegger’s politics that draws on his development and transformation of Christian themes in his work, hence “revolutionary saints.”

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far too oriented by means-end instrumental rationality to satisfy the truly radical notion Heidegger lays out as the basis for communal existence in “leaping ahead.” Crucially, the “leaping-ahead” community describes the shared liberation of one Dasein by another without reference to a purposive, means-end orientation. Thus, “leaping ahead” offers a deeper source of the bonds of community than the mere calculation of gain either ancient or modern political philosophy describes (even as elevated by a sense of the noble) and likewise promises a richer freedom than merely being relieved of concerns (or liberated to satisfy one’s desires).23 It is nonetheless not altogether clear on the basis of Heidegger’s extremely formal characterization of solicitude what such a “leaping-ahead” polity would look like.24 He suggests a rejection of the orienting principles of both ancient and modern modes of political association:  the subject or isolated individual, so essential as a correct premise of political reasoning to modern political thought and deliberative reasoning about the common good, justice, and nobility. There appears to be absolutely no room in his thought, given his premises, for any of the calculation of institutional design that has preoccupied modern political theorists such as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, James Madison, and even Hegel. Heidegger’s models of community offer a riposte to modern political orders premised on the subject-oriented rationalism of Spinoza, Hobbes, or Locke – where inner rationality corresponds to the sensation of exterior stimuli and the political correlate is rights-bearing, contract-making individuals – and to the Romantic alternative of a deeper, pre- or subrational, passionately felt belonging that attaches subjects to their community, such as in Rousseau, Schiller, Herder, and Dilthey. In place of these subject-centric models, Heidegger interrogates the possibility of a more primordial connection between the individual and community, parallel to his dismantling of the present-at-hand subject–object distinction in favor of exposing Dasein’s more rooted hominess in the ready-to-hand world of pragmata. Yet no more than Heidegger’s invocation of pragmata signals a return from Descartes to an understanding of Being as primum mobile or a metaphysics of substance does his search for a more primordial communitarian root to social life signal his return to ancient modes of political practice.25 Classical political philosophy takes its bearings by the opinions, doksa, held by citizens, in particular the highest opinions, the law.26 It emerges from rational discussion or deliberation about the content of opinions concerning

23

24

25 26

Leslie Paul Thiele quite rightly distinguishes Heidegger’s understanding of freedom from both “positive” and “negative” conceptions (Thiele 1994). Compare again Bernard Yack on the priority of the obstacle to the goal in certain forms of revolutionary political thought (Yack 1992). See Blitz 1981 on Heidegger’s relation to classical political philosophy. See Strauss 1961, 19–21.

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the noble, just, and good things. From Heidegger’s point of view, however, classical political philosophy proceeds blissfully unaware that opinion is already oriented by the everyday preference for stability, clarity, and visibility, and that such a philosophic orientation is already disposed simply to reify the given as the discovered. A community oriented by virtue as construed by Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero  – to refer only to pre-liberal, non-individualist examples – which sees in the mutual regard of dutiful citizens the resources for sustaining a political community characterized by ruling and being ruled in turn and deliberation about the just and the noble, is altogether too constrained by everyday notions of stability, circumspective means-ends calculations, and doctrines of the perfection of the soul to satisfy Heidegger’s expectations of a politics of profound, unfathomable communal belonging (viz. authentic communal existence). That is, beginning with “opinions” about the proper orientation of our lives, and then deliberating about which of these is best, overlooks that the initial content of these opinions is shaped by our everyday preference for stability, constancy, and familiarity. That is, a politics that consists in rationally clarifying our confused desires for the noble or the good has already acceded to an attenuated understanding of human existence that is closed off to our more disclosive capacities for anxiety, distress, and disquiet. If this much should be said of Heidegger’s formal critique of the theoretical reasoning of the major figures from the history of political philosophy, what may be discerned in this discussion of any positive vision of communal existence? The relationship between Dasein implied by the authentic, positive mode of leaping-ahead solicitude is not given much concrete detail. It is implicitly nondominating, inasmuch as Heidegger explicitly describes the “leaping in” mode of solicitude as “mastery.” Given the temporal priority of the present that informs circumspective activity, it stands out here that leaping-ahead solicitude consists precisely in opening up each fellow Dasein’s ownmost futural possibilities for itself. In what respect are these shared between Dasein? The weight of Heidegger’s discussion emphasizes that nothing common or public, no properties, are so shared.27 Heidegger’s treatment appears to privilege a radical diversity of sorts, a “community” of ownmost particular and distinct possibilities, but these in turn share in a perfect, formal identity. The community envisioned comes to resemble an association premised on a profound but nondeliberative, nontheoretical identity – hidden, as it were, from sight – attentive to a shared past that may be enacted or reached through a solicitous accompaniment or attendance with respect to the future. 27

Blitz notes the obscurity of the unit in Heidegger between an “individual” Dasein and a group. What size group? City, country, nation, religion, language? (Blitz 1981, 206–7). Zuckert 1990 points to Heidegger’s later (1930s) work on language as the answer to this question, but Heidegger’s initial formulation of it would seem to allow for considerable variety, or at least ambiguity.

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Everyday Dictatorship: DAS MAN Perhaps the most misunderstood part of Heidegger’s account of communal existence is that it is precisely the “success” of authentic community that pushes us toward the everyday forms of inauthentic community. This is because of the totalizing character of everydayness. Our dwelling with other people who are, in the profoundest sense, like us is the source of the (eventual) oblivion of authentic communal existence. The seeming similitude of our existences obscures the “ownmost” and Jemeinigt  – the “mine”  – character of each of those existences. Even the formally authentic mode of solicitude  – “leaping ahead”  – will tend toward and approach inauthenticity. Being-with-others exhibits Dasein’s tendency – already evident in the emergence of the present-athand from the ready-to-hand – to take its bearings by something other than our own existence, that is, by something in the world in its most stable, reliable aspect. It is not simply an excessive focus on what is handy and its purposes that leads Dasein to see itself “proximally and for the most part” in terms of things other than itself. This tendency of Dasein is likewise exhibited in communal life, as it is in fact other Dasein who endow the articles of use that one encounters in the world with significance. That is, the purposes – in Heidegger’s terminology, “towards-whiches,” and “for-the-sakes-of-whiches”  – according to which one uses, manipulates, and deliberates are fixed in their aims by the other Dasein with whom one shares the world. Whether an article – a bench, say – is for sitting on or an altar for sacrificing, whether a cup is for drinking or a chalice, is decided by the existential togetherness of the others who we are with, not simply by the character of the things themselves (are those decorative hand towels, or not?).28 These others set the terms, then, for what is ready-tohand and what is not. More precisely, we, inasmuch as we are with these others, set such terms.29 The articulation of the world is thus social in its roots. One thinks of oneself with reference to the articles and things of use in the world; one still more insidiously thinks of oneself with reference to people in the world, the other Dasein who determine the very limits of what constitutes

28

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“With their Being-with, their disclosedness also goes to make up significance (Bedeutung)  – that is to say, worldliness. And significance, as worldliness, is tied up with the existential ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ ” (SZ 123). Heidegger is not perfectly clear in Being and Time that our sociality obscures more than our theorizing. The passage quoted in the previous note from SZ 123 is the most certain basis for such a reading: that meaning (Bedeutung) is principally derived from our Being-with, and that this is the source of the evident purposiveness in the world. This would then seem to be the basis of Dreyfus’s emphasis on the conformism of our sociality determines what things are. In the reading I develop here, I stress Heidegger’s suggestion that everydayness is first of all an attitude toward time, and therefore a determination of the Being of both our involvement with articles of use that tends toward theorizing and our situation with other people, which tends toward occlusive traditionalism and instrumental calculation.

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the world itself.30 Heidegger gives the sense that in thinking of oneself with reference to the articles of ready-to-hand use, one is in danger of thinking oneself a tool; the still greater danger is that one think of oneself, not as a tool, but as a “duplicate” of the others (SZ 124). In thinking of oneself as being like others, or seeing oneself as one of the others, Heidegger understands us to be submitting to the “domination,” not strictly speaking of these others, but to an aspect of our own Being, namely, das Man, “the They.”31 The rule of this dimension of ourselves, which Heidegger rather ominously refers to as “the dictatorship of the They,” consists precisely in not being ourselves, that is, occluding rather than disclosing the truth of Being, which cannot be gotten “through” other beings, even if those other beings are also Dasein.32 The remainder of this chapter treats the occlusiveness of our existence with others in three sections, first considering Heidegger’s description of the They and the public, second reviewing the central place of communication and “chatter” in constituting this everyday community, and third discussing the ensuing “fall” of Dasein into an orientation by the beings rather than by Being.

The They and the Absorption of the Public We derive our predominant interpretations of the make-up of the world, and the meaning that suffuses all of our involvements and encounters, from Being-with-one-another. Given, then, that that way we are with one another, “proximally and for the most part,” is typified by a facile indifference tending toward mastery, this also determines the barrenness of meaning that saturates our everyday existence:  “Dasein is for the sake of the ‘they’ in an everyday manner, and the ‘they’ itself articulates the referential context of significance. When beings are encountered, Dasein’s world frees them for a totality of involvements with which the ‘they’ is familiar, and within the limits which have been established with the ‘they’s’ averageness” (SZ 129). The comfort, the familiarity, of the They establishes what all of our governing purposes, what the regnant meaning of our involvements with the world, will be. Furthermore, inasmuch as we submit to the They in how we understand ourselves now, 30

31

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“As a Being-in-the-world-with-others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to Dasein-with and to itself; and in this thralldom it ‘belongs’ to these” (SZ 163). The proper translation of this term remains contentious, several Heidegger scholars insisting that “the They” is inferior to “anyone” or “the one.” Taylor Carman insists that “the They” is the worst possible translation: “Unfortunately, the fact that ‘they’ is a personal rather than an impersonal pronoun has the disastrous implication of excluding you and me, whereas Heidegger clearly intends it to include us all” (Carman 1994, 222 n. 5). Quite true. I retain it here, however, for the spooky, disturbing connotation that it conveys, which is certainly also part of Heidegger’s intention in using this strange term. “When Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern – that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards others – it is not itself” (SZ 125).

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this submission therefore determines what we shall become, that is, what we can be in the future. Our involvement with these others, an involvement that privileges our presently agreed-upon purposes and meanings, and that then reinforces and imposes these agreed-upon meanings – explicitly or implicitly – profoundly limits our openness to future possibilities that are not so endorsed. In the self-understanding that is permitted by the They, we privilege stability and reliability, what Heidegger refers to in this context as “constancy” (SZ 128). The principal way that we are given over to emphasizing a stable constancy is to imagine that the They is “others,” and not us. The crowning adornment of Western civilization  – the individual “self,” clearly distinguishable from “others” in society, deserving of dignity and respect  – is a self-gratifying, self-deluding fiction. Our evaluation of “others” as other than us distinguishes them in their averageness, regularity, and stability and locates them in the aspiration to permanence and stability of the world. The others are simply those who “are there” proximally and for the most part in everyday Being-with-one-another: “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all . . .” (SZ 126). That we refer to them as “others” disguises from ourselves our own intimate belonging to them. Far from being really free from “them,” we indeed belong to them. We are “they,” because we establish “them” as the standard by which to evaluate ourselves and everything else.33 Inasmuch as we typically encounter the others of the They in our doings, our affairs, business, handling of worldly articles  – namely, the circumspective ready-to-hand  – we tend toward evaluating ourselves relative to them, what Heidegger refers to as “distantiality.” We compare ourselves to them in their work, or judge whether we are behind or ahead by looking at them.34 In so evaluating ourselves, we subject ourselves to them in their average, leveled-down normalness. We thus allow the They to mediate the future as it opens up in our work, allow the They to shape the possibilities that emerge from our present engagement in the world. The They’s capacity to mediate and shape our future, Heidegger claims, is the essence of “publicness,” another integral element of everydayness. In the notion of everyday publicness, Heidegger assimilates all notions of the common good, social contract, rights, and community into a broad, totalizing dullness of the nonidentifiable, ambient “they” who determine the future by flattening everything into its dimmest aspect as a regularized constancy. 33 34

“One belongs to the others oneself and enhances their power” (SZ 126). Johannes Fritsche claims that Dreyfus misses here Heidegger’s employment of a standard “socialist” critique of capitalist liberalism (Fritsche 2003) in Dreyfus’s interest in emphasizing the conformist element of Heidegger’s critique of the They (Dreyfus 1991). No doubt there is something to Fritsche’s point. I would emphasize, though, that as Heidegger sees it, the amour propre of competitive economic activity – such as is being glossed in the discussion of “distantiality” – is itself derivative of a presumed likeness, i.e. conformity, that would permit the comparisons in question. That is, both capitalism and socialism are oriented by the ephemera of the They, neither of them attaining the freedom or independence they claim for themselves.

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Dasein’s absorption in the They is, paradoxically, both comforting and dissipating. Evaluating oneself and one’s possibilities with reference to the average undertakings of the They is “disturbing” (SZ 126), but such evaluation is sufficiently subtle or unobtrusive in its own right that the “disturbance is hidden” (SZ 126). One is dissolved into the others in such a way that they vanish the more we accommodate ourselves to them or understand ourselves in light of them and their Being: In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they”, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness (SZ 126–27).

In this manner, Dasein is “disburdened” by the They; the trouble (Sorge) of existing is eased. That life is easier thanks to the They is how they reinforce their “stubborn dominion” (SZ 128). Being disburdened, Dasein is no longer confronted with anything profound, difficult, exceptional, or primordial; there is no need to struggle to gain anything. What can be seen in the uniform light of the public is the familiar and accessible; differences of level and genuineness, anything that cuts to the heart of the matter, are ignored and missed (SZ 127).35

Chatter, Ambiguity, and the Masquerade of Everyday Community What is at stake in our communal existence, according to Heidegger, is our disclosedness, our character as the being that is open to Being, and that in being open in fact “discloses” Being in and among the beings in the world. Perhaps the primary way that we do this is by properly being ourselves, our “ownmost,” authentic selves, which includes a reference to our communal essence. We are not being who we really are if we deny or disguise that we are communal. So the problem with the dictatorship of the They is not really moral; it is a problem with our exhibition of the meaning and truth of ourselves, and of Being inasmuch as we are Being-There. The further complication of the matter is that, while we are the disclosers of Being, we are also the principal occluders

35

Heidegger echoes Nietzsche in equating the public with the common, as in vulgar, and thus imputing to that which remains undiminished by the glare of the public the distinction of being rare and unique. Heidegger’s consideration of the seductiveness and easiness of the ascendance of the They has summoned occasional comparisons to Tocqueville’s concept of “soft despotism.” On this, see Dostal 1994 and the searching meditation by Ralph Hancock (Hancock 2012). Julian Young pushes this comparison rather far (1997, 63–4) seeing, of all things, the possibility of enthusiastic, wholehearted support for liberal democracy in Heidegger’s positions.

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of Being, and this element of our Being, our occlusiveness, needs also to be manifested or disclosed. As Heidegger accounts for everydayness, it is in the first place an attitude toward time that privileges regularity and stability, and therefore in our dealings with articles of use, privileges the stable, visible aspect of the beings in its relation to the purposes that govern our use of them. Everydayness privileges stability, therefore, but is not itself stable or at rest. This is important to keep in mind for Heidegger’s discussion of everyday existence under the dominion of the They-self, because he frequently emphasizes the turbulence and business of such an inauthentic existence. The point is not that rest, tranquility, idleness, or peace are themselves to be preferred as, by contrast, “authentic,” but that the “hurly burly” (as he put it in the “Comment on Jaspers”) of everyday existence encourages a false and ultimately self-defeating form of such stability, one example of which is tradition. Thus, everyday existence is so turbulent that “tranquility,” rest, comfort, “habituation,” “constancy,” and “familiarity” are unduly privileged as ideals. Being-with-one-another and communicating with one another are the source of this misplaced elevation of rest, tradition, and theoretical rationality. Gerede, “chatter” or “idle talk,” occupies the most prominent place in Heidegger’s brief treatment of the characteristics of Dasein’s disclosedness under the aptly named “dictatorship” of the They.36 “Idle talk,” he says, “is the kind of Being that belongs to Being-with-one-another itself” (SZ 177). That is, it belongs not merely to the way we are when we are already inauthentic; Gerede is at all times and places characteristic of humans being together, in authentic as well as inauthentic communities.37 The Greeks inordinately privileged speech as the medium of disclosure, to the exclusion, Heidegger implies, of means by which the profounder relationship to Being might have been apprehended.38 When with other Dasein, we are simply immersed in speech – idle, chattery, gossipy, braying cant – to the point where every disclosure occurs 36

37

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It is first in his presentation of the everyday modes of Being-in, followed by curiosity (the everyday iteration of Verstehen) and ambiguity (the everyday version of Auslegung). This is the correlate of the priority Heidegger assigns to hearing and hearkening as modes of disclosure even despite his appropriation from the theoretical tradition of the language of sight and illumination: “Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (SZ 163). The connection between hearing and community comes through in the sequel: “. . . as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears, because it understands. As a Being-in-the-world with Others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to Dasein-with and to itself; and in its thralldom it ‘belongs’ to these. Being-with develops in listening to one another” (SZ 163). “Among the Greeks, their everyday existing was largely diverted into talking with one another, but at the same time they ‘had eyes’ to see. Is it an accident that in both their pre-philosophical and their philosophical way of interpreting Dasein, they defined the essence of man as zôon logon echon? The latter way of interpreting this definition of man in the sense of the animale rationale, ‘something living which has reason,’ is not indeed ‘false,’ but it covers up the phenomenal basis for this definition of ‘Dasein’ ” (SZ 165).

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through this medium.39 It is truly the vehicle by which the They dominates; its “dictatorship” really works by dictating: There are many things with which we first become acquainted in this way, and there is not a little which never gets beyond such an average understanding. This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extraction. In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed. In no case is a Dasein, untouched and unseduced by the way in which things have been interpreted, set before the open country of a “world-in-itself” so that it just beholds what it encounters. The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood – that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world “matter” to it. The “they” prescribes one’s disposition, and determines how one “sees” (SZ 169–70).

Our thinking and reasoning, our moods and feelings: all of this is established in advance by our immersion in the dominant opinion of our time and place. Despite its ubiquity and totality, however, Gerede leaves us neither soothed nor peaceful, but restless and confused. “Discourse” (Rede) as such refers to the articulation of the world as this may be apprehended and expressed by Dasein. By chatter (Gerede), however, Heidegger refers to a derivative, narrowed form of articulation that is uprooted from any speech that would be genuinely disclosive of the articulated structure of the beings themselves. Discourse (Rede) as such is meant to be “about” the Being of beings, such that what is said in the talk is the Being of the being. It is, after all, supposed to be disclosive; it discloses the Being of things inasmuch as they are related to each other. Chatter, however, is not “about” the beings at all; it happens at a further degree of removal from the things supposedly being discussed and just glosses over them (SZ 168). It is thus the source of averageness, as in “average everydayness.”40 39

40

Interpreters of Being and Time differ on the meaning of this “through” and therefore on the thoroughness of the dominance of the everyday. The question is this:  in Heidegger’s understanding, is everydayness a way of being in which we are “proximally and for the most part” immersed – as I along with, for example, Ernst Tügendhat (1967) argue – or is it a way of being “in light of which” we must consider other, authentic modes of existence. The scholarship of Günter Figal (1988, 150–2) and Steven Crowell (2008) presents a case for the latter. In seeing everydayness as merely the normal mode of Dasein’s dealing in the world, they understate or overlook, I  think, Heidegger’s emphasis on its “falling” character and its occlusive power to cover even itself up. The point of emphasizing this is not to stress some sort of moral disapproval on Heidegger’s part; the reason it is necessary to emphasize it is that the obscurity and occlusiveness of the phenomenon is precisely what Heidegger is trying to point out about human existence. This point becomes particularly important when trying to draw contrasts between Heidegger’s position and those of other figures in the history of thought, for example, Husserl and Aristotle, who overlook the initial obscurity of phenomena as essential to their very Being. In Heidegger’s discussion of “statement” or “assertion” (Aussage), the derivative, present-athand form of discourse, he says that it still discloses the Being of beings; it is not, like chatter, totally removed from the disclosure of the beings.

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Chatter is not “about” the thing talked about in the talk, but about the average understanding of that thing, which is “the same” among those commonly hearing it: “We do not so much understand the beings which are talked about; we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk as such” (SZ 168). The sameness of what is publicly so understood represents no original claims to understanding, but only an “undifferentiated kind of understandability” (SZ 169). This “undifferentiated kind of understandability” does not return to the ground of anything; it only closes off rather than opens up (SZ 169). The average, generalizable medium of communication expressed in chatter (Gerede) cuts Dasein off from every distinct or unique “relationship-of-Being” toward the beings of the world, toward other Dasein, even toward its own Being-in, by means of a hidden, “ever-increasing, uncanny groundlessness” (SZ 170). The public veneer of general and average regularity disguises an uncanny, uncomfortable uprootedness of each particular Dasein. The busyness and oppressive motion of chatter is a reminder that the everyday community is not itself calm or peaceful, but a dizzying swirl of motion and activity. This vortex of shallowness and superficiality makes stability and rest – tarrying and leisure – seem attractive, but perversely offers them as goals to be restlessly pursued. Everyday community thus privileges “curiosity” over any broader or more measured form of intellectual activity. Curiosity so understood is a way of “seeing” that lusts and chases sight after sight, not for the sake of the thing being looked at, but for the sake of an insatiable desire for novelty. It is goaded on, so to speak, by its accomplice, chatter. Chatter and curiosity, thus, as a mutually reinforcing homelessness, restrict the horizon of understanding. Each of these ways-to-be, Heidegger says, “drags the other one with it” (SZ 173; emphasis in the original text).41 In this depiction of the “everyday” relationship between thinking and speaking, “curiosity” and “chatter,” Heidegger thus skewers the original understanding of philosophy defined as the attempt to replace opinions about the whole with knowledge of the whole. All this ever amounted to was the immersion in chatter (opinion) and the formulation, on that basis, of dissatisfying theoretical attempts to give expression to our unquenchable “fascination” with the world (SZ 176). In treating curiosity, Heidegger gives a genealogical account of how it arises from our initial involvement, even “absorption,” in our concernful tasks within the world. The first step occurs when concernful circumspection comes to rest, that is, when we take a break from our labors or rest satisfied with them. In these circumstances, when “freed” from its tasks, circumspection will rest, “tarry,” and try to see the “ ‘world’ merely as it looks,” that is, in its stable aspect (SZ 172; emphasis in the original text). Heidegger deliberately echoes the Platonic and Aristotelian language of theoretical philosophy. Such circumspection “de-severs” the being from itself, and wherever it is spatially, 41

“Chatter controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one ‘must’ have read and seen. In being everywhere and nowhere, curiosity is delivered over to chatter” (SZ 173).

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it brings it near:  “Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongside that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand” (SZ 172). Heidegger is glossing here in the classical elevation of schole, leisure, and tranquility in the desire to apprehend Being by means of the present-at-hand looks (the Platonic eide) of a being. The philosophic rendering of the world as a static picture of visible presence, however, cannot satisfy the “lust of the eyes” that motivates the initial fascination with visibility that elevates the “looks” of the beings (SZ 171). This prompts the second step. Curiosity does not seek to understand the beings, even in the limited fashion of thaumazein in the presence of the beings that emerge out of ready-to-hand circumspection at rest, but pursues the experience of seeing after seeing, desire after desire. Heidegger characterizes it as a sort of restlessness, specifically “non-tarrying” (SZ 172, 347), which culminates in a total or perpetual distraction and a “never dwelling anywhere” (SZ 172, 347), ever in quest of “novelty” and distraction. The uprootedness of chatter and the spurious, specious guidance it supplies to our intellect in inflaming curiosity provokes a prevailing sense of meaning that is not, in Heidegger’s description, absurdity or meaninglessness so much as “ambiguity,” Zweideutigheit. This term, in Heidegger’s technical German usage, plays on the term significance or meaning – Bedeutigkeit – which refers to the aims and purposes toward which one’s pragmatic dealings are directed. In Heidegger’s terminology, the toward-whiches and for-the-sake-of-whiches are envisioned by concernful circumspection in one’s ready-to-hand manipulation of pragmata in the world. The meaning refers to the sense given by being assuredly goal-oriented. Yet the English translation, “ambiguity,” referring to unclear or blurred meanings, perhaps, does not quite capture the German, which stresses duality:  Zwei-deutigkeit, the double-signified. The doubleness stems from the gloss on everything supplied by chatter, which obscures the particular and profound, and pretends that the general is deep when it is really the most superficial: “Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genuinely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though at bottom it is not; or else it does not look so, and yet at bottom it is” (SZ 173). The doubleness of ambiguity refers to the unmoored meaning, current and up-to-date among the They, and the genuine meaning, almost completely obscured. Ambiguity interferes with the cohesion and therefore the collective undertakings of any community. What appears to be a collective project is revealed to have no one responsible for it; something that everyone seemed to support collapses in failure with everyone (das Man) rhyming off his or her supposedly long-standing criticisms of it. Heidegger describes the generality as though they are each privy to a secret insight. This is because in ambiguity everything genuinely unique and profound is obscured, and so instead everyone,

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mistaking trivialities for profundity, assumes the attitude of being sophisticated and canny, “on the scent” of something deep. Meanwhile, no one is genuinely responsible for any decisive action. Therefore, those who were once “in on it” are now critical: “When confronted with the carrying-through of what ‘they’ have surmised together, chatter readily establishes that ‘they’ ‘could have done that too’ – for ‘they’ have indeed surmised together . . . chatter is even indignant that what it has surmised and constantly demanded now actually happens” (SZ 174; emphasis in the original text). In ambiguity, talking about things seems more real than genuinely acting on them, hence the They is “constantly going wrong” in its understanding of its own projects: “This ambiguity . . . gives chatter the semblance of having everything decided in it” (SZ 174; emphasis in the original text). Ambiguity obscures the network of significance that would otherwise bind Dasein to shared meanings of articulated purposes; these being obscured, Dasein is turned over, as we have seen, to its endless capacity for voluble, loquacious chatter, ever and endlessly abstracted from even the thinnest disclosure of beings. Being is thus not shared between members of the community in a joint disclosure. Chatter interferes with, “slips itself in between,” relations between people (SZ 174). A “secret and reciprocal listening-in” then characterizes relations that are suspicious and “watchful” (SZ 175). Here Heidegger appropriates terminology from Simmel’s use of Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in referring to the condition of a “for one another” (Fureinander) disguising an “against one another” (Gegeneinander) (SZ 175). The upshot for community is suspicion and deception masquerading behind congeniality. In the ambiguous network of interpretations that make up the everyday community of the They, the common understanding of what is, and what means what taken from chatter, and is thus abstracted from even the thinnest representation of the Being of what is at stake and what is being handled.

Falling and the Everyday Ultimately, Heidegger groups the different elements of the disclosedness of everydayness  – curiosity, chatter, and ambiguity  – in their shared exhibition a particular relationship to time, which he refers to as “falling.” Falling (verfallen), a “basic kind of Being that belongs to everydayness,” encapsulates the disclosedness of this motion (SZ 175). The term, as with all other such terms in Being and Time, is not intended to express moral disapproval. Nonetheless, it captures a sense of the decadence – a virtual cognate – but also a sense of motion, a “crash” or a “plunge” (Absturz) into the world. Our “absorption” in the tempting, tranquilizing, alienating, entangling world is  – despite the comfort and familiarity sought and in some mistaken sense promised  – not as smooth as it might appear. It is, indeed, “turbulent.” The motion of falling captures the character of everydayness as a tendency. That is, it is not simply a state in which one either does or does not find oneself. Everydayness is the

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tendency to “move” in the direction of inauthenticity, whether one is currently authentic or inauthentic. We fall toward inauthenticity “proximally and for the most part.” Falling entails an emphasis on the temporality of the present at the expense of both the past (having been) and the future. The motion of falling is a “leaping away” from our “ownmost” future, a refusal of it in favor of a permanent present (Gegenwart). The present, as understood in falling, is not without a past and future,42 but it submits these ecstases of time to the predominance of the present moment: “The craving for the new is of course a way of proceeding towards something not yet seen, but in such a manner that the making-present seeks to extricate itself from awaiting. Curiosity is futural in a way which is altogether inauthentic, and in such a manner, moreover, that it does not await a possibility, but, in its craving, just desires such a possibility as something that is actual” (SZ 347).43 The passion to urge on ourselves an immediately “present” future, and to force this to relate to an immediately present “past,” does violence to ourselves. It consists in ripping ourselves away from a genuinely pertinent future potentiality by submitting it to the strictures and demands of “right now”; this, in turn, allows for no genuine connection to the past into which we’ve been thrown, and leaves us uprooted and disconnected from it (SZ 347).44 By falling into the present, we obscure from ourselves our finite existence as beings stretched through time, and come to understand ourselves only as a being like the other beings for whom time is not an issue. This can only be disorienting and disturbing, though, precisely because this is not who we are in our Being.

