Heidegger, Revolutionary of the Self
ACADEMIC PAPER
With his total privileging of the concept of Being, Heidegger radically changed the way we conceptualise selfhood. The self went from being an epistemic entity, as it had been for centuries under Descartes and Kant, to a largely ontological one. This paper attempts to shed light on aspects of this paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of the self.
Preliminary considerations
With Heidegger, the history of the philosophy of selfhood took an unprecedented turn. Where for his predecessors, the self was to be delineated in more-or-less epistemological terms, for Heidegger, it was rather on ontological foundations that the self would be conceptualised and deconstructed. Descartes, Hume and Kant, arguably the most influential Enlightenment theorists of the self, may have disagreed in the details – even, in some aspects, wildly – but on one point their opinions would likely have converged: the self is an epistemic entity first and foremost. One arrives at a delineation of its essence by directing one’s faculties of understanding at locating it, and when one manages to locate this ‘essence of the self’ – if one manages at all – it is invariably found to be articulable in terms of the very same. That is, one discovers one’s self by means of the understanding and also as an entity of the understanding. For Descartes, the self was reducible to the ‘I think’, in other words, to an epistemological point zero that one can only reach by pruning away all false beliefs one might possess. One finds one’s self by doubting everything that leaves room for doubt – that is, by virtue of a thinking process – and one likewise rebuilds oneself from first principles, adding a unit of knowledge at a time as one might bricks to a secure foundation. The self is justified ontologically by an epistemic process: “I think therefore I am”. I cannot know that I exist except through my reason; I cannot situate my ‘self’ in any other locus than my first and ultimate thought. A century later, Kant would take Descartes’ “I think” and given it an unparalleled technical foundation. The self is a transcendental unity; both the residing place of the synthesis of the manifold of intuitions, and also the seat of the so-called ‘pure concepts of the understanding’, a priori rules by virtue of which this synthesis takes place. I am a unity of thought because I am a transcendental self. Though I may not know this transcendental entity empirically, for it is available to me only as an intuition, and not as a thought (more on this later), I can nonetheless intuit that it is there, for otherwise there would be no representations of reality to speak of. If I have representations of the world, which, because they are synthesised and thus give me an accurate and stable picture of realty, must therefore be universal and necessary – that is, a priori – there must be a unity, equally necessary and universal, from which these representations spring and in which they are generated. Kant’s technical elaboration of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” might therefore read as follows: “I think by means of a priori synthesised representations of external reality which must spring from a transcendental unity, therefore I am”. Kant’s epistemological justification of the ontology of the self is thus articulated; I know I exist, since otherwise I wouldn’t think in the specific way I do.
The above is an over simplification, however I do not believe it is a misleading one. It is not completely naïf to see Kant’s notion of selfhood, at least in part, as a building-up of Descartes’, one in which the cogito is given a sophisticated revitalisation. In any case, however much one may like to dispute this generalisation – for admittedly Kant does, in fact, disagree with Descartes in the details, even radically at times – what is far harder to challenge is the idea that, for both these great thinkers, the self was an epistemic entity, discoverable and identifiable by means of the faculties of the understanding. Epistemology came first in the study of the self, metaphysics and ontology later, if at all. With his Being and Time, Heidegger would radically undermine this epistemological supremacy in his philosophy of selfhood, and bring about its more-or-less complete inversion. Descartes and Kant had, in their blind crusade to understand the origins of human knowledge and delineate the self accordingly, missed the point. Better still, they had set sail on the wrong ship, or at the very least directed it on the wrong route. Noble though their intentions had been, they were misguided, for they had effectively ignored the only permissible foundation on which all philosophy – including the philosophy of the self – must rest: the concept of Being. Before there is any knowledge at all, or anything else for that matter, there is Being. For how could we understand anything that ‘is’, if we don’t first understand what it means to ‘Be’ itself. The Greeks had understood this well; Being had, for them, held pride of place[1]. And yet, at some point in our history, the ontological priority had ended, and for Heidegger, it needed urgently to be restored. All entities we come across in this world are, for Heidegger, but structures or articulated forms of Being, and must be understood first and foremost as such. The self is no exception. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” becomes, for Heidegger, “I am, therefore I think”, or better still, “My thinking is a form of Being”. One cannot think anything if one doesn’t first exist. Descartes had, in this sense, neglected the most interesting half of his famous aphorism and mistakenly focused on the other. And Kant, who initially seemed on the right track when, in that section of the Critique of Pure Reason called The Paralogisms of Pure Reason, he had argued for the analytic tautology of the I think, had failed to take his reasoning to its logical conclusion, and examine the ‘I think’ as an ontological phenomenon. In Being and Time, Heidegger would attempt to correct this error, placing considerations of Being at the centre of his notion of the self, and building it up, not on epistemological but rather on ontological foundations. In this paper, I will thus attempt to examine basic elements of Heidegger’s notion of selfhood, and more specifically his ideas of authentic being, and situate them as a response to those of two of his major predecessors, Descartes and Kant.
