References
- Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 60: Abt. 2, Vorlesungen 1919–1944, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Frankfurt, M: Klostermann, 1995.
- Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, Being and Time, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962, hereafter SZ, page numbers refer to the German pagination.
- Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, p 309, hereafter HCT.
- I make use of the word “intersubjective” as a handy and customary way of referring to the social embeddedness of the human being, but the term itself threatens to lead into the very trap I am trying to work out of in so far as it suggests that sociality is best understood as a subsequent relation between previously formed and independent subjects.
- Augustine, City of God, trans. Bettenson, New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003, p 517.
- Scholarship on Heidegger's foundational engagement with Christian theology and mysticism in the decade preceding SZ has risen on the heels of the publication of GA 60 (op. cit.). For example, see John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994, pp 131–202.
- Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, volume 60: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, trans. Fritsch and Gosetti-Ferencei, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. See pp 151–155, “§ 12. The curare (Being Concerned) as the Basic Character of Factical Life”.
- See also, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, op. cit. “Appendix II” pp 203–206.
- For Heidegger's treatment of the “quaestio mihi factus sum” in the lectures see op. cit., p 130.
- On the crucial role of existentiell attestation or “testimony” in Heidegger's early thought, see both HCT 301–303 and Robert Bernasconi, “Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heidegger's Footnote on Tolstoy's ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’” in Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing, New York: Humanity Books, 1993, pp 76–98.
- This criticism might have been available as early as Hannah Arendt's 1929 dissertation, now published along with later revisions as Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Scott and Stark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. See in particular pp 13–14.
- Augustine, Confessions, London: Penguin, 1974. Citations of the Confessions are by Book number followed by chapter number. Heidegger's acknowledgement of Augustine in SZ is limited to six footnotes. These footnotes serve, in effect, as an epitaph to the buried Augustinian heritage of the text.
- Cf. James: “To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after.” “Some Metaphysical Problems” in Pragmatism and Other Essays, New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. p 43.
- This provocation has been disputed on the following lines: The inappropriateness of fungibility is not a unique mark of friendship but may also characterize certain contractual arrangements such as relying on the availability of a certain obstetrician whose services have already been engaged only to have a substitute gratuitously foisted on the mother at the onset of labor. On closer scrutiny, however, this objection actually affirms rather than refutes the unique relation between infungibility and friendship. That is to say, the example of the contracted obstetrician is an instance of infungibility only in practice, not in principle. The reason for the infungibility in this case are the practical limits of human life; given the complexity and time commitment required for such a delicate procedure, it would be practically impossible to bring a replacement up to speed at the last minute. And so a patient concerned to avoid a last minute switch would be prudent in securing some sort of ‘infungibility contract’ with her physician. However, given some imaginary scenario in which an obstetrician could be brought up to speed on every minute detail concerning the case, the patient would have no principled, strictly medical reason to require the care of this particular doctor over another. Now of course such transfers of information and understanding are impossible in practice, and so this specific obstetrician is for practical purposes irreplaceable. One might continue to protest that a patient in the imaginary scenario might agree that while some particular obstetrician is not medically different than the replacement, there may be some significant personal difference between them given the intimate nature of human contact and relations involved in the birthing process. But that objection seems not to threaten the unique irreplaceably of friendship but to bolster it. That is, while it may not be strictly medically relevant to a patient which particular obstetrician delivers her baby, it may be very much personally relevant. But that seems to me to show that the real world of human practices and limits is one not only in which contracts are practically necessary but is also one in which relationships that might have begun as professional can somewhere along the line develop the characteristics of friendship.
- John Donne, Devotions XVII, Selections, ed. John Booty, New York: Paulist Press, 1990, p. 268.
- See Lukács “Metaphysics and Tragedy” in Soul and Form, trans. Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. p 153: “It cannot last, no one would be able to bear it, no one could live at such heights—at the height of their own life and their own ultimate possibilities. One has to fall back into numbness. One has to deny life in order to live…”.
- See note 10 above.
- A reader of an earlier draft of this essay pointed me to George Santayana's poem “To W.P.” part II in particular. It should be clear as I proceed why I would expect many other such connections to be made and why they are likely to be found in poetry.
- It has been suggested to me that Michel Henry's discussions of our “feeling with” (pathos avec) in which we participate in community with the dead is another attempt to speak in philosophical concepts about the ways in which we are tied in relation with the dead. (See Phénoménologie matérielle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 p. 154.) To this one could also add Christian Lenhardt's essay “Anamnestic Solidarity” (Telos 25: pp. 133–154) which discusses the question of solidarity with the dead in various strands of Marxism. The claim in particular I am trying to press in this section and the next, however, is that the full power of our relations with the dead or vulnerable is missed to the extent that the dead are generalized, since it is only the particular that truly dies, never to be reborn. I take it that the wider point of contact between these projects and mine is that there is a sense in which a people as a community can also be said to be truly finite as in the cases of genocide or extermination. Finally, I do not mean to suggest that I am the only one who has ever noted and tried to articulate conceptually the connection between the death of others and self-awareness since, as I will suggest below, I think that it is along these lines that Hegel's treatment of Antigone is to be read. On the other hand, I will also try to show that there is on the whole something unsatisfying about the way traditional philosophy has dealt with this issue.
- On the generic quality of the other in Fichte see, for instance, pp 39–49 of Foundations of Natural Right ed. Neuhouser, trans. Baur, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. That the Not-self must in principle lack specific content see pp 230–231 (I, 261) of The Science of Knowledge, ed. Heath and Lachs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- See, for example, § 441 and § 463 of G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. p 278.
- Cf. note 19 above.
- On this point, and the wider discussion of the Levinasian phenomenology of the death of the other including the passage from John Donne, see Robert Bernasconi, “Whose death is it Anyway?” (www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/typanum/4/bernasconi/html).
- For an example of Emerson's conception of the self at a remove from and prior to friendship see “Friendship” in Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, New York: Penguin, 1983, pp 339–354. For a similar thought in Kierkegaard see Either/Or, Part II, ed. Hong and Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. p 319.
- For a very helpful and thorough discussion of friendship in Aristotle see John Cooper's “Aristotle on Friendship” in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. pp 301–340.) Cooper's appreciation of the philosophical importance of friendship comes very close to what I am aiming at in this essay. But in the final instance Cooper stops short of and explicitly rejects my privileging of friendship as a mode of self-understanding. “[It can be argued that] it is in the consciousness of the existence of another that a man becomes truly conscious of himself. Why, however, should one believe this? No reason is given, and offhand it does not seem true that merely in order to be distinctly conscious of oneself one need to be aware of other persons first. But even that one cannot attain self-consciousness except through consciousness of another person and his action, it would still not follow that one needs friends for this purpose. Why wouldn't a casual acquaintance do just as well?” (p. 319) I hope that this essay will both provide reasons how consciousness of another can be related to consciousness of oneself and why a casual acquaintance would not do just as well.
- Hence Socrates’ assertion of his own infertility. See, for instance, Theaetetus 149a ff. Martha Nussbaum gives a helpful interpretation of Plato's later theory of the soul which would allow us to distinguish Plato's own account from a Socratic maieutic position. But in that light it is hard to see how friendship as an intimate bond between selves or souls isn't eventually drained into one universal soul existing en masse. See her “Shame, Separateness, and Political Unity,” (pp. 413–15 in particular) in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, op. cit., pp. 395–435.