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UDC 141

R.M. Vabalaite

The concept of selfhood in Martin Heidegger’s thinking after “Being and Time”

Abstract. In article, development of understanding of self in Heidegger's theory after the edition of the book “Being and Time” is investigated. Values of concept of self of contexts of discussion of an ecstatic ek-zistention of the person, identity, a question, an event, language are discussed. The author interprets self not as a reality, and as creative process, awareness of human limitation, belonging to world around, life opened to that didn't reach definiteness yet.

Key words: self, Dasein, person, ek-zistention of the person, late thinking of Martin Heidegger, eigene, uneigene.

This theme obtains its actuality within the context of current collection of articles for mainly two reasons. First springs up from the consideration of a proper selfhood which is tightly intertwined with problems of understanding of contemporary human condition and obtaining of personal identity. The second reason lies is one of current tendencies in investigating into Heidegger’s heritage. Good part of investigations demonstrates a renewed search for ethical meaning in Heideggerian theory on the modes of existence of Dasein. Within the context of investigations into the human selfhood particularly distinguishable is a theory of American philosopher Stiven Crowell, where the author suggests the reading of Heideggerian characterization of authentic and inauthentic being as providing the grounds for following norms of moral behavior. In our everyday life our diverse practical identities determine our behavior according to the norms of relevant social practices; we simply “conform to norms”1, yet not try to ground them. Our authentic being ourselves means a possibility to ground norms, “responsiveness to norms as norms”2

By no doubts, the possession of the possibility to deliver oneself the behavioral rules presents itself as a distinct mark of human nature, yet we may ask whether the Heideggerian search for the authentic human selfhood is limited within this scope.

The incomplete character of ethical interpretation of the concept of selfhood is particularly clear when we consider the turn in Heidegger’s thought after the publication of his fundamental work “Being and Time”. We shall try to characterize the development of the concept of selfhood in the later theory of Heidegger.

1Crowell S. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. N. Y., 2013. P. 187

2Ibid. P. 280

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In the “Letter on Humanism” the author himself warns us that “similarly to inability of using the ‘they’ (Das Man) to furnish an incidental contribution to sociology, just as little does the ‘they’ mean merely the opposite, understood in an ethi- cal-existentiell way, of the selfhood of persons”1 and that “the terms ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, which are used in a provisional fashion, do not imply a moral

– existentiell or an ‘anthropological’ distinction but rather a relation that, because it has been hitherto concealed from philosophy, has yet to be thought for the first time, an ‘ecstatic’ relation of the essence of the human being to the truth of being”2. This meaning encompasses the belonging of human selfhood to the history of Being itself.

In the IVth part of the lectures on Nietzschean philosophy entitled “European Nihilism”, written around 1940, the author makes an inquiry into the fundamental questions of Metaphysics, commencing from their inception in the times of Ancient Greece, finishing with their turn at Modern times, which still proceeds into our contemporary epoch. This inquiry provides us with a possibility to discern a history of the changes in the concept of human selfhood. In the Pre-Socratic times the selfhood expresses itself in the human awareness of his limits. According to Heidegger: “here is where the self of man is defined as the respective ‘I’; namely, by its restriction to the surrounding unconcealed. Such restricted belonging in the radius of the unconcealed co-constitutes the being-one-self of man”3. This particular radius of the unconcealed being presents a stable ground for the being of selfhood; human being knows himself, distinguishes himself as a being among beings, which is not identical with him, and takes this knowledge as a measure of his own being. The philosopher derives such an understanding from the famous saying of Protagoras, grounding it on his own and unusual interpretation: “of all ‘things’ [of those, ‘things’, namely, which man has about him for use, customarily and even continually – chrēmata, chrēsthai], the [respective] man is a measure, of things that are present, that they are thus present as they come to presence, but of those things to which coming to presence is denied, that they do not come to presence”4. It is interesting that in his conversation with Medard Boss in 1964 Heidegger almost literally repeats these words, yet not like an interpretation of Protagoras, but as a true explanation of human selfhood. Heidegger writes that “a human being’s limited belonging to the realm of the unconcealed [situation] constitutes his being a self. The human being becomes an ego by this limitation [to a given situation] and not by being unlimited”5, and as the last demonstration he gives an argument that in Ancient

1Heidegger M. Letter on “Humanism“ / M. Heidegger // Pathmarks. Cambridge, 1998. P. 242.