The Clearing of the Everyday Heidegger’s characterization of the temporality of falling and the prevailing confusion of everydayness as ambiguity indicates, then, the historical moment to which the inquiry of Being and Time is addressed. There is some resolution here of the apparent paradox in Heidegger’s account of everydayness, where it seemed on the one hand to exhibit very particular, late-modern, even specifically Weimar elements, and on the other hand to be a fundamental element in the constitution of Dasein.45 The elements of Heidegger’s account that 42 43

44

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“In every ecstasis, temporality temporalizes itself as a whole” (SZ 350). “The present leaps away from its authentic future and from its authentic having been so that it lets Dasein come to its authentic existence only by taking a detour through that present” (SZ 348). “The more inauthentically the present is  – that is, the more making-present comes towards ‘itself’ – the more it flees in the face of a definite potentiality-for-Being and closes it off; but in that case, all the less can the future come back to the being which has been thrown. In the ‘leaping away’ of the present, one also forgets increasingly” (SZ 347). On Heidegger’s pedagogical rhetoric, see Ehrmantraut 2010. This superb study reads the sequence of courses following Being and Time as a successive working out of (one of the) theses

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seem to date specifically to Weimar – the references to public transportation, the welfare system, newspapers, and the like – are shown to be expressive of a latent tendency in the everydayness of human Dasein. In some sense, these late-modern elements are the completion or adornment of civilization qua civilization. Heidegger thus after a fashion echoes Nietzsche’s cruel diagnosis that the end of history as sketched by Hegel is but a “banker’s night out in Berlin.”46 But it must also be noted that Heidegger’s everydayness is not an accomplishment, like Hegel’s end of history, that was won through a history of struggle against brute nature and the lower elements of human character and society. The ascent of everydayness is a way of existing that we have relaxed into, stifling or numbing, at each step, our qualms or regrets. The foregoing analysis of Heidegger’s account of everydayness has uncovered and emphasized the intimate relationship between it and the “primordial” markers of Existenz – as discussed in the analysis of Heidegger’s earlier works in Chapters  1 and 2, Bekümmerung or distress at the question of whether one has attained the primordial. Theory emerges from practice thanks both to the ease and comfort of practice and as a comforting response to the disturbance of the breakdown of practice. Our everyday orientation by habitual custom, stability, regularity, and “constancy” elevates the visible – and therefore “public” – aspects of the beings of the world. It is not the case, then, that our habitual practices are straightforwardly a more “primordial” or basic form of our understanding or grasping Being of pragmata: indeed, the fluency and general reliability of such practices occlude from us a deeper finitude betokened by moods of distress, anxiety, or disturbance generally.47 What is “given” cannot thus be understood as the beings that are “present” (vorhanden) to us, rather the given is apprehended in both the distressed, finite, manifesting of the nothing, the null basis of existence, and so on, as well as our privileging and therefore elevation of the stable and secure, theoretically apprehensible aspect of the beings. There is a social-communal correlate to the privileging of stability that expresses itself as the emergence of theory from practice: this is the inauthentic,

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of that book, namely, that “the very possibility, necessity, and direction of philosophic questioning (i.e., its passage through fundamental ontology) essentially belongs to a distinctive moment in the ‘History of Being’ ” (Ehrmantraut 2010, 45). The claim I develop here is that this insight is already present in Being and Time, though it is not made as explicitly as in the courses to come. Nietzsche is quoting Edward von Hartmann, Untimely Meditations 2. 9 (Nietzsche 1997, 109). In a memorable passage, Heidegger puts it this way: “It is precisely when we see the ‘world’ unsteadily and fitfully in accordance with our moods, that the ready-to-hand shows itself in its specific worldliness, which is never the same from day to day. By looking at the world theoretically, we have already dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely present-at-hand, though admittedly this uniformity comprises a new abundance of things which can be discovered by simply characterizing them. Yet even the purest theoria has not left all moods behind it; even when we look theoretically at what is just present-at-hand, it does not show itself purely as it looks unless this theoria lets it come towards us in a tranquil tarrying alongside . . ., in rastonê and diagogê” (SZ 138).

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everyday mode of Being-with that privileges a particularly “instrumental” form of relating to other people and again reinforces a limited, sclerotic way of manifesting in all of our dealings with the beings. Again, Heidegger’s meaning is illuminated by seeing it in the light of his claim that everydayness is our inclination to privilege stability, familiarity, and constancy in the face of our temporally finite existence. This tendency, when expressed in our dealings with other beings like us, that is, other people, inclines us to understand ourselves in stable terms comprehensible to them, as well as then to construe our future possibilities on this most constrained, indeed severely curtailed basis. In other words, the prospect of getting along smoothly in a community with our fellow human beings dulls our sense of what our own truest, most fulfilling possibilities are. At the same time, therefore, this prospect tempts us to relate to this community on an ill-formed basis, where we are doomed to exist “inauthentically” in a so-called community of craven deceit and self-dealing precisely because neither we nor our fellows have a sound grasp of who we really are. The “original” problem then is the occlusion of the truth: such occlusion manifests itself, again, misleadingly as moral or ethical phenomena, but the root problem is truth. Moreover, the entire superstructure of the history of political philosophy and the defining quarrels of this tradition – ancient versus modern, individual versus community, virtue and passion, rights and duties, calculation and sacrifice – have been premised on an altogether shallow and inadequate understanding of (a) the sort of beings having the quarrel and (b) the Being that is therefore characteristic of them and rest of the beings in the world. To put the inadequacy of previous political philosophy more precisely, and in terms of Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time, Heidegger’s argument suggests that both modern and ancient philosophy are premised on the “leaping in” rather than “leaping ahead” forms of solicitude for others. The orientation of traditional political philosophies, be it the classical form that begins in “opinions” concerning the just and noble, or the modern form that is concerned with the objects of the passion and their similitude, are both oriented by a pragmatic “concern” with an object that is not Dasein: in the case of the classical orientation by opinion, the implicit objects are justice “in itself” or the noble “in itself,” which “solicit” more deference and attention than the Dasein with whom we are involved. Or, to put this another way, we orient our involvement with these other Dasein in the light of these non-Daseinish objects. In the case of modern political philosophy, to speak with a similar degree of generality, the rationality that informs political life is properly oriented by the objects of desire common to the human species as a whole. Hobbes famously speaks of the “similitude of the passions” and the reliability, therefore, of political communities designed with this most reliable generality in mind. Kant, to select an example from whom it is important to distinguish Heidegger, likewise orients political questions around universal qualities of human nature and the dignity that these impart to us. The problem, according to Heidegger’s reasoning on the character of Mitsein and solicitude, is that these ways of relating to other

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Dasein are oriented by beings – objects of passions, passions, virtues, the dignified qualities of the human species – that “do not have the Being of Dasein.” They cannot therefore express a “leaping-ahead” solicitude that intends to help another Dasein come into its “own” authentic existence. Understanding and relating to others with respect to generalizable qualities that may somehow refer to them is not “solicitously” tending to their Being; it is effectively mastering and dominating them by submitting them to the rule of an instrument or object, wittingly or otherwise. “Leaping-in” solicitude, thus, as is perhaps now clear, has the character of “theoretical” ethics, as diagnosed by Heidegger in his earlier courses. The form of such ethics is that it relates humans to and evaluates them with respect to standards from which we are removed, and therefore grasped by “looking” at or theorizing about. “Leaping-in” solicitude, like theoretical ethics, fails to have an adequate appreciation for the character of the being at the center of the inquiry, the human consciousness, that is supposedly being related to such theoretically apprehended beings. Heidegger’s recurrence to Dasein in its everydayness as the necessary starting point for the investigation of the meaning of Being is sometimes compared to Aristotle’s claim that we may approach an understanding of the first things by way of appreciating what is first for us, that is, Aristotle’s recapitulation of the orientation of Socratic philosophy by way of opinion.48 The foregoing interpretation, however, illuminates the profound differences between this Aristotelian or Socratic approach and that of Heidegger. Everydayness is not opinion; turning to everydayness in order to apprehend the meaning of Being is in fact a rejection of the prospect of discerning such meaning in the contradictory opinions that people hold about such matters. Why? In Heidegger’s characterization, Socrates’ turn to opinion misses the first step in thinking. It overlooks our inherent preference for the visible, stable, reliable, and habitual by turning, indeed, to our “habitual” or “customary” opinions and seeking to clarify the stable, present content of these opinions in their “looks.” The Socratic turn lives out Heidegger’s claim that everydayness covers itself up. It is already incipiently “theoretical,” occlusively moralizing and thus blind to our Being. Opinion, in Heidegger’s schema, is chatter, Gerede. The reflection of “what’s what” to which we have access in opinion is stripped of any genuine openness to our “ownmost” existence: the predominant meanings in this medium are zweideutig, ambiguous, current, and gripping at one level of meaning, but altogether untethered from any worthwhile purchase on the meaning of Being. Whereas the Socratic thesis is that “dialogue” can lead us to the truth, that the juxtaposition of one opinion or set of opinions against another in the light of mutual contradictory claims can lead us, step by step or dialogically, toward greater clarity and stability with reference to “what’s what” or the meaning of Being as such, Heidegger’s characterization of the predominance of “ambiguity” in Gerede is that there simply is no such path or openness 48

Graeme Nicholson is just one example (Nicholson 2005, 47–8).

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available; each seeming path is indeed governed by our “everyday” preferences for stability, and what appears as “contradiction” or, after a manner of speaking, a “breakdown” in the argument merely points us to another grasping after serenity by way of clarity. Heidegger’s lifelong refusal of dialogue, a “philosophic embarrassment” (or “perplexity,” Verlegenheit, SZ 25) as a path to the genuine openness to the truth of Being is fully present in Being and Time.49 Indeed, the very inquiry of the book as a whole is premised on acknowledging the perplexity that the Socratic tradition of Western philosophy has obscured. Heideggerian philosophy is, in the decisive respect, counter-Socratic. Seeing this contrast with opinion and therefore with the starting point of Socratic political philosophy should dispel the mistaken notion that by everydayness Heidegger means simply how we are in our “pretheoretical” or “prescientific” way of existing. Heidegger’s everydayness does not provide a “neutral” or presuppositionless phenomenological account, if there were such a thing, of the way human life is lived before the deforming influence of theoretical rationalism.50 Instead, understood in the context of the intimate relationship between everydayness and our primordial disquiet, anxiety, and disturbance, the error of this reading should have been exposed. By contrast, as I have argued, everydayness most essentially expresses our temporality, namely, that aspect that privileges a possible future of regularity and stability, “an eternity of yesterdays.” Its essential temporality – of which its relationship to the theoretical is derivative – is of decisive importance for Heidegger’s account of everydayness and therefore of greatest importance for understanding its place in the wending argument of Being and Time. Everydayness, so understood, expresses an aversion to our perishing finitude and finite temporality as such. Such an understanding of everydayness yields both (1) a grasp of the connectedness of its social aspects (the dominance of the They-self as the main source 49

50

Here, then, is the principal difference with Gadamer, who retains the conviction that dialogue will conduct us, even in a time of destitution, to the understanding of Being. Gadamer even maintains that this is true of Heidegger, even though Heidegger denies it (see Gadamer 1994, 194). On his difference with Heidegger on this point, see Zuckert 1996, 102–3, and Robert J. Dostal, “The World is Never Lost: The Hermeneutics of Trust” (Dostal 1987). I have mentioned previously the influence of this reading by Hubert Dreyfus on such thinkers as Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty. It might also be noted that Gregory Bruce Smith’s interpretation of Heidegger offers another version of this reading (Smith 2007). Smith finds that the merit of Heidegger’s “early” work is in the phenomenological acuity exhibited in his attentive account of “everydayness,” as in the way things normally are, and that his later work is compromised by “metaphysical” flights that abstract from the granular, detailed phenomenological” treatments of our pretheoretical existence to be found in his earlier work (the period in the vicinity of Being and Time and slightly afterward). Smith, in my view, understates the extent to which Heidegger’s account of everydayness includes an account of what it is about how things are “proximally and for the most part” that obscures the phenomena, and hence an appreciation that an important dimension of the given phenomena is what Heidegger refers to as “Nothing,” i.e., the given is in a certain respect absent and the primordial condition is hence, in some respect, confused. Heidegger’s later work, on such a reading, should therefore be seen as continuous with these early insights and read as a way of giving some sort of expression to our profound finitude.

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of meaning in the world) and its theoretical aspects (the emergence of theoretical presence [vorhandenheit] out of practical handiness) and (2) a sense of this happening within a historical moment in which the present (Gewartigen) has come to predominate in our understanding of and relationship to everything in our existence. “Everydayness” is not self-evidently, by any means, the necessary way to reckon how we are “proximally and for the most part.” Heidegger’s claim is only tenable in the context of other elements of his thought, most importantly his argument that the “fundamental experience” is Existenz  – that Dasein is “mine” and projected futurally as “care” for its “existence” – as claimed in the early work discussed in Chapters  1 and 2, and in Being and Time. Only if our Being is most illuminated in the perilous and fraught experience of Existenz does it become plausible to say that the principal obstacle to our own apprehension of our Being as such is our constitutional inclination to privilege stability and regularity. By correctly appreciating the complex duality of everydayness, Heidegger’s proposition that his work in Being and Time starts in perplexity (Verlegenheit) can now be understood more precisely and contemplated in its tenuousness. Perplexity appears as one of these moods or experiences that breaks through the ersatz tranquility and persistent ambiguity to announce the finitude of existence. Perplexity is provoked not merely by the magnitude or grandeur of the topic to be considered but by the sensation of the vast discrepancy between the adequacy of available accounts of the matter and their pretensions to coherence. A contrast with the beginning of Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology is warranted. That series of Husserl’s lectures, given in Göttingen in 1907, purported to explain the source of the “perplexity” and “discomfort” that obtained in the field of epistemology: Natural thinking in science and everyday life is untroubled by the difficulties concerning the possibility of cognition. Philosophical thinking is circumscribed by one’s position toward the problems concerning the possibility of cognition. The perplexities [Verlegenheiten] in which reflection about the possibility of a cognition that “gets at” the things themselves becomes entangled: How can we be sure that cognition accords with things as they exist in themselves, that it “gets at them”? . . . Absurdity: to begin with [zunächst], when we think naturally about cognition and fit it and its achievements into the natural ways of thinking which pertains to the sciences we arrive at theories that are appealing at first. But they end in contradiction or absurdity – Inclination to open skepticism (Husserl 1999, 1).51 51

This is from “The Train of Thought in the Lectures,” published with the lectures themselves. The German text is as follows: “Natürliches, um die Schwierigkeiten der Erkenntnismöglichkeit unbekümmertes Denken in Leben und Wissenschaft  – philosophisches Denken, bestimmt durch die Stellung zu den Problemen der Erkenntnismöglichkeit.” “Die Verlegenheiten, in die sich die Reflecxion über die Möglichkeit einer die Sachen selbst treffenden Erkenntnis verwickelt; wie kann Erkenntnis ihrer Übereinstimmung mit den an sich seienden Sachen Gewiss warden, sie ‘treffen’? Was kümmern sich die Sachen an sich um

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In Husserl’s account, the currently felt “perplexity” needs to be overcome or removed by returning or reviving a clarity and unconfusion that is present either (a)  in life or (b)  according to nature or the natural horizon. For Heidegger, by contrast, perplexity remains our only clue, the golden thread that leads from our present miasma of confused, embarrassed, dulled, numb pretensions back to the primordial, genuine Being of things, which is itself disturbing, anxiety-inducing, and troubling. If Jacques Taminiaux is correct that for Husserl, “phenomenology has its origin in a perplexity regarding the very possibility of cognition, and that phenomenology was designed by Husserl as a method for overcoming once and for all the discomfort and perplexity that were prevailing at the time in the field of knowledge,”52 then Heidegger may fruitfully be seen as attempting to undertake an investigation where the initial experience of our poverty and destitution, our “perplexity,” is retained throughout as the only perilous link we have with the profoundest currents of Being. The principle at work is that expressed in the famous hermeneutic circle, where one must already have an apprehension of what is being sought in order to sense when or if one has found it: perplexity, the ghastly sense of the inadequacy of our pretensions to knowledge, even the most basic sense of the meaning of the most ubiquitous and apparently important matter, namely, Being, is the only thin purchase we have on the question of Being and must therefore be tended most carefully.53

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unsere Denkbewegungen und um die sie regelnden logischen Gesetze? Sie sind Gesetze unseres Denkens, psychologische Gesetz. –Biologismus, psychologishe Gesetze als Anpassungsgesetze.” “Widersinn:  man gerät zunächst, natürlich über die Erkenntnis relecktierend und sie mit ihrer Leistung in das natürliche Denksystem der Wissenschaften einordenend, in ansprechenede Theorien, die aber jederzeit in Widerspruch oder Widersinn enden.  –Neigung zucm offenen Skeptizismus” (Husserl GS 2, 1 ll. 1–17). Taminiaux 1991, 2. I thus take a broader view of the importance of perplexity to the investigation than de Beistegui. De Beistegui comments on perplexity in Being and Time, which he notes “is left unanalyzed,” that it contributes to Being and Time remaining “sheltered from the questions that begin to be articulated in the lecture course from 1929–30 and from the unresolved tension which characterizes it” (de Beistegui 2003, 69).

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5 Disclosive Occlusion and the Promise of Nihilism

In Being and Time, Heidegger writes from and for a moment in which everything has been oriented and reoriented according to the prominence we give to beings – handling them, understanding this handling in the clarity available to theoretical reflection, and sharing these reflections as a basis for the ordering of communal life – and according to the comfort, even solace, that comes from this orientation. And yet this “everything” inadequately soothes or quells our disquieted perplexity about what it all means. We have arrived at this point, Heidegger suggests, because human Dasein initially and usually prefers to be oriented by “constancy” and regularity. This attitude toward our finite temporality conceives of time as “the moving image of eternity,” as first expressed in Plato’s Timaeus (37d), or with different emphasis, conceives of time as an eternity of yesterdays (SZ 371).1 In the case of our involvement with the pragmata amid which we are “always already” involved, this attitude toward time privileges their visible aspect as a token of their character. In the case of our shared existence with other beings like us – other people, other Dasein – this attitude toward time results in a self-deceiving submission to a broadly shared articulation and understanding of the world that again takes a false constancy as guide, but which is more tangibly expressed in various forms of mastery and domination, sometimes, but not necessarily, subtle. The constant search for constancy leaves us numb to our disquiet and confusion, but not for that reason less disquieted or confused. Being and Time announces this disquiet and raises the prospect of its appropriation as the clue to our existence. Our awareness of this condition is communicated to us through perplexity, the distressed, aporetic sense of confusion and dissatisfaction with the prevailing and available accounts of the most 1

George Grant frequently compared the notion of time as the moving image of eternity to the notion of “time as history,” which he argued reached its fullest expression in Heidegger (Grant 1995).

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fundamental matter, the meaning of Being, not least our own Being, our existence as ourselves. Heidegger refers variously to the historical moment in which this perplexed awareness may be granted as the time of nihilism, the hegemony of technology, the “forgetfulness of Being,” the abandonment of beings by Being, the death of God, the “world-midnight.”2 Again, these refer to that time in which the prevailing, theoretically inflected, “metaphysical,” understandings of the very meaning of To Be are apprehended to be exhausted:  the time of destitution, when what stood now falls. Given, then, that our age is littered with the conceptual detritus and civilizational wreckage of the epoch of “metaphysics,” that is, the tradition in the West that privileged theoretical rationality as “our only star and compass,” to quote one important formulation of the principle, how are we to understand our possibilities both for ourselves and with respect to the political community?3 What, then, are the possibilities for human life and, in particular, the political community now that we have been shown to be so alienated from Being? Heidegger’s new philosophical proposition in Being and Time is that our possibilities for community are fundamentally determined by our way of Being, that way being uniquely distinct from that of all the other beings. We are the only ones that are concerned about Being, that are at all open to the question of Being. This openness, this questioning, is the primary means by which Dasein – as the locus of Being among the beings of the world, the “there” (da) of Being (viz. Da-Sein) – discloses Being. In our time, when every available doctrine of Being from the history of thought has been shown to be destitute, Dasein does this most fundamentally by raising the question of Being. That is, Being comes to us not in the fullness of an overflowing endowment, a Plotinean emanation, or the fulfilled speech of Hegel, but reveals itself in our perplexed distress as the impoverishment of a question, even a forgotten question. The impoverished

2

3

Michael Ehrmantraut notes the relationship between the moment of perplexity and the characterization of the inquiry into Being as historical: “In Being and Time, Heidegger had treated the crisis of science as a re-emergence of perplexities which concern the character and accessibility of the basic objects of science, objects designated by ‘fundamental concepts’ like ‘nature’ and ‘life’ (SZ 9–10). Heidegger moves beyond this narrower determination of the crisis as a perplexity about conceptual foundations when he now treats the crisis of science as one that concerns the ‘position [of science] in the whole of historical actuality’ (GA 27, 40) and presents this comprehensive crisis as determinative of the historical situation of the question of Being. Here one can say that the treatment in Einleitung stands within a movement of thinking from Being and Time to the works of the late 1930s (the Nietzsche lectures in particular) in which the implications of the thesis (of Being and Time) that the questioning of Being is essentially historical are gradually and ever more comprehensively unfolded. According to this thesis, the very possibility, necessity, and direction of philosophic questioning (i.e., its passage through fundamental ontology) essentially belongs to a distinctive moment in the ‘History of Being.’ In the course of this unfolding, the contemporary crisis of science appears as merely one aspect of a deeper and more pervasive ‘crisis,’ an even variously described in more comprehensive terms:  the ‘death of God’ or the ‘darkening of the world’ ” (Ehrmantraut 2010, 45). Locke, First Treatise I58.

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disclosiveness fundamentally constitutive of our Being must be retained in any conception of our political possibilities. Incidentally, our destitution comprises the fuller meaning of our “finitude.” Inasmuch as Being comes to us as a confused, perhaps barely recalled question, the key to understanding Being  – and any communal possibilities that might follow from such understanding – is to understand Nothing. In a qualified way, that is, with respect to the beings, (somethings), Being is the “same” as Nothing. For Dasein to think Being as Nothing – that is, to think Being not only as the Being of the beings but Being as such, free from comparing it to or somehow “as” a being – is both a liberation from the millennia-long sojourning of human existence in its alienation from Being and a true homecoming. The character of communal existence complicates Dasein’s liberating thought of Being as Nothing. Our disclosedness consists not merely in “understanding,” but also in “articulating” or speaking this understanding. Heidegger argues that whereas our understanding of Being expresses an openness to the finitude of Being in its grasp of the Nothing, articulation or our discursiveness (Rede in the terminology of Being and Time) is always oriented by beings, by “somethings.” Any articulated account of Being as such recurs to referencing beings and occludes, therefore, the openness in question. The necessary propaedeutic of grasping the sameness of Nothing and Being is constrained by our Being. Such constraint attains communal, political resonance because those capacities of our Being that permit our existing in communities – Mitsein – are rooted in our powers of communication (Mitteilung) or speech. Existing with others involves necessarily relating ourselves to these other beings: it requires the “articulation” of somethings rather than nothings. And the articulation of “somethings” carries with it the relapse into the orientation by the presence of beings that characterized the epoch of metaphysics. The fraught tension of our disclosive possibilities is particularly resonant in a time such as ours, a time of destitution. The promise of nihilism, then, is as follows:  given the unique purchase on the distinction between Being and beings afforded by the acquaintance with the experience of the Nothing, our time, the time of nihilism, offers a genuinely unique opportunity to confront the question of Being and, as such, to orient our existence by Being as such. The peculiar, topsy-turvy promise of our time, where the forgetfulness and abandonment of Being leaves us open finally to grasping our impoverished finitude, and therein the truth of our relation to Being, is always being obscured from us by our persistent, occluding involvement with beings, with somethings, not least the “somethings” that are other people! This occlusion, therefore, is especially troublesome for communal or political life, which by its nature involves relating, at a minimum, one Dasein to another. Our communal existence in a time of nihilism promises nothing, but perhaps that is too much. Characterizing such human possibilities with regard to Being without relapsing into the categories and language of the theoretical, metaphysical tradition poses exceptional challenges for Heidegger. He deliberately strikes

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a different tone than Nietzsche, for example, in his evocation of what may be expected: he stresses the poverty, the weakness, and the incapacity of philosophy. Philosophers are not commanders and legislators:  they are woodsmen or farmers; they do not master, they submit.4 In “The Word of Nietzsche, God is Dead,” Heidegger evocatively compares the task of philosophy to that of a farmer or gardener, who does not even plant a seed, but who tills the soil with no confidence that he will live to see the fruit of his labor. Being might, in time, reveal a new dispensation; in the meantime, we till. This should not be taken as altogether gentle or pastoral, however. In an earlier lecture course (referred to in Chapter 3), he remarks: Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend] and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunderstanding if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy. We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept, man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack – driven out of everydayness and driven back to the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Dasein in man launches the attack upon man (GA 29/30 31; FCM 21; emphasis in the original text).

Philosophy submits to terror in a time bereft of order, weathers the attack; indeed, philosophy itself, in this presentation, is the attack on man for the sake of releasing the essence of man.5 Heideggerian philosophy is not “optimistic,” as in Nietzsche’s accusation against Socrates, but still, in a time of destitution, of the abscondence by Being where we are left perplexed and distressed in the midst of beings, in the acknowledgment of such loss we find ourselves released into a moment of unsurpassed hopefulness, because for the first time since the dawn of the West, it is possible to confront our genuine place with respect to Being.

Neither Ancient nor Modern In stressing the submission of Dasein to the beings in order to grasp Being, Heidegger may appear to recapitulate something of the classical or ancient 4

5

Without giving a full account of Heidegger’s great Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, it may nonetheless be said that he emphasizes the will in his account of Nietzsche, possibly with the result that he downplays the “Dionysian” dimension and the notion of play in Nietzsche’s thought. This is argued in Eugene Fink 2003. See also Gillespie 1984; Lampert 1986, 149–50; Newell 1990. For a discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche that sets it in the context of Heidegger’s Nazism, see Bambach 2003. On Heidegger and “terror,” see Mitchell 2005.

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approach to philosophizing as opposed to the emphasis on, for instance, torturing Nature in order that she “give up her secrets,” that more generally characterizes the moderns. The difference between Heidegger and the ancients, therefore, ought to be stressed. Our everyday orientation to temporality inclines us to see ourselves as lookers upon beings that are out there, the beings that initially we had been involved in using and manipulating. Everydayness inclines us to relate to the world in the media of theory and practice as though these are a well-coordinated whole, or as though they could, with only a little fine-tuning, be such a well-coordinated and -constituted whole. As this plays out in the history of Being, what begins as the restful, theoretical gaze upon the order of the beings becomes a preliminary step to the “mastery and possession” of these beings. That is, seeing the beings as objects separate from ourselves is the necessary first step to seeing them as objects to be controlled. From Heidegger’s point of view, the two primary modes of coordinating the theoretical and practical within the history of thought  – for simplicity’s sake, the ancient and modern – both fail to get at the root of the problem. The ancient mode privileges a restful, tranquil submission to the beings in their given order: theory goes together (initially) with idleness and leisure. It submits to the beings in their given order as “Nature.” Practice, which preceded the emergence of theory in Heidegger’s account, may be reformed to accord with the insights discovered by theory or not, if it is deemed incapable of reform – but the principle at work in either case is the same: theory submits to the order of Nature; it is subordinate to it. The modern mode rejects this principle of submission to Nature in favor of a new principle of the control of Nature, reconstruing theory and practice in light of this new principle. The modern mode does not submit to the given order of beings, but interferes with this order and improves it – as “masters and possessors,” in Descartes’ phrase  – for the purpose of securing perilous human existence in the face of a hostile nature: to establish the equal dignity and freedom of humanity; to ennoble the human situation. The principle of submitting Nature to our control is inseparable from the new or revived appreciation of human freedom and the possibility of human will. Practice – the free use and manipulation of the beings upon the beings for the sake of purposes and wherefores of our own devising – is, in a sense, liberated from the submissive constraints and rules initially discovered by the ancient version of theory. Indeed, it appropriates and uses a transformed, “repurposed” theory for its own ends. These ends, however, are themselves derived from that which is no longer submitted to – the order of the beings, or Nature – and in short order evaporate as a governing principle of practice. What remains, as Heidegger argues, is the purified will to master, freed from any constraints, which itself submits human beings to its imperatives. The result is a regime of the ascendency of technology, wherein instrumental rationality governs the institutions and practices of everyday human life.

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The submission Heidegger has in mind takes from the moderns a refusal of the given order of nature as the key to Being and from the ancients the principle of submitting to the beings, but is therefore to be distinguished from both. In Being and Time. he combines, in a fashion, the “realism” of the ancients with an “idealism” that gives purposes to the beings among the moderns. In the former case, Dasein apprehends Being by submitting to the beings; in the latter, Dasein gives Being to the beings. The key to understanding how he does this, I argue, is his emphasis on the sameness of Nothing and Being.

Consciousness and Understanding Heidegger locates our possibility for existing in the world both among the beings, “ontically,” and as the being that is open to Being, “ontologically,” in “consciousness,” or more precisely, in understanding. As discussed in Chapters  1 and 2, his contemporaries, in particular the Neo-Kantians, failed properly to identify consciousness in their object-oriented, theoretical accounts of ethics and value philosophy. Traditional analyses of the consciousness fail because they are insufficiently ontological; what is required is an ontology of the consciousness, not an anthropology or psychology. The necessary task, then, is the “ontological analysis of consciousness itself” (SZ 207), as called for in the “Comment on Jaspers” and provided in the Daseinanalytik of Being and Time.6 A sufficiently ontological account of consciousness leads to the understanding: “Only because Being is ‘in the consciousness’ – that is to say, only because it is understandable in Dasein – . . . are ‘independent’ beings, as encountered within-the-world, accessible to circumspection” (SZ 207–8, emphasis added).7 Heidegger situates his own brief ontology of the consciousness in Being and Time within a debate between realist and idealist forms of philosophy.8 His 6 7

8

See Heidegger’s critical remarks on Kant regarding the subjectivity of the subject (SZ 24). Heidegger remarks judiciously: “If what the term ‘idealism’ says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by beings but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant. But if ‘idealism’ signifies tracing back every being to a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its Being and is best characterized negatively as ‘un-Thing-like’, then this idealism is no less naïve in its method than the most grossly militant realism” (SZ 208). Also: “Being ‘is’ only in the understanding of beings. . . . Beings are to be understood” (SZ 183). Peter Gordon argues that throughout Heidegger’s early period (leading up to the Davos debates with Cassirer in 1929), he repeatedly came close to an idealist, subjectivist position because he could not reconcile his existential ontology with the “serious challenge” of the objective claims to “real” and objective knowledge on the part of the natural sciences (Gordon 2010, 226–9, 232). Gordon overstates Heidegger’s perception of the challenge he saw in modern natural science (227). Since his earliest days studying with Husserl, he was well acquainted with the fallacies of biologism, naturalism, psychologism, and so forth. Gordon also misses the connection between the “transcendental” arguments Heidegger presents in Being and Time and their connection to, not abandonment in favor of, the Seinsgeschichte (233). The “ground” of the transcendence or “surpassing,” as Heidegger explains in “On the Essence of Ground,” is in surpassing the beings

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presentation has elicited some confusion as to whether and how Heidegger might be understood either as a realist or as an idealist. The question, as framed, turns on whether the beings have their Being independently of Dasein (realism) or whether Dasein gives Being to the beings (idealism). This discussion has political implications because, on the one hand, the realist interpretation would greatly favor communal forms that defer or submit to the order of the beings, that is, a form of “conservative” politics, at least inasmuch as this is concerned with our inherent potentialities. An idealist interpretation, on the other hand, would give more emphasis to a constructivist, despotic, or mastering dimension to communal life, where the Being and therefore the fuller meaning and purpose of the beings are understood not to inhere in “the things themselves,” but to derive from the freely chosen ends or purposes determined by Dasein. Heidegger’s presentation of the matter in Being and Time presents interpreters with difficulties because it has elements of both the standard realist and idealist positions. One passage captures this ambiguity nicely: Beings are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained. But Being “is” only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs. Hence Being can be something unconceptualized, but it never completely fails to be understood (SZ 183; emphasis in the original text).9

Beings are independently of their manifestation to us, but Being “is” only in our understanding, that is, only in its manifestation to us. In other parts of the work, Heidegger states a realist position. He claims, “the world is disclosed essentially along with the Being of Dasein” (SZ 203; emphasis in the original text) and so he shares with the realists the conclusion that “beings within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed” (SZ 207). That is, the impression we have of things or the beings is not fashioned by us; we are not the producers or makers of the world and the things in it. This realist point needs to be acknowledged, Heidegger suggests, without making the traditional error of realism. This error is simply taking the beings as our “hermeneutical foothold” for understanding Being. This is precisely the error that in Heidegger’s view characterizes the entire history of Western metaphysics is what he would later term “ontotheology,” that is, the mistake of thinking of Being principally and ultimately only with respect to the

9

into the nothing. Heidegger can make claims that surpass the beings and therefore science by transcending them in the confrontation with nothing, and is uniquely able to do this, as he develops the point further in the Nietzsche volumes, in the historical epoch of nihilism. Taylor Carman uses a reading of this passage to support his “ontic realist” interpretation of Heidegger against the temporal idealism of Blattner. See Carman 2003, 157; on Blattner 1999, 168–75.