Dasein, or that entity of Being in terms of which alone Heidegger’s self can be articulated
It is impossible to understand Heidegger’s conception of the self without considering it as a phenomenon of Dasein, and so a very brief explication of this last concept will be now provided. In essence, Dasein is that mode of Being which is particular to humans. It is, to this extent, unique among forms of Being, having “a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities” (32). It is distinct from other ontological entities, such as, for instance, those designated as ‘Being-present-at-hand’ (69). Where this latter form of Being is germane to those things, which, for their innate susceptibility to this kind of treatment, can be gazed upon as mere objects of scientific enquiry, and ontologically comport themselves as such, Dasein, on the other hand, could never be characterised in these terms, and rather “understands itself in terms of existence” (33); that is to say, it comports itself in relation to its own possibility of Being. It is “that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue” (68), or, otherwise worded, that kind of Being which, for its unique capacity for self-reflection, is able to question and evaluate its own purpose and place in this world – a faculty not present in other forms of Being. It is along the lines of this unique ability that Dasein unfolds in its various structures, including those structures which come to define its selfhood. But all these begin with what could be argued to be its fundamental defining characteristic: Being-in-the-world. Dasein is, first and foremost, an entity that cannot exist in any other way than in the world, a world into which it is thrown (Geworfen) and from which it cannot exit without at the same time ceasing to be Dasein. It is, accordingly, “alongside the world” (80), not in the sense of being ‘side-by-side’ other things as might an object that is ‘present-at-hand’, but rather “absorbed in the world” (80). Heidegger elaborates this thus: “There is no such thing as the 'side-by-side-ness' of an entity called 'Dasein' with another entity called 'world'” (82). Since, in other words, it is a Being-in-the-world, Dasein is “bound up in its 'destiny' with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world” (82). Its mode of Being is such that its very essence compels it toward a delicate, interactive existential dance with others entities that encircle it, a dance that defines it, at once, directly and by contradistinction. Dasein can be conceptualised only in these terms, so that if any deadening, objectifying paradigm were adopted in order to understand it, such an approach would fall miserably short of its objective.
It is here, since I have now given an adequate overview of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, that I shall begin to hone in on his conception of selfhood – for the Heideggerian self is nothing if not the ‘who’ of Dasein.
The self, or the ‘who’ of Dasein
Given all that has been said of Dasein thus far, it might be possible to piece together a satisfying, though by no means thorough, analysis of the Heideggerian self simply by using Heidegger’s own definition as one’s starting point and colouring it with the attributes of Dasein we have already underscored. If the self is the ‘who’ of Dasein, then we might do well to ‘fill it out’ conceptually in the following way: we might, for instance, imagine that the Heideggerian self is that ‘who’ for whom, since it is endowed with consciousness and self-reflection, its very Being is an issue; that ‘who’ whose Being is distinct from all other forms of Being, particularly those that are ‘present-at-hand’, and cannot therefore be understood as inhabiting the world as dead objects of scientific observation; that ‘who’ whose meaning in Dasein is temporality, and is thereby inescapably conditioned[2] by it; and finally, that ‘who’ whose Being is, at the same time, a Being-in-the-world, that is, ‘bound up’, in its destiny, with those entities around it, and cannot exist except in this world. Such a semi-improvised explication, though incomplete, surely goes a good way to accounting for the Heideggerian self and many of its nuances, and it in any case certainly covers its main tenet: that the self is, in fact a ‘who’ that is to be understood ontologically – or, even more precisely – existentially.
