The first section of this chapter provides a general discussion of the nature of Dasein's timeliness as the 'meaning' of its being, that is, as what makes its being possible, distinguishes it from simple consciousness of events and objects in time, and indicates why Heidegger describes this basic condition of Dasein as 'timeliness,' with all the word's connotations.1 Section 3.2 introduces Heidegger's general notion of 'ecstatic' timeliness and his technical vocabulary while Sections 3.3 and 3.4 discuss inauthentic and authentic timeliness as its two concrete modes. Section 3.5 examines Heidegger's existential notions of conscience and guilt, and Section 3.6 previews Dasein's historicality by examining Heidegger's formal analysis of it in Being and Time.
Heidegger warns us that, given the dominant understanding of being as well as the common notion of time and the standard philosophical reflections upon it, his notion of the timeliness of Dasein may seem strange. This timeliness does not 'correspond to that which is accessible to the ordinary understanding as "time."' Neither the way time is conceived in our ordinary experience nor the problems arising from our consciousness of it can function as starting points for Heidegger's analysis of time (304).
As I indicated in the Introduction, the time of Dasein's being is more a matter of kairos, the time of opportunity, than of chronos, the time of clocks, although one of Heidegger's goals is to show that the latter is derivative from the former. As we will see, timeliness puts Dasein 'in time with' the disclosure of being in cultural practices; it is the 'horizon for the understanding of being which belongs essentially to Dasein' (BPP 228/324). To comprehend Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time, we must, as he will later say, keep in mind that he is ultimately and always attempting to attain 'the transcendental horizon of the question of being.' All of his analyses, and 'above all the interpretation of time, should be evaluated strictly as they aim at making the question of being possible' (ER 97/96). Heidegger can legitimately argue that even in Being and Time he was aiming beyond the timeliness of Dasein and toward the Temporality of being (TB 32/34). We will see his target more clearly as we work our way to Chapter 5's account of Temporality as the meaning of being.
Never in Being and Time does Heidegger descend to the level of a detailed analysis of the particular aspects of time-consciousness similar to the one offered by Edmund Husserl, or, for that matter, Kant's or Bergson's analyses, although his discussion has almost universally been read as a sort of 'Existentialist' version of the Husserl lectures which he himself edited, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness.2 Supposedly, he added to Hussed's discussion some advice on how the individual person should live his life; for example, he should be nonconformist, open to change, and perpetually aware of his perhaps imminent demise. This recommended 'authentic timeliness' is, it seems, no more than a heightened awareness of events in time and a more responsive attitude toward the people and things that one encounters.3 Most commentators failed to find any route from such claims to the promised investigation of the meaning of being and hence concluded that Being and Time was sidetracked into a dead end of subjectivity.
The 'transcendental horizon' for the understanding of being which Heidegger seeks, however, is not the 'fringe' of expectations belonging to time-consciousness, as it was for Husserl, and Being and Time neither started nor ended with such subjectivity. The horizon, Heidegger later says, is 'not that of subjective consciousness, but rather it is defined as the existential-ecstatic timeliness of Dasein' (IM 18/14). As we saw earlier, Dasein's existence, its standing toward being, is the condition for the possibility of consciousness, not vice versa. Consciousness does not create the openness to what-is but is derivative from it (Way 272/375). Similarly, time-consciousness or the consciousness of things and events in time does not create timeliness but is derivative from it. We are 'timely' in our skillful dealings with things, not just our explicit awareness of them, and these dealings show Dasein's dependence on a disclosure of being. In lectures and works immediately following Being and Time Heidegger took pains to contrast his own approach and subject matter with those of Husserl and Bergson. He asserts that, from Aristotle and Augustine down through Kant and on to these early twentieth-century thinkers, the philosophers all take time as something present-at-hand, even when they locate it 'in' the soul, and they all operate with an unexamined, inadequate conception of subjectivity. However, what Heidegger said was too late and did too little to counter the misunderstanding already imposed upon his thinking by the pervasive presuppositions in traditional and contemporary philosophy.4
We must recall the preceding analysis in Being and Time to situate Heidegger's discussion of timeliness. Heidegger has already laid out the essential dimensions of Dasein and traced them back to their origin in care. At the beginning of the timely reinterpretation of the structures of care, Heidegger reminds us that, 'Dasein's being-whole as care indicates: ahead-of-itself already-in (a world) as being-at-home-with (what-is within the world).' He adds that the 'primordial unity of the structure of care lies in timeliness' (327).
In Division One Heidegger had already argued for a priority in the existential structures of Dasein's being, placing understanding as always ahead-of-itself as the most important dimension, the one which releases Dasein's ability to be 'already-in' a world, at home with the roles, goals, and everyday items of the everyday environment. Timeliness, as the meaning of Dasein's being, is the condition for the possibility of the existence of this entity that understands being. As Heidegger puts it in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, emphasizing the whole sentence,'The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is timeliness itself' (BPP 228/323). Such timeliness, Heidegger says, 'times itself,' that is creates its own unity as it manifests itself (350). We will explore this idea throughout the rest of the chapter.5
The 'timing' does not happen most fundamentally in a moment to moment flow of consciousness. In lectures given shortly after the publication of Being and Time which present the subject of timeliness in a different context, one which bypasses an analysis of death and thereby avoids its diverting tendency, Heidegger comments that 'world-entry' only happens when timeliness times itself (MFL 211/274). Such world-entry does not happen, say, when an individual consciousness awakens to start the day. Rather world-entry is characteristic of Dasein's timely, historical 'happening' (MFL 194/251).
In Heidegger's explanation of world-entry, the concrete illustrations he uses are the 'metaphysics of myth' (MFL 209/270) and the end of the history of philosophy, not, like Husserl, the consciousness of a melody or the meaning of a sentence made possible by retention and expectation of its absent elements. Consciousness finds its unity in the significance of the world 'timed' around it, a world in which melodies and sentences are paid such attention, and Dasein's world is the phenomenon for which wc are trying to account.