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beings – that is, as the Being of beings – and consequently thinking of Being as a being.10 If we let our narrow involvement with the beings determine our understanding of Being, as we are drawn to do given the tendencies of everydayness, we erringly treat pragmata as things (res in the Cartesian sense) and then think of Being (Sein) as a being. In the attempt to avoid this error, then, Heidegger’s complete position is more idealist than realist. He agrees with the idealist, “in principle,” that “Being cannot be explained through beings,” but resides somehow “in the consciousness” (SZ 203). In retaining the “primordial phenomenon” of Being-inthe-world (SZ 206), Heidegger examines Dasein not just as an isolated subject among objects present-at-hand, but as the being whose existence among the other beings is the source of their Being. Without being understood by Dasein, the beings would not have any Being.11 But while Being is communicated to the beings through Being-in-the-world, Dasein is not for that reason anything like the “master and possessor” of the beings. The nuances of Heidegger’s position come out in a comment on Being and Time that Heidegger provides in the “Letter on Humanism.” In an attempt to respond to the existentialist reading of his work, he points to a passage in Being and Time where he writes that only insofar as “Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible) ‘is there’ Being [‘es gibt’ Sein]” (SZ 212; emphasis in the original text).12 That is, Being only “is given” if Dasein, Being-There, “is,” that is, is understanding Being. In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger contrasts his formulation with the antique statement of Parmenides: esti gar einai, “for there is Being.” Heidegger remarks on Parmendies’ statement that the “primal mystery for all thinking is concealed in this phrase” (BW 238; emphasis in the original text). In claiming that “Being is,” Parmenides obscures the difference between Being and beings. Heidegger, in his formulation of the understanding of Being, stresses the donative character of Being – the essence of Being is the “gives,” the “self-giving into the open, along with the open region itself, is Being itself” (BW 238) – in order to avoid the error of thinking Being in terms of the things of the world. Heidegger’s “idealism” is contained in his emphasis on the sense of giving Dasein’s relation to the beings or Dasein’s position between Being and the beings. The key here is to grasp how Heidegger sees the idealist position, which he condenses as “the understanding that Being can never be explained by beings but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every being,” and yet insists on submitting to rather than in imposing something on the beings. 10

11

12

There is some anticipation in Being and Time, as when Heidegger identifies the following as an error: “Even where the issue is not only one of ontical experience but also one of ontological understanding, the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of beings within the world” (SZ 201). See Carman 2003, 16, and the disagreement he indicates with Okrent 1991, 225; Blattner 2005, 5–6. In Being and Time, Heidegger’s marginal notation here is “Ontological Difference.”

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Understanding: Thrown Projection and Clearing Heidegger’s discussion of understanding as it functions in our existence as Being-in-the-world is helpful for grasping the submitting character of understanding as well as the interplay of nothingness – which is how he characterizing our thrownness – and projection.13 Understanding gives purposes (for-the-sakes-of-which) to the beings of the world as pragmata. Heidegger’s first discussion of understanding in Being and Time is in the context of his consideration of the genesis of, on the one hand, the distinction between theory and practice and, on the other hand, the distinction between the subject and the object. The latter emerges in the technico-practical, ready-to-hand world of the workshop. It is not that the circumspective aims and purposes of the craft activities undertaken by Dasein are “understood.”14 Rather, the circumspective knowledge of pragmata  – proto-practical handy implements in the world  – occurs within whole context, which is already grasped or understood. Understanding grasps the whole context and situation beforehand, in advance, meaning, for example, the workshop in which one works, the network of clients for whom one works, and the suppliers who provide material for one to work upon. Understanding receives the articulated network of possible connections, uses, and purposes of the useful things, namely, equipment. The reference point for all of this is Dasein, which remains at the center. This contextual understanding does not exhaust the role of understanding in Heidegger’s thought, to be sure, but it should be illustrative. In order to use a tool, we must already be possessed of an understanding of how and for what possible purposes, and on what possible materials, it might usefully be employed. We submit to these possibilities by choosing one of them or a purposively connected series of them. For example, we understand in a given situation that a hammer is useful on nails  – metal nails, not plastic nails or ceramic nails that might shatter – which might be driven into wood – hard or soft wood, but not rotten, punky wood – and not into clay (SZ 86–7). This is obviously not, at least not initially in its root sense, “theoretical” knowledge. In its wider sense, understanding understands not just the particular situation or complex of purposes and assignments, but understands purpose and assignment as such. Indeed, it is because understanding grasps worldliness as such that it is able to “make sense of” any particular set of references. In understanding worldliness, what is understood is the “structure of the world,” what is called “significance” (Bedeuten, SZ 87; emphasis in the original text). What is grasped is the occasionality of how the 13

14

“If Being-in-the-world is a kind of Being which is essentially befitting to Dasein, then to understand Being-in-the-world belongs to the essential content of its understanding of Being” (SZ 86). Though, as we shall see, Heidegger establishes that circumspection [Umsicht] is derived from understanding (Verstehen – SZ 146–7).

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“for-the-sake-of-which” signifies an “in-order-to”; this in turn, a “towards-this”; the latter, an “in-which” of letting something be involved; and that in turn, the “with-which” of an involvement (SZ 87).

Heidegger’s distinctive, countertraditional terminology for the complex of references and assignments, the for-the-sakes-of-which and so forth, means the “relational totality of . . . signifying” (SZ 87). In non-Heideggerian language, this refers to the possible uses, purposes, materials, and aims of technical-practical undertakings. But this must not be conflated with the circumspective, ready-tohand grasp of these possibilities: the circumspective grasp of possibilities is, in a sense, interior to the possibilities and does not see them as possibilities but as ends, whereas understanding holds the possibilities forth “as possibilities.” Understanding is not simply “know-how,” or technical competence. It would thus appear to grasp these networks in their multiplicity, variability, and occasionality, whereas circumspection has a more interior, singular grasp of any particular possibility.15 Heidegger is at pains to present this pre-given, articulated world as neither altogether determined in a rational, causally dictated, necessary way, nor as being completely undetermined as though an open field for the willful, creative exertions or assertions of Dasein. The former points toward a natural, rational teleology, and the latter toward the ontical world as merely disguising a void of formless flux, awaiting the masterful imposition of free human agents. Heidegger’s distinctive response to this quandary is communicated in his emphasis on understanding as always a thrown understanding, primordially bound together with a disposition, and further, that the possibilities with which understanding deals are given determinately by the fact of Dasein’s thrown existence. They are finite possibilities. As such, the context in which Dasein is situated is constituted in part by the residue of its earlier existence, by what is disclosed in moods as “having been”: “In the act of understanding [Verstehen] . . . the relations indicated above must have been previously disclosed; the act of understanding holds them in this disclosedness” (SZ 87; emphasis in the original text). And again, these possibilities “must have been disclosed beforehand with a certain understandability” (SZ 86). In a sense, Dasein accepts and participates in its own thrownness when it assigns to itself “the kind of Being that belongs to involvements. . . . And the structure of that to which Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldliness of the world” (SZ 86; emphasis in the original text). This acceptance has the character not of Dasein electing to fulfill natural teloi, eternally established, but of Dasein freely choosing for itself one possible, temporary, or passing Um-zu that in turn supplies the purpose of the 15

See Kisiel 2005, 197: “In a summary of the prepositional nexus of Being and Time, Heidegger had already emphasized that the relations of the in-order-to can be understood only ‘if the Dasein understands something of the nature of the for-the-sake-of-itself’ (295). An in-order-to (present) can be revealed only insofar as the for-the-sake-of- (future) that belongs to a potentiality-for-being is understood.”

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things in the world. Dasein accepts the occasionality of its possibilities not by selecting the narrowest, most universalizable aspect of what has been, but by throwing them again in projection.

Understanding Projected Possibilities: Thrown Projection The foregoing goes some way to explaining the apparent paradox in Dasein’s understanding being at once neither receptive (realist) nor essentially donative (idealist) in is character of granting Being to the beings. Understanding understands possibilities, possibilities, that is, that extend beyond what is actual. Dasein is what it can-Be, what it is possible that it be; it is most decisively in its orientation to the future, toward what is beyond the presently actual, toward possibility. Moreover, the Being of these possibilities is understanding. Here some preliminary but important clarification is in order. First, Heidegger does not mean by possible the “merely possible” but not actual.16 For “higher than actuality stands possibility” (SZ 38; emphasis in the original text). Possibility is, in this sense, not to be understood as a category of the present-at-hand, not as “a free-floating potentiality for Being in the sense of the ‘liberty of indifference’ (libertas indifferentiae)” (SZ 144). Second, that possibility stands higher than actuality is not a generality; every possibility is particular. Every actual, particular situation of Dasein is such that possibilities extend beyond it. This means, third, that in terms of temporality, what can-Be is not exhausted by what actually is. Every actual present is superceded by its particular possible futures. The present as it actually exists does not exhaust the past that led to it. The future stands ahead of and above both; every past contains as yet unexpressed resources of possibility that may be summoned up for the sake of the future. The standard of this is not the present-at-hand, but rather future possibilities pointing forward into non-Being, quite literally, transcending what is in the direction of Nothing. Possibilities are thrown possibilities (geworfen Möglichkeit). They belong to a particular, existing Dasein, in a particular time, place, environment, and ontic world. Correspondingly, possibility is never infinite, but always limited, and defined relative to this particular, existing Dasein. Possibilities are as particular as each Dasein, each of which is, in a sense, its possibilities: “Dasein is the possibility of Being-free for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (SZ 144).17 Dasein 16

17

“The Being-possible which Dasein is existentially in every case, is to be sharply distinguished both from empty logical possibility and from the contingency of something present-at-hand, so far as with the present-at-hand this or that can ‘come to pass.’ As a modal category of presence at hand, possibility signifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary. It characterizes the merely possible” (SZ 143; emphasis in the original text). “Understanding is the Being of such potentiality-for-Being, which is never something still outstanding as not yet present-at-hand, but which, as something which is essentially never present-at-hand, ‘is’ with the Being of Dasein, in the sense of existence” (SZ 144).

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itself is always, implicitly or otherwise, understood along with its possibilities, because the possibilities would not really be possibilities without being related somehow to the Dasein in question. Thus, Dasein’s understanding is these possibilities, in particular, that possibility that is its own potentiality-for-Being. It “knows” this not cognitively and not through self-examination, but from the very Being of the “there,” the essence of which is understanding (SZ 144). Whereas Dasein is its disclosedness, and the There of Dasein is disclosed in disposition, understanding, and articulation, the Being of the There “is essentially understanding” (SZ 144). Understanding, more than the other components of the there, is the there; or otherwise put, the there “is essentially understanding,” because understanding is possibilities that stretch determinedly into the future. The Being-There of Dasein is made up, therefore, of what Dasein can-Be: what it can do, what it can see, what is exposed to Dasein as possibilities for Being itself and for Being in relation to other beings in this particular clearing. This particular openness is the Being of each Dasein. Dasein actively stretches toward the future in projecting its understanding upon possibilities. Heidegger calls the “existential structure” of understanding “projection.” The German, Entwurf, has a perfectly explicit repetition of the “thrownness,” Geworfenheit (from throw, Wurf). Dasein is thrown into “the kind of Being which we call ‘projecting’ ” (SZ 145); it is thrown-into throwing-forward. Heidegger stresses that this should not be thought of as bringing a plan, cognitively conceived, which will then be acted upon. Projection does not grasp that upon which it projects “thematically,” that is, theoretically. Such an approach would reduce the upon which to what was “in mind” already, as though it were material upon which to plan. Instead, understanding as projection, “in throwing, throws before itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as such.” Indeed, in this way, understanding is its possibilities as possibilities (SZ 145). This may helpfully be thought of in connection with his earlier discussion of understanding – with reference to the Umwelt – in which Heidegger said of understanding that “the act of understanding holds them in disclosedness” (SZ 87). The understanding is given with possibilities, thrown into a sort of Being that consists in, in turn, throwing itself into the possibilities with which it is confronted; the understanding thus does not, on its own “open up” possibilities  – Dasein is not such a master of the world as to do this  – but Dasein may elect to, in a sense, repeat its own thrownness (a) by holding open and continuing to hold open the possibility that it remain itself, as it is, a thrown being moving forward into open possibilities, and (b) by projecting that opportunities that are open be held open. Projection is a projection into the future. It is “basically futural” (SZ 336). In being its projections, Dasein is thus constantly more than it “factually,” currently is; this is signified both by it being constituted by what it “factically is,” referring to the horizon of the past, and by Dasein’s existentiality, that is, it “is existentially that which, in its potentiality for Being, it is not yet” (SZ 145; emphasis in the original text). Understanding “means to be projecting

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towards a potentiality for Being for-the-sake-of-which any Dasein exists” (SZ 336; emphasis in the original text). Dasein understands, is understandingly, what it is capable of, not by discovering a fact, but by “maintaining itself in an existentiell possibility.” Underlying this understanding is the future, which “does so as a coming-towards-oneself out of that current possibility as which one’s Dasein exists” (SZ 336). That is, it is not The Future! that approaches, but a particular future respective to the particular, “existentiell” possibility in which Dasein maintains itself as Being itself. As such, “understanding is grounded primarily in the future (whether in anticipation or in awaiting)” (SZ 350; cf. 408).

Understanding as

LICHTUNG

As a projection that ventures from the past into the future, extending beyond and thus around itself and the beings with which it is currently involved, understanding forms a “clearing,” a temporal clearing, in its pressing forward as projecting possibilities, and in holding them open as possibilities. Heidegger characterizes the temporal clearing with the freighted term, “sight” (Sicht). With this term, he reiterates its connection to the clearedness, the lighting of the There, “With the disclosedness of the ‘there’, this sight is existentially [seiende existenzial].” Dasein “is in such a way as to be its ‘there’. To say that it is ‘illuminated’ [erleuchtet] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing. . . . Dasein is its disclosedness” (SZ 133; emphasis in the original text). The clearing, which is made up of possibilities as possibilities, is a “nothing” that surrounds the beings: The being which bears the title “Being-there” is one that has been “cleared”. The light which constitutes this clearedness [Gelichtetheit] of Dasein, is not something ontically present-at-hand as a power or source for a radiant brightness occurring in the entity on occasion. That by which this being is essentially cleared – in other words, that which makes it both “open” for itself and “bright” for itself  – is what we have defined as “care”, in advance of any “temporal” Interpretation. In care is grounded the full disclosedness of the “there” (SZ 350; emphasis in the original text).

To say that the clearing is made up of possibilities is to say that the clearing is temporal: “Because temporality is ecstatico-horizonally constitutive for the clearedness of the ‘there’, temporality is always primordially interpretable in the ‘there’ and is accordingly familiar to us” (SZ 408; emphasis in the original text). In employing the language of sight, Heidegger deliberately invokes the traditional designation for the faculty that is granted access to Being. But once again, the invocation is countertraditional, for Heidegger does not intend a notion of the lumen naturale that illuminates with reference to eternity, but rather a clearing that opens up temporally, through which passes the future,

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having been, and present as moments of the ecstases of temporality.18 As with his argument for understanding how the attitude of tarrying and awaiting explained the genesis of theory from the busy undertakings of the Umwelt – as we saw in Chapter 3 – here again Heidegger’s argument is juxtaposed against the tradition as inaugurated by Aristotle and extending to Husserl: By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in understanding (the circumspection of concern is understanding as common sense) we have deprived pure intuition [Anschaue] or its priority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the present-at-hand in traditional ontology. “Intuition” and “thinking” are both derivatives of understanding, and already rather remote ones (SZ 147; emphasis in the original text).

The temporal clearing of understanding is the foundation of such derivative modes of knowledge as noetic intuition, eidetic intellection of form, and Wesenschau.19

Irruption As Heidegger details it in a series of writings from shortly after he published Being and Time, the understanding of Being has certain structural similarities to the understanding of Being-in-the-world laid out in Being and Time. He expresses the finite, nonmastering emergence of Being into the world through the understanding as an “irruption,” an implicitly violent “break-in.” The irruption follows from the submission to the beings exhibited in the sciences and surpasses them. In thus submitting to the beings, the understanding gives Being to them, fulfilling Heidegger’s qualified idealist position in Being and Time that the understanding is the source of the Being of the beings. What is irruption?20 The word, Einbruch, means literally a break-in (less in the sense of a cat burglar and more in the line of crashing through the door). It also has the sense of a collapse or cave-in and, less frequently, the meaning of

18

19

20

See Theodore Kisiel:  “This is the ultimate reorientation of possibility dictated by the extrovertive thrust of ex-sistence which turns human being ‘inside out,’ as it were: facultative powers, once possessed by the rational animal, become empowering contexts (later, the clearing of Being itself) in which and by which the human being is ‘out for’ its being, in order to be” (Kisiel 1993, 441). This is admittedly provisional on Heidegger’s part. In lieu of a full explanation early in Being and Time, Heidegger remarks:  “The existential meaning of this understanding of Being cannot be satisfactorily clarified within the limits of this investigation except on the basis of the Temporal Interpretation of Being” (SZ 147). He employs the term twice in Being and Time (SZ 369, 432), though clearly he has not yet fixed any particular terminological importance on it at that point. The usage at 369 is interesting, though, in that it anticipates the meaning Heidegger later derives from the term: “Only on the basis of its ecstatico-horizontal temporality is it possible for the irruption of Dasein into space possible” (SZ 369). In his first lecture courses after returning to Freiburg University, he develops this sense of the term in more detail, and connects it, in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 28/29), to the irrupting nihilation of the difference between Being and beings.

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“slack,” as in sails that have loosened in a calm or an easing of the wind. Being comes as Dasein in a billowing, falling gust that rolls through the beings.21 In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger discusses the special status that science (Wissenschaft) has for human existence (menschliche Existenz).22 The various fields of science give the impression that science is too manifold to be unified, and furthermore that any notion of the rootedness of the sciences in a unified ground has “atrophied.” But, in fact, the sciences in their variety share in a “trinity” of “radical unity”: a relation to the world (Weltzug), a “stance of human Existenz,” and an irruption. First, the relation to the world shared by all the sciences “lets them seek beings themselves (die Seiende selbst) in order to make them objects of investigation and to determine [Bestimmung] their grounds  – in each case according to their particular content and manner of being [Seinsart]” (WM 83). The unity of the sciences comes from their relating to the world by seeking the beings themselves. Second, that there is a “relation to the world” (Weltzug) implies a preexisting stance, a position from which one relates. As Heidegger explains, the relation to the world is “guided” by a “freely chosen stance of human existence [Existenz].” This stance is one of “submission to the beings themselves.” Moreover, it is a “position of service” (Dienstellung – “official position”) that “evolves in such as way as to become the ground of the possibility of a proper though limited leadership [Führerschaft] in the whole human existence.” The seeking of the beings themselves is guided by the initial submission to them – as opposed, for instance, to any attempt to master or control them – which is characterized as an office or duty, the assumption of which provides a certain title to rule in human affairs. Science thus leads by submitting. Third, these two elements that make science distinctive among the available determinations of Dasein – the unique attention to the beings themselves and the stance of free submission to those beings  – are “fully grasped only when we see and comprehend what happens in the relation to the world thus attained.” In the free submission of human existence to the beings themselves, the relation between the world and the human being changes:  Being, in the Dasein of human existence, emerges for comprehension:  “nothing less transpires than the irruption [Einbruch] by one being called ‘the human being’ into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this collapse [Einbruch] beings break open and show what they are and how they are. The irruption that breaks open, in its way, helps beings to themselves (Seienden . . . zu ihm selbst) for the first time” (WM 83). Heidegger describes the “radical 21

22

For a discussion of this and other key terms – Durchbruch, Bruch, Aufbruch, Ausbruch – see the work of Frank Edler 1990, 1993. Edler situates Heidegger appropriation of these terms in the context of their connection to the German Revolution in 1933. The discussion of Einbruch that follows refers mainly to Heidegger’s published essays, but his courses from this period may also be consulted: GA 27, 136–7, 393–8; GA 28/29. “Our Dasein  – in the community of researchers, teachers, and students  – is determined [bestimmt] by science [Wissenschaft]” (W 82).

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unity” of irruptive submission to the beings as bringing a “luminous simplicity and aptness of Dasein to scientific existence” (WM 83). The irruption brings the beings into being themselves and humans into being themselves: humans become Dasein with the beginning of scientific submission to the beings. Heidegger takes Wissenschaft as his point of departure because it so completely characterizes the Dasein of himself, his audience in this lecture, and indeed our epoch. The undertaking of Wissenschaft, inasmuch as the questioner takes “explicit possession of the Dasein illuminated in this way for [itself]” and addresses himself to the nothing along with the beings satisfies the requirements established by Heidegger of a metaphysical inquiry at the beginning of this essay.23 A  metaphysical question, according to Heidegger, must “be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is also there within the question, that is, is placed in question” (WM 82). According to this definition, a metaphysical question is the same as what Heidegger had earlier designated a “formal indication.” Metaphysical inquiry must call the very Being – the Dasein – of the questioner into question. In clarifying the unified root of the various sciences – the irruption of Dasein in a submission to the beings – Heidegger has pressed the question of science to the point where it is authentically a metaphysical question. The essentials of this account of Dasein’s situation among the beings are confirmed in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Moreover, this book clearly establishes that the irruption of Dasein takes place on the “original” ground of the understanding (Verstehen) of Being. What Heidegger describes as a preconceptual, undeveloped, universal, but therefore unquestioned understanding of Being thoroughly saturates man’s existence [Existenz]. In his example, the what-Being, that-Being, and true-Being of the exclamation, “Fire!” are so well understood as to be unquestioned, to be beyond question (KPM 159). That is, everyone knows what it means when someone shouts, “Fire!” Heidegger insists that some understanding of Being must be at work in every situation in order for man to be distinctively man. The root of this unquestioned, nonconceptual understanding of Being is man’s very Existenz, which consists in the awareness – easily befogged or obscured – that he as man is different from all the other non-man beings: “man is a being in the midst of beings in such a way that for man the being which he is himself and the being which he is not are always already manifest” (KPM 159). Now we see the extent of the reversal contemplated by Heidegger: Being may be understood as a crashing, collapsing submission, not as an addition in fullness and power to the beings, but as their sharing in their own demise. Heidegger isolates the experience that brings man’s Existenz to clarity. It is the twofold realization that (1) “he already finds the being (Seiende) as that 23

As Christopher Rickey points out, Heidegger’s use of the term “metaphysics” changes during his career. In its usage here, Heidegger employs it in the manner with which he will later associate the overcoming of metpahysics (Rickey 2001, 141).

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from which he is supported, as that on which he has depended, as that over which, for all his culture and technology, he can never become master” (KPM 159–60); and (2), that he therefore “is at the same time not master of the being which he himself is” (KM 160). Heidegger identifies this realization with the irruption of Being into the beings: With the existence of human beings there occurs an irruption [Einbruch] into the totality of beings, so that now the being [Seiende] in itself first becomes manifest, i.e., as being [Seiende], in varying degrees, according to various levels of clarity, in various degrees of certainty. This prerogative, however, of not just being among other beings which are also at hand without these beings becoming manifest as such to themselves, but rather [of being] in the midst of the beings, of being surrendered to it as such, and itself to have been delivered up as a being – for this prerogative to exist harbors in itself the need to require the understanding of Being (KPM 160; emphasis added).

As the beings “become manifest” to Dasein, Dasein becomes aware that it is not by means of its own power that the beings – their characteristic what-Being, we may infer, and their that-Being and true-Being – have been revealed to him. Man did not make the beings, did not make himself, and did not cause them to manifest themselves to him. The fact of their being manifest – in different degrees of clarity, Heidegger specifies – communicates to Dasein that he is not responsible for them. In not being responsible for them, not having caused or created them, Dasein further apprehends his dependence on them. What is more, in addition to being subservient to – that is, in addition to his nonmastery of – the beings, Dasein is shown to be not even master of himself: Dasein is thrown among the beings, as the being to whom the other beings are manifest in their Being, as beings. This is the paradox that Heidegger is trying to illuminate: Dasein gives Being to the beings not by mastering them, but by understanding them. Yet if understanding is not simply endowing Being and therefore, implicitly, mastering and controlling (idealism), it would seem that it should be submissive and receptive (realism). In other words, the beings would inform Dasein of their Being; Being would be communicated from the beings to Dasein. Yet Heidegger insists on this point: understanding is not receptive but donative; Heidegger inverts these formulations by holding that because Dasein submits to the beings out of its finitude, and in this submission Being manifests itself, then the understanding of Being – which is “the most finitude in what is finite” (KPM 160) – though it is essentially powerless, can still be said to grant Being to the beings. For Being is also finite, indeed, most finite:  from this perspective, Being is the same as nothing.24 For the beings to be disclosed to the understanding of Dasein  – that is, for Being to be  – Dasein must choose to submit to the beings, must remain dependent on them. Heidegger describes this as Dasein “repeating” its own 24

On Being as manifesting, see Richardson 2003, 43–4.

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thrownness or participating in the throw. Having already been thrown into Being and being among the beings, Dasein must now elect To Be a being among the beings; having been drafted, it must now enlist: “In order to allow the being [Seiende] to be what and as it is. . . the existing being [i.e., Dasein] must already have projected that it is a being on the strength of what has been encountered” (KPM 160). Here Dasein’s projection of understanding constitutes the repetition of it being a thrown, existing being among the beings. As long as Dasein remains finite  – and the most finite within Dasein is understanding  – Being will manifest:  “There is and must be something like Being where finitude has come to exist” (KPM 160). Why? Because finitude implies the realization that one being is dependent on another. This realization by the first being that it is dependent on the second implies that something about the second has been discovered or revealed to the first. At a minimum, this entails that it (the second one) is, and possibly also an intimation of what it is (what-Being); and the awareness of the possibility of its true-Being, that is, that it is something of such and such a kind or appearance. The minimal discovery that another being is – that is, that this other being is not me and has not been created by me as though by an omnipotent God – implies the anteceding understanding of Being. This is so even if the understanding is only ever in a condition of perplexity or ignorance, as in its ignorance of the sense of Being. This foregoing understanding of Being thus underlies any encounter or dealing with the beings that Dasein might have: “On the grounds of the understanding of Being, man is the there [das Da], with the Being of which occurs the opening irruption into the being so that it can show itself as such for a self. More original than man is the finitude of the Dasein in him” (KPM 160; emphasis in the original text). As the understanding of Being precedes, in a manner of speaking, every interaction between Dasein and the beings, then understanding is the ground of the There of Dasein.