This last point Heidegger himself makes explicitly. In what is surely an indirect reference, not only to Descartes and Kant, but also Husserl, Heidegger stresses that the self cannot be found in the “formal givenness of the ‘I’” (152), that is, by taking the ‘I’ as something sheered from the rest of the world, left over when all else is put to the side. Descartes’ self is formally given in this sense precisely; it is that kernel of thought left behind when all else is doubted – as is, more or less, Husserl’s ‘pure consciousness’, or ‘phenomenological residuum’[3]. For Kant, the self is similarly the transcendental unity that stands apart from and precedes all intuitions[4], and must accordingly be sought in a place ‘higher’ not only than these, but also than all concepts and judgements.[5] Heidegger understands that, having laid out the concept of Dasein as Being-in-the-World, he cannot now suddenly divorce its ‘who’ from a world with whom it is, rather, inextricably bound up. As he puts it, the ‘who’ of Dasein is no ‘bare subject’, for a “bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally” (152). The self is always and only ‘in the world’, for, stripped of its ‘in-the-worldness’, it would be simultaneously deprived of its Dasein, and therefore of its existence. And a self that doesn’t exist can hardly be thought of or imagined at all, let alone understood. The self must therefore be analysed precise as an ontological problem; it “must be interpreted existentially” (152).
Here, Heidegger makes an observation that is both historically important and relevant to the discussion at hand: the self is a substance only insofar as its substance is existence. When attempting to define the core of Dasein as Being, Heidegger concedes, one might at first fear that one is running the risk of obfuscating it, or rendering it less concrete than it ought to be[6]. When one understands, however, that the ‘substance’ of the I of Dasein is not concrete to begin with, nor even the combination of spirit and body that it was for Descartes, but rather existence, one sees that this operation is no obfuscation at all, but rather a clarification (153). Here, Heidegger parts radically with theological notions of selfhood upheld by the Medievals and also by Descartes. The substance of the self is not an eternal and immaterial soul, independent from the body[7]. Or better, if it can be said to exist at all, the human soul is the ‘who’ of Dasein, or the self whose defining feature is that mode of temporally-conditioned Being characterised by Being-in-the-world; a kind of being for whom its own Being is an issue. For Heidegger, since there is no possibility of the continuation of Dasein beyond death, there can accordingly be no immortality attributable to the ‘I’. Moreover, since Being does not stand apart from any materiality, but rather underpins it, and more specifically, since Dasein underpins the materiality of its ‘who’ instead of standing independently alongside it, it can likewise not be argued to yield a self that is wholly immaterial. In both these respects, there is a fairly firm disavowal of the Christian soul and a bold proclamation of a decidedly more godless equivalent.