Thus, we need to see how timeliness makes possible the understanding of being that we all share, not just how it makes possible a person's consciousness. We may well ask at this point, why call this phenomenon, whatever it is, 'timeliness' at all? What has it got to do with time in the ordinary sense such that we should call it 'primordial time'? Heidegger thinks that if he shows that 'the "time" which is accessible to Dasein's common understanding is not primordial but arises rather from authentic timeliness, then, in accordance with the principle "a potiori fit denominatio," we are justified in designating "primordial time" the timeliness we have just laid bare' (329). The ordinary conception of time as a series of 'nows' is supposedly derivative from inauthentic timeliness, which in turn is derivative from authentic timeliness. Both modes of timeliness are thus primordial in comparison with ordinary time. After completing our account of timeliness in this chapter, we will examine the 'derivation' of ordinary time in the next.
Heidegger distinguishes three 'ecstases' of timeliness. This new term, like 'existence,' indicates a 'standing out' manifest in Dasein's being, but this time the etymological play is from Greek, not Latin, although the literal meaning is similar: 'to stand out toward' or 'to stand out from.' The usual definitions of ecstatic as 'blissful,' 'overjoyed,' or 'astonished' have no relevance to Heidegger's use, and neither does the more closely literal Greek sense of 'displacement' if this is taken as indicating a need to get out of some momentary now of consciousness and certainly not a displacement from self as in religious ecstasy. The creation of a field of possibilities for Dasein's activities by ecstatic timeliness is precisely what makes possible its unified selfhood and the consciousness of each particular Dasein.
The specific dimensions of timeliness are labeled, in order of priority: (1) the 'future,' or in German literally the 'to come,' (2) 'having-beenness' or the 'haying-been,' and (3) the 'present' or the 'pre-sent.' The latter term Heidegger frequently turns into a verb (translated as 'making-present' or 'waiting-toward') to emphasize that the present is an active process of making things present, dealing with them as objects of our everyday concerns (326).6
The second term is obviously part of a technical vocabulary, but we should regard all three as such. To reinforce their distinctive meaning, we will use the following terms:
| the having-been | the pre-sent | the to-come |
While not paralleling the German term or its etymology, calling the 'present' ecstasis the 'pre-sent' indicates the way in which the significance of Dasein's activities in this dimension originates from the 'to-come' and the 'having-been' and the way in which all three dimensions are tied to the 'destiny of being' sent from Ancient Greece by the way the question of being was posed and subsequently answered. Although I have tried to avoid using jargon too frequently, in this case, as with the term 'timeliness,' resorting to it helps break down the reader's attachment to the assumption that we are merely describing elements of time-consciousness correlated with 'parts' of time or that a person's experience of time constitutes the subject of Division Two of Being and Time.
The ecstases do not represent parts of the time which is measured by a clock or calendar, nor do they have any time-measurable relationship to one another. Heidegger says: 'Timing does not signify that the ecstases come in a "succession." The to-come is not later than having-been, and having-been is not earlier than the present' (350).7 Despite the way the chart might be read, we should not think that the to-come starts tomorrow or five minutes from now; neither does having-been occur before today.
The dimensions of timeliness are intertwined; "Timeliness times itself as the future making-present as having-been' (350).8 In this tortuous jargon Heidegger characterizes the phenomenon of timeliness as having a particular kind of unity. The dimension of 'having-been' arises 'from the future and in such a way that the future which has been, or, better, is "beening," releases the present from itself' (326). The odd English matches Heidegger's neologistic German. We will need the rest of the chapter to unpack its meaning.
The description indicates the priority Heidegger grants the ecstases: the future is the most fundamental dimension; from it arises having-been; and together they release the present. The priority of the ecstases matches the priority involved in the existential structures of Dasein's being which Heidegger had laid out in Division One of Being and Time. In the timely reinterpretation of the structures of care, Heidegger reminds us that, 'Dasein's being-whole as care indicates: ahead-of-itself already-in (a world) as being-at-home-with (what-is within the world).' He adds that the primordial unity of the structure of care lies in timeliness' (327).
Dasein's 'ahead-of-itself' dimension, rich with concealed possibilities, is correlated with the future; its 'being-already-in' a world is correlated with having-been as the tradition of understanding being into which it is thrown; and its 'being-at-home-with* what-is within the world is correlated with the 'making-present' of the present world of its concern. The unification of this care structure is accomplished by the self-unifying character of timeliness.
Although we shall use an example below of personal everydayness to illuminate the phenomenon that Heidegger is investigating since, after all, the person is Dasein, and such an example helps illustrate the priority of the dimensions of timeliness, it is a mistake to understand Heidegger's discussion as dealing only or even most directly with the personal level. As I argued above, he is interested in the entity that we are and its being. Thus, we need to focus on the peculiar character of Dasein as the entity that makes an issue of what it is to be in general, not just Dasein in its everydayness and certainly not just the individual person living within the realm of the Anyone.
We can understand the priority of the ecstases of the timeliness of Dasein at the ontological level by first examining the most important dimension of Dasein's time. The future as the ahead-of-itself makes possible Dasein's being as existence, that is, as a standing open toward being. Thus, Heidegger says that the ahead-of-itself indicates 'the future as of a sort which would make it possible for Dasein to be such that its able-to-be is at issue' (327).
The future makes possible Dasein's 'essential characteristic of existentiality' (327). This is not to say that we need a future span of time in order to 'debate' about what it is to be. Right now we are the entity that makes an issue of what it is to be, whether or not we are actually doing so. As we have seen, the future is 'still outstanding' not in the sense of something yet to come but of something still unsettled. Dasein is the 'dis-closedness' which is always 'un-closed,' always unsettled or at issue.9 Dasein exists in such a way that it encompasses the debate yet to come, that is, in such a way that its 'not yet' belongs to it and makes it the entity that it is.
As I noted in the Introduction, Heidegger thinks that 'the existence of historical man begins at that moment when the first thinker takes a questioning stance with regard to the unconcealment of what-is by asking what it is' (ET 128/189). Heidegger's remark about this beginning in Ancient Greece proves enlightening;
A genuine beginning, as a leap, always is a head start in which everything to come is already leaped over, even if as something covered up. The beginning already holds the end concealed. The genuine beginning has nothing of the neophyte character of the primitive. The primitive, because it lacks such a bestowing, grounding leap and head start, is always futureless. It is not capable of releasing anything more from itself because it contains nothing more than that in which it is caught.
