While in the throes of a change in vocation from psychiatry to philosophy Karl Jaspers published a lengthy treatise entitled The Psychology of Worldviews (1919).1 He had composed the book hurriedly, writing it down and sending it off to the printer without re-writes or extensive corrections. In the opening pages of this eminently personal work, which tried to communicate nothing less than its author’s conception of human life and purpose, Jaspers remarked with a tinge of self-criticism that “it is senseless to want to say everything at once” (J, 7). Leaving form to benign neglect, Jaspers pursued in all directions the content for a “psychology of psychology” which would dare to occupy “the outermost boundaries” of existence, in order to learn “what man is” (J, 5). In his 1954 Foreword to the fourth (substantially unchanged) edition, reflecting on the work’s sacrifice of formal outline and perspective to existential experience, Jaspers explained, “. . . I thought about nothing else than authentic human being” (J, x).
After Jaspers’ death in 1969 friends found among his papers an unpublished study of The Psychology of Worldviews by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had originally planned the study as a review of Jaspers’ book. Jaspers himself received a copy of the typescript in June, 1921. More than five decades after Jaspers received his copy, Heidegger reluctantly consented to the essay’s publication in a collection of critical articles on Jaspers’ philosophy.2 In September, 1975 he informed me of his intention to make the Jaspers review the very first of his Wegmarken in the new Collected Edition.
Heidegger had been working intermittently on the manuscript since the appearance of Jaspers’ book, concurrent to his own return to Freiburg University after the war in 1919. At that time he was an “assistant” to Husserl, although he had received his venia legendi (the right to lecture as a Privatdozent) three years earlier. During the period of the essay’s composition Heidegger taught courses on phenomenology and transcendental value-philosophy, on the philosophical foundations of medieval mysticism, on the phenomenology of intuition and expression, as of religion, and on Descartes’ Meditations. Perhaps most interesting in the present context is a seminar held during the winter semester of 1919–20 on Paul Natorp’s General Psychology. At the present time only one of the texts of these courses is available in print. Yet the Jaspers review is the most significant piece of work we have from Heidegger’s hand stemming from the first Freiburg period (1909–23), before the move to Marburg and the publication of Being and Time (1927). As I shall try to show in my “Conclusions” below, of all the early writings it is especially valuable for insight into Heidegger’s way toward Being and Time. For in it are unmistakable intimations of ideas basic to Heidegger’s magnum opus, nascent structures and analyses which appear much earlier and in a more mature form than anyone might have imagined.3
Heidegger’s typescript, some 12,000 words long, shows no articulated divisions except for a brief “Appendix” at the end. Nevertheless, the text proves to have certain natural joints, and may be considered as having five sections:
(a) an introductory appreciation and criticism of Jaspers’ book (pp. 70–76, 1. 37);
(b) a section focusing on “the phenomenon of existence” (pp. 76–89, 1. 21;
(c) the preparation of a new starting-point for the analysis of the phenomenon of existence (pp. 89–94, 1. 32);
(d) a recapitulation of both appreciation and criticism (pp. 94–99);
(e) an “Appendix” (pp. 99–100) offering suggestions for revisions in a possible second edition.
Since Heidegger’s suggested changes were never adopted,4 I shall incorporate this “Appendix” into my account of the general criticism. Sections (a) and (d) belong together, while sections (b) and (c) contain the most original and constructive material. I shall offer a particularly detailed account of (c), where Heidegger’s own projected starting-point emerges, consider the three references to Jaspers’ book in Being and Time itself, and offer some concluding observations. Chapter one thus has five parts: Appreciation and Criticism; The Phenomenon of Existence; Toward a New Beginning; References to Jaspers in Being and Time; and Conclusions.
Heidegger lauds the “self-reliance and significance of achievement” in Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews (70). The work’s aim is to explore the “substantial totality” of man’s spiritual being by advancing to the very limits of his psychic life. Its purpose is not to promote any particular view of the world but to clarify in a philosophical way all such possible views. “Worldview” thus loses some of its historicist implications: Jaspers understands it as “the ultimate nature and totality of man, . . . his preoccupation with the whole” (J, 1).
