![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article interprets Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time with two objectives. First, it argues that, for Heidegger, temporality and affectivity implicate each other and that this coupling might be read as a critique of abstract modern notions of time. Second, it claims that the affectivity and temporality that characterize the ideal of “authentic existence” in Being and Time correspond to a white Protestant ideal of subjectivity. While the article looks to highlight the usefulness of Heidegger’s comprehension of temporality/affectivity, it also warns the reader against upholding “authenticity” as a neutral ideal of liberated existence. Ultimately, the article delineates the religious and racial genealogy that, affectively and temporally, characterizes “authenticity.” By articulating the Protestant eschatological experience that undergirds this model of subjectivity and the racialized connotations of “transparency,” the article re-interprets “authenticity” as an ascetic ideal defined by an unending pursuit of becoming-transparent via the re-appropriation of oneself and the world.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Heidegger, Being and Time, §6, H. 22. From now on Being and Time will be “BT.”
2 BT, §6, H. 20.
3 See, §§ 78–83.
4 Heidegger may not call modern the “ordinary conception of time”, but his description of it, especially the way time becomes a public measurement represented by technological devices (particularly the clock), allows us to conclude that the main object of his critique is the modern conception of time. See Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation.
5 For Heidegger, time is a modality of temporality. Temporality is the ontological basis of Dasein and “time” is a concrete and lived form of temporality.
6 BT. §78, H. 404.
7 BT. §80, H. 418.
8 In Dasein Disclosed John Haugeland clarifies that Dasein and “human being” are not interchangeable categories. Dasein designates, for Heidegger, a “way of being” that exceeds the human individual. It refers to an interconnected way of being in/with the world. However, Dasein is different from other living beings in the sense that it can question its own relation to the world and reveal this network of relations to itself. Dasein is not a substance or a biological category, but it does refer to a distinctive way of being, a way of relating to the world and to the self. If Dasein is defined by a “manner” or a “way,” this means that, ultimately, to talk about Dasein is to analyze human existence from a perspective that privileges practice and relation over substance. Nevertheless, I think it’s undeniable that the concept of Dasein is a different approach on existence that is still centered on the human experience of the world.
9 According to Jan Slaby, “It is Heidegger’s contention that in the material dynamic of situated agency, time is literally ‘made’, it springs up, originates.” Slaby, “Affectivity and Temporality in Heidegger,” 197.
10 BT. §80, H. 414.
11 Elpidorou, and Freeman, “Affectivity in Heidegger II,” 673.
12 BT. §65, H. 327.
13 See Elipodorou and Freeman’s discussion of this in the footnote 4 of their essay “Affectivity in Heidegger I,” 661–71.
14 Ibid., 663.
15 In “Missing in Action: Affectivity in Being and Time” Daniel O. Dahlstrom says: “The ways we find ourselves to be disposed take the form of feelings and emotions as well as moods—in general, the sorts of experiences that have been traditionally grouped under the heading of affectivity” (107). Moods, therefore, are aspects of experience that, without being articulated explicitly at a conceptual level, already indicate something about the way we are-in-the-world.
16 “In terms of Dasein, anxiety is the mood which attests to the role that the not-yet, the possible, and thus the non-present or the Nothing play in Dasein’s existence … ” O’Brien, “Being, Nothingness and Anxiety,” 18.
17 See Sludds, The Incurious Seeker’s Quest for Meaning, 139.
18 O’Brien, “Being, Nothingness and Anxiety,” 13. Kevin Sludds interprets that “[t]he mood of anxiety is a threat to everyday familiarity and comes from Dasein’s projecting ahead into possibilities and, most especially, the overriding possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein (i.e. death) from which it arises.” Sludds, The Incurious Seeker’s Quest for Meaning, 140.
19 BT. §68, H. 344.
20 BT. §68, H. 343.
21 For Heidegger, this “event,” although certain for every human being, cannot be properly called an event because it cannot be experienced as such. One can talk about death and witness others’ deaths, but one’s own death cannot be experienced. Therefore, for Heidegger death is Dasein’s most certain possibility which is, at the same time, an impossibility.
22 BT. §53.
23 Ibid.
24 BT. §68, H. 345.
25 Recall that in BT. §6, H. 22, Heidegger says that the destruction of traditional ontology is made with the purpose of arriving at “primordial experiences.”
26 See Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” 270–88; Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins; Sludds, The Incurious Seeker’s Quest for Meaning; Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology.
27 “The sources suggest […] that Heidegger discovered the phenomenological method, together with Protestantism, in large part as a means to adequately describing religious experience.” Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 44.
28 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 51.
29 Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 2.
30 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 45.
31 Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 63.
32 Heidgger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 67.
33 Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 62.
34 Piotr Hoffman argues that the inauthentic “Dasein’s search for security is reflected in a collection of entities —of persons, things, goods, and so on—with which this sort of Dasein surrounds itself (and thus “makes present” these entities) in order to gain a sense of having a place within the reassuring world of the ‘they.’” Hoffman, “Death, Time, History,” 207.
35 “As a consequence of his engagement with the implications of the Anti-Modernist Oath and his switch to philosophical studies, Heidegger became increasingly frustrated with the Catholic lack of an adequate epistemology, and consequent stultifying dogmatism about both the constitution of objects of perception and the nature of judgements.” Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 28.
36 Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger on this point is notorious. Kierkegaard also expressed a deep contempt of what he called “Christendom,” namely, popular forms of Christianity preoccupied almost exclusively with tradition and institution. For Kierkegaard, “true” Christianity was one in which subjectivity was produced, rather than buried underneath customs and the obedience of norms.