2Ibid. P. 253.

3Heidegger M. Nietzsche. Vol. IV. N. Y., 2001. P. 93-94.

4Ibid. P. 91.

5Heidegger M. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters. Evanston, 2001. P. 188.

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Greek understanding, human presents himself to himself as a selfhood only by submitting to the restriction of the unconcealed.

It is well known that radical changes in the concept of selfhood are carried on in Cartesian philosophy. Here “man as self is defined by referring the world back to man’s representing”1. Thus the selfhood obtains the primordial sense of being a subject as “laying-at-the-base-of”. Such a subject becomes aware of himself as a basis of all representations, a centre of all being, which becomes a simple sum of human representations. A man becomes a measure of all being, who decides what is being, and what is not. Following this turn permanence of my self is being thought as consisting “in the secure establishment of representation, in the certitude according to which the self is brought before itself”2. When the contemporary European mind forgets it dependence on the radius of present beings, it strives to ascertain itself through the transformation of all surrounding beings into the objects and “Framing”, into the means of the progress for the sake of the progress itself.

This process unwillingly turns out to cause the same transformation of the humanity itself. We shall constrict ourselves with just noting the changes in the sphere of spiritual culture, which we may distinguish from the ample Heideggerian criticism of the contemporariness. In the lecture “The Way to Language“ philosopher notes that our language becomes orderly formalized and became “the kind of communication which ‘inform’ man uniformly, that is, gives him the form in which he is fitted into the technological – calculative universe”3. In the essay “Overcoming metaphysics” considering the technological exploitation of being, the author mentions that it includes also planned “manufacturing” of culture and fine art4. In the same essay Heidegger makes a statement that human being already turned into a “main row material”5, and in the lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” warns us us that in the nearest future man “will have to be taken as standing-reserve”6.

May there be another concept of human selfhood and what are the conditions for its implementation? In the essay “The Principle of Identity” author invites us to reject thinking about the selfhood in the light of the Modern European idea of identity. Philosopher explains that this traditional understanding of identity should be complemented with an awareness that it consists of the moment of the relation of

1Heidegger M. Nietzsche. Vol. IV. N. Y., 2001. P. 122.

2Ibid. P. 115.

3Heidegger M. The Way to Language / M. Heidegger // On the Way to Language. N. Y., 1971. P.

4Heidegger M. Überwindung der Metaphysik / M. Heidegger // Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main, 2000. S. 90-94.

5Ibid. S. 91.

6Heidegger M. The Question Concerning Technology / M. Heidegger // The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays. N. Y., London, 1977. P. 27.

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any kind of being to oneself, of its directedness to itself. The relation consisting in the identity we may represent for ourselves as some inclusion, demarcation of component parts, providing us with a possibility to think identity as a process. Heidegger writes that “sameness implies the relation of ‘with’, that is, a mediation, a connection, a synthesis: the unification into a unity”1. It means that selfhood is not a static formation; it exists only in the process of internal and external relations, which bring up the changes.

We may find quite clear determination of the constancy and change of the selfhood in “Zollikon Seminars”. Philosopher states that “the self is what constantly endures as the same in the whole, historical course of my Da-sein. [It is] what exists precisely in the manner of being-in-the-world, as potentiality for being-in- the-world. The self is never present-at-hand as a substance. The constancy

[Ständigkeit] of the self is proper to itself in the sense that the self is always able to come back to itself and always finds itself still the same in its sojourn [Aufenthalt]”2. The question comes up, why the selfhood couldn’t be thought as a substance, having in mind that it in spite of changes retains its sameness? Thus we should mind the principal temporality of Dasein and understand that selfhood in the reality exists only in the moment of its meaningful comprehension. The author points out that “the whole self can never be realized in one moment”3. At every moment only a definite part of possibilities of human being and manner of his being skills are represented.

Human selfhood is inexorably tied not only with a meaningful reflection of itself, but an understanding of the whole existence, awareness of its dependency on the surrounding world. In “Introduction to Metaphysics” Heidegger states that “humanity first comes to itself and is a self only as questioning – historical. The selfhood of humanity means this: it has to transform the being that opens itself up to history, and thus bring itself to a stand”4. The selfhood appears when human being asks himself a question about his essence and thus separates himself from other entities and persists in existing only among them. The condition where a human being becomes himself, the philosopher calls an introduction into the truth of being, a remaining in the proximity of being, an existence close to being. In our opinion it means that human being obtains its true selfhood at those moments when almost in an unconceivable manner the being itself opens up to him. Heidegger attempts to think over such moments with a help of one his crucial concepts – Ereignis. We

1Heidegger M. The Principle of Identity / M. Heidegger // Identity and Difference. N. Y., 1969. P. 25.