(OWA 76/64)
Dasein acquires a future when it acquires an understanding of being such that being is in question. In this respect, 'primitive Dasein' has no future. As the future which is the 'to-come,' what Western Dasein will be comes to it from its concealed end, the realm of death. For Heidegger, being toward the future is being toward this end, either authentically or inauthentically. We will not pause here to consider the parochial or Eurocentric character of Heidegger's dismissal of 'primitive' Dasein, but just point out that cultures such as Ancient Egypt, the Kalahari bushmen, Australian aborigines, or some Native American groups continued in the same basic form of everydayness for thousands of years.10 Heidegger is trying to account for what he sees as the inner dynamism of Western culture, which he does not identify with progress or cultural superiority, but the manifestation of a unity and continuity within dramatic change that needs explanation.
The future releases to Dasein its dimension of having-been as the understanding of being into which it is thrown. Dasein always already has an understanding of being. In the initial leap, that first insight into what-is, the Greeks find themselves with such an understanding already and do not suddenly acquire it. And, without the world of the Greeks and the Middle Ages on which it builds, the modern world would not be what it is. Not that the past is over and done with, a 'given' with which we are confronted or which determines what we are. We understand the past through the projection of a future with certain concerns, and hence our understanding of our 'already having-been' changes as our understanding of ourselves changes. What matters about the past depends on what matters about the future. Indeed, as we shall soon see in more detail, Heidegger argues that Dasein's authentic projection of its future requires it to 'repeat' the possibilities of its past by transforming them in its new understanding of being.
At the end of the Introduction we noted Heidegger saying that the dialogue with Parmenides never ends. We might also think of how the interpretation of Parmenides' poem or Plato's dialogues changes with every epoch and how that interpretation arises from current cultural concerns. Will we ever achieve the right account of what such thinkers meant? Heidegger asks us if we could come to the final essence of a great thinker. Could we 'distill the Kant and the Plato by cleverly calculating and balancing off all Kant interpretations or all Plato ones?' He answers 'No.' There is no 'Kant as he is in himself.' Such an idea 'runs counter to the nature of history and most certainly to philosophical history.'
This historical Kant is always only the Kant that becomes manifest in an original possibility of philosophizing, manifest in part, if you will, but in a part that carries the impact of the whole.
(MFL 71/88)
Similarly, there is no way we are in ourselves, no 'in itself' of human being or being itself. But neither is a manifestation - a disclosure or unconcealment - of either human nature or the being of what-is just some imaginary slice of an indeterminate and indeterminable pie in the sky. It is the way things show themselves to be in our changing cultural practices. We will come back to this point in Chapter 5's discussion of the Temporality of being, but for now we are interested in Dasein's ability to be.
To explain the priority of the ecstasis of the future and its relation to the other two ecstases of timeliness, we can look at another concrete but limited and derivative example of the timing activity of Dasein. This is the way the timely structure manifests itself in the inauthentic everydayness of the individual. To understand oneself as a teacher or student, for example, is to project certain roles, goals, and tasks; it is to have a certain understanding of oneself that determines one's aims in life. This is the 'ahead-of-itself' dimension, and out of it arises a certain understanding of one's past or what has happened and its significance. These dimensions in turn 'release' a present and determine the activities that one is engaged in right now, such as preparing a class session or doing homework.
Perhaps the most dramatic personal illustration of the interaction of the ecstases, which we borrow from Kierkegaard, is that of a person who undergoes a radical conversion and comes to a new self-understanding. Here, too, Heidegger 'learned from' Kierkegaard. Because he projects a new future for himself, for example, that of a Christian, he comes to a new understanding of his past as despair and sin, no matter how happy he seemed at the time. The new understanding of his future and his past determines what he does in his life at present.11 This example anticipates the authentic timing of timeliness in the way a change in the understanding of being reconfigures future, past, and present.
We might also recall Jean-Paul Sartre's example of the young man who has to choose whether to join the Free French Forces or stay home and help his mother, or the young Jesuit who had decided that his lack of academic success, botched love affair, and failure in military training meant he should become a priest.12 But the contrast between Kierkegaard's and Sartre's analyses highlights an important aspect of Heidegger's position.
For Sartre these individuals' interpretations of the meaning of their past and the facts about it they remember, as well as what they choose for the future, is ultimately arbitrary, a convenient fiction imposed on indifferent data to fend off anguish in the face of our spontaneous freedom. For Kierkegaard God's grace grants a path from sin to salvation if only the individual will be open to the eternal at work in the self. Once the leap is made the hindsight view of the previous life as sin and despair is an accurate grasp of its nature, not a retrospective illusion or arbitrary fiction. On the side of Kierkegaard but from a different perspective and on a quite different ontological level, and of course with no personal will attached, Heidegger sees the revelation of being guiding authentic Dasein's timely insight into the being of what-is, a subject we will explore in Chapter 5. For now, we are looking at such insight from the historical character of Dasein.
As we see from both the ontological and personal examples, the pre-sent that is released by the to-come and having-been does not refer to some instantaneous moment of consciousness; nor are the ecstases of future and having-been simply the dimensions of attention that enable us to have an experience of an enduring, if specious, present. The term 'now,' as the term 'present,' points to an indefinite dimension of disclosure. The 'present' can refer to what I am doing at this minute, or this day, or this week or month or even a period of years, for example, 'At present I am writing a book on Heidegger.' As ecstases, the dimensions of the to-be, having-been, and pre-sent are a disclosure matrix which cannot be measured or delimited by the time that we can measure on a clock.13 Indeed, the time that we measure on a clock is a feature of a world disclosed by a particular understanding of being. This does not make time a fiction or in any sense unreal, as it might seem for Kant, Husserl, and Bergson, but its revelation, its presence in our lives, is dependent on the concerns originating in Ancient Greece and continuing in our understanding of being.
Although the example of personal every dayness illuminates the phenomenon that Heidegger is investigating since, after all, the person is Dasein, and furthermore, we can call upon such an example to help illustrate the priority of the dimensions of timeliness in the next section, it is a mistake to understand Heidegger's discussion as dealing only or even directly with the personal level. As I argued above, he is interested in the entity that we are and its being. Thus, we need to focus on the peculiar character of Dasein as the entity that makes an issue of what it is to be in general, not just Dasein in its every dayness and certainly not just the individual person.