Kant, who in the Paralogisms argues for the impossibility of affirming the immateriality and substantiality of the soul, would in this sense have rather ironically found himself at odds with both these thinkers. For Kant, though the transcendental unity of the self is a virtual certainty, the same can sadly not be said for its empirical equivalent. The scholastics, as we have seen, were convinced that the soul was eternal, immaterial and indivisible; Descartes agreed. Yet these affirmations, irresistible though they may be, require of human reason that it go beyond the natural reach of its powers, since they rely on intuitions that lie outside of our thinking[8]. Affirming the ‘personality’ of the soul, or the idea that it forms a coherent, distinct, indivisible unity, is thus impossible. The same reasoning is more or less applied by Kant to all other aspects of the human psyche he examines, including its substantiality and its permanence. There is a ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ – this much is clear, since otherwise we could not have synthesised representations of the world. And yet we can do no more than glance upon this unity merely indirectly through the representations it generates, and can never grasp it empirically as the whole it hints at being. This skepticism circa any possibility of affirming a united empirical self, one that Hume would surely have corroborated[9], would likely have been met with disapproval by Heidegger. The self is united and indivisible, not because it is enclosed in a solipsistic apperception, but because it is constituted by Dasein itself, which, since it is Being-in-the-world, opens it up to the world and to itself. There is no noumenal impasse blocking me from true self-knowledge, but on the contrary a flowing Parmenidean oneness connecting me to myself and others, which instead allows it completely. Kant’s version of the cogito – “I think therefore I am, but in exactly what way I am, I know not” – is here filled out ontologically by Heidegger: “I know in what way I am, because I exist in Dasein”. If Kant and Descartes fail “to provide an ontology of Dasein” (46), Heidegger furnishes, as a response, an ontology of the self, which is at the same time the self’s essential analysis and conceptual justification.
Heideggerian authenticity seen as against its Cartesian counterpart
In the Meditations, Descartes begins his own project of authenticity by ‘demolishing everything’. That is, having realised that all the opinions about the world he had mindlessly imbibed during childhood were, at best, misguided and, at worst, patently false, he sets out to doubt them all systematically[10]. The enterprise that ensues is his grand project of epistemological reconstruction. His false beliefs, which had sat in him like so many cancerous tumours, would be painstakingly excised. The ‘doubtful edifice’ that these had formed would be razed to the ground and replaced with a sturdier, more truthful one, one built on the foundation of the cogito with the stones of axiomatic first principles. At first glance, this grand mission might understandably appear conceptually rather similar to Heidegger’s own exhortations to authentic Being. Descartes was, in effect, aiming for an all-encompassing, even absolute authenticity; no belief that did not belong to him completely would be ruthlessly discarded, and, what’s more, in order to qualify as ‘belonging to him’, any conclusion would need to be arrived at by a watertight method proceeding stepwise from an incontestable initial premise. Heidegger too insisted that, in order to live authentically, one had to ‘wrest’ one’s self from the pernicious and deadening effects of a life lived in mindless obeisance to public opinion. But, as we shall now see in the final section of this paper, though the similarities between them are clear and even significant, these two conceptions of authentic selfhood are, in the main, paradigmatically divergent.
*
Heidegger’s idea of authentic Being is, naturally, a form of Dasein and must be understood as such. Since we have already covered the basic tenets of Dasein and situated the self as its ‘who’, we will now pass directly to an attempt to define the authentic self as the authentic ‘who’ of Dasein without the need to re-define either of those two foundational concepts. Before delving into authenticity, Heidegger very wisely chooses first to define inauthenticity, a notion up against which authentic Dasein is then delineated by contradistinction. I will, here, do the same.