Understanding Nothing Our normal, everyday orientation is to think of the beings, to think with respect to the beings, to be absorbed in the beings. Heidegger proposes that if we submit to the beings, we will encounter our finitude, that is, we will be drawn to or discover their limits, and that these limits are constituted by nothingness. His insistent claim is that encountering and thinking this nothing is the key to genuine freedom from our orientation by the beings, which enslaves us, he says, to thinking of ourselves as being “like” the beings. The way to really understand Being as distinct from the beings  – what Heidegger refers to as the “ontological difference” – is first to see, from the perspective of the beings by which we are initially oriented, the “sameness,” then, of Being and Nothing. Heidegger is perfectly direct and explicit about this in the famous Davos disputation with Cassirer:  “It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand the nothing or anxiety. Being is incomprehensible if the

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nothing is incomprehensible” (KPM 199). In his Kant book, this formulation is varied only slightly, to clarify that understanding the nothing is preliminary to  – but still necessary for  – understanding Being:  “The Being of the being, however, is in general only understandable – and herein lies the profoundest finitude of transcendence – if in the ground of its essence Dasein holds itself into the nothing” (KPM 166–7). Trying to think either Being or the nothing induces perplexity. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he asks rhetorically, “Is Being then not something like the nothing [das Nichts]? In fact, no less a person than Hegel said: ‘Pure Being and pure nothing are thus the same’ ” (KPM 158–9). In the 1949 preface to his 1929 essay “The Essence of Ground,” Vom Wesen des Grundes, Heidegger discusses the seeming identity of Being and nothing with more detail and precision. Here he compares the discussion of the ontological difference in “The Essence of Ground” with the discussion of the nothing in the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?”, both of which were prepared at the same time. Each piece, he says, treats a nihilative “not.” The nots “are indeed not identical, yet they are the same in the sense of belonging together in the essential prevailing of the Being of beings” (EG 97). He briefly characterizes each “nihilative ‘not’.” In “What Is Metaphysics?” the nothing is how Being appears from the perspective of the beings: “The nothing is the ‘not’ of beings, and is thus Being, experienced from the perspective of beings.” The challenge laid out by Heidegger in this preface is to think this “not” together with the “not” of “The Essence of Ground,” the “not” of the ontological difference that occurs between Being and beings. To grasp the sameness of the nothing and Being, it is helpful to recall that Sein, Being, is a verb. Thus, the be-ing of a thing – what brings it into being, keeps it in being as what it is (true-Being), keeps it existing (i.e., that it is, that-Being), supplies the ground of its character and attributes (what-Being) – this is not itself a “thing” or a something. Not being a something: what else can be said but that it is a nothing? Someone could object that it is not nothing that keeps all these things together, but an array of somethings: the things that cause it, its causes. That is, what if it were a something that held something in Being? Heidegger’s point is that even if this were a “something,” and that something in turn were held in Being by something, and so on, this regression could not be infinite, and we would eventually have to ask why these somethings are held together by some-not-thing all the way down. Heidegger is not denying the ontic role of causation among things. What he is denying is that causality so conceived supplies a sufficient answer to the question of Being. Causality fails adequately to approach nothingness. In this sense, the causes are beings, somethings, which must themselves  – lest it be turtles all the way down25  – be accounted for in their Being. Heidegger’s typical formulation thus sees the 25

Michael Davis recounts Stephen Hawking’s version of this story in the first chapter of his Autobiography of Philosophy (Davis 1999, 16).

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nothing as what lies beyond the “totality of being” or all their ontic causes as well. In Leo Strauss’s lucid illustration, he compares Heidegger question of Being to seeking a noncausal account of causation: “I can begin to understand it in the following manner: ‘Sein’ cannot be explained by ‘das Seiende,’ as causality cannot be explained causally.”26 In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger characterizes science (Wissenschaft) as that human endeavor preeminently characterized by a submission to the beings. Such submission prompts the irruption of Being among the beings. But inasmuch as manifestation implies that in addition to something doing the manifesting, there must also be something that is manifested to; thus it is apt to characterize the submitting of Dasein to the beings as “causing” the irruption of Being among the beings.27 Science is the mode of human existence that submits to the whole of beings: “What should be examined are beings only, and besides that – nothing; beings alone, and further – nothing; solely beings, and beyond that – nothing” (WM 84). With regard to the totality of the beings to which science submits, the nothing is what is left over when the sciences are done. That is, it is not another something to be accounted for by the science of nothingology, but rather the boundary or limit beyond which Dasein extends itself in meta-physics, or transcendental philosophy, by surpassing.28 “What Is Metaphysics?” shows the nothing “from the perspective of beings,” in which verstehen is limited to Verstand, the understanding.29 The nothing assaults the limits of the understanding, as the nothing is both given

26 27

28

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Leo Strauss 1989, 44. See Velkley 2007 253 n. 12. Thus, even the notion that the emergence of Being in Dasein among the beings should be characterized as an Einbruch, a cave-in or an irruption, anticipates the sameness of Being and nothing. Cave-in signifies the collapse or emptying of something that was otherwise stable, much as the notion of clearing signifies an open, i.e., nothing-filled, space. Einbruch signifies that crater where there is not or is no longer something. This reverses the traditional understanding of metaphysics in the tradition deriving from Aristotle, where what surpasses is the most actual, the most real (as opposed to the nothing), and where distinctions are made in light of eternity or actuality rather than possibility. Heidegger’s term Verstehen needs to be understood as deliberately counterposed to the traditional philosophic meaning of Verstand, to which it is terminologically related. The term Verstand was introduced to the German philosophical vocabulary by Paracelcus, as a translation of the Latin intellectus (corresponding to the Greek, nous); at the same time, Vernunft, reason, translated ratio (corresponding to dianoia). Through the early Enlightenment, up to Wolff, Verstand was understood to be “higher” than Vernunft; the former was characterized by clarity and mathematical rigor, the latter associated with the conceptualization of sensory material (my discussion here follows Inwood 1992, 243). Wolff led a reversal of the “ranking” of these faculties, in which reversal he was followed by the luminaries of the German Idealist Enlightenment: Kant, Goethe, Jacobi, Schiller, Schelling, and eventually Hegel. On this reversed understanding, Verstand was taken to be the source of conceptual thinking and judgments, with the implication that it ministered to the practical spirit. It was subordinate to, or subsumed within, Reason, Vernunft, which reconciled the opposites as analyzed by the abstract understanding. In Schiller’s evocative formulation: “Nature (sense) everywhere unites, the understanding separates everywhere, but reason unites again” (Letters on the Aesthetic Education, XIX; quoted in Inwood 1992, 243). (See also

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to the understanding and likewise confounds it. Inasmuch as the nothing is at least given to the understanding as a question – Wie steht es um das Nichts? (WM 84 – “How stands it with the nothing?”) – then the understanding is not altogether without some apprehension of the nothing. But the nothing also defies understanding. It is inadmissible to treat the nothing as a something, as an object of inquiry in the normal sense, or as something to which such a question might be put, since, as Heidegger observes, “the question deprives itself of its own object” (WM 85). According to the normal canons of logic and grammar – both operations of Verstand, “in the usual sense,” according to Heidegger’s later marginal notation  – the “nothing” is just a function of logical and grammatical negation, the “not,” “a specific act of the understanding (Verstand)” (WM 85). The confounding of the understanding by the nothing as presented by Heidegger in this lecture seems to occur because here he treats understanding (Verstehen) not with its fuller breadth as presented in both Being and Time and in the contemporaneous essay “On the Essence of Ground.” Rather, in this lecture he presents the understanding (Verstand) as it has been traditionally conceived, in particular, as it has been conceived by scientifically oriented philosophy from Kant to Husserl. In Heideggerian terms, the understanding is presented as having been determined by the world.30 This

30

Frederick C. Beiser’s remark: “Schiller, unlike the romantics, never understood the imagination to be an extra-rational power. Synthesis is ultimately the function of reason. If it is the task of the understanding [Verstand] to divide what is given to sense, it is the task of reason to reunite what the understanding has divided. Such is the unmistakable purport of his famous adage in the Asthetik Briefe: ‘Nature [the senses] unites everywhere, the understanding separates everything, but reason unites once again’ [NA XX, 368n.]” Beiser 2008, 266.) This reversal reached a culmination in Hegel, where Verstand represents the analytical lucidity and fixity of Enlightenment rationality. It is understood to provide clarity without depth and characterizes deductive reasoning, as well as performing the necessary abstraction required for the initial steps of thinking: “the thought-determinations or concepts of the understanding make up the objectivity of the cognitions of experience” (Hegel, Encyclopedia of Logic, § 40; Hegel 1991, 153). Nonetheless, this is only the first moment of thought, which needs to be subsumed within the higher rationality of Vernunft in order to be truly rational. Heidegger jettisons Vernunft (he only mentions it in Being and Time when he is quoting or talking about Kant or Hegel), its function being occupied, one could argue, by Rede. Verstand remains the principle of abstract, deductive rationality, but is shown to be derivative from verstehen: “understanding” rather than “the understanding,” supplies the ground of human reasoning. The “reconciliation” of analytical division and distinction is shown not to happen at a “higher” level of Reason (Vernunft) or synthesis, but through a return to the primordial ground that understanding (Verstehen) shares with the world and from which the hypostatizing, objective understanding (Verstand) emerged only as an occasion. Thus, encompassing both Verstand and Vernunft is Verstehen. Since the lecture was given to scientists, Heidegger uses a roughly traditionally “scientific” understanding of Verstand. This emphasis in the lecture  – which was in many cases the first work of Heidegger’s to be translated into other languages  – probably contributed to the widespread understanding of Heidegger as being hostile to reason as such, particularly in the English-speaking world. For an influential early artifact, see Ryle 1928.

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worldly orientation is what Heidegger means in the 1949 Preface to “On the Essence of Ground” by “from the perspective of beings” (EG 97). As the understanding is depicted in “What Is Metaphysics?” the nothing is not really apprehended directly by the understanding (Verstand) at all, but through the disposition of a mood or attunement. However, what is at stake is whether or not the nothing is merely a derivative of the grammatical-logical not. Heidegger “assert[s] that the nothing is more originary than the not of negation” (WM 86). His reasoning returns to the very availability of the nothing as a question. However seemingly “illogical,” the issuance of the nothing as a problem is evidence of its questionability independent of the formal impossibility of such: “If the nothing itself is to be questioned as we have been questioning it, then it must be given beforehand. We must be able to encounter it” (WM 86). Yet its impenetrability to the understanding (Verstand) persists. If “the nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings,” and our understanding is sufficiently finite that the totality of beings in themselves are inaccessible to our reasoning, then how can we think the nothing? “As surely as we can never comprehend (Erfassen) absolutely the whole of beings (Ganze des Seienden) in themselves we certainly do find ourselves stationed in the midst of beings that are unveiled somehow as a whole. In the end an essential distinction prevails between comprehending (Erfassen) the whole of beings in themselves and finding oneself (Sichbefinden) in the midst of beings as a whole” (WM 87). The finite intellect (Verstand) cannot, as a preliminary to thinking beyond the beings into the nothing, summon all the beings that there ever were, are, or will be before itself to give them its reasons. A completed science of the whole, all that ever was and will be, is not available. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger reiterated Kant’s point that to have unlimited knowledge, infinite knowledge, would be to assume the status of creator of the beings (KPM 27). Nonetheless, certain moods disclose the sense of the totality of beings as that among which Dasein finds itself as being thrown, and so in this fashion Dasein might apprehend the totality of beings and thus confront their surpassing opposite, the nothing. Heidegger specifies three moods in which Dasein “finds itself” disposed, as it were, among the totality of the beings: boredom, joyful love, and anxiety. Each of these moods brings out Dasein’s disposedness among the beings in their totality. The first is boredom. The “as a whole” of beings comes over Dasein in everyday, “authentic boredom.” Authentic boredom “breaks out” (bricht auf) not when one is bored with this undertaking or that project, or when one is without occupation here or there. Authentic boredom “removes all things and human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference.” It drifts “here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog” (WM 87). In its overlap with everyday existence, boredom removes the difference between Dasein and not-Dasein – “all things and human beings and oneself” – in a dull homogeneity that is neither wonderous nor solicitous of our attention or attraction, but also not oppressive, monstrous, terrible, or perplexing.

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Boredom is the mood of the end of scientific enlightenment, where the motivation to investigate has given way to the presumption that what will be discovered has already been anticipated or accounted for by gray concept-nets, easily deployed and collected. Boredom accompanies or presents the totality of beings in its dull confidence that there is no being – known or unknown – that would disrupt this mood, that would rattle it to the foundations and awake any awe, terror, fear, reverence, or love.31 The second mood that Heidegger says disposes us before the “as a whole” of the beings is the joy in the company of a beloved. His exact phrasing  – as throwaway as this example may seem to be  – is worth attending to. He says: “Another possibility of such manifestation is concealed in our joy in the presence of the Dasein – and not simply the person – of a human being whom we love” (WM 87). In this particular mood – joyful love – the “totality of the beings” are disclosed, but in a concealed fashion. That is, as in boredom, they are brought before us, but we have no interest in them. Joyful love would seem to reveal the world as a rapture, a limitless eternity of horizons, all based on sharing in the Being-There of the person who one loves. Heidegger stresses the shared Being-There, notice, and not simply the proximity to the person; this would perhaps imply a shared, intimate privacy as opposed to a public meeting, and likewise also would entail a shared participation in joy. The loving couple are so enchanted with one another that the totality of beings is summoned, in a manner, by being revealed as totally other than the blissful couple, and therefore is meaningless. The beings are brought “before” the couple in their joint and total indifference to the rest of the world. Though boredom and love summon up beings in their totality, they nonetheless fail to disclose the nothing. Of boredom and joyful love, Heidegger says the following: “But just when moods of this sort bring us face to face with beings as a whole they conceal from us the nothing we are seeking. We will now come to share even less in the opinion that the negation of beings as a whole that are manifest to us in attunement places us before the nothing” (WM 86–7). What is needed is a sufficiently “originary attunement,” a “fundamental mood.” The mood he is looking for is anxiety. The nothing is apprehended only in the mood of anxiety. First, as we have already seen, anxiety should be distinguished from fear. In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger expands on a point of contrast between anxiety and fear. Fear has a worldly, being-oriented character that anxiety does not have. Anxiety separates Dasein from the world. Unlike boredom, where the “muffling fog” makes the difference between Dasein and world indistinct and obscure, and unlike joyful love, where the beings perhaps fade away, leaving 31

Heidegger discusses boredom at much greater length in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, GA 29/30. L. P. Thiele (1997) treats Heidegger on boredom and the “routinization of novelty” (Thiele 1997). Giorgio Agamben (2004) interrogates Heidegger’s account of boredom as the mood that distinguishes humans from animals.

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the shared Dasein of lover and beloved together, anxiety is individuating.32 It cuts off one Dasein from the world: . . . we ourselves – we humans who are in being – in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though “you” or “I” feel uncanny; rather it is this way for “one.” In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold on to, pure Da-sein is all that is still there (WM 88–9).

In anxiety, the beings retreat from Dasein uncannily, leaving Dasein alone and “homeless.” The totality of being is exposed but not as a present whole, rather as a retreating collectivity: “it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole” (WM 88). Indeed, “beings as a whole become superfluous” (WM 90). What remains and what opens up to Dasein is the chasm of the nothing. In reemploying the structural formulation that Heidegger applied with such prolix verbosity to fear in Being and Time, he says of anxiety that Dasein is anxious “in the face of . . .,” anxious “concerning . . .,” leaving the ellipses, signifying the nothing: anxious in the face of nothing; anxious concerning nothing. As in Being and Time, the effect in “What Is Metaphysics?” of the discussion of anxiety is to expose the uncanniness, the Unheimlichkeit or homelessness, of Dasein. Whereas Heidegger’s approach to these phenomena in Being and Time is not especially evocative, in this essay he attempts to generate this mood in his audience, summoning his reader to anxious uncanniness. Uncanniness is basically unpleasant, unappealing, disquieting; Heidegger describes it as oppressive: “All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in their very receding, things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole closing in on us in anxiety, oppresses us” (WM 88). To be sure, “The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling” (WM 90). The onset of the nothing in anxiety, to repeat, is disclosive. Anxiety discloses some of the truth about the beings, but it is not for this reason satisfying, but finally strange and disturbing: “Nihilation is not some fortuitous incident. Rather, as the repelling gesture toward beings as a whole in their slipping away, it manifests these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other – with respect to the nothing” (WM 90). Anxiety exclaims the lostness of Dasein in the world among the beings, the foreign alienness of such fate. It must be stressed again that the response envisioned by Heidegger of anxiety is not like fear. As he accounts for it in Being and Time, fear is typified 32

In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that anxiety is the mood that “individuates” Dasein (SZ 184–90) because it is the singular mood that is not responsive to beings, but to Dasein’s own Being as Being-in-the-world. Safranski argues that Heidegger’s lectures, and after the publication of Being and Time his writings, were rhetorically formed to summon anxiety in his students and readers (Safranski 1998, 178). Capobianco’s careful and measured study traces the development of Heidegger’s conception of anxiety from its fairly technical account in Being and Time to the more evocative treatments of it as a steely “calm” (Ruhe) in “What Is Metaphysics?” (Capobianco 2010, 82–3).

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by a bewildered, confused flight, provoked by its being mixed up among the beings; he cites Aristotle approvingly on this point (SZ 342). In anxiety, Heidegger means to conjure more the sense of a cool, calm steeliness. Anxiety is not simply worry or fretfulness. In contrast to fear:  “Anxiety does not let such confusion arise. Much to the contrary, a peculiar calm pervades it” (WM 88). It is in this self-possessed apprehension of the finitude and frailty, the irretrievable occasionality of everything actually existing, that “anxiety makes manifest the nothing” (WM 88), and from here that the nothing may be “interrogated” (WM 89). Anxiety is the experience of transcending or surpassing the beings in the direction of the nothing. This condition of surpassing is the experience of Dasein comporting itself as such toward the beings. As well as stressing its manifesting of the nothing, Heidegger also identifies anxiety with Being-inthe-world as such. It is anxiety that lurks beneath every comportment toward the beings in the world. Heidegger equates the extension of Dasein into the nothing and the accompanying surpassing of the beings with metaphysics. Indeed, he identifies metaphysics with the very essence of Dasein:33 Human Dasein can comport itself toward beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. . . . Metaphysics is the fundamental occurrence in our Dasein. It is that Dasein itself. Because the truth of metaphysics dwells in the abyssal ground it stands in closest proximity to the constantly lurking possibility of deepest error. For this reason no amount of scientific rigor attains to the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science (WM 96).34

Indeed, as he puts it more forcefully, “Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing” (WM 91). Heidegger regularly defines this as transcendence, for this holding out into the nothing is passing beyond beings (WM 91). In “On the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger argues that transcendence means essentially surpassing, as in passing beyond (EG 107). We may think here of the original meaning of metaphysics, the beyond (meta) of nature (physis; nature 33

34

The term “metaphysics” is one of the trickiest in the Heideggerian corpus to pin down, for the simple reason that Heidegger altogether changes what he means by the term at a certain point in his career. In the years following the publication of Being and Time, up until sometime in the 1930s, he referred to his own thinking as “metaphysics.” Here, for instance, he described metaphysics in terms nearly identical to those in his earlier accounts of formal indication. In his later work, Heidegger will refer to metaphysics as the form of thinking that was possible in the “age” of metaphysics, extending from the pre-Socratics to the contemporary period, whereas Heidegger seeks in his own “thinking” to “overcome” or “surpass” metaphysics. See Rickey’s helpful note, Rickey 2001, 87. This is an explicit rejection of the fundamental aims of Husserlian phenomenology, namely, that philosophy so understood should approach the rigor of science. Taylor Carman plausibly shows that Heidegger was quite veiled in his utter contempt for Husserl until he had secured Husserl’s support for the chair at Freiburg. See Carman 2003, 57–63, 98. It is at this point in his career that he no longer refers to his project as “phenomenology.” See FCM 1–2.

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understood as the “totality of beings” in Heidegger’s sense). Heidegger elsewhere draws etymological parallels to existence, as in Ek-sistensce: from the Greek, ek, out, and histêmi, to stand: standing out. Dasein is the existing being, the being that by holding itself out into the nothing stands out from beings in having a comportment toward them (P 252).

Understanding the Ontological Difference The conditional character of the equation of Being and nothing should not be overlooked. In the 1949 preface to “The Essence of Ground,” when Heidegger says that “experienced from the perspective of beings,” the nothing is Being. Being is elusive in the utmost.35 As such, even to be able to remark on something as outrageous as its occasional sameness with the nothing clarifies its question for us. This, to repeat, is similar to how the nothing is available to our understanding – as a fathomless question. By way of illustration, consider this: if one were looking for the sun in a daylight sky where it shone so brightly as to be indistinguishable from the fully illuminated firmament, it would be helpful if the moon were to pass before it, casting a shadow over everything, for in the moment of eclipse, one might then discern in its absence the real location of the sun. We can understand the problem of the ontological difference by thinking through the sameness of nothing and Being, to which anxiety leads our understanding. Understanding nothing and Being together allows one to understand the “origin.” In the 1949 preface to “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger echoed the contemporaneous preface to “The Essence of Ground” in expressing the relationship of the nothing to Being as that one that “veils” the other: One of the essential sites of speechlessness is anxiety in the sense of the horror to which the abyss of the nothing attunes human beings. The nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of Being (P 238).

The nothing is between beings and Being such that from the perspective of the beings, Being appears only as nothing, is veiled by nothing. Thinking this requires, however, thinking the difference between nothing and Being; it requires transcending the beings and then thinking Being and nothing together: “The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but unveils itself as belonging to the Being of beings” (WM 94). This allows, Heidegger says,

35

In Heidegger’s late lecture “Time and Being,” he attempts to think Being beyond even the ontolological difference, that is, to think Being as “event” (Ereignis) without reference to beings. See Gonzalez 2009, 293–307. Whereas Gonzalez emphasizes this as representing a break with the initial thinking of the ontological difference, my interpretation here emphasizes the continuity, inasmuch as they are each on the path of thinking Being as other than beings. That is, if confronting the nothing is introductory to the ontological difference, I present the latter as introductory to thinking Being as such.

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for the thinking of the “origin” (Ursprung), which is expressed in the question, Why is there something and not nothing?36 To be able to formulate the difference between beings and nothing is to think the question of why there is something and not nothing. Heidegger identifies this as the question of Being, as in, Why is there something and not nothing? (The “is” in the question expresses the verb, “to be”). With this question, we begin to think Being differently from the beings, or without Being being totally mediated by the beings. The question raises the issue of why beings are and nothing is not. The nothing here gives us a purchase on Being different from that offered by thinking the beings. Apprehending this difference between the beings and nothing is to think the ontological difference because Being is not beings, nor yet is it nothing. Indeed, in later formulations that apply to our understanding of these texts, he sometimes puts it that Being is the difference between beings and nothing, the “not” between something and nothing, namely, to be something is to be not nothing (EG 105 n.). Thinking of Being as the ontological difference itself is the logical conclusion of the attempt to think the finitude of Being as such. The finitude of Being, properly so-called, requires to be thought without any mediation by beings, without even being thought in relation to the beings. This is at once the great ambition of Heidegger’s thought and its ultimate humility. Thinking Being relative to the beings implies a being-oriented measure of “generosity” in an accounting of Being, which, in its overflowing bounty, “provides” something rather than nothing, which leads to the well-known and -understood error of ontotheology (thinking of Being as a being and implicitly, therefore, as the greatest of the beings). The culmination of thinking Being submissively without regard for the beings is apparently the most genuine faithfulness to its finitude. Heidegger gives some expression to this line of interpretation in the marginalia he wrote to “On the Essence of Ground.” In a comment on his discussion of the ontological difference, Heidegger describes thinking the ontological difference in these slightly oracular terms: Here the essence of truth is forked in terms of the “distinction” as a fixed reference point, instead of the contrary approach of overcoming the “distinction” from out of the essence of the truth of Beyng, or of first thinking the “distinction” as Beyng itself and

36

Heidegger expresses this question in both the Davos sessions and the lecture “What is Metaphysics?”:  “And only in the unity of the understanding of Being and nothing does the question of the origin [Ursprung] spring up [springt. . . auf] from the why. Why can man ask about the why, and why must he ask? These central problems of Being, the nothing, and the why are the most elementary and the most concrete problems” (KPM 199 – Davos). And: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing. But this ‘and not nothing’ we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather, it makes possible in advance the manifestness of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such” (WM 90).

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therein the beyngs of Beyng (das Seyende des Seyns) – no longer as the being of beings (EG 105 n.; emphasis in the original text).

Here Heidegger is urging that Being (Beyng, or Seyn, in this later formulation) be thought not as the genetive of beings, that is, not in relation to beings, but as the not between beings and Being, as the distinction itself.37

The Promise of Nihilism Does thinking Being in the way described in the preceding promise us a more fulfilling existence, one attuned to our own deepest identity and to who we most fundamentally are, either alone or in a community? Heidegger’s response is highly ambiguous: we live in a time of unique possibility and, perverse as it is, promise; yet Heidegger also remains deeply pessimistic. The ambiguity he articulates in Being and Time, as well as in passages from a later essay, “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” stems from our own very “constitution of Being” (Seinverfassung) because from Being itself. Our alienation, estrangement, and detachment from Being happens by Being absconding, abandoning us, and concealing this abandonment in our own attention to the beings. In Being and Time, Heidegger frequently characterizes our “understanding” as only one of the means of our disclosive “there,” regularly referring to our discursiveness (Rede, articulateness or “speech”) and our disposition (Befindlichkeit, expressed as moods), as well.38 These elements of our disclosedness are, in Heidegger’s distinctive argot, “equiprimordial.” Each is as important and fundamental to our manifesting what is what and manifesting Being as the others:  discourse is equiprimordial with understanding; all of our understandings are articulated understandings. The discursive element of our disclosedness is necessarily oriented by beings, “somethings,” rather than by nothing, and poses a problem for our possibility of abiding authentically in a new age of repaired alienation from Being. Heidegger envisions an open struggle with the nothing as a genuine possibility of our understanding, that is, our understanding is capable of surpassing the beings and thinking, however tenuously, Being as such. However, because our disclosedness is always discursive, we are never given to thinking in a way that can attain to such a grasp of the nothing that does not also refer to somethings. The world is given to us both as an articulated potential whole of beings with which we are involved and as a possible unity for this articulation drawn from our 37

38

Joan Stambaugh, in the introduction to her translation of Identity and Difference, offers Nicolas of Cusa’s definition of God as the “non-other” as a way to help think of what Heidegger means:  “as nothing other than himself and as nothing other than the world” (Heidegger 2002a, 9). In division two of the extant text of Being and Time, Heidegger begins to replace this trinity with understanding-mood-fallenness. See Schürmann 2008, 112.

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understanding. The irruption of Being into the world through our opening up a possible and futural purpose gives this unity; but the unity is always, Heidegger suggests, the unity of a manifold of beings. What we understand the Being of is always several “some-things.” We also manifest these “some-things” in talk or discourse (Rede): we communicate with and to other Dasein, that is, we refer an understanding from one being (ourselves) to another one. As Heidegger puts it, “Talking is talk about something” (SZ 161). Something is always said in the talk; the talk is always about something and addressed to something (i.e., someone). “In this ‘something said,’ discourse communicates” (SZ 162). Discourse thus relates (a) the talker and (b) the Dasein being talked to, to (c) the thing to which the talk is addressed: “Listening to . . . is Dasein’s existential way of Being-open as Being-with for others. . . . Being-with develops in listening to one another” (SZ 163). Such communication inherently relates to the essence of community, requiring that the potentialities for communal existence be intimately bound to the occlusiveness of discourse: the “with” of communication, Mitteilung, announces the fundamental connection between it and community, rooted in Being-with, Mitsein.

The Occlusion of Being by Beings Heidegger describes the history of Being as a “withdrawal” of Being from the “site” of Dasein – meaning not just us humans, but us and the world in which we exist and with which we are concerned. In this withdrawal, Being leaves the “beings” ta onta “in the light” as beings. That is, Being gives itself to, as, in, or through the beings. The ensuing “metaphysics” takes the “What is it?” question (the characteristically Socratic question) as the guiding question, and construes a series of responses that Heidegger calls “ontotheology.” This happens, according to Heidegger, not because of any wickedness of one thinker or another, but above all because “Being as such” has concealed itself as though it were the same as “the Being of the beings.” The occlusion of Being comes from having our attention drawn to the beings as occupying an especially exemplary place in “Being” what is. This realization allows for an insight unique to our time, according to Heidegger. His presentation of the matter in “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being” supplies a helpful way to situate Being and Time in and as a product of our time. In that essay, he argues that Western metaphysics begins with the question “What is the being?” directed to the whole of the beings and to the collective things that are. The question – which, like all questions determines in advance what may and what may not be offered in response – establishes the fateful course of thought for the entire epoch to come. It “intends” to ask about Being, Heidegger allows, inasmuch as it enquires about what is, but “Being as such” is “passed over” as attention is directed to the beings themselves (SZ 207). Being is passed over as “unthought.” Being unthought, it is only a matter of time before it should be discovered that all of our doings and

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dealings with the beings, which presume to be rooted in Being and thus to flourish or fail according to our understanding of Being, are in fact not. The history of our orientation by the beings has never been attached to or expressive of Being: this is the meaning of nihilism. What we have heretofore thought is in fact is not. Metaphysics, which for ages was understood to be, in effect, our rescue from nihilism, our guardian against the horrors and tribulations of nihilism, is nihilistic. In the formulation of the virtual koan from this writing: “Metaphysics as metaphysics is nihilism.” If the understanding of Being that perdured through the history of the West – that To Be means to be present – is now shown to be an error, what, then, is Being? Being as such must be distinguished from the Being of the beings, and in the metaphysical line of thinking proceeding from the question, “What is the being?” Being as such is never thought. The asked about, the interrogated (das Erfragt), is thought about; but this question, Being as such, is not interrogated (N4 207). It is thought, to be sure, with respect to the beings. Beings are implied or assumed “on the basis” of Being, but Being is passed over. Metaphysical thinking transforms Being into a being – such as the cause of the beings, or as the ground, or the a priori conditions for possibility, and so on  – and so passes over being or thinks of Being as a being (this is the “ontotheological” error). The very structure and character of the initial, “guiding question” of metaphysics ensures both that Being as such will be passed over, but inasmuch as Being is intended in this and subsequent formulations of the question, the absence of Being will have remained determinative for metaphysical thinking (cf. N4 210). Heidegger’s discovery of the initial error in the guiding question of metaphysics deepens the critique previously suggested in his account of the ascendency of theoretical rationality. If the guiding question of metaphysics intends Being, why should it be that it misses it altogether? Conspicuously, Heidegger fails to attribute the nihilism of metaphysics to the work of any thinker, neither Nietzsche nor even Plato. Whatever sense of loss or decline he evokes in his varying accounts, strictly speaking, he assigns no blame in his history of the West. Metaphysics is nihilism because it thinks Beings with respect to the beings; it asks after the beings and passes over Being as nothing. Heidegger surmises that metaphysics asks about the being because its Being is concealed. That is, it would never have been a question if it were not initially concealed. How should this concealing be understood? Heidegger points to two ways. First, as we have seen, Being “as such” is concealed by the beings, covered up by them; our openness to it is blocked, as it were, by the presence of the beings. Second is the concealment of the “as such” in the beings. The original metaphysical question asks, “What are the beings as such?” “but never ponders the ‘as such’ itself” (N4 212). Yet the “as such” designates that the being, as itself, in existing as what it is, is unconcealed: “The hei in on hei on, the qua in ens qua ens, the ‘as’ in ‘the being as a being,’ name unconcealment,

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which is unthought in its essence” (N4 212). In sum, Heidegger raises the possibility that the two passed-overs in metaphysics, the as such and Being, might be the “selfsame” and together account for metaphysics as nihilism. Being would then “be” unconcealment, or more precisely, concealed unconcealment: “the unthought unconcealment of the being would be unthought Being itself” (N4 212). The guiding question of metaphysics would then arise because (a) the being is set forward to be asked about as Being withdraws (unconcealment), and (b) the withdrawing of Being (unconcealment) is disguised by the presence of the being (concealed). Metaphysics is not neglectful of Being, on such an account, but determined by the abscondence of Being: Metaphysics asserts and knows itself as a thinking that always and everywhere thinks “Being,” although only in the sense of the being as such. Of course, metaphysics does not recognize this “although only.” And it does not recognize it, not because it repudiates Being itself as to-be-thought, but because Being itself stays away. But if that is so, then the “unthought” does not stem from a thinking that neglects something (N4 213).