Heidegger hones in on the “principal issue” of Jaspers’ intended philosophical psychology. He asks whether “the choice and manner of application of the methodological means genuinely correspond” to the motifs Jaspers himself wishes to display; that is, whether “these motifs and tendencies themselves have been grasped radically enough” in terms of what Jaspers himself wishes to accomplish (71). For such critical purposes no “standard measure” of philosophical rigor can be applied. Heidegger’s own critique must therefore go beyond the usual logical and historiological limits. In fact, the epistemological presuppositions behind all such “standards” live a “shadowy existence” in a philosophical tradition that is congested and in decline. At the very outset of his review of Jaspers’ work, one of the central themes of Being and Time thus comes to the fore: the destructuring of the history of ontology (cf. Being and Time, section 6). Heidegger speaks of a “destructuring of what is transmitted in our intellectual history,” relating that destructuring from the start to “the explication of the original motivating situations from which fundamental philosophical experiences spring” (72). In this way Heidegger expresses his “strong suspicion of all Lebensphilosophie that revels in indeterminability and assumes an apparent originality” (72). Only a factically rooted historical self-criticism can successfully dismantle all those presuppositions and preconceptions that occasion the discrepancy between who we are and who we think we are. Such self-criticism may seem to be a detour in Jaspers’ (or anyone’s) study of man, but according to Heidegger it is the only way (73). It is finally time to ask whether we have adequately comprehended “what we ourselves ostensibly ‘have’ and ‘are’—in connection with the fundamental question of the meaning of the ‘I am’” (73). It is this “preliminary work” (74) that is lacking in Jaspers’ study.5
Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews hopes to establish the horizon of the totality of human psychic life by locating its “limit situations.” Man stands out, according to Jaspers, “in certain decisive, essential situations that are bound up with human being as such and are inevitably given with finite existence [Dasein]” (J, 229). For Jaspers, the “primal phenomenon” of human life is the subject-object split and the resulting antinomial character of existence (J, 42; 232). In fact, the subject-object split determines the outline of Jaspers’ own treatise, which first analyzes the subjective “engagements” (Einstellungen) possible for the psyche (J, 52–138), and then elaborates the objective “world images” (Weltbilder) corresponding to them (J, 139–216).6 Behind this central motif of the subject-object split hides a certain set of presuppositions which Jaspers uncritically adopts. Heidegger italicizes the following principal complaint: “In the very starting-point [Problemansatz] a preconception [Vorgriff] of the psychic, articulated in a definite way, is pre-given and works its effects” (74). He continues:
If genuine psychology is to enable us to see “what man is” [J, 5], then preconceptions concerning the ontological meaning [Seinssinn] of this totality of psychic-spiritual life lie within the prerequisite and proper scope of the task. So do those preconceptions about the possible method of clarifying life as it is supposedly lived, and also those about the basic meaning of that from which something like “possibilities” can emerge at all. [75]
Here we sense something of Heidegger’s later definition of Dasein as “possibility-being” and “ability to be” in which basic structures of the “I am” are brought to light without special appeal to “psychic life,” as indeed already belonging to “our factical life-experience” (75). Hence the method for exposing the preconceptions of the subjectivist tradition is to trace their genesis in a concrete analysis of the basic possibilities of human existence. So long as the problem of method is not made thematic, however, the analysis cannot genuinely advance. In the fourth section of his review, which recapitulates his appreciation and criticism, Heidegger explains why this circle (cf. SZ, section 2) is unavoidable. If existence or Dasein is the “object” to be examined, no mere “observation” of it is adequate unless its own interpretive behavior becomes an issue for it; in other words, unless it becomes aware of its own history (95). Existential explication requires more than a typology or description of certain human behaviors; it must be more than a “looking around to see what is there,” more than a regional depiction. For its own tendency is to search for the whole. Nor can it spare itself this task by appealing to the “infinitely flowing” character of life, which will not allow its particularity and individuality to be fixed in concepts.
Instead of repeating again and again the oft-quoted individuum est ineffabile, it is high time we ask what sense the fari [speech] should have, and what kind of grasping should come to expression. We should also ask whether the above dictum doesn’t presuppose a certain way of conceiving the individual that is ultimately rooted in an aesthetic, extrinsic observation of the “whole personality.” Such extrinsic observation still remains in force even when the personality is “understood” in immanent-psychological fashion: the objective, image-like aspect is maintained (cf. for example Dilthey). [96]7
Indeed, what has just been described is the image of the world that Jaspers’ own observations propagate—although Jaspers’ verstehende Psychologie wishes to refrain from all such propagation. “Mere observation does not give what it most wants to give, namely, the possibility of radical re-examination and decision, as well as a . . . rigorous consciousness of the necessity of methodical interrogation. . . . As one advances in reflection, one can make others aware only by going ahead a stretch of the path oneself” (98). It is not enough to reserve this methodological problem for a “general psychology.” Failure to see the pervasive influence of unclarified preconceptions in all specific or derivative psychologies is “a mistaking and an underestimation of the genuine methodological problematic” (98). Jaspers cannot simply observe and describe helter-skelter what is “there”—he must broach “a radical interrogation [Befragen] which keeps itself in the question” (99). Yet the “primary Befragte” (cf. SZ, section 2) is the “there” of the questioner himself, Dasein or Existenz.