As we have seen, Dasein is characterised first and foremost as Being-in-the-world. This means, chiefly, that as beings imbued with Dasein, we exist in the world in such a way that our destiny is bound up with that of others who encircle us. At first glance, this may suggest an intersubjectivity reminiscent of Hegel, who claims that, in order to obtain full ‘self-consciousness’, one is inescapably reliant on the recognition of the other[11]. This is an understandable misconception Heidegger anticipates and expressly obviates (162)[12]. The Dasein with which the self is imbued in relation to itself cannot be reduced to that which it experiences in relation to Others; this would render the Other a mere ‘duplicate of the Self’, which for Heidegger is a groundless proposition (162). So, the self is not rigorously intersubjective in the Hegelian sense, though it is doubtless interdependent. Its essence is not reducible to the Others’, although its destiny is undeniably bound up with theirs. The two conceptions – the intersubjective and the interdependent – though not entirely alien to one another, are thus not conflatable. The Others are those “among whom one is too” (162), not those to whom one can be wholly reduced and in whom one is wholly absorbed. This nuance is important to Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, for, had the self been but a duplicate of the Other, then there would be no inauthenticity to speak of, since such a thing depends on the possibility of distinguishing between one’s Being-toward-oneself and one’s Being-toward-the-other, a distinction without which authenticity would mean nothing more than a falling short of absolute intersubjectivity. If anything, Heidegger might deem inauthentic Being as the falling of Dasein into a pretense of intersubjective Being precisely. Here, one abdicates one’s Being-one’s-self in favour of a Being-with-the-They, so that one’s own Dasein is ‘dissolved’ in the latter (164). The net result of this ‘falling’, if experienced widely, is that everyone becomes the Other and “no one is himself” (165). It is a ‘dispersal’ of one’s ownmost Dasein, of its mineness, and its relinquishment to the ‘They’, who, since it represents the herd, is more a ‘nobody’ than an ‘everybody’ (164). Heidegger here takes great pains to clear up two potential misunderstandings about the ‘They’ to which the reader might understandably fall prey. The first is that the ‘They’ is a nothing; the second, that it is alien to Dasein. Although a blind deferral of one’s Being-one’s-self to the ‘They’ amounts to a dispersal of one’s self, the ‘They’ into which the self is dispersed is not a nothing. It is, rather, the amorphous something that cannot be reduced to one person or another, or even to a specific group of people, but all the while retains a form of Being that is undeniably its own. And this form of Being is precisely that iteration of Dasein which is inauthentic and results from its fall (Absturz) into “groundlessness and nullity of everydayness” (223).
Authentic Being, then, might accordingly be articulated as that form of Dasein which is achieved once one has made one’s way out of this fallen state, once a self has ‘brought itself back’ (sich Zurückholen) from “its lostness in the They” (312). This, for Heidegger, requires an existential modification, or a movement from the ‘They-self’ to authentic ‘Being-one’s-Self’ (312). It is an existential modification rather than an ontological one because it is one’s mode of relating to Dasein that shifts rather than one’s participation in it. Both forms of Being – the authentic and inauthentic – partake in Dasein, but do so in different, even opposing existential modalities. This switch between these is somewhat akin to the shift one experiences when one plays the same melody twice, first in the minor then in the major, and one understands that, since its tonic and shape have remained the same, it has lost nothing of its essential structure, and yet, on account of the mode-mixture, it has all the same palpably changed in tone and character.
This existential mode-shift from minor to major may take place primarily by means of three phenomena of Dasein: conscience, resoluteness and anticipation. Since, for our purposes, the first two are the more relevant, I will concentrate on these and cover the third only briefly. Conscience is defined by Heidegger as an “an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-itself through guilt” (314). Roughly ‘translated’, this might read as follows: having become aware of its inauthentic enslavement to the ‘They’ – a condition to which it is inescapably susceptible – the self is suddenly stirred by its conscience to confront the guilt with which this horror has all along burdened it, and wield it as a way out of its thralldom, toward a freer, more authentic existence. ‘Resoluteness’ functions in a very similar fashion, and in fact is, for Heidegger, closely related to conscience. If conscience is the call, through guilt, to confront one’s inauthenticity, then resoluteness is the wholehearted embracing of this call and all it entails – including the anxiety that inevitably results from its heeding (343). Were one not yet ready to respond to it, one might instead repress the call and retreat further into the quagmire of the ‘They self’. If, on the other hand, one should answer resolutely, one knowingly faces one’s existential responsibilities head-on. Resoluteness has, in this sense, all the airs of a bold and total acceptance of one’s tragic existential condition, and a commitment to overcome it no matter the cost. It is the heroic renunciation of the false comfort of the ‘Being-with-the-They’ in favour of the anguish involved in wholly taking on one’s existential destiny; it is that means by which the self reaches the truth of its own existence, the authentic truth of Dasein (343). Anticipation, too, has an important part to play in authentic Being, but since it is primarily an orientation toward the absolute possibility of Death – a vital question for Heidegger, but one that is not directly relevant to the discussion at hand – I shall not dwell on it here.