Being itself stays away, leaving the being in the light to be asked about Nihilism obtains when Being both withdraws and conceals its withdrawal, leaving “nothing” behind. “The essence of nihilism proper is Being itself in default of its unconcealment, which is as its own ‘It,’ and which determines its ‘is’ in staying away” (N4 216). Heidegger refers even more strongly to the “default” (Ausbleiben) of Being, the staying away of Being. This “default” implies that “something” (for lack at present of a better term) is being stayed away from. But what? Not the being, “which dwells in Being” (N4 217). The implication is that Being is staying away from a place: Rather, in staying away there comes to be a relation to something like a place, away from which the staying away remains what it is: the default of unconcealment as such. That place is the shelter in which the default of unconcealment essentially persists. But if it is precisely concealment that remains in the staying away of unconcealment as such, then the staying of concealment also retains its essential relation to the same place. The location, the place of the “abode,” the “shelter” of being is the “essence of man” (N4 217).

The essence of man is the location of the “advent” of Being where both “the staying away of unconcealment” (i.e., the withdrawal of Being that leaves beings unconcealed) and “the staying of concealment” (i.e., the presence of the concealment of the withdrawing unconcealment of Being) occur together in a shelter. Being stays, is, still in the beings; it has both flown from us and uses us for cover. We find ourselves, then, in the position that Heidegger evokes at the beginning of Being and Time. Again, Being issues through man:  “Being bestows itself by betaking itself into its unconcealment  – and only in this way is It

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Being  – along with the locale of its advent as the abode of its default. This ‘where,’ as the ‘there’ of the shelter, belongs to Being itself, ‘is’ Being itself and is therefore called being-there (Da-sein)” (N4 218). The default of Being is inherently misunderstood by metaphysical thinking because Being “leaves itself behind” only in the beings. When man, therefore, attempts to give an account of the Being of beings, he cannot but be confronted with a perplexing finitude. Our finitude, therefore, our impoverished perplexity, our everyday covering over this perplexity, our fundamental ignorance: these, Heidegger claims, are the real “promise” of Being. Nihilism can be a “gift” of Being, because “while withholding itself in default, Being is the promise of itself” (N4 226; emphasis in the original text). The essence of nihilism is therefore quite different from the phenomena of nihilism. These latter are Heidegger’s gloss on the ghastly events of the twentieth century. The essence of nihilism, however, will be misunderstood only if it is taken as a moral or political phenomenon: What is essential to the inauthenticity of nihilism is not something base or deficient. The essential occurrence of the nonessence in essence is nothing negative. The history of the omission of the default of Being itself is the history of the preservation of the promise – in the sense that such self-preservation is concealed in what it is. It remains concealed because it is occasioned by the self-concealing withdrawal of Being itself and in that way is imbued by Being with its preserving essence (N4 226).

Concealed in the inauthenticity of nihilism is what Heidegger calls the “mystery,” which is preserved by the disguise, so to speak, of inauthenticity: “In the inauthenticity of the essence of nihilism, the mystery of the promise occurs, in which form Being is Itself, in that it saves itself as such” (N4 226–7). Metaphysics, therefore, or in the terms of the earlier chapters of this book, theoretical rationalism and the ascent of everydayness, has borne through history a gift of Being, a promise that can be discovered as what it is: “The essence of metaphysics consists in the fact that it is the history of the secret of the promise of Being itself” (N4 227; emphasis in the original text). Even a lie presupposes the truth and is thus not completely overtaken by falsehood; by this logic, the worst lie is the most promising of all. Thus Heidegger envisions what might be called the redemption of nihilism. Nihilism – in the open in our time as it was not before, as the mature efflorescence of metaphysics, but always having been implicit in metaphysics, from its first question – points to Being beyond the beings. In the thought of Nietzsche, and as the violent phenomena of the contemporary world, it shows that Being is nothing in its concealing withdrawal: In the meantime, it has become clearer that Being itself happens (occurs essentially) as the unconcealment in which the being comes to presence. Unconcealment itself, however, remains concealed as such. With reference to itself, unconcealment keeps away, keeps to itself. The matter stands with the concealment of the essence of unconcealment. It stands with the concealment of Being as such. Being itself stays away (N4 213–14).

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Nihilism thus reveals that Being is so radically other than itself that it should not even be called “Being.” Nihilism shows that Being “even ‘is’ not” (N4  215). The advent of nihilism is accompanied, then, by a cautious but deep hopefulness, as it bears no essential resemblance to the cascade of atrocities normally invoked by the term: “the essence of nihilism in the history of Being still does not reveal those features that usually describe what one means by the familiar term nihilism: something that disparages and destroys, a decline and downfall. The essence of nihilism contains nothing negative in the form of a destructive element that has its seat in human sentiments and circulates abroad in human activities” (N4 221). Heidegger claims that the destructive phenomena of nihilism should not be overlooked. Nonetheless, the essence of nihilism allows for or assists through a passage “into the free region” (N4 250).

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6 Heideggerian Politics: The Past Is Not Dead, It’s Not Even Past

The politics that issue from Heidegger’s thought – his teaching on community, as well as the impetus his thinking gives beyond or in spite of this teaching – derive from his formulation of the problem of Being and its presentation to us as a perplexing, anxiety-inducing, disintegrating question. Given that our finite understanding has us apprehend Being as distinct from the beings when we can see its “sameness” with the nothing, then a time when we are surrounded by the phenomena of nihilism may be a uniquely disclosive moment in the history of Being. Heidegger evaluates the possibilities of our communal existence in the light of how they conduce to the re-raising and -posing of the question of Being: can a human community inquire into Being? In what respect may a community contribute to the Being of the beings? Heidegger explores this question in Being and Time by adumbrating a “factical ideal,” a specific way of life that, on the one hand, forms the basis for precisely the relationship to Being that Heidegger urges, and on the other hand, shows how this way of existing might relate us to our fellow Dasein in the community. Anticipatory resoluteness designates a precise form of openness that it is necessary for Dasein to affect in order to join in the interrogation of Being. This form of openness includes that we orient our discursive capacities in such a way that our communal life favors the interrogation of Being as well. That is, because we are essentially communal, it follows that the orientation that permits us to pursue the question of Being has a communal element as well. (Heidegger is not proposing a solitary walker type of response to the problem of Being in the world: no monks need apply.) Anticipatory resoluteness is meant to be an orientation with respect to beings, including other Dasein in community, that facilitates the proper resonance of Being in the world. Inasmuch as it responds to our involvement with beings, however, it shares in our constitutive inclination to be oriented by beings, and thus to fall into thinking of ourselves and then Being as “like” the beings. 152 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Columbia University Libraries, on 07 Aug 2017 at 20:09:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139963169.007

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That is, even the “factical ideal” is caught up in our characteristically human tendency to privilege the beings in their presence, and hence to occlude the “concealing unconcealing” of Being as time or nothingness. Prominent interpreters of Heidegger such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and John Caputo insist that there is no “existentiell ideal” to which the argument of Being and Time points that might be taken as suggesting a practical and therefore political purpose in the work. Caputo claims that “Being and Time attempted to keep the existential analytic free of privileging any concrete, factical way to be, like Christian or Greek life.”1 Gadamer remarks: “The existential analytic does not, with respect to its own intention, contain any existentiell ideal and therefore cannot be criticized as one (however many attempts may have been made to do so).”2 There is half a point here, and in the present chapter, I want to grant it. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, it is mistaken to see in Heidegger’s thinking  – as exhibited there in his earlier work, but as is also true of Being and Time – the establishment of a philosophic ethics or a moral stance that should provide guidance, “existentiell” guidance or otherwise. To the extent that this is what Caputo and Gadamer are emphasizing, I concur. However, in the text of Being and Time, Heidegger simply does refer to a “factical ideal,” and it occupies a necessary position in his argument.3 Just as there are numerous ways of existing that close us off to the inquiry into Being, likewise there is a mode of existence that opens us up to the inquiry into Being. (Indeed, and as the present study has emphasized, according to his own reasoning, Heidegger’s own investigation in Being and Time testifies to this necessity.)4 One mode of existence constitutes the “factical ideal” in Heidegger’s 1

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The passage continues: “There is no suggestion at this point in Heidegger’s writings that Greek existence was any more or less ‘primordial’ than Christian existence, no myth of the Great Greek Beginning. On the contrary, both Greek and Christian alike represented “existentiell ideals” upon which the existential analytic drew in order to bring them to the level of ontological formality” (Caputo 1993, 173). Gadamer 1975, 263. Catherine Zuckert notes that Gadamer is likely defending Heidegger against the sort of accusations made by Heidegger’s students Karl Löwith and Eric Weil (Zuckert 1996, 84). “Is there not, however, a definite ontical way of taking authentic existence, a factical ideal of Dasein underlying our ontological interpretation of Dasein’s existence? That is so indeed. But not only is this Fact one which must not be denied and which we are forced to grant; it must also be conceived in its positive necessity, in terms of the object which we have taken as the theme of our investigation” (SZ 310). As Karsten Harries notes, this passage would seem to contradict Caputo’s insistence that there is no such existentiell ideal (Harries 1994, 34 n. 20). Reiner Schürmann concludes his study of Being and Time with a compatible claim: “Heidegger, from the beginning of the book onward, makes a certain state of existence the condition for thinking. This state of existence, in the quote from Plato’s Sophist, was thaumazein, wonderment. In the context of temporality, to exist fully in the now-moment of anticipatory resoluteness is the condition for the understanding of temporality. ‘Dasein becomes “essential” in authentic existence, which constitutes itself as anticipatory resoluteness’ (SZ 323). It is true that Heidegger never explicitly says that to understand anticipatory resoluteness as the essence of authentic existence one has first to exist in anticipatory resoluteness oneself. Such a reversal of transcendental

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terms, or the “existentiell ideal” in Gadamer’s. The ideal is simply that we be open to the meaning or truth of Being, and inasmuch as it constitutes a mode of existence for Dasein (rather than, say, a propositional truth), it has a characteristic mood, a way of speaking, and an understanding. In short, this “factical ideal” is authenticity, or what Heidegger refers to more specifically as “anticipatory resoluteness.” As Caputo emphasizes, Heidegger’s presentation of the factical ideal is indeed a radical abstraction from every possible world, but this does not mean that it has no concrete expression.5 Heidegger is articulating a mode of existence that is radically individuated or particular. To do so, however, it is necessary for the basis of his claim to be, in some sense, “universal” in scope.6

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priorities is worked out only in later texts, and in another vocabulary. But returning to the beginning – thaumazein as the condition for the retrieval of the question of Being – we can conclude that authentic existence as an alternative way of understanding our death is the condition for the understanding of Being as time” (Schürmann 2008, 126–7). I disagree that this state of existence is thaumazein and stress instead the connection Heidegger draws between aporia and Verlegenheit, perplexity (see Cumming 1991, 79). Waller R. Newell makes this point (though employing the terminology of theory): “an abstraction from every possible world. It explains only the most general way in which worlds come into being, and nothing concrete about what they become – French, German, Russian, or American. These considerations help to explain the notoriously abstract quality of Heidegger’s many neologisms (such as being-with-one-another-in-the-world’). For the very abstractness of fundamental ontology is necessary so as not to impinge upon the unique ‘destiny’ which shapes each world and people from its origins with false universalizations about substantive human nature or historical progress. . . . Like Nietzsche, whose precedent he came increasingly to ponder, Heidegger tries to elaborate a theory of particularity, of the minimal conditions for mutually exclusive horizons” (Newell 1984, 777). James Phillips has identified this problem precisely and framed it very elegantly: “Heidegger’s nationalism is the nationalism of the rootedness of the Volk. It is not, however, an insurrection of the particular against the universal, if only because such an insurrection is always doomed to failure. Heidegger should not be seen to be translating Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian individualism for the NSDAP. A Volk that insists on its singularity, on its condition as ‘this’ Volk, is in the end, as Hegel had shown in his analysis of sense-certainty, always betrayed to the universal by its very ‘thisness,’ by the abstractness of singularity as such. A reprise of the nominalist cult of the particular does not describe Heidegger’s reaction to Hegel’s panlogism, since his critique of the universal pursues a different course from the beautiful soul’s pathos-laden avowals of the particular’s independence. Heidegger’s rejection of cosmopolitanism and his engagement with a nationalistic political movement are grounded in his treatment of the universal within the question of Being” (Phillips 2005, 6). Phillips insists that Heidegger is not an insurrection of the particular against the universal, and in his argument that follows, recurs to Heidegger’s reference to the transcendence of Being and the individuation of Dasein. My disagreement with Phillips may be crystalized by noting (1) that the purpose of developing the method of formal indication, which method is repeated in the recurrence to “existentials” in Being and Time, depends on making claims that are so particular and limited as to retain a universal validity that exceeds generalization; (2) the possibility of making such claims depends on them being made in a time when Being as presence is breaking down, and the phenomenologist or thinker is confronted with distress, perplexity, anxiety, or the phenomena of nihilism, which each in its way communicates the nothing that exists “beyond” the beings as a whole; and (3) that the insurrection is “doomed to failure” does

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As in the case of his development of the method of formal indication, the “existential” of authenticity (and its more refined specification in anticipatory resoluteness) depends on a claim that is, in principle, more universal than theoretical generalizations. It depends on an apprehension of the “concealed unconcealment” of the gift of Being, which gift first announces itself to us as distressed, perplexed anxiety.7 Consequently, the account of radical individuation, of a way of Being rooted beyond all rootedness, is necessarily articulated in a conceptual language of abstraction virtually unprecedented in the history of Western philosophy. Moreover – as is crucial for grasping the political import of Heidegger’s thought – the extreme universalism of this articulation entails that this most radical individuation entails the most widespread, in principle unlimited, application. Our historical communal existence is the necessary elaboration upon and correction of the abstraction of the presentation of anticipatory resoluteness. History allows us to confront the finitude of Being, that is, its occurence with respect to time by living or reliving it. Heidegger therefore proposes an orientation to history that can ground a community in its own particular openness to Being, including therefore a confrontation with nothing. As becomes clear from even his brief and allusive treatment of the matter in Being and Time, however, it is not clear that the particular form of community that Heidegger locates as most promising for the distinction between Being as presence and Being as time, the Volk, is able to resist our constitutive tendency to settle into an everyday orientation to the beings discursively. Anticipatory resoluteness fulfills the need that we orient ourselves to the beings by submitting to them and so confronting their limit in the nothing. The vulnerability of such an orientation, however, is not expressed as gentleness. In this chapter, I want to draw out this important element in the character of anticipatory resoluteness in its relation to history in order to see the inherent violence of Heideggerian politics, either as active destruction or as a streak of neutrality or indifference. Understanding the place and meaning of “hermeneutical violence” is essential both (a) for understanding the precise content of the “openness” of resoluteness, how it is limited and does not simply express a contentless indifference; and (b) for seeing that it is not contrary to Heidegger’s emphasis on a disposition of submission and vulnerability, but precisely out of the need to tend and preserve such a disposition in the face of recurrently occlusive and threatening everydayness that“violence” emerges.

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not disqualify it from being true, in the first place, and yet ceasing to be recognized as such at a possible future moment. In this connection, consider Leo Strauss’s insight that the position of the “radical historicist,” by which he means Heidegger, depends on the premise of an “absolute moment”: “According to historicism, therefore, the absolute moment must be the moment in which the insoluble character of the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest or in which the fundamental delusion of the human mind has been dispelled” (Strauss 1953, 29). On this aspect of Strauss’s understanding of Heidegger, see Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 94, with Velkley 2011, 112, 139.

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Anticipatory Resoluteness As we have noted, according to Heidegger, everydayness characterizes Dasein’s existence all the time. It will be more ascendant in different times and places, but as a tendency of Dasein’s, it is always constitutive. As such, this is what is closest to Dasein; this is where Dasein must begin in order to reopen the question of being. This reopening is not a “merely” theoretical undertaking, but involves a complete reorientation of Dasein as such. Authentic anticipatory resoluteness consists first in apprehending the permanence and character of this condition of fallenness. Authenticity is thus not a condition, not a state of purity, but a reappropriation of Dasein’s fallen everydayness. Hoping that this should be otherwise is inauthentic. Such an attitude toward its own fallenness is what Heidegger means when he refers to resoluteness. In resoluteness, Dasein reacquaints itself with its own finitude, its existence as a “null nullity” thrown into a world for which it is not responsible. It is most thoroughly itself, that is, authentic, as anticipatory resoluteness, which entails its apprehension of its fallenness (resoluteness) in the light of its own certain death (anticipation). That is, Dasein does not “rush ahead” in the expectation that it will be or become a “something,” a kind of apotheosis or salvation; on the contrary, anticipatory resoluteness expresses the full awareness of the paltriness, the genuine finitude of what we have been thrown into by resolving even upon our certain mortality. Dasein resolves upon caring for its fallen, everyday condition in view of its certain death – even though it is a fallen worthlessness, even though it is going to die soon, and cease to be anything at all, even anything worthless. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein remains itself through time, and thus supplies the true occasion for political liberation, by exhibiting and abiding in the truth of our situation. In this apprehension of itself as a thoroughly finite null nullity, Dasein rips itself from any immersion in the total, comforting, but stultifying occlusion of Being in the everyday and begins to fathom the full mystery of the possible connection of Dasein to one another in their joint apprehension of their Being as nothingness. This in itself requires each Dasein to rip itself away from that aspect of its existence that allows others to determine what everything is and what it means, from itself as the they-self, in order to be a part of the world as it is ordered according to the wholeness of Dasein as finite thrown understanding. This apprehension entails, necessarily, a radical revision, a revolution, in its own character as Being-with-others, and thus necessarily its relation to any community of which Dasein is a part.

The Silence of Authentic Discourse In everydayness, Dasein’s orientation by the beings comes to dominate its disclosedness:  our understanding is expressed as shallow curiosity; our discursivity is expressed as idle chatter; and our mood is expressed as a satiated but shallow satisfaction. Our disclosedness becomes absorbed in the beings,

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“somethings,” and fails to understand the distinctiveness of Being as such. Anticipatory resoluteness entails a complete reform of our disclosedness, of the way we manifest what we are and therefore how Being is, so to speak. This entails, as we have to some extent discussed in the previous chapter, being anxious before the nothing and so coming to understand “nothing.” Can we give voice to nothing, though? Can we articulate or speak nothing? The confusion and din of chatter amid the They cover over any possibility for genuine disclosedness. In this condition, the passage of time is so chaotic and hurried that it implies an essential stasis by way of contrast, hence the inclination to establish the present-at-hand as the meaning of Being. This condition and inclination contributes to the dissipation, the unfocused distribution of Dasein amid the beings, and erodes any sense of itself as a disclosing being with a kind of Being other than the present-at-hand. In terms from Heidegger’s other writings, human existence as the shepherd of Being – dwelling amid the beings, sheltered by the earth – is ever more ground beneath the juggernaut of technical mastery, massification, and machinization: our everyday flattering of our fascination with the “looks” of the beings is consummated in the nihilistic discovery that the beings “are” not what, how, and as we thought they were. These tendencies of everydayness are in the first place grasped, and in the second place resisted in what Heidegger refers to as the “factical ideal” of anticipatory resoluteness. Anticipatory resoluteness is reticent rather than chattery, slow rather than busy or frozen, and centered on the death-induced finitude of Dasein, and therefore not divided into its flittering interest in and attraction by the many and various beings it encounters. The contrast between the chattery din of the everyday, where discursivity dominates, and anticipatory resoluteness is perhaps most clearly seen by looking at reticence or discretion (Verschwiegenheit). Anticipatory resoluteness is a modification of Dasein’s disclosedness, one that is authentic and cares particularly for the maintenance of Dasein as its “ownmost” (i.e., authentic) self, that is, as a self that cares for Being, for the disclosedness of the world. As such, each element of the “there,” the elements of care – disposition, understanding, and discourse – have an authentic orientation that contributes to the make-up of anticipatory resoluteness. The mood that discloses nothingness to Dasein, and therefore shows Dasein and the beings of the world for what they are, is anxiety; anxiety thus “individualizes” Dasein. Similarly, understanding that is oriented by the nothing of beings is in a position to understand the absolute finitude of Being as the not of the ontological difference, indeed, as the prevailing essence of nihilism in our time, that is, to free itself from thinking Being with reference to the beings and think it just as difference. As we concluded in the previous chapter, such a thinking of Being would truly amount to a liberation – into the “free region” – from what Heidegger discerns to be the dominating characteristic of philosophic approaches to the thinking of Being since the Greeks, namely, the thinking of Being if not as a being, then still through the beings or with regard to the beings, the essence of what he comes

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to refer to as ontotheology. Reticence is the mode of discourse that Heidegger suggests as the counterpart to these two nothing-oriented, authentic modes of disposedness and understanding. We have also already seen, though, that Dasein’s disclosedness in discourse is always mediated by the beings. Even in silent reticence, what is disclosed is a “something,” not a nothing. As such, Dasein’s discursive articulation is intimately connected to Dasein’s fallenness.8 Silent reticence is the mode of discoursing that insulates Dasein from the chatter of the They. In the everydayness of the they-self, “talking extensively about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity, the unintelligibility of the trivial” (SZ 164). Reticence does not mean anything like simply having nothing to say or being drowned out by the din: “Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say, that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself” (SZ 165). This authentic and rich disclosedness of itself is supplied by reticence:  “one’s reticence makes something manifest, and does away with ‘chatter’ ” (SZ 165). It “articulates the understandability of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent” (SZ 165). The manifestness of reticence is quiet in that it does not announce itself in any prattling on. It is meant to communicate its own silent dignity without public fanfare. In so disclosing oneself by reserving from public discussion and display one’s most characteristic features, one contributes to the truth of one’s self-presentation. To a public characterized by noisy “somethings,” the silence of reticence testifies to one’s “nothingness.” Reticence thus corresponds to the discursive presentation of Dasein whereupon Dasein’s understanding approaches finitude as nothingness and senses the nothingness exposed in anxiety. Since community, as Heidegger conceives of it, is rooted in communication and thus the discursive dimension of Dasein’s there, reticence is particularly important for understanding the relation of authentic Dasein to politics. Heidegger sees reticence as supplying a “potentiality-for-hearing” that is so primordial as to be genuine and thus to supply a “Being-with-one-another which is transparent” (SZ 165). Reticence, as a function of disclosedness, particularly related to the discursive articulation of the world, “makes something manifest” (SZ 165). That is, reticence supplies the ground of genuine community, in contrast to the uncanny rootlessness of the chattery, everyday they-self, which is completely cut off from Being. This points to the absolutely crucial respect in which reticence is different from the other two elements of authenticity – anxiety and understanding – which is that reticence continues to be oriented 8

Reiner Schürmann suggests something similar in his interpretation of Being and Time. He notes that Heidegger refers to understanding, disposition, and discourse together as the equiprimordial modes of disclosedness in the first division, only to refer regularly to understanding, disposition, and fallenness together in the second division of the published text (Schürmann 2008).

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by beings rather than by nothing. It is surely true that silent reticence resembles nothing, in a certain sense, and particularly in contrast to the incessant blather of everyday chatter. But reticence “makes something manifest,” that something being Dasein as a self. And in reticence Dasein makes itself manifest to other Dasein; it supplies a “potentiality-for-hearing” as the source of a genuine “Being-with-one-another.” In manifesting Dasein to Dasein, it articulates beings and somethings. Reticence, as a mode of discourse, is still, therefore, subject to the “fatal” character of discourse, which is that it is inescapably oriented by the beings and thus seems to trap Dasein in continuing to understand Being as mediated by beings.

Open Nothingness as the Source of Dasein’s Potential Wholeness The full authentic disclosedness of Dasein, of which reticence is only one dimension, is resoluteness. Resoluteness, as a mode of Dasein’s disclosedness, therefore expresses a mood (anxiety) and an understanding projection (the distinction between Being and beings), as well as the silent discursiveness of reticence. Indeed, Heidegger claims that “in resoluteness we have now arrived at that truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic” (SZ 297). Here, then, we have the culmination of Heidegger’s view that the truth is not correspondence, but an active disclosure performed by Dasein in its care for Being. That is, truth is not a property but almost an action, an uncovering. Authenticity as resolute openness is being true, or being truly one’s self when the “who” of one’s self is the open region where the beings are illuminated by Being. In resoluteness, Dasein can be authentic because it holds itself truly as being the nothing, the cast-into-the-world nothing that it is. It is not a thing, but the place – a clearing, a “nothing” – where things (Seiende) show themselves. In the terms used in Being and Time, resoluteness is “Being-guilty, a self projection in which one is reticent and ready for anxiety” (SZ 301); “a way of reticently projecting oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and exacting anxiety of oneself” (SZ 305); “a projecting of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty – a projection which is reticent and ready for anxiety” (SZ 382). It would divert us from our main point to examine Heidegger’s Kierkegaardian-Christian terminology of guilt and conscience in detail. Let it suffice to say that in this context, “Being-guilty” (Schuldigsein) means being a thrown, fallen nullity, thrown into everydayness, who is where and what it is by no account of its own powers. In “wanting to have a conscience,” however, such a nothingness assumes responsibility for itself, for its nothingness, by projecting from where it has been thrown, into the nothing of the future. This is what is entailed by resoluteness: resolving to be oneself – and nothing else – as such a thrown nothingness. Resoluteness is thus a guard against the total dispersal of Dasein amid the whole field of “somethings,” the totality of beings present in everydayness, and so it is the guarantor of Dasein’s wholeness. That is, in resoluteness, Dasein

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holds itself together as not being dispersed in the nothingness of the everyday, as not joining in the occluding falseness of the everyday: Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. As something that keeps silent, authentic Being-one’s-self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying “I”; but in its reticence it “is” that thrown being as which it can authentically be. The self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the “I” (SZ 322–3; emphasis in the original text).

In resoluteness, Dasein holds itself as itself – “the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’ ” – back from the self-obliterating rush and turmoil of the everyday.9 Resoluteness does not freeze or fix the “I” as a point around which everydayness revolves, as though the “I” were present-athand; instead, it slows down, as an open being stretched out in time. What Heidegger means by what we have characterized as holding oneself back or holding oneself together should not be read as a hermetic removal from the fallen world, a retreat in the direction of a more authentic “location” elsewhere more pure or less fallen. The authentic nothingness of resoluteness is precisely what makes it so primordially true: it does not pretend that Dasein is anywhere but lost in the They; it does not regretfully long to be somewhere else. It instead appeals to its own lostness in the They as the truth of Dasein’s situation. This does not accomplish, nor does it seek to accomplish, a removal to another world: The irresoluteness of the “they” remains dominant notwithstanding, but it cannot impugn resolute existence. . . . Even resolutions remain dependent upon the “they” and its world. The understanding of this is one of the things that a resolution discloses, inasmuch as resoluteness is what first gives authentic transparency to Dasein (SZ 298–9).

Resoluteness thus reinvolves Dasein with all of the beings surrounding it, consequently transforming their very disclosedness:  “this authentic disclosedness modifies with equal primordiality both the way in which the ‘world’ is discovered (and this is founded upon that disclosedness) and the way in which the Dasein-with of others is disclosed” (SZ 297; emphasis in the original text). New possibilities for the very world inhabited by Dasein and the beings Dasein is with open up. The “content” of the world  – pragmata as well as people  – acquires now “a definite character in terms of their ownmost potentiality-for-Being-themselves” (SZ 298). As such, resoluteness is not isolating, but “as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world”; it brings itself into concernful Being-amid the ready-tohand beings, and “pushes” itself into solicitous Being-with-others (SZ 298; italics in the original text). 9

Consider also: “But when Dasein goes in for something in the reticence of carrying it through or even of genuinely breaking down on it, its time is a different time and, as seen by the public, an essentially slower time than that of chatter, which ‘lives at a faster rate’ ” (SZ 174).

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Liberation and Authentic Being-with Resoluteness, far from isolating an individual from the world, provides the disclosedness that permits the only true source of Being-with-one-another, Being-in-the-world-with-one-another, or genuine community. Heidegger is perfectly explicit about this and directly implies its political consequences. The liberation of Dasein brings with it the freedom of the things in the world. Dasein “frees itself for its world” in choosing its own for-the-sake-of-which, rather than that dictated by the They. Thus, Dasein’s “resoluteness toward itself” is what first frees up other Dasein. Others with it can thus “ ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (SZ 298; emphasis added). This authenticity-begetting authenticity is the culmination of the positive mode of solicitude described by Heidegger as consisting in “leaping ahead,” discussed in Chapter 4. The first Dasein is able “to co-disclose [Miterschliessen] this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates (der vorspringend-befreienden Fürsorge)” (SZ 298). Thus, because resoluteness is not isolating, and so does not entail a separation from the world and other Dasein, one Dasein may lead another Dasein to the latter’s own “ownmost” potentiality. This is the source of the genuine community that dissolves the contractual, suspicion-fostering structures of the everyday they-self.10 If this is to make sense as an authentic appropriation of the fallen they-self, it must be the case that, in some sense, the distance between the Dasein persists, but is no longer “alienating,” or generative of distrust and suspicion. So, although the genuine community envisioned here is not “individualistic” or composed of isolated individuals, what distinguishes it from the publicity of the they-self is its nurturing tending of each individualized Dasein by other Dasein, each in its ownmost, that is, authentic, particularity. It is difficult to construe concrete details about the import of this based on Heidegger’s rather formal account of authentic solicitude here, but it would seem to entail open differences among members of the community, manifold roles constituting the distinct identity of each Dasein, and therewith implications of rank and leadership. It is formally anti- or non-homogeneous.11 The notion of a political community that openly accepts its fallenness, deception, and falseness as its very own truth is most difficult to grasp. To restate this line of interpretation with maximum concision, Dasein’s existence with others is shot through with falsehood, deceit, dispersal, and confusion; it is essentially fallen into everydayness, literally, decadent; it always has been 10

11

“Only by authentically Being-their-selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another – not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the ‘they’ and in what ‘they’ want to undertake” (SZ 298). As we shall see, Heidegger’s construal of the genuine Gemeinschaft of the Volk in §74 may be understood to ameliorate this problem. His formulation of the matter there, however, is similarly terse.

