- On the issue of man in a lifeless world, cf. Hans Jonas' excellent book The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966), pp. 1–63.
- Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 66–67.
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 153.
- For brilliant accounts of how this openness to all possibilities renders man immobile and dispersed, the reader is invited to compare Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964) and The Last Gentleman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966).
- Cf.Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 67–68, 78, 150–153. Heidegger's usage of the term “existence” is not to be confused with the medieval usage of that term, which is usually opposed to “essence”.
- Ibid., pp. 21–24.
- Temporalizing activity is very similar to Kant's notion of “schematizing activity” in his first Critique. Cf. Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963).
- Heidegger uses the term “ecstases” instead of “dimensions” in order to avoid the spatial connotations associated with the latter term. As an ecstatical being, Dasein is able to “stand out” from itself into its temporal Spielraum. On this matter, cf. Being and Time, p. 377.
- Cf. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 193–201. With regard to Heidegger's interpretation of Kant, particularly with regard to time and the Self, the reader is urged to compare Charles M. Sherover's invaluable study, Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).
- Cf. Being and Time, pp. 370–401.
- Cf. Ibid., pp. 364–370. Cf. also Heidegger's essay, “The Way Back Into the Ground of Metaphysics”, trans. Walter Kaufmann in his Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1956), pp. 207–221.
- Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 425.
- Ibid., p. 428. Cf. also p. 434. (Emphasis in the original.)
- Ibid., p. 435. I have changed this translation slightly.
- The claim that the world “is not there without Dasein” does not involve Heidegger in a facile idealism. Heidegger defines world as the referential totality which is always with Dasein from the beginning. Within its world, Dasein discloses or reveals beings. That Dasein must disclose, not create, its objects testifies to Dasein's essential finitude. On the nature of world, cf. Ibid., pp. 91–148, 246–256. Also cf. Heidegger's The Essence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes), trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
- Heidegger Being and Time, pp. 441–442. I have slightly altered this translation.
- Ibid., p. 42. Stress in the original.
- Ibid., p. 442.
- Ibid., p. 443.
- On the notion that unowned existence is essentially a movement away from the more primordial possibility of owned existence, cf. Ibid., p. 365, 369.
- In another essay I hope to demonstrate that, for consistency's sake, everydayness cannot be identical with unowned existence.
- Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 168. (I have slightly altered the translation.) Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), p. 130. “Die Selbigkeit des eigentlich existierenden Selbst ist aber dann ontologisch durch eine Kluft getrennt von der Identität des in der Erlebnismannigfaltigkeit sich durchhaltenden Ich.”
- Early in this essay, we stipulated that the term “sameness” was to be used to refer to the phenomenon of the sameness of the Self throughout its existence. The reader must thus distinguish among the terms: sameness (the phenomenon to be explained), self-sameness (the owned way of achieving this sameness), and identity and connectedness (the unowned way of achieving this sameness).
- Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann, in his Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers (Mesenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1964) says with regard to Dasein as the basis of its own Being: “Man, however, is not the basis of his potentiality-for-Being in the sense that he is the basis for his potentiality-for-Being. To exist in such a way as to be the basis of its Being means, in the taking-over of the basis, to fulfil that basis as the facticity of Being-disclosed for-itself. The “is” of the farmulation “Dasein is the basis” has a transitive character, such that one must genuinely say. Dasein is its basis. In Being-the-basis (Grund-sein) lies the fact that man is a being which never has the power over his Being.” Cf. p. 130. (My translation.)
- With regard to “I” and “Self”, Heidegger says in Being and Time, p. 369: “With the ‘I’ care expresses itself, though proximally and for the most part in the ‘fugitive’ way in which the ‘I’ talks when it concerns itself with something. The they-self keeps on saying ‘I’ most loudly and most frequently because at bottom it is not itself in an owned way (eigentlich), and evades its owned potentiality-for-Being. If the ontological constitution of the Self is not to be traced back either to an ‘I’-substance or to a ‘subject’, but if, on the contrary, the everyday fugitive way in which we keep saying ‘I’ must be understood in terms of our owned potentiality-for-Being, then the proposition that the Self is the basis of care and constantly present-at-hand, is one that still does not follow. Selfhood is to be discerned existentially only in one's owned potentiality-for-Being-one's-Self—that is to say, in the ownedness of Dasein's Being as care.“ (I have changed this translation slightly.)
- In The Essence of Reasons, published not long after the appearance of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger reiterates his claim that the “I” finds its basis only in the power of the owned Self. “Only because Dasein is defined by selfhood can an I-self relate “itself’ to a Thou-self. Selfhood is the presupposition of the possibility of being an “I”, which itself is revealed only in the “Thou”. Selfhood is never related to a Thou; it is neutral toward “being an I” and “being a Thou”, and even more toward “sexuality”, since it is what makes them all possible in the first place.” Cf. p. 87.
- Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961), pp. 289–297, 438–447. Cf. also Heidegger's “Wer Ist Nietzsches Zarathrustra?”, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Vol. I (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954), pp. 93–118.
- Heidegger's interpretation of owned Selfhood finds its closest proximity to Nietzsche's übermensch in the notion that Dasein must resolve (will) to appropriate itself, to become itself. Heidegger has called Nietzsche the last metaphysician, insofar as Nietzsche brings to its culmination what Heidegger takes as the final possibility of Western thinking in the notion of the Will to Power. (Cf. Heidegger's great work, Nietzsche, I [Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961], pp. 473–481, and passim.) But to the extent that Being and Time includes something like will (resolve) in its characterization of the possibility of owned Selfhood, and to the extent that it brings to a conclusion the possibility of approaching the question of Being by way of the analysis of the Being of the subject, then Heidegger and not Nietzsche is the last great metaphysician. Heidegger claims that Western metaphysics is essentially subjectivistic, since it concentrates on the relation of the subject to beings, instead of on Being itself. But although Heidegger attempted in Being and Time to move beyond subjectivistic thinking, the book founders because it was unable to find its way back from its detour through the Being of Dasein, i.e., through the analysis of the subjectivity of the subject, and back to the analysis of Being itself. (Cf. Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers [Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1963], 180. Cf. also Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, pp. 193–196.) The famous “turn” (Kehre) in Heidegger's thinking is probably largely attributable to his recognition of the subjectivistic bent of his early thinking. After the “turn”, we learn that Being itself (and not the individual human Dasein) is responsible for the achievement of owned Selfhood. That is, owned Selfhood is no longer a product of willing (which is inherently subjectivistic, and thus to be avoided), but is understood as the manner in which Being works through man in order to realize its own mysterious aims.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
Volume 6, 1975 - Issue 3