37 Heidegger preferred the mystical notions of revelation of Christians, like Bonaventure, who rejected the notion of God as concrete being but affirmed that God was revealed in the illumination that made possible the existence of all things. Similarly, Wolfe claims that in “Heidegger’s re-analysis of Kierkegaard […] things appear as finite not by contrast to the infinite, but as illuminated from the horizon of the end or finis.” Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 132.
38 Khawaja, The Religion of Existence.
39 “Heidegger characterizes inauthenticity as ‘fallenness,’ which seems impossible to separate from the Christian notion of original sin: Inauthenticity or ‘fallenness [Verfallenheit]’ is not some accidental, adventitious feature of certain people’s lives. Instead, it is the de facto starting point of all human activity (which is not to say it is a metaphysical ‘property’ that belongs to ‘human nature’).” Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins, 75.
40 Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 45.
41 In Heidegger’s Confessions, Ryan Coyne argues that one of Heidegger’s long-standing endeavors throughout his work was to point out the relationship between theo-logy and onto-logy. For Heidegger, this was a pressing issue as he saw that ontol-logy did not get rid of the theological tendency of grounding the existence of beings in a highest being (theos or the philosophical causa sui). Coyne affirms that this constitutes Heidegger’s project of de-theologization and that Heidegger himself acknowledged that it was impossible to completely detach onto-logy from theo-logy. However, my argument here is different. My claim is that, in Being and Time, the practice, habits, and affects—as a possible answer to how deity enters philosophy—that authentic existence entails might be understood as religious themselves.
42 BT, §62
43 BT, H. 258, §52.
44 Even though da Silva has reinterpreted the post-Enlightenment philosophical tradition to show how it articulates with questions of race, capitalism, colonialism, science, and law, she doesn’t emphasize much on the religious undertones of this philosophical tradition. I am convinced that this religious aspect is crucial for a thorough critique of philosophical thought. Hence the value of the work of scholars like Noreen Khawaja, who shows that despite their pretensions of being secular thinkers, the post-Enlightenment tradition is deeply Christian in various ways.
45 One should not forget that although Heidegger is not concerned with history at all, his ontology aims, ultimately, at developing a method that allows philosophy to better capture lived experience. In other words, his project aims to show how, phenomenologically, our experience of the world is temporally, hence historically, charged.
46 Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 8.
47 Ibid., 76.
48 Ibid., 32.
49 Palmer, “What Feels More than Feeling?” 32.
50 Ibid., 47.
51 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown,” 9.
52 Ibid., 10.
53 “The Christian knows no such ‘enthusiasm,’ rather he says: ‘let us be awake and sober.’ Here precisely is shown to him the terrible difficulty of the Christian life.” Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 89.
54 BT, H. 310, §62.
55 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown,” 2.
56 The many gendered connotations of Heidegger’s ideal of authenticity fall out of the scope of this text. However, I’d like to mention at least two aspects of authenticity that could fall under a feminist critique. About 20 years after Being and Time’s publication, Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex (1949), completely inverted Heidegger’s assertions. She claims: “The bureaucratic world described by Kafka—among others—this universe of ceremonies, absurd gestures, meaningless behavior, is essentially masculine; she [the woman] has greater purchase on reality; when he linens up his figures, or converts sardine boxes into money, he grasps nothing but abstracts; the child content in his cradle, clean laundry, the roast, are more tangible things; yet just because she feels their contingence—in the concrete pursuit of these objectives, it often happens that she does not alienate herself in them: she remains available.” Although de Beauvoir’s ideas have been debated much since then, her perspective adds complexity to Heidegger’s discussion. By inserting sexual, social, and economic factors that make key differences between human beings, the place or the activities from which “authenticity,” “freedom,” or “liberation” are supposed to emerge turn much more complex and contextualized. From de Beauvoir’s point of view, it’s not from anxiety that one finds motivation to liberate oneself from worldly constraint, but from the materiality and the worries that women are concerned with every day. The second point refers to the centrality of death. Johanna Oksala, in her book Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations, points out that birth is just as universal and inevitable as death for human existence. She argues that there doesn’t seem to be any reason to uphold birth as a less meaningful certainty for existence compared with death. The omission of birth, for Oksala, demonstrates that the experiences that phenomenological investigations take as worthy of study are mediated by a gendered considerations of human experience that privilege a masculinist perspective.
57 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 119.
58 “As a discourse, then, political theology as I mean it proceeds under the logic of a cosmology of settlement, the supposed containment of the surround by a settler-God or settler-gods and as reactualized by settler-Man.” Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” 173.
59 Carter reminds that the sacred is usually interpreted as a means to reinstate “propriety and comportment.” Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” 166.
60 “ … the sacred, as I am given to thinking about it here as figuring a poetics of malpracticed Black (religious) study, is neither transcendental, pure, nor beneficent, but rather base, stank, low to the ground, underground, of and with the earth. All this is to say, I approach the sacred as a kind of ‘pathological’ and ek-static threshold before which other, differential, and unrepresentable ‘genres’ or forms of life, unplottable gatherings in representation’s colonializing ruins, alternative ways of being with the earth, come into view.” Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” 169.
61 Carter, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise),” 176.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carlos Ramírez-Arenas
Carlos Ramírez-Arenas is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University. He studies the religious and economic genealogies of modern theories and discourses of time. Currently, his research focuses on the processes through which the adoption of modern sensibilities and practices of time became a central part of the project of transforming Colombia into a "modern" nation in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.