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and always will be so. Resoluteness is not the elimination or flight from this, nor its amelioration, but an active acceptance of it, therefore, as resoluteness, the holding open of the truth of this. Such an interpretation is required in order to make good sense of Heidegger’s claims that Dasein is primordially “in the truth” and equally “in untruth.” There is always a fallen dimension of untruth, therefore, in the disclosedness of resoluteness: Disclosed in its “there”, it maintains itself both in truth and in untruth with equal primordiality. This “really” holds in particular for resoluteness as authentic truth. Resoluteness appropriates untruth authentically (SZ 298–9).

That Dasein should, in its most primordial disclosedness, be equally in truth and untruth has the consequence that it thus remains ever subject to – if not the dominance, then the shadow – of the they-self. Resoluteness discloses even this. Resoluteness seizes on the irresoluteness of the They, to which it had once been totally surrendered and will be again soon. A political community of resolute Dasein caring for other Dasein and helping them be resolute is in no way elevated, then, from its fallen, decadent condition. It is merely more openly, truly, resolutely what it is.

Anticipation Resoluteness, taken on its own, still perhaps gives the impression that Dasein’s possibilities are more undetermined than Heidegger means to communicate. This leads to the mistaken view that the near-contentlessness of Heidegger’s description of resolution – stressing the form of its open revelation but not the details of what is uncovered – implies that it is highly transferable in terms of what it may resolve. Heidegger’s students in the twenties, it is reported, used to joke with each other, saying “I am resolved . . . but I just don’t know about what!” On the contrary, resoluteness, as such, is not strictly speaking authentic; authentic resoluteness is anticipatory resoluteness, that is, Dasein’s open disclosure of its own nothingness as a thrown, everyday being. Authenticity requires that Dasein “own up” to the nothingness of where it is headed (the anticipation of death) as well as the nothingness of where it came from (where it was thrown into). The content of Dasein’s resoluteness is given by its confrontation with death. Dasein’s possibilities are always shaped by “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all” (SZ 262; emphasis in the original text), namely, the certainty of death. Heidegger enumerates the characteristics of death, which are taken over in anticipation: it is Dasein’s ownmost, nonrelational, not to be surpassed, certain, true, and indefinite possibility. Anticipation is the proper attitude toward death; in this distinctive possibility, Dasein is wrenched away from the They. Anticipation is a temporal “running ahead,” an attitude toward the future that stretches toward it rather than awaiting its arrival. This anticipatory “running ahead,” however, is sensitive to the most certain but indefinite

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truth about Dasein’s future, the unsurpassibility of each Dasein’s own – as in particular, “nontransferable” potentiality  – death. As “unsurpassable,” then, anticipation “runs ahead” to it, but not past it. In doing so, it illuminates every other possible possibility, none of which are as certain as death. To be clear, Heidegger is not imagining anticipation as a visit to the fortune teller; the details of one’s death are, to be sure, still obscure. But death is a certain possibility as nothing else is. It is the active confrontation with death that supplies the “content” of any otherwise seemingly “contentless” resoluteness. Authentic resoluteness must anticipate, that is, must run ahead of itself in its appropriation of Dasein’s finite possibilities to apprehend them in relation to the unsurpassable, certain but nonetheless indefinite possibility of Dasein’s own death. As such, possibilities that do not account for the particularity of each Dasein, which are governed by the prejudices and whims of the they-self in its seeming perpetuity, nonresponsibility, transferability, and ambiguity, are not authentic and, however much Dasein is thrown in to them, cannot be authentically resolved upon by Dasein. In anticipatory resoluteness – running ahead and keeping oneself together and open amid the temptations and tendencies of everyday dissipation and settling-in fixity – two kinds of nothingness are combined, however improbably. These are the nothingness of the fallen, thrown everyday (guilt) and the nothingness of death. Anticipatory resoluteness is resoluteness “modalized” by anticipation. This then forms the capstone of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein.12 The nothingness with which resoluteness is concerned is what Heidegger refers to as guilt, the fact of Dasein’s fallenness. The “Christian-existentialist,” Kierkegaardian terminology is extended in the formulation that “wanting to have a conscience” refers to the acceptance of “responsibility” for one’s guilt. Such responsibility is assumed in resoluteness: Dasein assumes responsibility for its thrown nothingness (guilt) by projecting, rethrowing that this should be so. Hence the characteristic formulation that resoluteness is a reticent projection of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty (thrown nothingness) and exacting anxiety of oneself. This is the nothingness into which Dasein is thrown without choosing, the everyday nullity of Dasein’s whys and wherefores: “Being-guilty belongs to Dasein’s Being, and signifies the null Being-the-basis of a nullity” (SZ 305). Resoluteness responds to this nothingness by refusing to refuse it, by choosing to project one’s continued Dasein upon such a nothingness without any false hope of escaping it. Thus Dasein assumes responsibility for its nothingness, though not in the search for any forgiveness or penitential alleviation of it, in full awareness of its “permanence.” The corollary of this is Dasein’s non-retreat, nonflight, from the everyday; authenticity does not leave 12

Gregory Bruce Smith’s interpretation of Being and Time arrives at a similar reading of anticipatory resoluteness (Smith 1996). He reads it as the final weaving together of Heidegger’s ontic and existentiell categories with the ontological and existential categories, both threads coming together in anticipatory resoluteness.

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the everyday behind, it seizes on it.13 The true constancy of Dasein that is summoned up and maintained by resoluteness is Dasein’s nothingness, its “null Being-the-basis of a nullity” (SZ 305); what is constant is that Dasein is a nothing. This, however, can only be genuinely disclosed as a “constant” if Dasein has, in fact, checked all the way from beginning to end, as it were. That Dasein’s nothingness should be authentically disclosed requires, then, that its death – its end – be anticipated. Resoluteness, to resolve truly, must anticipate the end of Dasein’s nothingness in its confrontation with the termination of this nothingness in another nothingness, death. Only in anticipatory resoluteness is the full intersection of past and future, fallenness and existentiality, disclosed: When Dasein is resolute, it takes over authentically in its existence the fact that it is the null basis of its own nullity. We have conceived death existentially as what we have characterized as the possibility of the impossibility of existence – that is to say, as the utter nullity of Dasein . . . but Dasein, as care, is the thrown (that is, null) basis for its death. The nullity by which Dasein’s Being is dominated primordially through and through, is revealed to Dasein in authentic Being-towards-death. Only on the basis of Dasein’s whole Being does anticipation make Being-guilty manifest. Care harbours in itself both death and guilt equiprimordially. Only in anticipatory resoluteness is the potentiality-for-Being-guilty understood authentically and wholly – that is to say, primordially (SZ 306; emphasis in the original text).

That is, when anticipated, death exposes the nothingness – nullity – that characterized Dasein’s fallenness, and thus the everyday, the nullity of the everyday, all along.

Violence To revolutionize one’s life in anticipation of death and thereby both expose its nothingness at the same time as we resolve to keep living as such, a “null nullity” is, to employ judiciously a double negative, not nonviolent. Readers of Heidegger are often disposed to associate “violence” with a politics of mastery, domination, imperialism, or control. Thus, when they read Heidegger and see that he associates domination and control with inauthenticity, with the solicitude of concernful “leaping in,” with Dasein dominating Dasein in an instrumental, technical fashion, they correctly note Heidegger’s strong preference for freedom and see his vision of authenticity as entailing a submission to Being rather than its domination. However, they mistakenly think 13

“To project oneself upon this Being-guilty, which Dasein is as long as it is, belongs to the very meaning of resoluteness. The existentiell way of taking over this ‘guilt’ in resoluteness, is therefore authentically accomplished only when that resoluteness, in its disclosure of Dasein, has become so transparent that Being-guilty is understood as something constant. But this understanding is made possible only in so far as Dasein discloses to itself its potentiality-for-Being, and discloses it ‘right to the end’ ” (SZ 305; emphasis in the original text).

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authenticity is peaceful because it is obviously not dominating, controlling, or mastering.14 Heidegger, however, repeatedly characterizes the investigation of Being and its corollary modifications for the existence of Dasein as violent. The textual support for this should be carefully distinguished from his other claims about violence. Some of his references to violence mean hermeneutical violence in the narrow sense, referring to more or less intrepid interpretations of texts and the obstacles associated with them.15 Heidegger also implies that from the perspective of everydayness, anything that does not conform to the narrow bounds of common sense is understood as being “violent,” as in shocking or épatant les bourgeois.16 Additionally, Heidegger gives the sense that ontological interpretation as such violates any settled interpretation, and so is “violent,” in a sense. He refers to “the violence of this projection amount to freeing Dasein’s undisguised phenomenal content” (SZ 313; emphasis in the original text) when referring hypothetically to an ontological interpretation that is not fundamental ontology, that is, an ontological interpretation that was in harmony with the tendencies of everydayness. Most important for the purpose of understanding the implications of Heidegger for politics is that Heidegger characterizes the breadth of human existence as circumspectively hermeneutical, through and through, from the most banausic tasks to political deliberation (SZ 359). This requires that “hermeneutical violence” be understood as important beyond the confines of the merely intellectually daring and as applying to the breadth of the ready-to-hand, thus to communal, political existence. The hermeneutical appropriation of Dasein’s circumspective concern amid the ready-to-hand beings in the world tends toward falling everydayness. Interpreting otherwise requires a wrenching transformation on the part of Dasein: “Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and tranquilized obviousness” (SZ 311). Even though anticipatory resoluteness is not expressed as a mastering domination, as an overflow of Being that fills Dasein and then determines the rest of the beings 14 15

16

See Dallmayr 1993, 152; Figal 2005, 105–16; Rockmore 1992, 72; Thiele 1994, 283. “In spite of this, even the ontical approach with which we have tried to interpret Dasein ontologically as care, may appear far-fetched and theoretically contrived, to say nothing of the act of violence [Gewaltsamkeit] one might discern in our setting aside the confirmed traditional definition of ‘man’ ” (SZ 182–3). “In terminology delimiting the primordial and authentic phenomena which correspond to these, we have to struggle against the same difficulty which keeps all ontological terminology in its grip. When violences are done in this field of investigation, they are not arbitrary but have a necessity grounded in the facts” (SZ 326–27). “Common sense concerns itself, whether ‘theoretically’ or ‘practically’, only with beings which can be surveyed at a glance circumspectively. . . . Common sense misunderstands understanding. And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as ‘violent’ anything that lies beyond the reach of its understanding, or any attempt to go out so far” (SZ 315; emphasis in the original text).

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in the world, it is nonetheless disruptive, and quite literally totally so. The “crashing-in” irruption among the beings of nothingness as appropriated by Dasein attempts to restrain its own diffusion, to remain its own vulnerable self as an uncoverer of the Being of beings. In doing so, it repeatedly uncovers truth – “again and again,” Heidegger says – in an act of thievery undertaken in the shadow of death. This work of Dasein’s is disruptive in the highest extreme; it is violent. Heidegger’s talk of violence is not merely metaphorical but extends from the very logic of fundamental ontology. Heidegger points to this in his account of Dasein’s necessarily involved role in the exhibition of truth. Truth is understood not as the correspondence of a theoretical statement with a given state of affairs, but as an uncovering, a gloss on the Greek aletheia. The truth, so understood, and in the context of the covering-over inherency of our everyday orientation by the beings, must be torn, violently ripped, from untruth, not once but “again and again.” What has already been uncovered needs to be seized by Dasein: it is “essential that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered” (SZ 222). And it must be seized repeatedly, for truth is not such that in seizing it once it might then be “established” as true, but rather it must be reappropriated again and again. Truth is vulnerable; its appropriation is its defense against “semblance and disguise,” the falling covering over that is equally characteristic of it. “Uncovering” is a verb, not a condition; for it to be at all what it “is,” it must always be in tension with covering over. Making something true, reenacting its uncovering, is thus a violation, a crime against what is settled and what is immediately becoming settled: “The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery” (SZ 222). The truth is not static, and thus, to “remain” true, needs to be re-appropriated, -expressed, and -interpreted at every turn; remaining true is an activity, not a state. Here, then, is an intimation of what Heidegger means by authenticity and resoluteness.17 The reason why violence extends beyond the textual-hermeneutical to the full hermeneutics of facticity is the total and thoroughly social character of Dasein’s hermeneutical involvement and therefore disclosedness. The radical reorientation entailed in anticipatory resoluteness and the ontological investigations that take it as the guide to Dasein’s wholeness is violent because (a) everydayness itself is so totalizing and (b) “hermeneutics” refuses to admit a separation between theory and practice. Everydayness shapes our very situatedness both concernfully amid the things of the world and solicitously among our fellow Dasein. It determines the interpretation of everything theoretically and practically (including what constitutes theory and practice). 17

“The Being of truth is connected primordially with Dasein. And only because Dasein is as constituted by disclosedness (that is, by understanding), can anything like Being be understood; only so is it possible to understand Being. Being (not beings) is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is. Being and truth ‘are’ equiprimordially” (SZ 230, emphasis [italics and the weird spacing] in the original text).

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Thus the radical disruption of one entails the radical disruption of the other. On Heidegger’s account of the derivation of theory from the technico-practical realm of the circumspective ready-to-hand, the “transformation” effected by anticipatory resoluteness and ontological investigation necessarily entails the whole disclosedness of Dasein and is not restricted to the “merely” theoretical. Hermeneutical violence thus has as much to do with the full panoply of everyday personal and instrumental encounters with the world, from tool usage to practical deliberation. Anticipatory resoluteness – the “factical ideal” in which Dasein’s for-the-sake-of-which is manifest and therefore Dasein’s wholeness is available to Heidegger’s philosophic project – entails a “total revolution” surpassing the limited spheres of mere theory and practice.18

On the Meaning of Anticipatory Resoluteness Many of the disputes about the political import of Heidegger’s thought turn on how anticipatory resoluteness is understood. These disputes derive from two sorts of misinterpretations of Heidegger, each of which amplifies certain ambiguities in Heidegger’s own account. For the purposes of this discussion, we designate the first of these positions the abstract-formalist reading (AFR), the second of these the awaiting-letting-be reading (ALB).19

On the Meaning of Resoluteness: The Abstract-Formalist Reading (AFR) The abstract-formalist reading of anticipatory resoluteness does not give due credence to the element of anticipation in this factical ideal and thus understates the radicalness implied in Heidegger’s understanding of a community or politics based on a finitude that approaches nothingness. In this regard, the Abstract-Formalist Readers are following through Heidegger’s own highly formal, thus “abstract,” account of resoluteness, which is the consequence of his own procedure of “formal indication.” As discussed in Chapters  1 and 2, the dismantling of the distinction between theory and practice entailed in Heidegger’s approach to existential categorization or formal indication is so abstract – intentionally so – that it accounts for both one phenomenon and its ontic opposite. The radical degree of formality allows for a vast multiplicity of related phenomena to be “categorized” together. So, for instance, both anxiety and hope are “dispositions.” Thus both may be accounted for as moods that 18 19

On “total revolution,” see generally Yack 1992. Disputes about the character and place of authenticity in Heidegger’s thought are numerous. For some of the high points in the literature, consult Carman 2000, 2003; Guignon 1984, 2000, 2004, 2006; Scott 2010; for a prominent critique of authenticity, see Adorno 2003. In the discussion that follows, I bring out certain characteristic readings of Heidegger for the purposes of emphasizing ambiguities in his account.

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reveal something of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, and neither is, on ontological grounds, preferable or “better.” Similarly, both authenticity and inauthenticity are ways for Dasein to be  – as Being-in-the-world, as Being-with-others  – though neither has a more privileged ontological status, and so Heidegger refuses the language of better and worse in accounting for these ways of Being. Heidegger’s approach is meant to avoid the reductive, ocular biases that have distorted every traditional account of Being, beginning with the Greek identification of “category” with what might be publicly accused of a thing. As applied to the question of resoluteness, the resulting account is so abstract as to allow for any content to the resoluteness whatsoever. Heidegger says as much directly: “Resoluteness, by its ontological essence, is always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time” (SZ 298). Each Dasein is resolute in its own way, at its own time, with respect to its own situation and surroundings. The “content” of any particular instance of resoluteness, that is, what it might resolve upon, is variable in the highest degree: On what is it to resolve? Only the resolution itself can give the answer. . . . The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time. To resoluteness, the indefiniteness characteristic of every potentiality-for-Being into which Dasein has been factically thrown, is something that necessarily belongs. Only in a resolution is resoluteness sure of itself. The existentiell indefiniteness of resoluteness never makes itself definite except in a resolution; yet it has, all the same, its existentiell definiteness (SZ 298; emphasis in the original text).

Resoluteness might be called the “active acceptance” of the condition Dasein has been thrown into, whichever fallen situation, wherever it finds itself, and the claiming of it as Dasein’s own: Dasein inhabits this world, it dons it, stakes its own claim to it. As in the vernacular exhortation:  Own it! The existential, formal structure of resoluteness, however, does not on its own decide what existentiell content definitely will not or definitely will satisfy the criteria of resoluteness. The apparent contentlessness of resoluteness has led some prominent Heidegger interpreters, both friendly and critical, to see resoluteness as a nearly infinitely transferable (and thus malleable) structural component of Heideggerian politics. It thus permits of a surprisingly wide political application.20 One of 20

See Safranski 1998, 170, for example. Likewise, Charles Guignon, the highly-regarded existentialist interpreter of Heidegger, so construes this important dimension of Heidegger’s thought (Guignon 1983, 139–42), as does William Blattner (2006, 160–7). Rockmore has a similar view (1997, 45–8, 64–7). My analysis of these two misreadings of Heidegger bears some important similarities to Johannes Fritsche’s assessment of the ongoing debates about Heidegger. I should like, then, to clarify my disagreements with Fritsche on this point: 1.

Heidegger is more future-oriented than Fritsche allows. Heidegger is indeed, as he diagnoses, a “revolutionary rightist,” but I stress the future orientation of the right rather than the content of what is retrieved from the past. In my view, Fritsche still interprets Heidegger

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the striking features of this interpretation of resoluteness is how quickly any “hardness” may be bled away from Heidegger. Paradoxically, this highly formalized reading of him allows for “extremely” gentle views to be plugged, with all possible sincerity, into the structural characteristics of Heidegger’s thought, and laden with the “jargon of authenticity.” This interpretation lends itself to appropriating Heidegger as a supporter of a politics of vegan animal rights as much as of national resolve and struggle; such a Heideggerian is as likely to be a Green as a venture capitalist, a pacifist as a Nazi.21 Such a reading misunderstands Heidegger’s formalism, however, which is so amplified in order to liberate the particular from the publicness, generalizations, and false pretentions to universality in the everyday. This is accomplished, paradoxically enough, by yoking the particular to existentials that are so abstract and “transcendent” as to contain each particular in its finite totality without distortion. This maximum scope is premised on the dissolution of traditional philosophical distinction between theory and practice. The result in Heidegger is the amplification of violence, not its arbitrary relaxation or lessening. This is so because the confrontation with death so wrenchingly transforms the possibilities and thus the Being of the world. The “practical” consequence of violence in Heideggerian politics is intextricably linked to its philosophical radicalism. In moderating the former, the abstract-formalists diminish the latter. The fundamental error of the AFR is to overlook the decisive role of anticipation in authentic resoluteness. Heidegger clearly states that “resoluteness

2.

3.

21

in a less-radical fashion than his philosophic transformation of the bases of theory and practice warrant, hence my stress on the “contentlessness” of the future versus Fritsche’s emphasis on the retrieval of a past form of life. As I read Fritsche, his Heidegger is still bound by empirical particulars, and thus “conservative,” whereas I  think Heidegger is radicalized by the attempt to incorporate the most extreme particularity  – approaching nothingness – into his thought. I, thus, grant that the interpreters in the AFR group have more to their position than Fritsche allows, inasmuch as I agree that the “contentlessness” of resoluteness is the source of Heidegger’s violent radicalism. In general, I think the ambiguities of Heidegger’s actual doctrines in Being and Time give a certain warrant to the AFR (what Fritsche refers to as the “empty-decisionism” interpretation of Heidegger). I agree with Fritsche that Being and Time (more or less) “stands on its own” regarding political interpretation, but I disagree that this means it is unambiguous. For example, §74 does not provide all the necessary content for resoluteness. I insist that the political implications of Being and Time are not exhausted by Heidegger’s endorsement of National Socialism (whether this is found in §74 or not, and here I think Fritsche’s claims are exaggerated; for instance, there is no actual use of the term Volksgemeinschaft [though both Volk and Gemeinschaft are on the same line, admittedly], the crucial term, the sine qua non, for Fritsche’s linkage of Heidegger and Hitlerism). Thus, given the ambiguities genuinely present in Being and Time, the ALB interpretation (what Fritsche might identify with the “post-modern interpretation”) also has warrant from the text of Being and Time, though it rests on a fairly partial and, indeed, “violent” interpretation.

Cf. Thiele 1994, 285–6. See Zimmerman 1983.

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is authentically and wholly what it can be only as anticipatory resoluteness” (SZ 309). Failing to see the importance of anticipation, the AFRs tend to take the “throw” of Dasein as final. This inadvertently privileges the present at the expense of the future. Thus they imagine a Dasein who is thrown into an everyday situation where, once the misunderstandings are scraped away, what would be authentic would be to be resolutely a fisherman, or to be resolutely a corporate lawyer, or to be resolutely an astronaut, true to one’s ownmost self, perduring through adversity. Taking one’s orientation by anticipation, however, one runs ahead to compass one’s virtually imminent death and sees the nothingness of not merely the everyday into which one is thrown, but the nothingness to which that which one has resolutely fastened oneself amounts to. One’s life is nothing through and through:  not merely where one comes from (the fallen everydayness into which one is thrown), but where one is going (the certain possibility of the end of one’s possibilities, still fallen, in death). The effect this has on resoluteness is to enforce that resoluteness must include complete reversals and ontic transformations in response to the anticipation of one’s death. The certainty of nothingness in one’s death exposes one’s current commitments, even the seemingly most “resolutely” fastened upon of commitments, as arbitrary. There is no necessary connection between one’s desires, and therefore the life one has elected to lead in order to fulfill them, and what the bracing anticipation of one’s own death will reveal to be true of oneself. The ontical consequences of anticipatory resoluteness point not merely to the steadfast defense of one’s own (resoluteness). They also point to the eviscerating reconsideration and transformation of what truly is one’s own and the consequent abandonment any “content” that is familiar or sound in order to refuse any closing-down fixity implied by the adherence to already established orders. As in the “Comment on Jaspers,” Heidegger points to the need for the most “radical suspicion” and skepticism. The certainty of the complete obliteration of “what” one has resolutely been permits its complete abandonment as much as it instructs that it be determinedly clung to.

On the Meaning of Anticipation: The Awaiting Letting-Be Reading (ALB) The second important interpretation of anticipatory resoluteness might be called the awaiting-letting-be reading. Whereas the AFR reading stressed resoluteness in isolation from anticipation, and as a result privileged the present, the ALB reading emphasizes an attitude toward the future that Heidegger designates as the inauthentic counterpart to anticipation, “awaiting.” Whereas the imperative in the AFR was for Dasein to be what it is, where it is, when it is, the imperative in the ALB reading is to let others and other things be what they are. In a different way than AFR, then, ALB also privileges the present, adopting an attitude toward things and people that takes what they are now as the guide

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to what they shall be, vastly underemphasizing Dasein’s contribution to their revelatory manifestation of their being what they are and, like AFR, undervaluing the transformation effected by Dasein’s confrontation with its own death. The most illuminating account of the ALB interpretation of Heidegger is supplied by Fred Dallmayr, culminating in his latest publications on Heidegger.22 Dallmayr argues that Heidegger’s thought offers fruitful lines of thinking about politics and genuinely free praxis, nonteleological and yet not bound by the narrow contractual, agent-centered modes of liberal political theory. Praxis – in the terminology of Being and Time, circumspective concern – on this account takes place before the distinction between theory and practice.23 It begins in and completes or fulfills the actor, and yet also displays a “peculiar passivity or receptivity” by “encountering and letting things and beings ‘be.’ ”24 Here we see the distinctive dimension of “letting-be,” where any notion of resoluteness that stresses its hardness rather than its truth-disclosing openness is destabilized. The openness of Dasein is emphasized: “This receptivity implies openness and a kind of ‘self-surrender’ (Sichfreigeben) in favor of beings so that they can show themselves how they are.”25 Letting-be is extended to the communal as well, suggesting that Dasein engage in a process of sharing with others: “This sharing, Heidegger stresses, provides a common ground (ein Gemeinsames) that is not instrumentally fabricated or engineered but is a corollary of the ‘Ürhandlung’ of letting-be: ‘The ‘with’ of being-with-others discloses a commonality that derives from the fact that self and others are equally projected or catapulted [toward truth]’ ” (Dallmayr 2010, 76).26 One lets others “be” in their own sojourning approach to disclosing the truth along with one’s own in process appropriation of oneself: . . . human beings are oriented toward something shared “in common” (ein Gemeinsames, ein Selbiges) that does not at all coincide with “sameness” or identity; thus, it is possible and even assumed that “several people relate in quite different ways to commonality.” . . . this thought is also expressed in the statement that human orientation toward Being is neither identical nor purely relativistic but “relational.” Given that care for Being is also defined as “primordial praxis,” commonality can be described as diversified participation in the disclosure (or letting-be) of truth (Dallmayr 2010, 77). 22

23 24 25 26

Dallmayr 2010, 67–82. For other accounts of Heideggerian politics that explore the sources in Heidegger of a politics of “letting be,” consult Thiele 1995; White 1991. The former may be read as a prelude of sorts for further consideration of the relationship between a Heideggerian recovery of phusis from beneath the occlusive screen of “Nature” in Latin Christianity and modernity; see Thiele 1999, 2011, 2013. The latter should be taken as part of White’s ongoing exploration of a postmodern citizenship; see White 2009. Dallmayr 2010, 74. Dallmayr 2010, 74. Dallmayr 2010, 74–5. Dallmayr is quoting Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie (GA 27), a course taught in 1928–9. The richness of Dallmayr’s attention to the political resonances of Heidegger’s work should cast suspicion on Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that Heidegger failed to think the “with” in his account of Being-with (Nancy 2002).

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Read thus, Heidegger supplies an ontological support for a politics that is at once inclusive and respectful of difference. As with the AFR interpretation, the ALB interpretation derives considerable support from ambiguities or problems in Heidegger’s own thought. The latter view begins from Heidegger’s account of resoluteness, that in resoluteness Dasein sets itself free and solicitously assists its fellow Dasein to “be” themselves: “Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let the others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates” (SZ 298). This passage is central to the ALB interpretation, as it is here that we see Heidegger suggesting a fruitful interplay between the resoluteness of one Dasein and its care for, solicitude for, the freedom of other Dasein.27 The politics of the ALB respond to this account of solicitous Being-with-others. This being said, Heidegger’s explicit (and only) discussion of letting-be in Being and Time is in the context of his consideration of awaiting, which he singles out as the orientation toward the future that is the inauthentic counterpart of authentic anticipation. As Heidegger presents it in Being and Time, awaiting is a more tentative, cautious, or receptive orientation to the future – its “ahead-of-itself” – than anticipation. In anticipation, resoluteness concentrates on each “item of modalization” from Dasein’s death because it “tends of itself” toward these:  ownmost, nonrelational, not to be outstripped, certain, indefinite, true (SZ 309; emphasis in the original text). That is, despite the exaggerated separation between them implied by the AFR, resoluteness, when it is really being itself, points toward anticipation (hence, “resoluteness is authentically and wholly what it can be only as anticipatory resoluteness” [309]). Resoluteness is thus an active stretching out, a stretching itself along, forward in time. Anticipation shapes the future by means of the appropriation of that possibility of Dasein’s that is its ownmost, nonrelational, not to be surpassed, certain, and yet also indefinite. In anticipatory resoluteness, understanding considers and “maintains itself in an existentiell possibility” (SZ 336). In doing so, it is “coming-towards-itself out of that current possibility as which one’s Dasein exists” (SZ 336). Anticipation is not the mastery and possession of its self, but it is the mastery and possession of the possibility of its Not-Being. This, however, is not the normal, inauthentic attitude toward the future. Dasein’s irresolute, “not [yet] individualized” (SZ 336), closed-off, “ahead-ofitself” (SZ 337) is called awaiting. In awaiting, the future is not individuated as run-toward (vorlaufen), but is accepted or received passively. The future is allowed to come toward Dasein, not vice versa. Dasein “awaits this concernfully in terms of that which yields or denies the object of its concern” (SZ 337; italics in the original text). In expectant awaiting, one’s possibilities for the 27

See Dallmayr’s reference to and explication of this point in Being and Time in his Polis and Praxis (Dallmayr 1985, 115 f.) Hatab alludes to this passage in the only reference to resoluteness in his book (Hatab 2000, 175).

