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ABSTRACT
This paper offers a reading of passages in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures in which Heidegger describes love as a feeling which grants an essential vision. I contend that by invoking this language of vision while simultaneously contrasting love with infatuation, Heidegger is implicitly attempting to situate love within his category of fundamental attunements. While Heidegger does not explicitly follow this thought through, I argue that doing so leads to a problem—namely, how can love be a fundamental attunement if such attunements are necessarily objectless? I suggest we can see a response to this problem in Heidegger’s treatment of Plato’s Phaedrus within the same lecture course. I conclude by claiming that while Heidegger attempts to follow Plato in arguing that love is most properly directed towards Being, love nonetheless poses a challenge to Heidegger’s category of fundamental attunements which also strikes at the heart of his claim that ontology is first philosophy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend a special thanks to Katherine Davies, with whom I first read Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures and began formulating the earliest thoughts for this project, as well as the graduate students at Miami University and Michael Hicks, with whom I spent a semester workshopping this paper during the spring of 2019. This paper has also benefitted significantly from feedback given by Kevin Siefert, Jeffrey Gower, Elaine Miller, Pascal Massie, Samir Haddad, Harris Smith, and Ginger Guin.
Notes
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Being-with of Being-There,” in Continental Philosophy Review 41, no. 1 (2008).
2 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Nicolas Pasternak Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
3 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1991), 51. Heidegger also equates attunements with “feelings,” though this time somewhat pejoratively with reference to the language of psychology, in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 64.
4 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. 1, 47.
5 Ibid., 48.
6 Ibid. Heidegger makes a similar distinction between love and “urge” in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 296.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 49.
9 I will note from the outset that my intention here is not to give an exhaustive account of love in Heidegger’s corpus, but rather to focus on select passages in which he appears to treat love as a fundamental attunement. As mentioned, Heidegger’s treatment of love is scattered throughout his corpus, and in various places he seems to suggest different conceptions of love. For instance, in his letters to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger makes recourse to St. Augustine’s expression “Volo ut sis” (“I want you to be”) in a way that suggests love might be a kind of ontological affirmation, perhaps prefiguring his concept of Gelassenheit. In other places, such as his 1925 lecture course History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (p. 410) and his much later Zollikon Seminars (p. 190), Heidegger describes love as a mode of, or equivalent to, the concept of care (Sorge). Both Lauren Freeman (“Love is not Blind: In/Visibility and Recognition in M. Heidegger’s Thinking”) and Marcia sá Cavalcante Schuback (“Heideggerian Love,” 2012) have explored these passages in more depth elsewhere. I take the equation of love with care, however, to lead down a conceptually different path than the one I attempt to trace in this paper insofar as care describes the fundamental structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world as such, whereas attunements describe particular and transient ways in which Dasein can be comported towards the world and itself.
10 In my own writing, I will use the word “attunement” as a general term to refer to both Heidegger’s use of Befindlichkeit and Stimmung. In Being and Time Heidegger himself seems to claim that Befindlichkeit (translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “state-of-mind” and by Stambaugh as “attunement”) refers to the more general concept which is the condition for the possibility of any particular Stimmung (translated by both M&R and Stambaugh as “mood”). Yet almost immediately Heidegger is somewhat inconsistent with his terminology, titling §30 “Fear as a Mode of Befindlichkeit.” This ambiguity is further compounded when Heidegger goes on to refer to anxiety as both a Grundbefindlichkeit (see §40) and a Grundstimmung (p. 310, German edition). Two years later in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics Heidegger drops the term Befindlichkeit and almost exclusively uses Stimmung and Grundstimmung, which William McNeill and Nicholas Walker translate as “attunement” and “fundamental attunement” respectively (though they do occasionally substitute the term “mood” in places where it seems to offer stylistic benefits, i.e., Dasein is in a “good mood” rather than a “good attunement”).
11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 2008), 134 (all further references are to the German pagination).
12 Ibid., 134.
13 Ibid., 186.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 250. Emphasis mine. Alternatively, Stambaugh translates gelöst as “dissolved.”
16 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 59.
17 For the purposes of brevity, I give here only an example of the first kind of boredom, “boredom by.”
18 Ibid., 95.
19 Ibid., 157.
20 Ibid., 138.
21 Ibid., 143.
22 Ibid., 149.
23 While I do not treat hate at length in this paper, it is likely that Heidegger is drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric—a text he was reading while composing Being and Time and which he footnotes in the title of §30—where Aristotle makes the same distinction between hate and anger. According to Aristotle, anger is a feeling that is directed at particular individuals, whereas hate is directed towards “classes” or “types” of people, such as thieves (see 1378a1–1382a31). This distinction between particulars and abstract classes would further square with the object and objectless orientations of everyday and fundamental attunements, respectively.