We need to distinguish the timeliness of, to use the phrase that Heidegger sometimes does, 'the Dasein in man' and the timeliness of a man or a woman or any one. Another passage in Basic Problems seems to make this contrast, Heidegger first refers to the futural dimension of Dasein but then makes the parallel with individual behavior:
In thus relating itself to its ownmost able-to-be, it is ahead of itself. Expecting a possibility I can come from this possibility toward that which I myself am. Dasein, expecting its able-to-be, comes toward itself. In this coming-toward-itself, expecting a possibility, Dasein is futural in a primordial sense.
(BPP 265/374-375)
As a person, I project a particular possibility for myself, for example, being a teacher, a woman, and so on, in understanding who I am. As Dasein, I also project the fundamental, comprehensive pre-ontological understanding of the being of what-is of a world in which institutions, ways of life, professions, and child-rearing make such roles available. These personal projects occur with the realm of the Anyone and are immersed in the general phenomenon of inauthentic timeliness. Their parameters and goals are laid out by the significance-structure of the world. My selfhood is based on the Anyone, not Casein's ownmost being, no matter how creative and unique I might be in the way I take up these roles. I may make an issue of what it is to be me, but this is not the same as making an issue of the being of what-is.
For Dasein 'at present' to encounter what-is within the world and deal with things in its daily activities, being must be already understood (315). When our stance toward being itself is brought into question, the significance of our present world falls away and we find ourselves in anxiety. Only then does the possibility of authentic timeliness arise, and we may either flee it, turning anxiety into fear, or become open to the unconcealment of the possibilities of being and to understand the being of what-is in a new way, for example, to see the order of things as not a divine hierarchy gathered around God but as material interconnected by quantifiable mass and motion.
When Heidegger makes claims such as 'timeliness times' one should not forget the ordinary meaning of his German verb.14 Ordinarily, his use of words as technical terms with their own invested significance requires us to prescind from their common meanings. But with this phrase the ordinary connotation adds a resonance which is missing in the translation of it as 'timeliness times,' specifically a sense of 'maturing' or 'ripening.' Dasein's timeliness is what lets Dasein ripen toward its end and what lets its understanding of being change and grow. Heidegger comments: 'Time times - which means time makes ripe, makes rise up and grow. Timely is what has come up in the rising' (OWL 106/213).15 Dasein's authentic insights keep 'in time with' the epochs of the revelation of being in our dealings with things. The impetus for and direction of this 'timed' growth, though briefly mentioned in Section 3.5, ought to be discussed more fully in the context of Heidegger's analysis of the history and finitude of being.
Before moving into a detailed characterization of the specific ecstases of inauthentic and authentic timeliness, a map of the wealth of new jargon would be helpful.16 The following chart relates the specific terminology to Heidegger's general names for the ecstases of Dasein's timeliness:
| HAVING-BEEN | PRE-SENT | TO-COME | |
| INAUTHENTIC | forgetting | waiting-toward | awaiting |
| AUTHENTIC | repetition | moment of insight | forerunning death |
The two modes in which timeliness times itself make possible the fundamental modes of Dasein's being, that is, authentic and inauthentic existence (328). In this section we will discuss inauthentic timeliness with its three ecstases of 'awaiting,' 'forgetting,' and 'making-present.' In inauthentic existence Dasein loses itself as the entity whose ownmost being is to make an issue of being; it 'falls* away from its ownmost self and is absorbed by the objects of its concern. In the timing of inauthentic timeliness a particular understanding of being is taken for granted. In this mode of timeliness the ecstasis of the future, now specified as 'awaiting,' still has priority, but it involves a projection of a particular existentiell understanding of the being of what-is rather than a plunge into the questionableness of being.
Although Heidegger labels the future ecstasis of inauthentic timeliness 'awaiting,' the verbal use of his term suggests a more active stance such as 'to be prepared for.'17 Dasein's inauthentic future dimension is 'awaiting' in the sense that Dasein is prepared to deal with the objects of its concern, finding their being comfortable and assured. Heidegger says:
Inauthentic understanding projects itself upon that with which it is concerned, what is feasible, urgent, or indispensable in everyday activity . . . Dasein comes toward itself from that with which it concerns itself. The inauthentic future has the character of awaiting.
(337)
Dasein 'comes to' itself from that which is 'to-come.'
Though the term may suggest a conscious intention, the 'awaiting' of the inauthentic future is a mode of existence, that is, of having an understanding of being according to which we deal with things, and not necessarily of explicit, conscious awareness. It indicates our ready skills for dealing with things, even objects we have never encountered before. Heidegger says that 'awaiting' the 'toward-which' of some project which we aim to accomplish is 'neither a considering of the "goal" nor an expectation of the impending finishing of the work to be produced. It has by no means the character of thematic grasping.' Many times we ourselves are quite unaware of the details of our dealings with things, as, for example, when we are driving a car and adjust our steering to the banked slope of the road. We let our skills put tools to work for us. This 'awaiting' combined with the two other dimensions of inauthentic timeliness will make 'possible in its ecstatical unity the specifically manipulative way in which equipment is made present' (353).
Heidegger also speaks of a futural way to be that he calls 'expecting' which comes closer to being a type of reflective activity.18 However, his notion of 'expecting' seems general enough to cover both conscious and unconscious expectations. It may indicate an orientation toward a specific project or circumstance, not just our general ability to deal with things. Heidegger remarks that 'expecting' is 'founded upon awaiting.' He adds that only because Dasein awaits its able-to-be in terms of that with which it concerns itself can it expect anything and wait for it (337), Unfortunately, Heidegger provides no concrete examples to illustrate the contrast between awaiting and expecting and their derivative relationship.