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future are shaped by one’s present concerns, by one’s worldly, ready-to-hand involvements. That is, one approaches the future as it is, in a sense, received from the beings with which one is involved. Oriented by such a general array of things, the future that determines them lacks the certainty of that individualized future of authentic Dasein. Anticipation and awaiting have a different relationship to the beings that Dasein finds itself currently amid and thus to letting them be. Anticipation runs ahead to compass a for-the-sake-of-which relative to the certain though indefinite, unsurpassable possibility of Dasein’s ownmost death, providing an indefinite but nonetheless certain future point around which every current involvement must be forcibly made to orient itself. Awaiting is oriented by Dasein’s discovery of the beings in their ready-to-hand aspect as Zeug, pragmata. In submitting itself to the beings, Dasein receives, in a sense, its “purpose” from them, from these “things in themselves” or from their “nature.” It submits itself to them by “letting them be involved” (SZ 353, emphasis added), that is, by allowing them to interact with one another according to their character, separate from or undetermined by any imposition from Dasein’s Being. The awaiting sees the telos of the beings with which it is concerned by letting them be: “letting something be involved is constituted in the unity of a retention which awaits, and it is constituted in such a manner, indeed, that the making-present which arises from this, makes possible the characteristic absorption of concern in its equipmental world” (SZ 353–4). Awaiting thus submits to beings; anticipation, in submitting to Being (as the nothingness of its own finitude), challenges, wrests, and violates beings for the sake of their sharing also in the finitude of Being. Heidegger’s depiction of awaiting resembles an attitude toward the future more characteristic of classical philosophy, which sees it in light of the eternal present, the present-purposive orientation by the beings. Awaiting the future means that one’s attitude toward beings in the present is a self-forgetting letting-be. That Dasein would submit itself to the beings and thus derive its own purposes from them glosses the Platonic-Aristotelian derivation of human nature from the order of the natural cosmos.28 This “conservative” or realist attitude, where the beings are allowed to show themselves in the light of their own ends, should be contrasted with a modern, “subjective,” or idealist approach whereby the beings are submitted to the human will in order that they might be used for more narrowly human ends or purposes. By emphasizing awaiting at the expense of anticipation, the ALB interpretation of Heidegger misconstrues a point that Heidegger treated with considerable precision in Being and Time. Anticipatory resoluteness can be read as the culmination of Heidegger’s account of human authenticity, where existential inquiry meets the existentiell ideal in which it is necessarily grounded by exhibiting the truth of Being-there. Dasein, recall, as the source of its own world, is the revealer, the dis-coverer of 28

See Dallmayr 2010, 71–2, 78–9.

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its own primordial truth. Anticipatory resoluteness is the most true, in a manner of speaking; Dasein is most truly “itself” when it manifests the finitude of Being in and among all the other beings. When Dasein is being anticipatorily resolute, it is being most itself by stretching out toward the future, in the full “anticipation” of its ownmost certain death, and from this sharpened sense of its own finitude, the world and the beings of the world are more luminously cleared in their true character and relation to Dasein. What is more, by resisting the assimilation of itself to this manifold array of things and their characteristic way of being, by “resolutely” withholding itself in its own thrown null ground from being closed off in the fashion of the everyday things in the world, Dasein remains open (erschliessende), “unlocked” (aufgeschlossen), and in this sense decided (beschlossen) against the fixity of sham, everyday stability as elevated under the dictatorship of the They. This involves a wrenching, tearing, violent dislocation of oneself from the everyday and one’s own tendency toward dwelling there. To downplay the violence of this dislocation is to mistake the present “normal” situation – its conventions and prejudices – into which Dasein has been thrown for the “content” that must be employed to supply the otherwise contentless, formal, and abstract resolution. Similarly, to minimize the forceful, energetic dimension of anticipatory resoluteness’s striding and leaping into the future and its role in determining the individuated Being of the beings in favor of Dasein’s letting beings be as they are in their present Being is to mistake the full import of Heidegger’s rethinking of community based on his rethinking of the relationship between theory and practice.

Authentic and Inauthentic Historicity Given that Heidegger’s accounts of Being-with (discussed in Chapter  4) and anticipatory resoluteness are highly formal, it is necessary, as other scholars have done, to look to Heidegger’s discussion of historicity to appreciate more fully its political import as delineated in Being and Time.29 As Heidegger says:  “the interpretation of Dasein’s historicity will prove to be, at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality” (SZ 382). In his discussion of historicity, Heidegger comes closest to giving clear expression to what he means by authentic community in his references to a Volk that seeks to retrieve its own “heritage” according to the dictates of its “destiny.” In developing his account of historicity, in showing that historiology (the science) derives from it, in outlining an authentic approach – an activist, “enactmental” approach, recalling elements of his “Comment on Jaspers”  – to history and in situating this within the communal lives of people, Heidegger supplies the outline of what by any other name is a prescriptive political teaching. As we shall see, this does not mean that his “prescriptions” are without ambiguity, yet he

29

Newell 1984 provides a reading of Being and Time that shows its conceptual continuities with Introduction to Metaphysics.

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nonetheless shows the limits within which this ambiguity must be worked out by his interpreters.

Tradition and Heritage Inauthentic historicity is the everyday inhabitance by a community of its normal understanding of itself and its past, namely, tradition. Tradition is the medium within which a community understands itself and its possibilities for the future.30 Tradition is everyday inauthentic history. History, in turn, is based on Dasein’s historicity, whereby it is “stretched along and stretches itself along” (SZ 375) from the birth into which it is thrown and its death, each of which is as constitutive of Dasein as the other. The study of history, however, as it is ordinarily and thus inauthentically interpreted as a science whose objects are present-at-hand, covers over Dasein’s genuine historicity (SZ 375–6). In such a view of history, the past tends to dominate, but Heidegger insists that there is no clear reason why this should be so (SZ 379, 381). What makes something “past,” as he analyzes it, is that the “world” to which it belonged has ceased to be, is no longer (SZ 381). Heidegger’s contrary view is that Dasein cannot be “past,” because it is never present-at-hand:  “A Dasein which no longer exists, however, is not past, in the ontologically strict sense; it is rather ‘having-been-there’ [da-gewesen] (SZ 380). Thus, he contends that “what is primarily historical is Dasein. That which is secondarily historical, however, is what we encounter within-the-world – not only equipment ready-to-hand, in the widest sense, but also the environing Nature as ‘the very soil of history’ ” (SZ 381). The ordinary view of history then appears to have taken its bearings by the interplay of worldly present-at-hand “Things,” objects and their coming into being and passing away, without accounting for Dasein itself, its temporal constitution as the stretching-along and world-opening being, as the root of history. Against this, Heidegger deploys his own alternative mode of historizing (and indeed shows how standard-issue tradition is derivative from it) that is oriented by the future and only thus retrieves the covered-over past, distorted and obscured to the point of unrecognizability by the normal, everyday medium of traditional history. This understanding of history draws on his accounts of everydayness, resoluteness, and anticipation. In Heidegger’s understanding of authentic historizing – and as we have already seen in anticipatory resoluteness – everydayness is not dissolved; it does not disappear. Instead, it is seized upon: the ordinary, public everydayness into which each Dasein has been thrown is thus transformed into the stuff of which we are made: “The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which 30

“It becomes plain that Dasein’s inauthentic historicity lies in that which  – under the title of ‘everydayness’ – we have looked upon, in the existential analytic of Dasein, as the horizon closest to us” (SZ 376).

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that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. In one’s coming back resolutely to one’s thrownness, there is hidden a handing down to oneself of the possibilities that have come down to one, but not necessarily as having thus come down” (SZ 383). In coming back to itself, resoluteness appropriates its tradition as its own heritage and thus opens up new possibilities for the future. When Dasein resolutely anticipates its ownmost, certain death – the nothingness in which it meets its end – when it faces the future in this fashion, then its apprehension of its own past – the history into which it is thrown – is purified of extraneous, inessential elements: for “only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and ‘provisional’ possibility driven out” (SZ 384). The inherited, traditional past is burned away and only the covered-over, now-exposed core that contributes the nonaccidental, nonprovisional future possibilities remains. In thus facing death, Dasein ceases to flee into the comfortable history of tradition as ordered by the reassuring stability of the present-at-hand. Heidegger designates this as Dasein’s acceptance – not passive, but active – of its fate: Only Being-free for death, gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude. Once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one – those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly – and brings Dasein back into the simplicity of its fate [Schicksals]. This is how we designate Dasein’s primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen (SZ 383–4; emphasis in the original text).

Oriented and thus freed by our certain death, we seize on where we are – what we were born into, the everyday traditions we did not initially choose  – in their least comfortable, least superficial core: this is the heritage into which we are fated. It is this that we pass on to ourselves, by remaining ourselves and remaining situated in this fated heritage by actively, not passively, accepting it, by choosing what was not initially chosen, and thus, as it were, rethrowing ourselves into this most particular future, projecting upon this finite possibility.

Repetition Heidegger’s formulation of “handing oneself down to oneself” points to the core of his understanding of Dasein’s authentic historicity:  repetition. Repetition is the authentic response of Dasein to its having-been. Heidegger does not mean that in repeating, one is endorsing the status quo. In “choosing a hero,” Heidegger’s arresting formulation for bucking the orthodox history of the They (SZ 371, 385) and retrieving a model to emulate, he does not mean that Dasein should just reactualize the past.31 Rather, “the repetition makes a 31

Karsten Harries emphasizes, plausibly, that in “choosing a hero,” Heidegger is specifically opposing the notion of a community oriented by “recognition” (Harries 1994, 20). Contrast Freeman 2009.

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reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility in a resolution, it is made in a moment of vision, and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the ‘today,’ is working itself out as the ‘past.’ Repetition does not abandon itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress” (SZ 386; emphasis in the original). In repetition, resoluteness exposes the truth of the past as certain, where “certain” is understood with maximum flexibility: . . . it simply cannot be rigid as regards the situation, but must understand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure, must he held open and free for the current factical possibility. The certainty of the resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back – a possibility which is factically necessary (SZ 307–8; emphasis in the original text).

That is, what is repeated, strictly speaking, need bear absolutely no ontical resemblance whatsoever to what has happened as might be understood in any other situation; in resoluteness, one must be prepared – “hold oneself free” – to reverse oneself, to “take back” what has been resolved upon. Repetition “begins,” so to speak, in a future possibility.32 It is a response – “reciprocative rejoinder” – to this possibility that then retrieves a former possibility, as if in answer to a futural question. That this happens in the notional present is referred to in the “moment of vision,” the blink of an eye, which as such refuses (“disavows”) the everyday, orthodox, encrusted, closed- and closing-off now, the crystallization of the past. Heidegger’s appropriation of the term Augenblick from Luther’s Bible refers to St. Paul’s apocalyptic sense of the total reversal and transformation of the world upon Christ’s return. Thus, in coming toward oneself authentically in historical anticipatory resoluteness, one is also coming back to one’s authentic self, the self that has been thrown into a particular history (SZ 338–9). The alternative is inauthentic forgetting, when one is oriented strictly by the objects of one’s present concern and without regard for who one has been or where one is from (SZ 339). The difference is whether one is oriented by the future or the present. Repetition is thus perfectly indifferent to the political “right” – which submits the present and future to the past as tradition – and the political “left” – which aims at progress. Neither, however, may it be located in the squishy middle: in repetitively choosing a hero, it is more radically future-oriented than any progressive, and more securely rooted in a past so bygone that it never actually was: “As a way of Being for Dasein, history has its roots so essentially in the future that death . . . throws anticipatory existence back upon its factical thrownness, and so for the first time imparts to having-been its privileged position in the historical” (SZ 386; emphasis in the original text). That is, “for

32

Johannes Fritsche (1999, 11–24) reads Heidegger’s understanding of “repetition” as a conservative defense of tradition. He disputes that Heidegger gives priority to the future, but does not seem to notice Heidegger’s attention to the evident failure of tradition to supply the resources for preserving itself.

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the first time,” Dasein apprehends the true meaning of what has been; mere conservatism (traditionalism) is shown up as privileging the present in its take on the past. To sum up, repetition takes its bearings by the future possibility in which Dasein is most itself as clarified in anticipatory resoluteness, and with a view to this seizes the elements of its past that are most responsive to this authentic future. This necessarily sets it at odds with traditionalist history according to the they-self. The stakes are, to repeat, the identity of Dasein through “history.” Its loss of identity is a genuine possibility in the dissipation of the they-self. The possibility of it remaining itself depends on its resolute acceptance of “who” it has been thrown into being, its “null” nothingness in this respect being accepted, and this being done authentically because it is being done in full awareness of Dasein’s ownmost, ineluctable, un-out-runnable, certain death; in full awareness that Dasein’s mortal nothingness is terminated by further nothingness. Thus, each authentic Dasein is born into its history, and as constituted by temporality, stretches along as what it is unto death. It then takes up the full weight of the genuine, truthful essence of its history, the “baggage” with which it has been saddled by birth, and carries this – but nothing else, no edifying lessons, no load-lightening hope – through as itself, without shirking, unto death. When Dasein does this, it actively accepts its fate by transmitting it as its own heritage. On this presentation, repetition supplies a genuine source of steadiness, as opposed to the false constancy of the everyday privileging of the ocular present-at-hand. Heidegger arrives at this characterization not by searching for the “unity of connectedness” among experiences, but rather by interrogating the refusal of dispersion within the lostness of the everyday They, as this characterizes the repetitious Dasein (SZ 390). The dispersal and lostness is a clue to the priority of death. When Dasein faces up to this properly, it is resolute in “the repetition of the heritage of possibilities by handing these down to oneself in anticipation” (SZ 390). In this sense, “resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own self” (SZ 391; emphasis in the original text). It thus passes on itself  – in the form of the details of its thrownness, the particulars of its own heritage – to itself, by ensuring that the possibilities that compass Dasein’s particular future are informed by the most essential core of Dasein’s particular past: “The Self’s resoluteness against the inconstancy of distraction, is in itself a steadiness which has been stretched along – the steadiness with which Dasein as fate ‘incorporates’ into its existence birth and death and their ‘between’ and holds them as thus ‘incorporated,’ so that in such constancy Dasein is indeed in a moment of vision for what is world-historical in its current situation” (SZ 390–1; emphasis in the original text). Again, it is mistaken to think of this steadiness as comforting or secure; indeed, it is precisely in tearing itself away from false comfort in public everydayness that this steadfastness may be found. The steadiness of authentic historicity derives from collapsing the everyday orientation according to the present. Inauthentic historicity summons the past

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before the todayness of the present, “repetitiously,” in a sense, in that every day this is done anew. Dasein’s being stretched along from the history into which it is born toward the death that lies ever before it is obscured in a horizon of sham certainty and regularity, which in turn obscures the need for choice and decision.33 In the present “today,” the “comfortableness of the accustomed” (“pleasantness of the habitual,” 370–1) sits in judgment and awaits a tomorrow that is “eternally yesterday’s,” and the total homogeneity of which is mistaken for regular diversification (SZ 370–1). Authentic historicity denies, forcibly denies, the tyranny of “todayness” over the present, future, and past: . . . the temporality of authentic historicity, as the moment of vision of anticipatory repetition, deprives the “today” of its character as present, and weans one from the conventionalities (Üblichkeiten) of the “they.” . . . But when historicity is authentic, it understands history as the “recurrence” of the possible, and knows that a possibility will recur only if existence is open for it fatefully, in a moment of vision, in resolute repetition (SZ 391–2; emphasis in the original text).

When the currently present “leavings” of history are scraped away, the false political alternatives of conserving a status quo or progressing beyond it are shown as such, and the possibility of genuine steadiness “presents” itself in a “moment of vision” as the possibility of choosing a recurrent possibility. Repeating a possibility does not look like doing the same thing that was done before. Here at the meeting of the existentially open and the existentiell there is a strong sense of violent confrontation with the past, a wresting of something covered over, once passed-over possibilities smothered and suppressed by official history, by accepted traditional dogmas about the past. The steadiness of resolute Dasein allows it to be open, genuinely open, to the possibility of the total reversal of its ontic-historical circumstances: In resoluteness lies the existentiell constancy which, by its very essence, has already anticipated vorweggenommen every possible moment of vision that may arise from it. As fate, resoluteness is freedom to give up some definite resolution, and to give it up in accordance with the demands of some possible situation or other. The steadiness of existence is not interrupted thereby but confirmed in the moment of vision. This steadiness is not first formed either through or by the adjoining of “moments” one to another; but these arise from the temporality of that repetition which is futurally in the process-ofhaving-been – a temporality which has already been stretched along (SZ 391; emphasis in the original text).

33

“In inauthentic historicity. . . the way in which fate has been primordially stretched along has been hidden. With the inconstancy of the they-self Dasein makes present its ‘today’. In awaiting the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one. The ‘they’ evades choice. Blind for possibilities, it cannot repeat what has been, but only retains and receives the ‘actual’ that is left over, the world-historical that has been, the leavings, and the information about them that is present-at-hand. Lost in the making present of the ‘today,’ it understands the ‘past’ in terms of the ‘present.’ . . . When . . . one’s existence is inauthentically historical, it is loaded down with the legacy of a ‘past’ which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern” (SZ 391).

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Thus, what might appear as the least constant, most fickle eagerness to “give up some definite resolution” and immediately adapt to any possible present  – “some possible situation or other” – is, in truth, the token of genuine steadiness and resoluteness that has already anticipated  – not intellectually, but existentially  – every possible historical transformation. As Heidegger presents it, the They-sanctioned, static, everyday interpretation of things is so ephemeral, relative to the profundity and manifoldness of Being, that the existentiell orientation that most faithfully relates Dasein’s fallenness and thrown, historical nothingness to a genuine, steady, and loyal openness to Being is itself, from the perspective of such trivialities, highly changeable and seemingly capricious in its characteristics. As we can see, the repetitive steadiness of Dasein is such that it remains itself through complete reversals of its ontic situation. The radicalness of this should not be understated: what Heidegger is presenting is a historicity that is just as faithful to itself when its ontic content undergoes a complete transformation as when it is “steady” in any more conventional sense. The foregoing assumes political import because Heidegger takes historical repetition as a model not just for “individual” life, but for the collective existence of a community of Dasein. The characteristics of Dasein’s historicity are thus transposed directly to Dasein in their Being-with. In characterizing Dasein’s authentic historicity, Heidegger is fleshing out the positive mode of solicitude, which takes the shape of leaping ahead. Historizing, thus, as co-historizing is determinative for Dasein not merely as fate, but as what Heidegger refers to as “destiny” (Geschick). Heidegger insists that destiny is not composed as the sum of multiple fates, but guides them in advance, as an authentic alternative to the they-self’s determination of a collectivity of Dasein’s for-the-sake-of-which. Destiny is the “historizing of a community, of a people (Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes)” (SZ 384).34 Heidegger says very little about what 34

In Johannes Fritsche’s reading of Being and Time (Fritsche 1999) Heidegger’s employment here of the terms “Gemeinschaft” and “Volk” should be read as a signal of his complete adherence, in 1927 when Being and Time was published, to the political program of the NSDAP. That is, he reads this allusion to Volksgemeeinschaft as demonstrating not merely that Heidegger was a rightist, but that more specifically he adhered to Hitlerism. He claims that the use of this term was unique to the NSDAP program. One should consult the historical work of Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, for a corrective; it is not a specifically Nazi term:  The enduring popularity of the Nazis rested on the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community. It was not a Nazi idea, and it was not perceived as something imposed or strange. On the contrary, the Nazis were credited with finally putting into place the national solidarity that Germans had long yearned for. This is an important point because many of the achievements of the “national revolution” in 1933 were cherished by citizens who did not necessarily identify with National Socialism. The legitimacy that Hitler and his regime enjoyed rested on a wider basis of goodwill. The national revolution came before the Nazis, even if the Nazis were the indispensable means for its realization. Since World War I, the people’s community had stood for reconciliation among Germans who had long been divided by class, region, and religion. Already the “August Days” of 1914, when

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precisely this might mean. It would be plausible to conjecture that destiny corresponds to fate as authentic, solicitous co-being corresponds to authentic anticipatory resoluteness. If so, then Heidegger is here considering the possibility of a community, a people (Volk), seizing upon its thrownness into its own traditions, and in view of its impermanence, that is, the certainty that it, as a community or people, will cease to be, will cease to have future possibilities. Presumably, the community correlate to anticipatory resoluteness is sketched in the positive mode of “leaping-ahead” solicitude, and the community consists in myriad Dasein, each “caring-for” one another by assisting others in seizing on and transforming the comfortable conventions of the dictatorship of the They. As repetitive anticipatory resoluteness is necessarily violent, so the corresponding authentic community of Dasein attains its freedom through “struggle” (Kampf). These passages from §74 are some of the most freighted with political significance in the entire work; this possibly owes more, however, to the Wirkungsgeschichte of the book than to the actual intentions of the author. The full passage reads: “Only in communicating (Mitteilung) and struggling (Kampf) does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein” (SZ 384–5).35 In this passage, Heidegger reiterates the role of communication

thousands of Germans rallied in the streets to support the national cause in time of war, revealed extraordinary emotional investment in the promise of national unity. Of course, German politics did not dissolve into collective harmony, and “1914” was always more a manufactured image than an experienced reality. Nonetheless, the idea of national solidarity resonated because it seemed to offer more social equality. It showed a path to integrate workers into national life, to break down the caste mentalities of middle-class Germans, and to disarm the deference demanded by the country’s elites. Its democratic or populist quality was crucial to its appeal. The people’s community was also always a statement of collective strength. It expressed “the peace of the fortress” that enabled Germans to mobilize against their external enemies in World War I. This martial aspect became more important after Germany’s defeat in 1918. The calamity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” redrawn in the postwar settlement at Versailles, and the overwhelming chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experiences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible. During the Weimar years, the people’s community denoted the beleaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the political unity necessary for national renewal. As a result, there was always something dramatically embattled about the Volksgemeinschaft (Fritzsche 2008, 38–9).

35

My point in disputing the soundness of Fritsche’s interpretation is not to deny a fundamental sympathy on Heidegger’s part for the Nazis, but to insist that this connection not be drawn with a misplaced precision. Gregory Fried has proposed that the theme of struggle or war, as in Kampf and polemos, may be taken as the central concepts for interpreting Heidegger (Fried 2000). On the connections between these passages and Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis in the years after writing them, see Altman 2012; Bambach 2003; de Beistegui 1998; Dostal 1992; Edler 1990, 1993, Phillips 2005. Fritsche joins Thomas Rockmore in reading §74 of Being and Time as representing the peak or “resolution” of the “drama” of the book (Fritsche 1999, xi), where it “as a whole culminates” (Fritsche 1999, ix; quoting Rockmore 1992, 47). This is possible only if one has

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in community at the same time as recognizing the consequent and necessary decline – fall – entailed in being so constituted and thus the need for perpetual struggle. Such a struggle – a Kampf – aspires not to maintain or to retain the “sharing” (Mitteilung) but to repeat or reestablish the character of a community by authentically reappropriating its destiny, that is, its futural possibilities. In sharing out and struggling, a people frees itself to seize upon its own history and pass itself down to itself as a communal heritage in its own generation. These brief, allusive passages on the political import of Dasein’s historicity are frustratingly bereft of clear explanations as to how one Dasein’s confrontation with its own death, its confrontation with its fate, its choosing of a hero, and its repetitious passing this on to itself can be simply transferred to a community of Dasein or Volk. If destiny is not a collection of fates, then what is it? Does a Volk relate to other Volke the way that Dasein relates to other Dasein?36

Conclusion Despite the ellipses in Heidegger’s presentation of the possibility of an authentic communal existence in a Volk summoned to its destiny, it is possible to reconstruct something of the dynamic of the argument given the connections Heidegger draws to other parts of his discussion that are worked out more fully, in particular anticipatory resoluteness and Being-with as well as what he says about the disclosive character of discourse. The “purpose” of the factical ideal in Being and Time is not to establish an ethical or political model in the normal sense, but to discuss precisely that mode of existence – Schürmann says “state of existence” – that is the necessary “ontic” ground for the inquiry into Being. It occupies a place in the argument of Being and Time that is parallel, then, to the “disquiet” (Bekümmerung) determined beforehand that Heidegger’s motivating questions concern German politics in the 1920s exclusively. James Phillips’ evaluation of such an approach cannot be improved upon: Since Heidegger himself in the Leipzig address declares his allegiance to both Hitler and the question of Being, the prehistory of his political engagement is but sketchily reconstructed by commentaries that fasten on the lone instance of the word “Volk” in §74 of Being and Time. It is within the question of Being that Heidegger addresses the notion of Volk in 1927, just as it is within the question of Being that he confesses his loyalty to Hitler in 1933. To clarify the sense of “Volk” in Being and Time by its sense in National Socialism is hence reductive and of dubious worth polemically. An interpretation of the use of “Volk” in Being and Time that does not simultaneously consider the question of Being is, irrespective of its intention, even apologetic, because it isolates a suspect lexical element in Heidegger’s thinking as a whole and delivers it up on its own to judgment. The step from Volk to Hitler is certainly one that Heidegger took, but schematized in this way, Heidegger’s engagement ceases to be a scandal for philosophy, because the distance between his thinking and the intellectual squalor of the regime has been minimized. The question of the relation between nationalism and fundamental ontology is thereby settled without having first been examined (Phillips 2005, 5). 36

On these questions, see Blitz 1981, 206–8.

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Heidegger refers to in the “Comment on Jaspers” and the professed “perplexity” from which the investigation in Being and Time begins. The inquiry itself is not a theoretical matter; it is clearly an “existential” event, summoning up and referring to every element of human existence and promising a certain transformation of human existence. Indeed, as Heidegger formulates it with apposite clarity in the Nietzsche lectures, thinking is neither merely theoretical nor practical; it is thus in a sense both. The purpose of the “factical ideal” of anticipatory resoluteness is to think the meaning or truth of Being. Given, though, that the being doing the thinking is Dasein, and that Dasein are essentially communal beings, there is a social or communal component to this factical ideal. That is, there is a necessary relationship, according to Heidegger, between the kind of existence that opens us up to the question of Being and how we exist with others. We “normally” relate to other Dasein in the fashion of the “everyday,” according to tradition, in a manner that suppresses the finitude of our existence and even of our existence together. Heidegger’s depiction of heritage, however, is that we might seize upon the content of the tradition within which we share our existence with other members of our community  – more specifically, the Volk  – and so repeat the coming into and remaining in Being with them that we share as fellow members of a community. As Heidegger accounts for it, though, the relationship within us, in the very constitution of our Being as Da-Sein, is fraught with a tension between relating to other beings, such as other Dasein, and to Being as such. Our communal life, therefore, is especially compromised or contributes especially to our covering over our own apprehension of Being. More particularly, anticipatory resoluteness includes “reticence,” a mode of discourse that is characterized most especially by silence and attentive listening. It is not, however, possible that it should be altogether determined by the “nothing,” inasmuch as it, as is the case with discourse in principle, refers always to a “something,” and indeed refers this something to another “something.” Discourse, communication, is always oriented by the beings. Community is itself rooted in communication, a specific modification of discourse. Community, therefore, would seem to be immovably oriented by the beings, and therefore the prospect of a community that properly confronts the nothing would seem, according to Heidegger’s own principles, to be ruled out. The orientation by the beings is not exclusive to “communities,” though: it is inherently a part – “constitutive” – of Dasein as such. Disquiet, perplexity, and anxiety: these are in their way provoked not merely by the pure experience of nothing, but by the sense that what is, the beings, are themselves joined with and limited by nothing, and that our frequent, indeed everyday, perception to the contrary is mistaken or erring. Our authentic communal existence, therefore, would seem to entail the regular uncovering of our heritage in accordance with our true destiny, as a people and as this is revealed in “communication and struggle.” But it would also

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appear, again, according to Heidegger’s own conceptual grasp of the matter, that our heritage would ever be tending toward reification as tradition, that our communal wresting with Being by means of confrontation with nothing would tend toward privileging beings and therefore the present. Community would, on this reading, be an ever-evanescent moment, always being occluded by the very powers of disclosure that express it.

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Conclusion: The Paradox of Heideggerian Politics

This book has presented an argument in support of the position that the Heideggerian soul is divided against itself in a fashion that produces an unsound approach to politics: the Heideggerian is confronted initially by an understanding of his surrounding world in the grip of its evident meaninglessness, a condition that is diagnosed as a bereavement of Being, or the abandonment by the fundamental, infusing principle of reality that renders everything that is what it is and holds it as such. In its place, he is confronted with an abundance of beings and accounts, and an overflow of claims to knowledge and competence. Among these claims is a cacophony of political doctrines, teachings, and opinions, each referring to a network of shared problems. The source of this situation is what Heidegger refers to in Being and Time as the “everyday” preference for comfort, constancy, and familiarity of the only being that is open to Being. More profoundly, the constitution of that being, and indeed of Being as it gives itself, entails that it discloses Being with reference to the beings, that is, discursively. What is more, the way this being relates to other beings like it is also discursive. The flight of Being is thus, in the decisive sense, the doing or work of Being. Nihilism is the gift of Being. The Heideggerian is thus torn: how should one think and act out a politics in accordance with Being, a politics that ministers to Being inasmuch as we – we Dasein – are the beings that are open to Being, a politics therefore that consists in an authentic communal existence? The Heideggerian is drawn first in one direction: revolution. The minister to Being should annihilate the moment and time of nihilism (of non-Being), should expose the truth of Being by peeling away the occlusions and obstructions that obscure it, and do so in the service of a possible communal existence that tends to Being.1 The Heideggerian is also drawn 1

The revolutionary moment is now; an authentic existence is just over the horizon, provided we uproot and destroy the encrusted traditions surrounding us, shed the desiccated husk of

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in another direction: stay put. Even the contemporary situation of nihilism, the culmination of a history of the presence-favoring tendencies of our constitutive everydayness is a gift of Being: “What is essential to the inauthenticity of nihilism is not something base or deficient. . . . The history of the omission of the default of Being itself is the history of the preservation of the promise” (N4 226).2 In what, then, does the political existence of such a soul consist?