The formal object of inquiry for both Jaspers and Heidegger is “existence.” This is “the phenomenon of the ‘I am,’” whose “ontological meaning” is to be interpreted (76). Heidegger remarks parenthetically that “the fundamental meaning of all philosophical concepts and conceptual matrices” rests in the problem of “existence” (76–77). The nucleus of Jaspers’ understanding of existence, and the “strongest” part of his entire analysis, is the description of the “limit situations.”
Jaspers discusses three “limit situations” that exhibit the pathos of existence—its striving, the opposing contradictions, and the resultant antinomies.8 “For our experience, absolute accident, death, and guilt seem to stand everywhere at the limit” (J, 230). The last two come to play a central role in the analysis of Dasein (cf. SZ, sections 49–53; 58–60). But for Jaspers they are primarily evidence of the subject-object split and of the presumably essential human need for unity, totality, and infinity. These notions are common to the Lebensþhilosoþhie of the day, which also leaves them unclarified (78–79).9 Yet these philosophies of life express a tendency toward the phenomenon of existence, which Heidegger, in a free adaptation of Jaspers’ use of the word (cf. J, 380), divides and italicizes as “Da sein” (79–80). He credits Jaspers with having led Lebensphilosophie to the central issue of the “phenomenology of existence,” but faults him for being unable to explicate the latter according to the “applicable conceptual means” (80). Heidegger’s aim in this critical appraisal is “to discuss the leading preconception [i.e., the phenomenon of existence] with regard to what it intends and how it intends it; that is to say, to delineate conceptually the phenomenon of existence with respect to its own suitability . . .” (83).
For Jaspers, the limit situations have meaning only by virtue of what in some unexplained way lies beyond the limit, namely, “the infinite totality of life,” particularly “the endless life of the spirit” (80). Heidegger criticizes the covert manner in which biological infinitude is borrowed for “the spirit” without an attempt to clarify either of these phenomena (81). A hopelessly obscure appeal to several senses of “infinity”—this is what results from Jaspers’ “mere observation.” Even if Jaspers wishes to deflate the pretensions of metaphysics by invoking the “stream” of transient life, the metaphysical substructure of totality and infinity perdures (82). Such “specifically Bergsonian argumentation,” in Heidegger’s view, because it overlooks all problems concerning “significance, concepts, and language,” cannot offer more than “a very rough and vague elaboration” of what “the fundamental meaning of life and of our whole life-experience” might be (82).
As I have already observed, Jaspers’ leading preconception regarding the phenomenon of existence—the psychic Urphänomen—is the subject-object split (83). Effectively presupposed thereby is a “fundamental reality” of something “unsplit,” as it were, toward which life strives. Heidegger insists that it makes little difference whether one overtly defines this Absolute in traditional metaphysical ways or makes covert appeals to it (84). Resisting Jaspers’ starting-point, and anticipating his own later work, Heidegger suggests that life’s striving must be more closely defined as the factical inclination toward one’s own existence; in other words, as an a priori structure “of the disclosure [Aufschliessen] and holding open [Offenhalten] of a horizon of expectations with respect to concrete preoccupations” (84–85). Such a definition should produce the genuine structures for explicating the fundamental experience (Grunderfahrung) of existence.
Nevertheless, Heidegger appreciates Jaspers’ individual analyses of the limit situations, especially that of death. Jaspers exhibits clearly the antinomial nature of death, “a universal situation” which at the same time is “a specific, individual” one. He makes much of man’s “utterly unique relation to his own death, incomparable to any universal or particular experience of the death of the Other” (J, 261). The relevance of Jaspers’ account of death for Heidegger’s Being and Time (cf. section 47, “The possibility of experiencing the death of others and of grasping a whole Dasein”) is unmistakable; but Jaspers’ eclectic account, replete with extended quotations from Buddhist religious texts, Goethe, and Kierkegaard, differs sharply from Heidegger’s programmatic analysis. Also lacking in Jaspers’ account is a description of man’s access to such limit situations (87), something Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety will attempt to supply (cf. SZ, section 40). Heidegger’s admiration of Jaspers’ empassioned description is riddled by doubts concerning the role such accounts—and their recounting—play in existence as such. “Our critical observation therefore finds itself again and again thrown back to the problem of preconceptions” (87).