I can suggest two examples which I think capture the distinction. Again they will be examples on the level of particular things since these are more immediately understandable. Contrast the difference between 'awaiting' a ringing telephone, or being able to deal with one when it does ring, and actually 'expecting' a phone call, an expectation which may be evident in both reflective awareness ('I wonder when he is going to call?' or 'I wish he would call') and unconscious physical behavior (drumming one's fingers, tapping one's toes) while one's conscious thoughts are on what to fix for lunch. Similarly, contrast the difference between 'awaiting' when one enters a stranger's house, that is, having a general familiarity with what one may find there and being able to deal with it, and 'expecting' to see certain things when one enters one's own house. The latter expectation can be, and probably almost all of the time is, quite unconscious. Its operation and its difference from awaiting is indicated by one's surprise at finding the furniture rearranged or changed or missing. Both conscious and unconscious expectations are made possible by the more fundamental 'awaiting,' that is, being able to deal with things.
These examples do not just illustrate the inauthentic ecstasis of the future but also that of having-been and the present since the three dimensions organize a unitary phenomenon. Thus, we can see 'forgetting' and 'making-present' (or 'waiting-toward') at work in them, too.19 How Dasein exists as futural releases these particular modes of having-been and the present. In regard to the past:
The inauthentic self-projection which is making-present and producing possibilities out of that with which it conccrns itself is, however, only possible because Dasein has forgotten itself in its ownmost, thrown able-to-be. This forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a 'positive' ecstatical mode of having-been, a mode with a character of its own.
(339)
Heidegger is using 'forgetting' as a technical term, and its ordinary meaning should be set aside. What we are 'forgetting' are not events that have happened to us or facts that we might try to remember. We are 'forgetting' what it is to be Dasein in its ownmost being, but this is something of which we may never have been aware in the ordinary sense and therefore cannot 'forget' in the ordinary sense. The ecstasis of forgetting has 'the character of self-closing backing away before its ownmost "been"' (339). Dasein closes itself off from the questionableness of its being and the past from which this stems and thereby closes itself off to its ownmost self, too. The experience of the forgottenness of being, that is, the recognition that being was forgotten, was, Heidegger said, the fundamental experience prompting the writing of Being and Time ( TB 29/31). It provided the motivation for raising anew the question of being.
Heidegger refers to a 'retaining' a number of times in a way that suggests that, despite the opposition in common meaning, it could be used as a substitute term for 'forgetting.'20 For example, he correlates retaining with the future as 'awaiting' in such phrases as 'awaiting retaining.'21 This, too, indicates that in the inauthentic past ecstasis nothing is being 'forgotten' in the ordinary sense. What is 'retained' is Dasein's existentiell understanding of being, its understanding of how to deal with things, but this requires 'forgetting' being in its questionableness.
Only on the basis of such forgetful retaining can we 'remember' or 'forget' anything in the ordinary sense. Heidegger comments:
Just as expecting is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible only on that of forgetting and not vice versa. For in the mode of having-forgotten, the having-been "discloses' primarily the horizon into which Dasein, lost in the 'superficiality' of the objects of its concern, can bring itself by remembering.
(339)
We could say that when we remember events or the characteristics of things, we take their being for granted and recollect the details of their particularity. Such recollections are evoked by our current concerns and the things with which we are dealing. Thus, remembering as the derivative mode of the inauthentic past also indicates an absorption in the things with which we concern ourselves. Our cultural remembrances, too, for example, Memorial Day or Black History Month, are only kept alive by our current concerns. In anxiety, when we do not forget the questionableness of being, remembering is precisely what we do not do. Our understanding of familiar ways of being recedes and new possibilities can make their way to the foreground.
Correlated with the inauthentic future and past is the particular kind of present which they release. Dasein's current ability is laid out in terms of the things with which it concerns itself. Whether the project lasts a minute, a day, a week, or a year, it is articulated by the web of significance that constitutes Dasein's world. Heidegger comments: 'Corresponding to the inauthentic future (awaiting) there is a specific being-at-home-with things of concern' (337). This way of being-at-home-with things is a 'making-present' or 'waiting-toward' activities in the current context of concern that is 'pre-sent' by the understanding of being which we project in 'awaiting' the future.22 Heidegger's use of the notion of 'waiting-toward' suggests a more specific involvement in particular projects than the more general comfort of being-at-home in the world, perhaps correlating with the other derivative ecstases of inauthentic timeliness, remembering and expecting. We can formalize the vocabulary to specify both a primary and derivative mode of the ecstases of inauthentic timeliness:
| INAUTHENTIC | HAVING-BEEN | PRE-SENT | TO-COME |
| primary mode | forgetting | making-present | awaiting |
| derivative mode | remembering | waiting-toward | expecting |
Moving on the ontological level in Being and Time, Heidegger is interested not just in how we relate to things such as telephones or living room furniture, of course, but in how we take what-is in general as having a specific being. We await what-is ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, nature, and so forth, as, for example, God's creation or stuff to be manipulated, and this shows up in our expectations about specific things and the way our understanding lays out the ecstatic context of the roles, goals, and standards according to which we deal with them.
Cultures, like individuals, can be more or less immersed in an understanding of being which is taken for granted. Revolutionary periods such as the early modern epoch are rich with possibilities, and sterile periods such as the Dark Ages are addicted to actualities. The cultural givenness of an understanding of being involves more than just a collection of individuals going about their particular daily lives. The interaction of people within the culture produces the effect which Heidegger calls 'leveling,' making the breakthrough of a new paradigmatic work of art or philosophical thought difficult. The more we deal with things in the same old ways, the more we reduce the way that they can appear to us to the bland sameness which Heidegger calls 'averageness.' Dasein, as the entity which we are, can be more or less entrenched in this averageness, more or less locked into an understanding of being, in different periods of its history. The timeliness which makes possible Dasein's being has, one might picture, a topography of peaks and plains, a rhythm of crescendos and murmurs.
In the first two chapters of Division Two of Being and Time Heidegger frequently acknowledges a need for an existentiell 'attestation' of the existential ways of being he claims to uncover, for example, inauthentic being toward death. But he found the attestation or concrete manifestation of this phenomenon in literature in the character and musings of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych.23 At the end of the chapter on death he admits that the question of Dasein's being-a-whole, its authentic being toward death, 'still hangs in mid-air' and needs phenomenological justification. The abstract, ontological analysis needs to be attested by concrete realization of an authentic ability to be. The next chapter asserts that this 'authentic able-to-be' is found in resoluteness, the phenomenon he proceeds to analyze and, in the process, uncovers Dasein's conscience and its being-guilty.