2Heidegger M. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters. Evanston, 2001. P. 174-

3Ibid. P. 175.

4Heidegger M. Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, London, 2000. P. 153.

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shall try to clarify how to relate Ereignis with a giving of sense to the selfhood of human being.

American philosopher Richard Polt in his investigation of the aspects of Heideggerian “Ereignis” discerns as one of the fundamental the relation of the event with an expression of the selfhood of human being. He writes that “only in

Ereignis can we truly become our own selves; this does not mean returning to some fixed nature but accepting our role as the beings to whom our own being, and being in general, makes a difference. […] Ereignis is the way in which the givenness of given beings – including ourselves – comes into question for us”1. There is a demand for human being to respond to the being and it happens in Ereignis where he becomes himself as being which gives itself to the actualization of what comes up into the unconcealment and hiding of that what remains in the concealment. How does this owning of one’s own being happen?

Heidegger explains the event of Appropriation (Ereignis), where human being finds his selfhood, as a “realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature2. In order to understand what this realm means, we need to think about its self-suspended structure, using the tools of language. The philosopher in this case calls the language a vibration in this suspended structure of that what comes to being, fulfills itself and writes that in the event the language composes the possibility to gain this indefinable glimmering. We may note that here something extraordinary obtains a sense – both what is expected and what passes away – a structure. Because of his unusual mode of being this structure reminds the well known “inconspicuous furrows”3, which thinking leaves in language.

The authentic language is tightly connected with an event and also by the fact that both are the expressions of human selfhood. In the lecture “The Way to Language” the author emphasizes that appropriation “in beholding human nature makes mortals appropriate for that which avows itself, from everywhere to man in

Saying, which points toward the concealed. Man‘s, the listener‘s, being made appropriate for Saying, has this distinguishing character, that it releases human nature into its own, but only in order that man as he who speaks, that is, he who says, may encounter and answer Saying, in virtue of what is his property4.

1Polt R. Ereignis / A Companion to Heidegger / edited by H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall. Malden, Oxford, 2005. P. 383.

2Heidegger M. The Principle of Identity / M. Heidegger // Identity and Difference. New York, 1969. P. 37.

3Heidegger M. Letter on “Humanism“ / M. Heidegger // Pathmarks. Cambridge, 1998. P. 276.

4Heidegger M. The Way to Language / M. Heidegger // On the Way to Language. N. Y., 1971. P.

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What does this already mentioned Saying mean? This concept is introduced in searching for an answer what the unity of the language consists of, what relates the entities which are named separately. Saying ties up every reality, it appears to be “the gathering that joints all appearance of the in itself manifold showing”1. The human being is not a creator of the Saying, he submits himself to the Saying, when he admits unconcealment or concealment of that what manifests itself. Following an interpretation of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in this particular understanding of the purpose of language “it must be there as the necessary context for all our acting and making [...] It is the basis for all the sense that our lives make: or that anything makes”2. Explaining existence of language Heidegger creates the whole series of new concepts, among which we may point out the names for an actions: “to design”, “to cut a trace”, “owning”, making up a specific character of his teaching about the necessary conditions of articulation of being. Language creates the conditions for the existence of beings, defines their limits, places, relations, discerns what is unconcealed in them, and what remains concealed, and at the same time retains the mobility of both of those being created “constructions”, and of those which escape, slip away. The basis for an understanding of the surrounding world is not a fixed distribution of things and phenomena by species, kinds, and categories, but a creative, poetical (in old sense of this word) discernment, understanding, naming. The attempt of the philosopher to pay our attention on the constancy of change becomes evident from his definition of the concept “owning”. “Owning it is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own, from where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind”3. The human selfhood comes up into the being in the process of contraposition with the other being and the strife to actualize its own being; according to

Heidegger, “that is, sets beings into limits and form, projects something new (not yet present), originally poetizes, grounds poetically”4.