Jaspers’ sources for the “antinomies” of existence and its striving for the “infinite” are, of course, Kant (cf. especially the first antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason) and Kierkegaard, who further “purifies” infinity of its theological trappings (88). Yet do these sources provide an adequate base for a full explication of existence? Or do they not by virtue of concepts transmitted in the metaphysical tradition—infinity, totality, contradiction—cover over the fundamental experience Jaspers himself wishes to expose? Heidegger suspects that the latter is the case, and that a new point of entry into the phenomenon of existence is needed.
Existence is . . . a definite manner of Being, a certain sense of the “is” which “is” essentially the sense of (I) “am.” It is a sense that is not possessed genuinely in any sort of theoretical opinion, but rather in the process of the “am,” which is an ontological mode of the Being of the “I.” Formally designated, existence suggests the Being of the self understood in such fashion. . . . Decisive is the fact that I have myself—the fundamental experience in which I encounter myself as a self, so that, living in this experience, I can question its meaning in an appropriate way, corresponding to the sense of my “I am.” [89]
These words appear, not in Being and Time, but in the central pages of Heidegger’s review of Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews, completed before June, 1921. (Cf. SZ, sections 9 and 25.)
The fundamental experience of existence with which all explication must begin is one that “radically and purely involves me myself [um mich selbst geht],” not as a particular instance of some “universal,” but as this (my) experience itself. Explication of such experience must guard against the perpetual danger of objectifying the “I” as some sort of “stream of consciousness” or “nexus of life-experiences” which would congeal the meaning of the “am.” Such “objectifying preconceptions” must be subjected to “radical suspicion” and untiring scrutiny (90).
All theoretical explanations, seeking as they do the “what-it-is” of things, distort the way in which I have my self and trouble myself about it in the factical life I lead in my environment. The “I” must be taken not as “the concept of an empirical subject” but as “the full, concrete, historical, .factical self” (90). Formally, of course, the “I am,” as a meaning of Being, a “how” of Being,10 can be transmuted into the form “he, she, it is,” the form of statement that tells “what-it-is.” Yet the last-named modes are appropriate to the Being of beings at hand, vorhanden (90), in a way that existence never is.11 The fundamental experience of having my self cannot be reduced to any immanent-psychic act of consciousness, for which the “am” is reduced to an “I” that is present-at-hand. The “am” is not so readily accessible to interpretation. For experience has an “authentically historical extension into the past,” which is itself experienced within an always presupposed (vorweggesetzt12) horizon of expectations. Heidegger elaborates:
The decisive task is the phenomenological explication of the “how” of this process of experience, within the whole complex of problems involving the phenomenon of existence, according to its fundamentally historical meaning. . . . We must achieve the meaning of the explication itself as an interpretive process that corresponds to this task. We must maintain access to the explicate themselves, in accord with their essential character as hermeneutical concepts, as essentially open to ever-renewed interpretation. . . . [91]
The phenomenological basis for the explication of existence must be the facticity of its own fundamental experience (cf. SZ, section 12, p. 56, and section 41). The latter is essentially “historical,” in that it is experienced in process as a factical life-situation, enacted, executed, and achieved in the course of a life-history (ein sich selbst so erfahrendes vollzugsgeschichtliches Phänomen) (91). This process yields the “how” of “the self’s taking trouble concerning itself [or: preoccupation with itself, Bekümmerung des Selbst um sich selbst]” (91). Heidegger later calls such Sichbekümmern (in section 41 of Being and Time) Sorge, “care.”13
Bekümmerung betrays a peculiar union of past, present, and future for the self. The phenomenon of existence, whose basic experience is a taking trouble concerning itself, is disclosed (erschliesst sich) as radically historical (92).14
On the basis of this process of Sichbekümmern, existence may be said to possess conscience (92), a concept central to the later existential-ontological analysis of Dasein (cf. SZ, sections 54–60). Conscience, in turn, provides the basis for an original understanding of historicality in a narrower “historiological” sense (cf. SZ, section 76). Furthermore, the essential relatedness of having-a-self to history in an original sense—from which the discipline of “history” derives—and to having-a-conscience is usually covered over and hidden. Existence has a tendency to “fall” into ready-made meanings and possibilities, so much so that a new exposition of the phenomenon of existence must be bound to a destructuring of the tradition.15
With that we arrive at the most striking of all the intimations of Being and Time in this early essay. It merits extended quotation.