Since Heidegger seems to describe resoluteness as both a preparation for authenticity and a full achievement of it, we can bring some clarity to his dense discussion by distinguishing these two forms of authentic disclosedness, preliminary and completed, and even extract a third form that is a 'philosophical' resoluteness. In this section we will discuss resoluteness as not the final completion of authenticity but as a way of disclosing Dasein's being which only - but importantly - prepares us for the existentiell possibility of authentic insight into being. We should emphasize at the beginning, though, that the discussion of resoluteness remains on the level of a search for an ability or potentiality to be, not for a concrete exemplar of being such as we found in Ivan in the case of inauthentic being toward death
Although we may be making the text of Being and Time more systematic than it is and giving Heidegger more credit for architectonic design than he deserves, we can preview Heidegger's analysis of all three stages of authentic resoluteness by suggesting a tripartite structure of preliminary resoluteness that is related to the existentiell concretion of authentic timeliness according to the following parallels:
| RESOLUTENESS as: | HAVING-BEEN | PRE-SENT | TO-COME |
| philosophical | ready for anxiety | wanting a conscience | questioning being |
| preliminary | anxiety | call of conscience | being-guilty |
| authentic resolution | repetition | moment of insight | forerunning death |
We have yet to explore the meaning of some of these technical terms, but while we have the architectonic before us, I should note it might be tempting to reverse anxiety and being-guilty as modes of the 'to-come' and 'having-been.' However, Heidegger clearly describes anxiety as a mode of situatedness and thus of having-been (340, 343) and being-guilty as a matter of understanding involving a projection and thus of the 'to-come' (296-297). However, Heidegger reminds us that the structure of timeliness is an integrated whole, not three distinct parts strung together, and that hence, even though each aspect of Dasein's being may be primarily manifest in a particular ecstasis, in each we find the whole of timeliness implicated (346). Thus 'anxiety springs from the future' even though, as a particular instance of situatedness, it is manifest in having-been (344), and being-guilty demonstrates Dasein's 'thrownness,' its finding itself in an inherited understanding of being, even though it points us toward the possibility of forerunning Dasein's death as its ownmost existentiell modality (305).
Heidegger speaks of 'readiness-for-anxiety' and 'wanting-to-have-a-conscience' as if they were precursors to actually being in anxiety and heeding the call of conscience. Although his text offers little leverage to distinguish these modes, such a way of being seems to indicate the philosophical or theoretical stance toward authenticity, a matter of knowing what it is rather than, at that moment, being authentic. Hence it seems well worth distinguishing from the other two modes. If preliminary resoluteness and full authenticity both involve new although different disclosures of being and if 'proximately and for the most part' Dasein is caught up in inauthenticity 'when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment' (43), then we can see that even the great thinkers and creators will live like Anyone most of the time, before or in between their episodes of creative insight. They are no longer 'addicted' to the Anyone, lost in fallenness, or fleeing the anxiety in which the current understanding of being is brought into question, but neither are they engaged by a new disclosure of being. We can supply the description of this way of being's futural dimension as a questioning of being or an openness toward being though one that is only this; genuine authenticity may never be subsequently achieved.
Such a prelimery ecstatic matrix may underlie what Heidegger much later calls 'interpretive thinking,' the sort of thinking his own reflections provide. He did say that he never intended to 'preach' a variety of existentialism, or, for that matter, I would say, offer any specific new existentiell understanding of being. Rather, he was always only concerned with renewing the question of being. But such questioning can only take us to the verge of making the leap of insight to a new understanding of being, which he himself only claims to try to prepare us for, not actually supply.24 To paraphrase Heidegger's comment about philosophical thinking in general and turn it against him: To 'philosophize' about being shattered by death is separated by a chasm from a thinking that is so shattered (LH 222-223/343).
Understanding that being is questionable and laying out the existential structures of Dasein's being as existence does not inevitably lead one to make the authentic leap across the chasm to a radically new understanding of being. One cannot become an authentic creator by, for example, reading Heidegger's works or those of the great thinkers of history. Far from theory-produced, it makes as little sense to exhort someone to 'Be authentic!' in Heidegger's view of this achievement as it would to exhort them to be another Plato or Aristotle, let alone expect them to become authentic by reading Being and Time. However, the reader who understands the book might al least achieve this philosophical level of resoluteness.
In Being and Time Heidegger s own reflections on resoluteness as a way or being focused on the preliminary resoluteness which is not just a philosophizing about Dasein's being as an openness toward being but rather a specific disclosure of being, although not one in which Dasein actually reaches fully-fledged authenticity in the moment of insight. Resoluteness involves the anxiety in which being is called into question. In resoluteness Dasein discloses the indefinitencss of its being as suspended over an abyss of possibilities.
To understand Heidegger's notion we must make one of our rare textual excursions into his own German terms rather than leaving his wordplay for the footnotes. The etymological connection between 'Erschlossenheit' or 'disclosedness' and 'Entschlossenheif or 'resoluteness' is lost in the translation but is crucial for Heidegger's meaning.'Schliessen,' the verb forming the root of both 'Erschlossenheit' and 'Entschlossenheit,' means 'to close' or 'to lock.' Although the prefix 'er'- usually indicates the beginning of an action or the carrying through of the action, 'erschliessen means not 'to close' or 'to lock' but, quite the opposite, 'to disclose' or 'to make accessible.' Dasein is characterized as disclosedness because it lets things come forth and show themselves as what they are.
Ent-schlossenheit or resoluteness is a completion of Erschlossenheit or disclosedness that reveals Dasein as the entity that it is, something which perpetually escapes our attention when we take an understanding of human nature for granted as God's image or conscious subject - and direct our attention to the things with which we deal everyday. The 'ent-' prefix attached to 'schliessen' suggests entry into a new state or the abandonment of a previous state, appropriately indicating that Entschlossenheit is a disclosure of Dasein's being as 'Erschlossenheit' and is, as such, a new mode of disclosedness: Heidegger describes it as a 'distinctive mode of Dasein's disclosedness' (297). Indeed, as the preliminary authentic disclosedness, resoluteness 'limns' Dasein's 'distinctive' being as the entity that makes an issue of being. If Dasein remains inauthentic, it is closed off to any new revelation of being and never comes up against the boundary of its particular understanding of being. In contrast, resoluteness reveals the clearing of being for what it is. Resoluteness reveals the limits of the clearing - 'the thin wall by which the Anyone is separated, as it were, from the uncanniness of its being' (278). As we were frequently reminded in Heidegger's discussion of death, Dasein's being always has 'something still to be closed,' something unsettled and not-yet, 'eine ständige Unabgeschlossenheif (236), a fact of its being disclosed in resoluteness.