The resemblances between Heidegger’s and Descartes’ notions of authenticity are undeniable. For starters, both pit the individual self against an ominous collective that appears hell-bent on distorting its reality, contaminating its purity, and jeopordising its chances of a truthful mode of living. Furthermore, both suggest, as a way out of this inauthenticity, a self-inoculation against collective toxicity by means of a fervent defiance aimed at a total ‘restoration of the self’. Both speak, either directly or indirectly, of anxiety: Heidegger, as we have seen, since it is the automatic result of the awareness of one’s inauthenticity; Descartes, since it is a strong psychological discomfort that compels him, in the second Meditation, to find a way out of his doubts. However, though by no means discountable, these similarities are revealed, upon closer reflection, to be somewhat superficial, since they are only outwardly analogous and lack the underlying paradigmatic commonality that would truly bind them. Heidegger’s authentic self is an ontological, not epistemological animal. It aims for an authenticity of Being, not of knowledge. When Heidegger’s self finds its way out of its thraldom to the ‘They’, it is not merely a set of beliefs it is wresting itself from, but an entire mode of existence which, yes, might also include a way of understanding reality, but cannot be reduced entirely to it. When Heidegger speaks of resoluteness as a path to truth, he is here not speaking merely of factuality, of the kind of truth, in other words, one aims at when one seeks a concept of a thing that corresponds to the thing itself. Heidegger’s truth is rather more metaphysically profound, having to do with the underlying structures of our specific mode of Being, which, if we align ourselves perfectly with them, allow for the genuine nature of our existence to be fully revealed. Heidegger’s thought is thus set apart from that of Descartes and Kant by its privileging of ontology, and it is for this reason that Heidegger’s philosophy of selfhood represents such a radical departure from that of his predecessors.
Bibliography
Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis
/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company (4th ed.), 1998
Hegel, Georg W. The System of Science: First Part of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Terry
Pinkard, 2010
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. by John Macquarrie Edward Robinson. Harper &
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Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First
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Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014
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[1] Being and Time (63): “If we may allude to some earlier researchers on the analysis of Being, incomparable on their own level, we may compare the ontological sections of Plato's Parmenides or the fourth chapter of the seventh book of Aristotle's Metaphysics with a narrative section from Thucydides; we can then see the altogether unprecedented character of those formulations which were imposed upon the Greeks by their philosophers.”
[2] 38: “We shall point to temporality as the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call ‘Dasein’” (38)
[3] Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (§ 33). Note that Husserl goes to great lengths to specify that he is not doubting reality in order to find ‘pure consciousness’, as Descartes does, but rather, ‘bracketing’ or ‘suspending’ it. The two methodologies, however, are in the main comparable.
[4] Critique of Pure Reason (A107): “Now no cognitions can occur in us, no connection and unity among them, without that unity of consciousness that precedes all data of the intuitions, and in relation to which all representation of objects is alone possible. This pure, original, unchanging consciousness I will now name transcendental apperception.”
[5] Critique of Pure Reason (B131): “We must therefore seek this unity…someplace higher, namely in that which itself contains the ground of the unity of different concepts in judgments, and hence of the possibility of the understanding, even in its logical use.”
[6] Here, Heidegger uses the verb ‘volatilise’ rather than ‘obfuscate’ (153)
[7] Sixth Meditation: The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body
[8] Critique of Pure Reason (B409)
[9] Treatise of Human Nature (pp. 199-200): “I may venture to affirm of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”
[10] First Meditation: What can be called into doubt
[11] Phenomenology of Spirit (¶178): “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself by way of its existing in and for itself for another; i.e., it exists only as a recognised being.”
[12] “The relationship-of-Being which one has towards Others would then become a Projection of one's own Being-towards-oneself 'into something else'. The Other would be a duplicate of the Self.
But while these deliberations seem obvious enough, it is easy to see that they have little ground to stand on. The presupposition which this argument demands – that Dasein's Being towards an Other is its Being towards itself – fails to hold. As long as the legitimacy of this presupposition has not turned out to be evident, one may still be puzzled as to how Dasein's relationship to itself is thus to be disclosed to the Other as Other.”