With respect to what it experiences, our concrete, factical experience of life has its own tendency to fall into the “objective” meanings of the experienceable environment. From the prevailing ontological character of the objective meanings which this falling experiences we can understand that the self, with respect to the meaning of its Being, can be experienced in an objectified sense (“personality” or the “ideal of humanity”). Such a direction for experience comes to the theoretical grasp and to philosophical conception in ever stronger measures as the experienced and known past insinuates itself into the present situation as an objective tradition. As soon as this particular burden of factical life [i.e., the past] is seen in terms of tradition (which is to be understood in a manifold sense), a burden that fatefully exercises its effects most directly in the worldly experiences of one’s having-a-self, the insight develops that the concrete possibility of bringing phenomena of existence into view and specifying them in genuine conception can manifest itself only when the concrete, relevant, and effectively experienced tradition is destructured, precisely with reference to the ways and means by which it specifies self-realizing experience; and only when, through the destructuring, the basic motivating experiences that have become effective are dismantled and discussed in terms of their originality. Such destructuring actually remains bound to one’s own concrete and fully historical preoccupation with the self. [92–93]
The central question of a new beginning for the exposition of the phenomenon of existence closes with a discussion of the problem of method and an enumeration of several concrete tasks (94). The problem of method, of the initial steps of such exposition and of its access to the phenomenon, cannot remain extrinsic to the interpretation itself. The genuine problem—largely ignored in Jaspers’ work—is “the method of the historically-in-process interpretive explication of the concrete, fundamental ways of experiencing one’s factically preoccupied having-one’s-self” (94). Without specifying the several tasks outlined at the end of this third section of the review, we can still attend to their general character and to Heidegger’s own direction in search of a new beginning. The latter resists quite strongly any interpretation of the “self” in terms of current psychological notions, and hence tries to surpass from the outset the subjectivist understanding of the “I am” that supports such notions.
The point is not casually to introduce the personality and then to apply to it something gained from some philosophical tradition or other. The point is to take the concrete self as the starting-point of the problem and to bring it to the appropriate fundamental level of phenomenological interpretation, namely, that related to our factical experience of life, in this way bringing the concrete self to “givenness.” From our necessarily restricted remarks one thing should have become clear: the authentic phenomenon of existence designates a manner of access appropriate to it; the phenomenon of existence is to be had only in a definite way of achieving the “how” of experience; precisely this how of the appropriation [Aneignung], and even of the very beginning of its appropriating, is decisive. The factical, historically-in-process life in the factical “how” of this problematic of the self’s preoccupation with and appropriation of itself belongs originally to the meaning of the factical “I am.” [93]
It is surely not out of place to recall that the questions of existence, history, and a “new beginning” in method had been brewing for some time in Heidegger.16 Husserl’s young assistant had been reading Dilthey at least since 1917. Dilthey fulfilled two vital functions for Heidegger. First, he elevated Bergsonian Lebensphilosophie beyond Bergson’s own intuitionism to a sophisticated hermeneutics of history. Second, he fortified Heidegger’s growing resistance to the bloodless transcendental consciousness of Husserl’s Ideas I (1913) by considering the full thinking-willing-feeling life of historical human beings, hence proving himself to be, as Pöggeler puts it, “a better phenomenologist than Husserl.” Even Heidegger’s admiration for the Logical Investigations did not blind him to his own task, which required him to place practical, “lived” truth on the same level as theoretical, cognitive truth: the transcendental ego would have to be brought to confront its finitude as factical, historical, life-in-process. The word “process” (Vollzug) is particularly important—we confront it constantly in the Jaspers review. Heidegger always and everywhere prefers Vollzugssinn to the more Husserlian Gehaltssinn: the sense of historical process, enactment, and execution is more decisive than any eidetic content or cognitive import. “Religious” experience offers a number of striking examples of such factical, process-bound life-experience, although the fact that the word has to appear in quotation marks indicates that it has a special sense in Heidegger’s case.