The etymological reverberation of 'Entschlossenheit' is, I would say, the main reason why Heidegger picks this word for the preliminary authentic mode of Dasein's being since he specifically rejects its ordinary meaning in a later, clarifying comment. In English, too, we ordinarily describe an individual as 'resolute' when he or she exhibits a single-minded striving toward a goal. But, in response to misunderstanding of his concept, Heidegger writes:
The resoluteness intended in Being; and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject but rather Dasein's opening out of the prejudice in what-is to the openness of being.25
He adds that resoluteness is not a matter of "a subject striving toward himself as his self-set goal' (OWA 67/55). Though Heidegger uses words such as "choice" and 'decision' in conjunction with the notion of resoluteness, he gives them a distinctive, ontological significance. For example, he describes 'decision'21 as 'not man's judgment and choice' but a separation in the 'togetherness of being, unconcealment, appearance, and non-being' (IM 110/84). A 'decision' lets the being of what-is appear in various ways.
By speaking of resoluteness as a matter of 'self-being' or of Dasein being itself, Heidegger misled many of his readers about the level of his discussion.27We failed to grasp the existential character of this 'self.' Resoluteness is not a characteristic of an individual's personality nor a way of setting particular life goals and facing one's demise28and it has little similarity to Kierkegaard's notion of life in the ethical sphere, though many commentators have found the two concepts nearly identical.29 As Heidegger himself points out, Kierkegaard's analysis remains within a particular existentiell understanding of what it is to be human.30 Accepting a contemporary Christian understanding of existence, Kierkegaard can then instruct the individual on how to achieve this version of personal selfhood which, at least as far as the ethical sphere goes, can aptly be described as a matter of deliberately striving toward self-set goals.
Heidegger, however, is operating at a level of existential generality which explores the conditions for the possibility of such a particular existentiell understanding of what it is to be. He is interested in how we come to have a particular understanding of our being and of being in general, and resoluteness is a step along the way in the formation of this conception. Resoluteness prepares Dasein for a new disclosure of being, but the definite 'content' of this disclosure - or, as Heidegger calls it, the 'resolution' - depends upon Dasein's 'situation' and has varied accordingly. One such situation is that of a Christian in nineteenth century Denmark. Another is that of a German in the 1930s.31 Some people who argue that Heidegger's philosophy led to his affiliation with the Nazis hold the mistaken view of resoluteness as an attitude about one's personal life, for example, a steely determination, choosing a goal and marching toward it. Correcting the mistaken view, however, does not eliminate the connection between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis. The issue then becomes whether Heidegger thought that the Nazis had an authentic insight into German culture in its contemporary situation, one rooted appropriately in its tradition and taking the path pointing toward its future fulfillment of its historical mission. Apparently he did, at least until 1935 and perhaps beyond.32
Heidegger says that 'the term "irresoluteness" merely expresses the phenomenon we have explained as being-surrendered to the way things have been prevalently interpreted by the Anyone' (299). As its opposite, preliminary resoluteness involves the recognition of the abyss of possibilities over which existence is suspended and thus is characterized by indefiniteness, not the definiteness of a particular way to be. In anxiety the significance that things usually manifest becomes blurred and indeterminate. We no longer know what things are: they are no longer present with a 'pre-sent' significance.
Now we must ask, how do 'conscience and 'guilt fit into this rather abstract picture? Once we understand the ontological level of Heidegger's discussion, that is, that he is talking about our mutual being and not the personal lives of subjects, we can see that his analysis of 'conscience' and 'guilt' bring out important aspects of authentic resoluteness and timeliness. Heidegger takes pains to dissociate his use of these terms from their ordinary, ethical employment, but his efforts have been to little avail since commentators have persisted in giving the notions moralistic overtones. However, what is at issue in both notions is not personal responsibility for individual actions or character traits but rather Dasein's relationship to being.
Conscience, says Heidegger, is the phenomenon that attests to Dasein s ownmost, authentic able-to-be' (279), To show us the ownmost self of the entity that discloses being, conscience must call us out from the hiding place of the Anyone (273) and into the uncanniness of anxiety. Since conscience is supposed to show us that authentic existence is possible, we can think of it - putting the point much more simply than Heidegger ever does - as what has kept Dasein continually questioning what it is to be for over 2500 years and has prevented us from remaining satisfied with any one answer. Western culture has been driven by a desire to know what things are. Heidegger's own experience of the forgottenness of being which prompted him to write Being and Time might be considered 'attestation' of this phenomenon.33
Why refer to this as a matter of 'conscience' when it bears so little relation to what we ordinarily mean by conscience? Perhaps his use of the word was bound to mislead, but Heidegger plays off the etymological connections of his German terms in a way that we can begin to capture in English by noting the root of 'conscience' is 'science,' especially if we keep in mind the latter's traditional meaning of any systematic knowledge. In his preceding discussion of being toward death, Heidegger had spoken of the kind of 'certainty' in which Dasein maintains itself in the truth of its authentic disclosedness.34 He distinguished this kind of certainty from the certainty of reflective knowledge or empirical matters of fact, and the distinction corresponds to the difference between truth as 'unconcealing' and truth as correspondence. This primordial certainty, like the primordial (ruth, indicates an understanding of Dasein's being that comes from existing, something akin to 'know-how' but on the level of ontological insight. The 'voice of conscience' calls us from the depths of Dasein's being and to Dasein's being. It calls us to break through the 'thin wall' of the Anyone and touch Dasein's ground in the revelation of what it is to be. But what docs consciencc tell us? Especially since Heidegger eliminates any moral connotations of the term and says that it calls us not in words but through silence, its function is mysterious until we consider the third ecstatic dimension of resoluteness: its futural mode.