24 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 2008), 99. Interestingly, this line does not appear in the original 1928 manuscript of the lecture. See “What Is Metaphysics? Original Version,” trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Gregory Fried, Philosophy Today 62, no. 3 (2018).
25 Tanja Staehler, “How is a Phenomenology of Fundamental Moods Possible,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15, no. 3 (2007): 427.
26 Heidegger, Being and Time, 141–2.
27 For instance, see Heidegger’s remarks in “On Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” where he writes, “Ever since being got interpreted as ἰδέα, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” In Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 181. On this point see also Iain Thomson’s article “Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8, no. 3 (2000): 297–327.
28 Plato, Symposium trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2007), 206a1–10.
29 Ibid., 210a6-d5.
30 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2007), 247d6–8.
31 Ibid., 249d4–6.
32 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol 1, 192.
33 Ibid., 193.
34 Ibid., 195
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 194.
37 Plato, Phaedrus, 255d2–5.
38 Martin Heidegger, Seminare: Platon—Aristotles—Augustinus, Gesamtausgabe 83 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittoria Klostermann, 2012), 368. I am reliant here on Francisco Gonzalez’s translation of this passage in his article, “‘I Have to Live in Eros’: Heidegger’s 1932 Seminar on Plato’s Phaedrus,” in Epoché 19, no. 2 (2015): 228.
39 Heidegger, Being and Time, 298.
40 Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 288.
41 Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 214.
42 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925–75, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2004), 21. The translation given in this edition is “To be in one’s love = to be forced into one’s innermost existence.” I have instead opted for the translation given by Marcia sá Cavalcante Schuback in her chapter “Heideggerian Love,” in Phenomenology of Eros, ed. Jonna Bornemark and Marcia sá Cavalcante Schuback (Söderton: Söderton University), 137.
43 Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 2, 24.
44 Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 1, 192.
45 On this point see “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
46 In “The Passion of Facticity,” one of the few works to explicitly take up the theme of love in Heidegger’s work, Giorgio Agamben does not seem to arrive at this same problem that I am attempting to draw out in Heidegger’s account of love, instead concluding that (1) “In love, the lover and the beloved come to light in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond Being,” and (2) “there is no sense in distinguishing between authentic love and inauthentic love” (Potentialities, p. 204). While the second of these claims might very well be the case as a matter of fact, it seems that Heidegger is not as willing to draw this conclusion himself considering the distinction he makes between love and infatuation (a distinction which may be necessary within his framework when we consider the fact that everyday attunements always seem to appear alongside their “fundamental” counterpart). And while the first of these claims treats the status of the beloved as unproblematic in Heidegger’s account of love, I would tentatively suggest that this stems from an undue treatment of the structure of fundamental attunements, their non-relational status in Being and Time, and their essential turning of Dasein towards Being and away from the world in the moment of vision. Indeed, while the first heading of Agamben’s essay is titled “The Absent Mood [Stimmung],” Agamben does not give an explicit account of how love might be functioning as a fundamental mood, nor how fundamental moods operate in the Heideggerian framework.
47 Heidegger, Being and Time, 11. Whether this more primordial ontological inquiry can in fact “ground” the ontic sciences is somewhat complicated, however, given that in other texts Heidegger will maintain that philosophy, conceived as fundamental ontology, is ultimately “useless” (See Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 29, and Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 10). That is, philosophy is never able to produce the kind of “positive knowledge” that we find in the sciences (What is Called Thinking, p. 159), nor can it directly give rise to political revolution (Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 11).
48 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 2.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 3.
53 Ibid., 4.
54 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. 1, 48, emphasis mine.
55 Ibid., 49, emphasis mine.
56 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 1.
57 Ibid., 1–2, emphasis mine.
58 Ibid., 5, emphasis mine.
59 On a related note, in order to draw out the internal problem of “firsts” in Heidegger’s thinking, I have worked from within Heidegger’s own framing of love and infatuation as two distinct attunements and similarly left untouched the question as to whether he is correct to distinguish between an authentic, vision-granting love and an inauthentic and blind infatuation. Perhaps one way of beginning to approach this question would be to more closely analyze the nature of Greek mania with which Heidegger is associating love’s vision and the extent to which such mania can be said to grant “clarity.” While here I have attempted to show that love troubles Heidegger’s category of fundamental attunements, perhaps such an analysis would similarly trouble Heidegger’s concept of the Augenblick and its connection to authenticity.