During the winter semester of 1916–17 Heidegger had taught a number of courses for the Catholic theology faculty in Freiburg, even though by that time Catholicism had become problematic for him. It is not—as Husserl believed—that his interest in Luther and Kierkegaard had “converted” him to protestantism. I imagine Heidegger’s rejection of his Jesuit training and his faith to be similar to that of his fictional contemporary, Stephen Dedalus, though far less passionate and bitter. Whatever his own religious state of mind, Heidegger acceded gladly to Husserl’s wish after the war that Heidegger devote his teaching to problems in the phenomenology of history and religion, in order to counterbalance Oskar Becker’s work in the phenomenology of mathematics and the natural sciences. In the winter semester of 1920–21 he taught an “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.”17 There he chose the model of belief in the Second Coming of Christ in early Christian communities as one “factical experience of life” that would burst the constraints of eidetic phenomenology. He referred to Paul’s epistles, especially I Thessalonians 4–5, where Paul invokes the Christian’s hope in Christ’s return. That return would follow not in chronological but kairological time, which is to say, at the fitting season. The critical period or fitting season was not a temporal object for prediction and control but, on the contrary, a matter of the risks of an open future. The Parousia of Christ’s Second Coming was of neither present nor past nor future, but a moment or “flash of an eye” (Augenblick) encompassing and transcending the ordinary dimensions of time. The early Christian experience was not one of mere expectation; the Christian did not simply await the Christ; his or her vigilance or wakefulness, as a factical life-experience, required a new conception of both history and temporality.
In his course on “Augustine and Neo-Platonism,” taught in the summer of 1921, Heidegger argued that while Augustine originally thought in terms of the factical experience of his own life he falsified that experience by subsuming it under neo-Platonic concepts. To Augustinian philosophy Heidegger opposed Luther’s rejection of the Patristic-Scholastic adaptation of Greek metaphysics and science and his decision to commit the world and its works to the Cross. In all this Heidegger had been impressed by Franz Overbeck’s interpretation of eschatology as the core experience of the early Christians, one that found its echoes in Augustine, medieval mysticism, Luther, and Kierkegaard. Yet Heidegger’s interest was not primarily religious or theological. What intrigued him in the Christian experience was the way in which life-in-process was grasped as a whole, gripped in the “hour of salvation,” an hour that was as much an instant as a lifetime. What captivated him was the factical, historical experience of life represented in such a grasp.
At least since his 1919–20 lecture course on “Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology” Heidegger had viewed such life-experiences as the proper theme of phenomenology, the “science of origins.” According to Pöggeler, however, it was not until the years 1922–23 that Heidegger attained the decisive insight into the “hermeneutics of facticity” which he had been practicing for some time. His insight was that although life-in-process or factical existence was defined by time the traditional metaphysical sense of time (as “presence,” based on the “presentness” of things) touched only the shallowest dimension of life. This crucial insight is not fully present in the Jaspers review of 1919–21 or in any of the courses contemporaneous with it; but that Heidegger is on the very verge of it is clear from his emphasis on the necessity of a “destructuring” of the tradition. Heidegger’s state of mind—better, the state of the question in him—at the time of the Jaspers review emerges clearly from an interior monologue fashioned for him by Pöggeler and Hogemann (pp. 53–54). Here the “new beginning” envisaged by Heidegger for philosophy of life, philosophy of existence, and hermeneutical phenomenology takes on well-defined contours.
To have a self—which is what life is all about—is not to have an isolated subject, and certainly not an ego as object. It is rather the process by which life achieves or loses a certain familiarity with itself. . . . Life settles itself into its world. It is not an ego that must first build bridges to things. . . . The problems of logic and of language thus receive a new foundation. . . . “Meaning” is not a world on its own, to be grasped as static and inert; it is rather the primal own-ness of factical life and must be conceived in accord with its structure in terms of life. Life, in its factical character, is a nexus of meaningfulness. To be sure, a particular human proclivity may level such meaningfulness to sheer reification or “objectification.” But such objectification has to be grasped as a “devitalizing” of life: as a result of it, living loses its “tendentious” structure; loses the meaningful relations to its world; loses its life. Because it exists in process, within its factical, meaningful contexts, life occurs in “situations.” It draws on the fundamental sense of its self when it grasps itself in process [Vollzug]. This way it comprehends itself as “historical” life; this way it is on the way to its origins.
To this imagined monologue only one or two thoughts specifically aimed at Jaspers must be adduced:
Life must be conceived of and described in terms of existence, and existence in terms of how I have my self. Such descriptions must dismantle the notions our tradition attaches to the self. Yet neither description nor destructuring can afford to be careless of concepts. Life-in-process is not a pot of freely flowing porridge. Enthusiasm is not enough. Though there be process, yet there is method in it.
Heidegger mentions Jaspers three times in Being and Time, at pp. 249n., 301—2n., and 338n. All three references are to Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews. Because the second reference is of central importance I shall consider it last.