Summarizing we may concede that after “Being and Time” philosopher thinks about the selfhood in the context of ecstatic ek-sistence of the human being, question, Ereignis, and language. Selfhood in the theory of Heidegger is not a given; in order to obtain it, first we should be aware of our limitness, free ourselves from our everyday “truths”, and our accustomed beliefs, think about the being in a creative manner, keep open for that what is not completely defined. The true self-

1 Ibid. P. 126.

2Taylor Ch. Heidegger on Language / A Companion to Heidegger / edited by H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall. Malden, Oxford, 2005. С. 449.

3 Heidegger M. The Way to Language / M. Heidegger // On the Way to Language. N. Y., 1971. P. 127.

4Heidegger M. Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, London, 2000. P. 154.

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hood could be obtained in those unrepeatable moments, when particular directions and ways of life-world are open for us. Nevertheless, the owning of the true human selfhood depends not only on our personal endeavor. Thus the realization of the selfhood remains a rare and unexpected Event.

Reference

1.A Companion to Heidegger / Ed. by H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. – 544 p.

2.Crowell S. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger / S. Crowell. N. Y.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2013. – 321 p.

3.Heidegger M. Identity and Difference / M. Heidegger; tr. by Joan Stambaugh. New York, Evanston, London: Harper and Row Publishers, 1969. – 146 p.

4.Heidegger M. Nietzsche. Vol. IV / M. Heidegger; tr. from the German by F.

A.Capuzzi. N. Y.: Harper One, 2001. – 307 p.

5.Heidegger M. The Question Concerning Technology / M. Heidegger // The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays; tr. from the German by

W.Lovitt. N. Y., London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977. – P. 3-35.

6.Heidegger M. The Way to Language / M. Heidegger // On the Way to Language; tr. from the German by P. D. Hertz. N. Y.: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971. – P. 111-138.

7.Heidegger M. Überwindung der Metaphysik / M. Heidegger // Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 2000. – S. 6798.

8.Heidegger M. Zollikon seminars: protocols, conversations, letters / M. Heidegger; ed. by M. Boss; tr. from the German by F. Mayr and R. Askay. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. – 360 p.

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UDC 141 + 171

J.N. McGuirk

Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s Ethics: re-appropriations, transformations and the spectre of Kierkegaard

Abstract. This article focuses on Martin Heidegger's reading of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the implications of this for our understanding of ethics and the life of practical reason. My claim will be that while Heidegger’s reading of the Nichomachean Ethics opens the text by placing the ethical in closer proximity to the ontological question, it ultimately commits a hermeneutical violence on the text by evacuating it of all genuinely ethical meaning and by suppressing entirely the legitimately of the ordinary lived wisdom that was so fundamental to Aristotle's ethical sensibility.

Key words: Heidegger, Aristotle, ethics, hermeneutics, social constitution, authenticity, phronesis.

When commentators attempt to explain the difference between the phenomenological approaches of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, they often do so mediately, by referring to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger is said to be the philosopher of praxis, who follows Aristotle in rejecting the Platonic intellectualism that valorizes only reflection as providing access to the good life. As against this, Husserl is often portrayed as a Platonist for whom the goal of human life is to be found in the disinterested spectating gaze of the philosopher that renders the world of life into objects for contemplation. The idea being that it is necessary to know the world in order to live well in it.1

Now while this view has become outdated with regard to the interpretation of Husserl, and indeed of Plato, the association between Heidegger and Aristotle has remained more or less unchallenged because of the sense that both insist that it is the practical sphere that is the primary arena for the constitution and experience of the meaningful. Of course, Aristotle does finally give priority to the life of contemplation over the life of action, but he remains the first major thinker to pay careful attention to the logic of practice and to the way the good life is articulated therein, and it is for this reason that he was so highly influential in the development Heidegger’s thought.

1 Based on the Socratic maxim that “the unexamined life is not worth living” which was often interpreted as suggesting that life that is not engaged as an object for reflection will be blind and directionless. As far as this reading of Husserl goes, one need only consider the interpretations put forward by Hubert Dreyfus (Dreyfus, 1991), who endorses Heideggerian phenomenology because it is not Husserlian.