Particularist Revolution Heideggerian politics abjures form; there are no Heideggerian regimes.3 The political “form” that corresponds most closely to the revolution in historizing is sometimes referred to as a “conservative revolution” (Bourdieu 1991; Fritsche 1999), but this term overstates the similarities between Heidegger and other figures, parties, and movements on the right, and in doing so, again, understates his outlandishness. This is not to limit the radical violence implied by Heideggerian politics, but to clarify its extent and nature. Heideggerian politics are not deferential in the slightest to established – that is, merely ontic and, indeed, everyday  – forms or regimes, to throne or altar.4 Heideggerian politics are not backward looking in the sense of trying to revive a forgotten or dying way of life, or even of trying to take such as a model to be followed. Instead, Heideggerian politics consist in “radical suspicion,” driven by the initial attempt of anticipatory resoluteness to loosen up possibilities from the layered-over, rationally ordered, or traditionally determined – in other words, everyday – present. From this perspective, both the right and the left are imprisoned by everyday formulations of ontic possibilities, the right being oriented by tradition, the left by progressivist attempts to “liberate” the individual or society from the shackles of particularist traditions in favor of universal, rational, and thus implicitly measurable goals. Heideggerian politics aim, thus, at “freedom” and may be well understood as a radical modification of the Kantian sense implying freedom from both natural causal determination, on the one hand, and cultural-conventional authority, on the other.5 Heideggerian

2

3 4

5

Western rationalism, and revive the desert it has made of late-modern existence – thus, Shariati, Fardid, and Davari look to revitalize concealed, authentic Shi’ism whereas Aleksandr Dugin summons a lost community of “archaic values” to be retrieved by means of a bloody purge of “Westoxication” or “Americanism.” Heidegger himself envisioned the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. Thus the near-quietism, at times, of certain post-Heideggerians, such as Havel’s diagnosis of the impersonalizing, dehumanizing character of technology that transcends the former distinction between the Soviet East and capitalist West. Likewise, George Grant sees the dynamic rootlessness and violence of American liberal capitalism as perhaps more characteristic of the modern project than communism. Though compare Ceasar 2000, 205–10. In this connection, notice Shariati’s resistance to the traditionalist clerisy in pre-revolutionary Iran (Rahnema 1999). Richard Velkley (2011) develops the connections between Kant and Heidegger.

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Conclusion: The Paradox of Heideggerian Politics

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politics do not, however – in the “Left Kantian” tradition of Marx – aim at the universal and homogeneous condition, the political correlate of the universal and apodictic veracity of reason. This is because, as Heidegger would see it, the Left Kantian tradition is oriented by an understanding of reason that is forfeited to the publicness of the everyday.6 Authentic politics on the Heideggerian model retrieves and rescues the individuated particular from the homogenization of such rational, generalizing everydayness. Heideggerian politics are as particular as the manifestation of Being shared by the members of a community in their moments of authentic, resolute anticipation of the possible future. In the first place, Heideggerian politics are a politics of particularist revolution. The seeming “conservatism” of Heideggerian politics comes from its radical particularity, that is, its finitude that approaches nothingness. The recurrence to the past takes place in response to, in furtherance of, the excavation of covered-over future possibilities. These are “nontraditional” in the extreme, stripping away every settled or conventional social arrangement in service to the purest, simplest individuation of existence, nothing more than Dasein’s existence. As Heidegger understands it, they will thus bear little resemblance to the content of any conservative tradition, but they are not for this reason utterly unmoored and creative. Here we see the “revolutionary” dimension of the particularist revolution.7 As much as Marx, Heidegger envisions the melting away and destruction of currently prevalent  – “everything actually existing”  – political forms and structures.8 Heidegger calls the grounding of established political orders, and therefore their legitimacy, into question, not simply by referring to a higher standard that they fail to meet, but by denying the validity of every “actually existing” standard as such. The character of historicity and the prospects for resolute, authentic historicity practically forbid any even notionally comforting return to recognizably legitimate sources of political authority. This includes “progressive” standards as well. In rejecting empirically established orders, on the one hand, and rational standards by which they might be evaluated, on the other, Heidegger does away with the “means” by which the “progress” of any actual, factual political reform might be empirically evaluated. When every everyday regime is thus as immeasurably inauthentic as every other, gradual improvement or slight ameliorations are impossible. The characteristic elements of a radically particularist political ontology can be enumerated: 1. There is no textual warrant for restricting Heidegger’s revolutionary hermeneutical violence to a sanitized literary exercise, when what he intends is the total theoretical-practical transformation of the everyday.

6 7 8

For a reading of Marx as a Left Kantian, see Yack 1992. Aleksandr Dugin is likewise contemptuous of both the left and the right. Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, “For a Ruthless Critique of Everything Actually Existing.”

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2.

3.

4.

5.

9

Heidegger and Politics Hermeneutics, as we have seen, refers to the use of tools and the elements of encounters with others as much as it does to reading a book. Thanks to the destruction of the division between the theoretical and the practical, politics cannot be understood as a distinct sphere, and neither can theory be separated off as though to minimize its influence on practical affairs. Moderate, piecemeal reform of and compromise with existing institutions and political arrangements are not adequate. A total rejection of the currently dominant order of the everyday is necessary because the everyday itself is so total and so completely shapes every disclosure of Dasein, both, as we have seen, theoretical and practical. Compromise in any degree entails submitting to the forsworn standards and orders of the They and begets a recurrence of the dispersal and tranquilizing confusion of everydayness. Thus, notice Fardid’s wariness of the Iranian Revolution resolving into a new traditionalism (Rajaee 2007, 184). In order to prevent any relaxation back into the comfort of everydayness, revolutionary hardness must predominate over the softness of compromise or moderation. This is the plain meaning of resoluteness – anxious, reticent projecting – and corresponds to the sidelining of leisure as tarrying, an inadequate response to the hustle and bustle of the They’s chatter. To say this is not to forget or deny that resoluteness also means openness or that it is most important to Heidegger’s thought for its truth-disclosing character, but to clarify further exactly what Heidegger thinks is involved in showing the truth and holding it open: hard, hard toughness. The first target in the particularist revolution is not a “foreign” enemy. Instead, it calls for revolution within, a civil war which contests the character of one’s own heritage – “hermeneutical violence” – with (a) conservative defenders of tradition and the status quo, and (b) progressives who take their bearing by the very status quo and tradition they aim to surpass and measure it according to present-at-hand standards. In this context, what emerges as most striking in the documents where Heidegger’s own Nazism is clearest is the extent to which he concerns himself with arguing against his fellow Nazis’ interpretation of the German Revolution.9 The opening campaign is thus an “interpretive argument” with one’s fellow hermeneuts, fighting over the text of one’s most distinctive past in perpetual “communication and struggle” in order to pass on one’s heritage to the future project to which the Heideggerian is in service. In this fight, the future assumes a more important position than the past, that is, the currently dominant understanding of the past. The genuine past will be retrieved in its dynamism, in its possibilities before they were inauthentically covered over. This past dynamism is shared by the

See especially the Introduction to Metaphysics and GA 94, 115, 135.

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“present” throw into the future, a “reciprocative rejoinder.” To compare this version of forward-leaping revolution to that envisioned by Marx, it is important to stress that the Heideggerian revolution is just as radically progressive, but it is more particularist than Marxism. It does not aim at the universal and classless society, but instead summons a particular past and leaps into a particular future over or beyond the occlusive present.10 6. In “repeating” a particular past possibility and so “choosing a hero,” one does not endorse any iteration of existing political orders, but chooses an unrealized possibility from the past to emulate. Adherence to this choice is more important than the instantiation of any precise political form, particularly as this is understood traditionally. In emulating such a hero, one may follow him in a solicitous leap ahead of others into the nothing. Repetition such as this charges beyond  – and helps others follow for themselves beyond  – the everyday false clarity of regimes, parties, and classes, past the normal horse trading and deal making of politics and gutless, time-serving politicians, past administrative tedium, dismal economics, and plutocracy. Authentic politics such as this is not based on rights, entangled as they surely are with reflective, reifying rationality that treats Dasein as though it were something present-at-hand.11 7. As a corollary of the foregoing refusal of normal party and group politics (as opposed to post-partisan group politics), Heideggerian politics are not a class revolution. Such empirically rooted divisions as the distinction between the rich and the poor, the few and the many, or republicans versus monarchists are irrelevant to the particularist revolution. Every traditional political form that gives shape to the political problems is inadequately attuned to the dispensation of Being summoned by Heidegger. The revolutionaries will enact a thorough rejection of prior or existing political order, class structures, and their ontical alternatives. They will be made up – in their essence – of the “nothings” of society, not simply the lower class (either peasant or proletariat), but the essentially déclassé. Those rejected from or otherwise disposed of by the social order, the hardest of the hard, are the “nothings,” so to speak, with nothing to lose. Heideggerian politics elevates those with none of the extraneous, conventionally valued paraphernalia of normal, everyday life (jobs, reputations, money, prospects, or concern about not having them). That is, this is not a revolution led by the officer class, business elites, capitalist interests, dispossessed nobility, social democrats, or traditional clergy of established religions. Neither, however, is it a proletarian revolution in the sense envisioned by Marx, still too formed is this class by actually 10

11

Alexander Dugin exhibits this tendency rather clearly; consider his sympathy for “National Bolshevism” after the fall of the Soviet Union (Dugin 2012, 136–7). Consider in this connection the position that has been called “hermeneutic communism” by its adherents (Vattimo and Zabala 2011).

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existing arrangements and institutions. Anyone who is “something” has no place in this vanguard of “armed bohemians,” in Konrad Heiden’s apt and felicitous phrase.12 8. Perpetual instability is the mark of authentic politics. This is the final and crucial point, and the juncture at which the second major inclination of Heideggerian politics appears. The everyday is never dissolved; it does not vanish at the first onset of authenticity. Rather, authenticity derives its character from its perpetual – not permanent, but perpetual, ongoing, and repetitious – rejection of the tranquility, stability, and sham permanence of the settling-in everyday. Ever-present and thus ever-tempting, the everyday might at almost any point, without constant vigilance, assume once again its dominance. Dasein as Dasein is fallen, a fallen, thrown existence; what is uncovered in authenticity is not the transformation or elimination of this, but its simple exposure. One should therefore expect that “following” the revolution, the reestablishment of order is the reestablishment of the conditions of the everyday. However, a politics that genuinely exhibits the “factical ideal” of anticipatory resoluteness will again uncover unappreciated or misunderstood possibilities from the papered-over vision of the future and will again summon up the authentic undercurrent of the purportedly settled “official history” or leap again into the future, violently deposing the former vanguard, now settling in to the upper tiers of the new “officially revolutionary” regime. Here, then, is the reason for distinguishing between the so-called conservative revolutionaries and the particularist revolution of Heideggerian politics. To the extent that the revolution ends and settles into established forms (or makes bargains with elements, conservative or otherwise, of the previous regime), then to this extent the movement is “conservative” and inauthentic. The logic of this inclination of Heideggerian politics entails something akin to perpetual revolution.13 The perpetual revolution is different from Trotsky’s in that the “future” being aimed at is not merely a distant but nonetheless universal and ostensibly rational condition, but is an ontic possibility that is ever being transformed by being reappropriated to a radically particular, nongeneralizable future dispensation of Being, ontically informed by successive different reappropriations from the once foregone but now vital past. Again, the Heideggerian revolution does not aim, is not measured by, its instantiation of any inherently generalizable principles – the exit from the state of nature into civil society, the bestowal of rights equal to the dignity of every person, or the struggle unto death of the incipient master and incipient slave, or, for that matter, the legitimacy of descent from divinely sanctioned monarchs – but 12 13

Heiden 1969. As noted in the introduction, this is a distinctive feature of the Iranian revolutionaries who draw on Heidegger in their reinterpretation of Shi’ism, particularly Ahmad Fardid and Ali Shariati. Compare Trotsky’s understanding of permanent revolution (Kolakowski 2005, 683–5).

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rather constantly wrestles against the current and recurrent dominance of the everyday by retrieving elements of the bygone, and essentially particular and unique, past, thus determining their Being with reference to previously unexpected future possibilities. The Heideggerian revolution is perpetual because it is, in its essence, hostile to the misplaced formalism inherent in the very notion of regime, contract, and universalizability in general. To the extent that any political, therefore ontic, order takes such a shape, the Heideggerian revolution is committed to destroying it for the sake of liberating a communal existence that ministers to Being rather than beings.

Quietist Awaiting Quietist awaiting sets in when everydayness is seen to comprehend not just “normal” politics but “revolutionary” politics as well. The everyday, though fallen, is not “separated” from Being. Its fallenness is part of the constitutional make-up of Dasein (along with thrownness and existence) and allows both for the perpetuity of the revolution on Heideggerian grounds and for its dissolution in favor of a particularist, quietist awaiting. The latter constitutes the second distinctive inclination of Heideggerian politics. The quietist awaiting is a response to the following problem inherent in the perpetual revolution: if the normalization of politics requires everyday means – that is, the discursive communication of Dasein among Dasein – and thus is inevitably fallen, then why should the same not be said of the revolutionary, violent, and destructive means by which the revolution is conducted? Is there no prospect of the everyday “routinization” (to import a congenial term from Max Weber) of revolutionary violence? Is this not precisely what the nihilistic domination of technology entails? The creativity of destruction gives way  – thanks to the necessity of Dasein’s constitutional fallenness – to the banality of destruction? Thanks to the hard logic of Heidegger’s “formal indications,” the structure of which is so contentlessly formal as to allow or permit numerous contradictions to exist within it, the nothingness of the everyday is the route to the interrogation of Being. This exposes the truth that in Heidegger, the inauthentic is prior to the authentic.14 The authenticity of anticipatory resoluteness does not wipe away inauthenticity. If the “hermeneutical violence” in play is a cleansing fire, then the phoenix of this tale is everydayness. Authenticity can only “be” because it “seizes upon” inauthenticity.15 It needs it. Because authenticity abjures otherworldly ressentiment, it does not refuse the nothingness that pervades the meaningless everydayness; it grabs on to it in order to apprehend the truth 14

15

See Simon Critchley’s recasting of Heidegger with a view to eliminating the Nazi elements of his thought – a forthright transformation of certain parts of Heidegger, not simply a willful denial of unpleasant elements (Critchley 2008). See Carman 2000, 13–28; 2003, 264–314.

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of Being. Authenticity does not consist in the return to a prelapsarian state of goodness; it is as fallen as inauthenticity. This, again, is the hidden promise of nihilism. The politics of a quietist awaiting have certain distinct features that may also be enumerated: 1. The politics of particularist, quietist awaiting begin with the sense that the revolutionary violence that destabilizes regime after regime is participating in the fallen, goal-oriented, incipiently teleological politics of the everyday circumspective technico-practical. It thus sees political violence as being just as technically manipulative as toolmaking or craftsmanship. Given the incapacity of authentic politics to resist such domination by any political means other than sharing in it, and given the impossibility of authentically “measuring” and so rationally limiting such sharing, a Heideggerian politics of apolitical, quietist pacifism or indifference follows. The quietist retreats from the violence of inauthentic politics to await such a dispensation of Being that the technico-practical need not succumb to the mastery and domination of beings, should this ever be possible. 2. When the everyday is already so fallen that revolutionary violence is equally inauthentic but not infinitely worse, then the Heideggerian will refuse to indict one everyday regime in preference for another on the question of oppression or domination. In the homogenizing glare of public everydayness, political orders constructed on the basis of the preservation of contract are just as oppressive as regimes modeled on bringing about the final equality of humanity in its species-being. Likewise, industrial agriculture is essentially the same as killing people in gas chambers. The differences between regimes are so obscured as to permit the quietist Heideggerian to think of liberal democracy as being on a par with totalitarian communism, to say nothing of other regimes. 3. Quietist awaiting discerns that the collusion of the everyday technico-practical use of articles and the present-at-hand is universal in potential and thus global in scope. Though it is neutral as to regime type, the quietist retains a preference for localist and other expressions of particularism that resist incorporation into the juggernaut alliance of the theoretical present-at-hand and the technico-practical ready-tohand. Quietist awaiting thus hopes for replenishment in the encounter of West with East, and in the meantime nourishes localist redoubts, refuges against the universal and homogeneous tide. A politics of quietist awaiting is as authentically Heideggerian as a politics of perpetual revolution and is similarly a response to the permanent condition of Dasein’s fallenness. Quietist awaiting recoils in horror from the means of revolution as much as it does from the means of everyday politics, seeing in

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both the “gorgon’s face” of the worst excesses of rationalist mastery and domination, prefigured in the circumspective technico-practical (see Grant 1969, 111).16 Revolution itself proves incapable of slipping the noose of everydayness and succumbs to the grisliness of fallen humanity. Quietist awaiting is an authentically apolitical response to inauthentic politics in the absence of authentic politics. Both of these inclinations share a characteristic double-take on everydayness. Everydayness is, in the first place, radically inconsequential, worthless, and dreary. It represents everything that is to be despised about human existence. But in the second place, it stands for the only fragile path available to Dasein for reopening the question of Being. It is, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, both the necessary starting place for philosophy and the chief obstacle to its undertaking. This peculiar doubleness begets, eventually, the two political inclinations characteristic of the Heideggerian. First, the paltriness and evident meaninglessness of everydayness encourage the expectation that it may be somehow purged, swept aside, done away with. Its nothingness goads Dasein to destroy it in favor of a more authentic existence. Yet everydayness also invites resigned contempt, a quietist endorsement of the status quo. It cannot be done away with, Dasein discovers. What is more, it remains our only altogether backward access to the most important questions as Being may be apprehended first through the nothing. Everydayness cannot, with a view to these most important questions, be meaningfully improved, even through a total revolution. Is one of these inclinations more Heideggerian than the other? Does one comprehend the other? As we have seen, the quietist inclination seems to comprehend the revolutionary inclination. It follows the revolution and thus comprehends the limits of revolution. Might one not, then, just skip the revolution? Possibly, but the quietist inclination cannot decry the revolution, inasmuch as the current order is in no ontologically meaningful sense “better” than the revolutionary condition or the goals at which the revolution aims. Moreover, the quietist inclination without being preceded by the revolutionary inclination might be indistinguishable from a mere conservatism, a mere instinct to preserve what is, the way it is.

Heidegger and Political Thought The principal representatives of the tradition of political philosophy – Plato, for example, or Aristotle, Machiavelli, or Locke, just to mention a few – the 16

Heidegger’s quietist legacies are perhaps still more varied than his revolutionary influences and include more self-conscious critiques of Heidegger, or at least parts of Heidegger. Vaclav Havel, George Grant, Christian Heideggerians, and Heidegger’s American influence more broadly fit into this group (on the latter, see Woessner 2010).

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great thinkers, present doctrines that have both cosmological and psychological elements, along with extensive discussion of prudential considerations that speak to the possibilities and character of civic life, human happiness, human excellence, statesmanship, and the practice of philosophy itself. These bodies of thought, in addition to their disquisitions on the nature of reality, are full of nuanced, subtle, and penetrating analysis of the psyche in numerous permutations and political settings, its longings, revulsions, and glories. While Heidegger’s teaching is similarly comprehensive in its claims, the rich chiaroscuro of psychological breadth and acuity to which the tradition of political philosophy and its accompanying poetic auxiliaries gave expression is rendered in the starker hues of the dichotomy of disquiet and everydayness. The entire contexture of “everyday” life  – its joys, pleasures, longings, ambitions, deceptions, cruelties, and varieties of scope and scale – is reduced to the broad pathos of the desire for comfort, specified as familiarity, constancy, or publicness. Conversely, this dreary, numbing whole by which we are ordinarily dominated is escaped from, in a manner of speaking, in our passionate confrontation with “limit situations,” moments of reversal, contradiction, or confusion, what Heidegger would express as the Nothing. Heidegger, though, is expressly limiting his investigation into human existence with a view to the broader ontological inquiry; that is, he does not profess to be offering a comprehensive account of human life. The psychological dimension in Heidegger is contracted to that element that is relevant to the all-consuming question, the question of Being, experienced as the confrontation with the Nothing in its guise as the acolyte of Being. This is why it is so important to appreciate Heidegger’s insistence that he is not providing an ethics, philosophical anthropology, or political philosophy:  it is only by seeing the limits he places on his own investigations and claims that we can grasp his relevance for politics. The plausibility of Heidegger’s approach depends, however, on the initial diagnosis that the cause of our civilizational calamity – the vapid decadence of the fin de siècle, the ghastly horror of the First World War, the economic ruin of the years following, the terror of the Holocaust, the total collapse and partitioning of Germany in the Second World War, and the peace settlement entrenching “bourgeoicracy” forever in an atomic twilight – is our alienation from Being understood as other than presence. Restated, it depends on the grasp of anxiety, distress, disquiet, perplexity, or terror as the disclosive moods, the human experiences that most illuminate Being. How can this claim be anything other than self-grounding? To what prior apprehension does it refer itself in order to be grasped as true? Nothing:  there can be no such prior reference. It needs to be argued for persuasively. All of Heidegger’s ontological claims depend on their reference to this level of our shared experience, to our grasp of what has manifested to us. The requirement to refer back to us as Dasein holds regardless of whether we are considering so-called early Heidegger, when his investigations are more evidently oriented by the

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analytic of Dasein, or late Heidegger, where the Seinsgeschichte attains more prominence.17 The priority of disquiet needs to be assessed along with the claim that our normal immersion in the world is dominated by “everydayness,” namely, the orientation toward time that privileges the comfort, reliability, regularity, constancy, and familiarity of the “present” above all. Again, this claim needs to be distinguished from the general purport of phenomenology, Heideggerian phenomenology included, to refer scientific and other theoretical claims back to the lived world or pretheoretical activity (practice, praxis, dealings, what have you). Heidegger’s claim is more specific than this; his claim is that theory is derivative from these other currents and dealings of our technical and practical activities inasmuch as it is oriented by the presumed fluency of our ends with our practices that is betokened by “familiarity” and “constancy.” Is this true? Again, the point is not to assess whether Heidegger has provided an adequate “anthropology” of “a central phenomenon in man,” but whether his proposition, that human life is normally inclined toward comfort because we are disguising the truth of our existence from ourselves, explains obstacles to relating to Being tolerably well. The foregoing discussion points to what is perhaps the deepest ambiguity in Heidegger’s ontology, or more precisely, in the meaning of Heidegger’s ontology for human life. This ambiguity may be posed as a question: are we or are 17

Heidegger writes in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, reflecting back on the fundamental ontology of Being and Time: Every page in this book was written solely with a view to the fact that since antiquity the problem of Being was interpreted on the basis of time in a wholly incomprehensible sense and that time always announced the subject. With a view to the connection of this question to time, with a view to the question concerning Being in general, it is first a matter of bringing out the temporality of Dasein, not in the sense that is now worked out with any theory, but rather in the sense that, in a wholly determined problematic, the question concerning human Dasein will be posed. – This whole problematic in Being and Time, which treats Dasein in man, is no philosophical anthropology. For that is much too narrow, much too preliminary. I believe that there is a problem here of a kind which hitherto has not been brought up as such, a problem which has been determined by means of the question: If the possibility of the understanding of Being is itself to be possible, and with it the possibility of the transcendence of man, and with it the possibility of the formative comporting toward beings and of the historical happening in the world history of man, and if this possibility has been grounded in an underworld history of man, and if this possibility has been grounded in an understanding of Being, and if this ontological understanding has been oriented in some sense with respect to time, then the task is: To bring out the temporality of Dasein with reference to the possibility of the understanding of Being. And it is with respect to this that all problems are oriented. In one direction, the analysis of death has the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, but not of producing an altogether final and metaphysical thesis concerning the essence of death. The analysis of anxiety does not have as its sole function the making-visible of a central phenomenon in man, but instead it has the function of preparing the question: On the grounds of which metaphysical sense of Dasein itself is it possible that the human being in general can have been placed before something like the Nothing? (GA 3 283–4; KPM 198–9).

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we not at home in the world?18 For example, even in anxiety, which discloses the nothing, we are in fact conducted to Being, which initially from our perspective, the perspective of beings, is not a thing, that is, is nothing. That is, even in our confrontation with the most disturbing, at our most uncanny, we find ourselves in the “draft” of Being, as Heidegger refers to it in Was Heisst Denken? The problem, such as it is, is that even when we are not at home in our surroundings, say, or in our contemporary age abandoned by Being, we are the being that thinks Being, and so cannot but be distinguished by this. And such distinction is, whether Heidegger likes it or not, at least slightly “comforting” or pleasing, and at some level it testifies to a “correspondence” that we cannot refuse for any good reason. Even anxiety “resonates” in a time of anxiety and destitution. There appears to be no getting around the original Parmenidean insight that being and thinking are somehow the same: and this is the original source of what Heidegger calls “everydayness” and identifies as the privileging of presence.

18

Capobianco considers this matter in a discussion that ranges from Being and Time through to Heidegger’s later work, finding that Heidegger resolves on a more “homey” understanding of Dasein’s situation in the world (Capobianco 2010, 52–69).

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Index

Adorno, T., 58n22, 65n5, 167n19 Agamben, G., 141n32 Arendt, H., 73n26, 99n19 Aristotle, 73, 76, 78, 83, 95, 99, 102, 115, 132, 143 Augustine, 33n28, 95n9

Frankfurt School, 3n2, 65n5 Fried, G., 5n8, 21n42, 27n13, 27n14, 181n35 Fritsche, J., 6n12, 18, 18n36, 27n12, 27n14, 27–28, 57n18, 62, 96n11, 97n15, 99n20, 100n21, 105n34, 169, 177n32, 180n34, 181n34, 181n35, 186

Blitz, M., 24n1, 64n4, 75n31, 101n25, 102n27, 182n36 Bourdieu, P., 19n37

Gadamer, H.-G., 6n9, 15n30, 19n37, 26n8, 53n13, 54n15, 71n22, 79n41, 84n48, 95n9, 116n49, 153n2, 153–54 Gillespie, M., 82n45 Grant, G., 9n18, 119n1, 186n2, 193, 193n16

Chacon, R., 59n22, 73n27 Cohen, 39n35 Dallmayr, F., 171–72 Davari, R., 8, 17, 186n1 Derrida, 27n14 Descartes, 78, 101 Dilthey, W., 40, 101 Dostal, R., 66n8, 96n12, 106n35, 116n49, 181n35 Dreyfus, H., 19n38, 66n8, 77n37, 79–80, 80n42, 85n50, 99n20, 103n29, 105n34, 116n50 Dugin, A., 10n21, 92n3, 186n1, 187n7, 189n10 Fardid, A., 8n15, 92n3, 186n1, 190n13 Farias, V., 10n20, 18, 27n14 Faye, E., 5n8, 6n12, 18, 18n36, 27, 27n11, 27n13, 27n14, 28n15, 57n18, 62 Fichte, G., 37, 39 Fichte, J., 39n35, 59n24, 61n25 Figal, G., 30n21, 66n8, 92n2, 97n16, 108n39, 165n14

Habermas, J., 26n9, 58n22, 65n5 Havel, V., 9, 9n19, 186n2, 193n16 Hegel, G., 15n30, 51n11, 95n11, 98n17, 99n19, 101, 113, 120, 137, 139n30, 154n6 Heracleitus, 25 Herder, J., 37, 101 Hitler, A., 27, 169, 180n34, 182n35 Hobbes, T., 61, 94, 99, 101, 114 Hölderlin, F., 4, 5n8 Husserl, E., 31, 32n25, 33n26, 33–34, 38n34, 40n36, 40–41, 45n3, 44–46, 52n13, 73, 78, 79n41, 79–80, 82, 108n39, 118, 132, 139, 143n35 Jonas, H., 8n17, 26 Kant, I., 38, 73n28, 93n4, 114, 124n6, 124n7, 138n30, 139n30, 138–40, 186n5, 186–87 Kierkegaard, S., 95n9, 154n6 Kisiel, T., 22n42, 28n16, 31n23, 35n30, 52n13, 70n21

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Index

214 Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 5n7, 5n8 Lask, E., 38n34, 40, 42, 59n24 Levinas, E., 26, 26n9, 30 Locke, J., 58, 94, 99, 101, 193 Löwith, K., 19n39, 25n5, 27n14, 29n18, 59n24, 68n12, 153n2 Luther, M., 95n9, 177 Machiavelli, N., 193 Malick, T., 3 Marcuse, H., 58n22, 65n5 Marx, K., 61, 67, 187, 189 Marx, W., 19n39, 73n28 Montesquieu, C.-L., 37, 101 Naess, A., 8, 8n17 Nancy, J.-L., 25n3, 25n4, 98n17, 171n26 Natorp, P., 33, 33n26, 51–53 Newell, W., 61n25, 122n4, 154n5, 174n29 Nietzsche, F., 2, 13n25, 13–14, 61, 67, 71n23, 73n27, 93n4, 106n35, 113, 122, 122n4, 148, 150, 183 O’Connor, F., 4n6 Ott, H., 27n14 Pascal, B., 95n9 Patocka, J., 9n19 Percy, W., 4n6 Plato, 8, 15n30, 25n4, 69, 73n27, 99, 102, 110, 119, 148, 193 Pöggeler, O., 15n31, 19n39, 27n14, 52n13, 63n2 Polt, R., 5n8 Rickert, H., 40, 42, 46 Rickey, C., 17n34, 94n7, 100n22, 134n23

Riefenstahl, L., 3 Rorty, R., 66n8, 67n8, 116n50 Rosen, S., 15n32, 45n3, 58n19 Rousseau, J.-J., 11n23, 66, 94, 101 Schelling, F., 37, 138n30 Schiller, F., 101, 138n30, 139n30 Shariati, A., 7n13, 186n1, 186n4, 190n13 Socrates, 13n25, 14n28, 13–15, 17, 73n27, 115, 122 Spinoza, B., 61, 101 Stern, G., 65n5 Strauss, L., 13n25, 13–14, 14n28, 15n30, 17n34, 22, 28n15, 39n35, 84n48, 101n26, 138, 138n26, 155n7 Strong, T., 11n22, 24, 24n1, 26n8 Taminiaux, J., 118 Taylor, C., 51n11, 66n8, 77n37, 116n50 Tocqueville, A., 106n35 Tugendhat, E., 63n2, 108n39 Van Buren, J., 25n2, 30n21, 33n29, 62n26, 70n21 Velkley, R., 6n11, 11n23, 14n28, 17n34 Villa, D., 61n25, 73n26 Weber, M., 191 Weinberger, J., 4n5 Windelband, W., 38–41, 43 Yack, B., 68, 101n24, 167n18, 187n6 Zuckert, C., 5n8, 14n28, 15n30, 21n42, 27n14, 102n27, 116n49, 153n2

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