First reference. At the end of section 49, “The delimitation of the existential analysis of death against other possible interpretations of the phenomenon,” Heidegger invites a comparison between his existential analysis of death and those of Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf Unger, Georg Simmel, and “especially” Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews—its general theory of the “limit situations” and “death” in particular. “Jaspers conceives of death along the guidelines of the phenomenon of the ‘limit situation’ which he explicates and whose fundamental significance surpasses all typology of ‘engagements’ and ‘world images’ [Einstellungen und Weltbilder].” (Jaspers’ first two chapters, we recall, were entitled “Engagements” and “World Images.”) Thus even six years later, in Being and Time, Heidegger finds Jaspers’ particular analyses of the limit situations stimulating, but the structures in which they are confined tenuous and unenlightening.
Third reference. In section 68a, “The temporality of understanding,” Heidegger refers to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of “the moment” (Augenblick) and also to Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews, pp. 108ff. and 419–32. Heidegger’s opposition to Jaspers’ Kierkegaardian view of “the moment” in terms of “time and eternity,” as the “cancellation of time, the present of the eternal” (J, 112), is vigorous. The “moment” Heidegger wishes to speak of in section 68 of Being and Time cannot be clarified by reference to the derivative conception of time as a series of “now” points (cf. SZ, section 81). Nor is it an escape from Dasein’s past and future: Dasein’s resolute openedness (Entschlossenheit) preserves its authentic present from complete dispersal precisely by holding onto its past and future. Jaspers’ interpretation of the “moment” wanders toward that unclarified “eternity” or “infinity” Heidegger had criticized in his review and which he continues to resist in Being and Time (cf. SZ, pp. 330–31).
Central reference. Toward the close of section 60, “The existential structure of the proper ability to be that is evidenced in conscience,” where Heidegger defines Dasein’s “situation” in terms of openedness, authenticity, and the call of care, Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews is once more invoked. That work’s problematic goes in the direction of “thematic existential anthropology,” which should describe in more detailed fashion than a fundamental ontology of Dasein can various “factical existentiell possibilities” for such phenomena as conscience. With reference to Jaspers’ book Heidegger continues:
Here the question of “what man is” is posed and defined in terms of what he essentially can be (cf. the Foreword to the first edition). From this the principal existential-ontological significance of the “limit situation” comes to light. One misses the philosophical import of Psychologie der Weltanschauungen entirely if one “utilizes” it solely as a reference-work for “types of worldviews.”
Several pages later (SZ, 308), Heidegger employs Jaspers’ term Grenzsituation in a passage that clearly exhibits the word’s “principal existential-ontological significance.”
The indeterminacy of one’s own ability to be, although it has become certain in our resolution [Entschluss], manifests itself wholly first of all in being toward death. Anticipation brings Dasein before a possibility that is constantly certain, yet which remains undetermined at every moment as to when possibility will become impossibility. Anticipation makes it manifest that this being has been thrown into the indeterminacy of its “limit situation”; opened to it [zu der entschlossen], Dasein achieves its proper ability to be a whole.
That the limit situation of Dasein’s being toward death, revealed in anxiety and sustained in anticipatory openedness, is essential to the very idea of an existential analysis and fundamental ontology of Dasein, is revealed clearly in a reading of the methodologically pivotal sections of Being and Time.18 All these sections testify to the importance of concrete phenomenal grounds, existentiell possibilities, and ontic testimony for phenomenological, existential-ontological investigation. The “limit situation” disclosed in anxiety—where the disclosure and what is disclosed are existentially selfsame (cf. section 40, p. 188)—and supported by conscience as the call of care, in other words, Dasein’s being thrown into death, is the most abyssal phenomenal ground, the most proper existentiell possibility, and the most compelling ontic testimony.