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For Heidegger, as Theodore Kisiel puts it, “the true having of philosophy is not in the cognition but in the comporting, the persistent having of inchoate being”

(Kisiel, 1993, p. 235). What it is to be human is first and foremost found in the movement of coming to understand which is enacted in the doings, seeing and engagements of everyday life. While science is, of course, one of the ways in which we make sense of the world and of Being, it is but one way and must, as such, be understood in the light of the relation between life and world rather than as the context for that relation. Indeed, theorizing or doing science is a praxis of life and not primarily a set of dogmas that must simply judge or be judged by non-scientific forms of praxis. In any case, Heidegger’s primary philosophical concern is with pre-scientific life, not as an object of contemplation but because it is in our embeddedness in lived networks of significance that meaning is first given (constituted) and that the question of the meaning of our own being is decided.

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is committed to articulating this Being-in- the-world which is to say that he, like Aristotle, is committed to unfolding the logic of practice as the pre-eminent site of the constitution and navigation of the meaningful. To repeat, Heidegger does not dismiss science or any other theorizing of existence but he does insist that these be seen as specific ways of responding to the enigma of existence already encountered and laments the tendency in Western philosophy to efface the primordiality of the embedded nature of human existence (worldhood, Mitsein) into a schematized relationship of subject and object. Husserl’s notion of intentionality was important in arresting this dualism at the ontological level but tended to validate it at the epistemological level (Heidegger, 1992). That is, while Husserl insisted that subjectivity is always and inextricably oriented towards the world – such that there is no ontological wound between self and world to be healed – his philosophical approach was rooted in epistemological justification in terms of his focus on acts of consciousness (noeses) and their objects (noemata) as the primary enactment of the meaningful.

But while this kind of dualistic thinking is determinative for western thinking, it is not the only story and Heidegger finds in Aristotle, the philosophical resources for another kind of thinking. While Aristotle is never mentioned in Sein und Zeit, there are several lecture courses (Heidegger, 1997, 2001, 2009) prior to the writing of his magnum opus, which testify to the enormous importance of Aristotle’s philosophy to the development of Heidegger’s philosophical development.

And within the Aristotelian corpus as such, it is particularly the central book of the Nichomachean Ethics to which Heidegger pays attention. What he finds in Aristotle’s ethics is not an ethics in the contemporary sense of that word, but a close phenomenology of the structure of practical life and its unfolding of the horizon of the meaning of human being. Aristotle discovers in praxis a movement of questioning which is concerned with the meaning of human existence in a way that is not whol-

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ly dependent on a cognitive comportment towards others, the world and ourselves but which is, rather, played out as a concern for the essence of the human in and as concrete and complex (situational) engagements.

What I want to do in this paper is to look at the use to which Heidegger puts Aristotle and the consequences of this employment. This issue is complex such that the ambition in the present paper can only be to sketch the main lines of Heidegger’s reading. My claim will be that Heidegger’s reading of the

Nichomachean Ethics involves a series of transformations or hermeneutical reorientations of the text and that while certain of these are legitimate, some are problematic. Chief among these problems will be the transformation of the Aristotelian discourse from an ethical to an ontological register as well as Heidegger’s understanding of how phronetic insight should be lived. This last point, as we will see, bears witness to a kind of Kierkegaardian reading of Aristotle which in itself can be problematic.

Hermeneutical clarification

Before we begin, I want to comment briefly on the way in which Heidegger reads Aristotle. Heidegger’s readings of central figures in the tradition of philosophy has always polarized opinion ranging from those who see these readings as shabby scholarship to those who find them indispensable guides to the tradition of philosophy. His lectures on the greats of the tradition were legendary even early in his career and were often described as explosive by those who attended his lectures. He was known for his ability to open texts in entirely new ways in order to allow them to address contemporary problems (Fried, p. 3). Whether it be Leibniz, Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle, Heidegger breathed new life into these texts and engaged their authors as living thinkers rather than as founders of the tradition. This, of course, made his readings controversial inasmuch as he frequently and deliberately read into these texts contemporary concerns which were perhaps not (explicitly at least) present in the texts themselves. He made these texts co-investigators into the problems which concerned him and which he claimed comprised the philosophical challenge of the day.

There is an important hermeneutic question at stake here in terms of what we may legitimately read into or out of a text. While this is a question for a book rather than a short article, let me just say the following. As a founder of the second generation of philosophical hermeneutists, Heidegger advocates the idea that what is of greatest concern is what the text makes possible in terms of understanding the crucial challenges of human existing. As Ricoeur would later put it, it is the world “in front of the text” (Ricœur, 2008, p. 82) that counts even more than the world behind the text. While the origin of the text, its context and the intentions of its author are not unimportant, it remains a text only inasmuch as it can continue to speak to

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