Heidegger’s praise of Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews, whose content offered much that Heidegger had been looking for, is tempered by his criticism of the work’s jumbled form and lack of sustained method. In his Foreword to the fourth edition, Jaspers concedes that the language of his early work “achieved no kind of form at all” (J, viii). While still affirming the book’s basic posture and tendency (J, xii), he admits that it is “somewhat unpreoccupied” with philosophical rigor (J, viii). Many of its concepts simply “swept over” him and were “not systematically thought through” (J, ix).19
I have dealt with Heidegger’s criticism of Jaspers’ preconceptions at some length, although in the preceding section we saw something of Jaspers’ more positive contributions to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein. These may be reduced to two essential matters. First, Jaspers’ very language—especially such terms as Existenz, Existenzphänomen, and Dasein—suggests how the starting-point of the prevailing “philosophy of life” may be surpassed. Second, the idea of a “limit situation” which would expose the essential character of existence, and the description of death as such a situation for each existence, foreshadow the methodological importance of the analysis of death in Being and Time.20
Before summarizing the ways in which Heidegger’s review points toward his major work, we should note several essential aspects of Being and Time that are not yet present in the earlier piece. For it would be foolhardy to argue that the project of Being and Time assumes its definitive shape prior to the Marburg years, 1923–28. In this early piece the terms Jemeinigkeit and Eigentlichkeit do not appear, although the notions seem to be brewing. Dasein as “being in the world” is not explicitly invoked, nor, understandably enough, are the detailed structures of Dasein’s being-in or the worldhood of the world presented. The existential structures of Befindlichkeit, Verstehen and Rede do not arise as such. Also missing is the crucial conception of temporality (Zeidichkeit) as the very essence of Da-sein and the horizon of the question of the meaning of Being in general. While implied in such phrases as the “Seinssinn of the (I) am,” the priority of the question of Being itself does not come to light. The distinctions between ontic and ontological, existentiell and existential, are lacking; the definitive formulation of the project of a phenomenological existential analysis, conceived as fundamental ontology, does not yet appear. Yet what is genuinely surprising is the extent to which the Jaspers review anticipates what Eugen Fink has called Heidegger’s “breakthrough work.”
We might now try to list the most striking of the foreshadowings of Being and Time in this early writing:
Awareness of the problem of method and a desire that the exposition of the “phenomenon of existence” thematize the problem of its own phenomenal access and process. Even at this early date the exposition is called a hermeneutics.
Attention to the ontological foundations of such hermeneutical exposition. Existence is a mode or “how” of Being, in the form (I) “am,” disclosed as historical Being.
Insistence on a concrete, factical, and complete account of the historizing Being of the “am,” based on genuine experiences, not theoretical constructs; in a manner appropriate to the basic experience of having-my-self, not to beings present at hand.
Resistance to the derived subjectivist interpretation of the (bracketed) “I,” and the proposed destructuring or dismantling of the Cartesian tradition.
Finally, we might try to locate the proper place of this essay among the other of Heidegger’s “early writings.” His doctoral dissertation, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism (1914), does seem the work of an unhistorischer Mathematiker, as Heidegger styled himself in its Foreword. For whatever reasons, the dissertation remains strictly within the confines of the neo-Kantian approach of his directors. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s resistance to the psychologistic reduction of phenomena is present in both this work and in the later Jaspers piece. For the dissertation, the matter to be safeguarded is the ideal content of judgment, whereas in the Jaspers review it is the ontological sense of the “am”; but the opposition to psychologism is itself constant. The Habilitation dissertation, The Doctrine of Categories and of Judgment in Duns Scotus (1916), shows the extent to which the problem of historical interpretation, primarily through the study of Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings, had shaken the apparently secure formal-systematic approach of the young academic. In effect, this treatise exhibits Heidegger’s incipient return to his original interest, metaphysics (rather than theory of knowledge), awakened by his early contact with Franz Brentano’s dissertation on “being” in Aristotle—discussed in chapter four, below. The Jaspers review manifests a much stronger emphasis on the problem of history—in keeping with the venia legendi lecture of 1916, “The Concept of Time in the Discipline of History”—and a corresponding shift of interest away from the primarily epistemological concerns of the Habilitation dissertation itself.
Heidegger’s first published article, “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy” (1912), spurns the neo-Kantian standpoint of these later dissertations in favor of a “critical realism” more attuned to the Aristotelian-ontological than to the modern-epistemological approach to philosophy. In a sense, this “opus one” of Heidegger embodies more of the Heidegger of Being and Time (cf. sections 13 and 43), and therefore also more of the Heidegger of the Jaspers review, than do his own later “school” writings. On the other hand, the discipline exercised in these dissertations in the neo-Kantian and Husserlian style doubtless contributes to Heidegger’s awareness of the problems of approach, method, and structure—and to his later criticism of Jaspers in these respects.
However, none of these early writings indicates as clearly as the Jaspers review does the fundamental direction eventually taken by the author of Being and Time. Heidegger’s review exhibits tendencies away from epistemology toward ontology, away from mathematical formalism toward hermeneutical exposition, away from timeless truths to the disclosures of history, away from problems of essence toward those of existence. At the same time, Heidegger’s direction maintains the rigor, precision, and definition typical of each of the former. It culminates in a work no one may call “early,” whose interlacing of content and form, matter and method, does not cease to astonish.
What we must now proceed to examine is the way in which Heidegger’s criticisms of Jaspers “come home”; that is, how they recoil on his own project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time. For Heidegger’s methodological rigor will soon crack the fundament of his own magnum opus.