Conscience calls Dasein to its 'being-guilty.' Once again Heidegger uses a term which misleads and then must repeatedly insist that his use of the term has no immediate moral significance. He comments:
The idea of 'guilly' must be sufliciently formalized so that those ordinary phenomena of 'guilt' which are related to our concernful being-with others will drop out... it must also be detached from relationship to any law or 'ought' such that by failing to comply with it one loads oneself with guilt.
(283)
The formal content Heidegger abstracts from the concept of guilt is twofold: guilt indicates being defined by a 'not' (as in not having done something required, being lacking, being indebted to someone or something) and being the 'ground' of something (as in having responsibility for something) (282-283).
These conceptual clues lead Heidegger to define being-guilty as both 'being-ground for a being which has been determined by a not' (283) and 'the null being-ground of a nullity' (305). Both descriptions indicate Dasein's relationship to being and not something characteristic of individual actions or personalities. That Dasein is 'guilty' in its being indicates that this way of being is both limited by and indebted to a revelation of being. Dasein's existence is a 'not-ness' or 'nullity' because it must always understand itself out of a possibility of being into which it has been thrown and which is not of its own making. This way of being precludes other possibilities of understanding itself and its world. We cannot, for example, escape understanding ourselves as conscious subjects by voluntarily returning to the medieval or Ancient Greek conception of human being. In his discussion of guilt, Heidegger says of Dasein that, as an ability to be, 'it always stands in one possibility or another; it constantly is not another possibility and has waived it in existentiell projection' (285).
Not just a nullity in this way, Dasein is also a 'null being-ground of a nullity' because it does not have 'power over its ownmost being from the ground up' (284). For its ownmost being as an understanding of being, Dasein is indebted to a disclosure of what it is to be. Dasein does not 'invent' being but rather is the 'there' in which being is revealed. Dasein's ground is being, and its own being is what it discloses both in the sense of understanding itself as human in a particular way but also as Dasein, as it does in resoluteness.35
Heidegger comments:
To resoluteness necessarily belongs the indefiniteness characteristic of every able-to-be into which Dasein has been factically thrown. Only in a resolution is resoluteness sure of itself. The existentiell indefiniteness of resoluteness never makes itself definite except in a resolution; but yet all the same it has existential definiteness.
(298)
Preliminary resoluteness limns the indefiniteness of Dasein's being and the being of what-is in a way that living in the Anyone does not. But it also manifests the world of Dasein's time, not a limitless expanse of possibilities with no claim on us. Dasein's projection of its self-understanding upon its being-guilty keeps it tethered from such free flights of fancy. The completion of authenticity, the realization of Dasein's ownmost being for which preliminary resoluteness prepares us, is the disclosure of the new way to be already becoming apparent in this world: the resolution achieved in the moment of insight brings us figuratively and literally in Heidegger's terminology, back down to 'earth,' to the limits of our world, as well as to the new possible ways to be showing up within it. It discloses Dasein's 'situation,' how both its own being and the being of what-is can be in its world.36
Let us focus on this last stage of resoluteness:
| RESOLUTENESS as: | HAVING-BEEN | PRE-SENT | TO-COME |
| authentic resolution | repetition | moment of insight | forerunning death |
The authentic pre-sent is the 'moment of insight." As we noted at the end of Section 2.2, in ordinary speech his German word means 'moment,' but Heidegger is drawing on its literal meaning of a 'glance of the eyes' to indicate a special kind of insight as well as its timely character. This special moment is a flash of insight. In the moment of insight, we are not absorbed in dealing with particular things whose being is taken for granted. Rather the insight discloses the being of what-is. As Heidegger puts it, the authentic present as the moment of insight 'lets what can be "in a time" as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand be first encountered' (338). What can be present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, or nature, number, or language, shows up. In different moments of insight being has revealed itself as phusis, as God's creation, as subjects and objects, and as stuff for manipulation, plus numerous philosophical variations on each theme.
The resolution which arises out of resoluteness and makes Dasein's able-to-be definite again is not simply a return to the previous, commonplace existentiell understanding of being; it is not an anxiety-fleeing return to the conventional wisdom of the Anyone. Neither is it the ex nihilo invention of some 'other worldly' possibility created by abstract thought. A resolution 'is precisely the disclosive projection of what is factically, actually possible' (299), and for this a revelation of the being of what-is is required. Galileo, for instance, could not have seen things as numerically quantifiable unless the cultural background practices were already letting them show themselves in this way.37
The resolution discloses possibilities of our world which were not recognized as such by the Anyone. After anxiety, preliminary resoluteness can either fall back into the Anyone's world or take a 'stance toward' being by making a 'resolution' that unconceals the being of what-is lying behind its facade.38 As Heidegger says, using 'exists' ill his own technical way, 'Resoluteness "exists" only as the understanding and projecting of the resolution' (298). In the leap of insight which takes place in the resolution, Dasein escapes the superficial understanding of being embodied in the Anyone and comes to understand its own being and the being of things in its world in a new way by 'appropriating anew' the possibilities offered by the Temporality of being as the being of what-is unconceals itself in new ways. The resolution is the point at which the timeliness of Dasein and the Temporality of being intersect, as we shall see in Chapter 5.
To be resolute, Heidegger says, it is necessary to 'recover a choice' of being. His point is not that a choice has not been made.39 The prevalent understanding of the Anyone, with which Dasein always first, 'proximally and for the most part,' finds itself, as well as the new possibilities tacitly coming to be in the background practices are both 'choices' in Heidegger's atypical sense. Dasein has always made a choice of being whether the choice is explicitly recognized or not. Its choice is what determines it as this possible way to be (42) rather than some other, for example, as conscious subject rather than speaking animal or image of God. The 'recovery' of the choice of possibilities of being means, Heidegger elaborates, that Dasein 'chooses this choice, determining itself as an able-to-be out of its own self' (268).
Although even authentic Dasein does not completely escape the choice ol being already made, starting with, for example, the understanding of the Middle Ages, choosing this choice explicitly involves something other than just accepting it as a 'given.' Heidegger says, 'In choosing the choice Dasein first of all possibilizes its authentic able-to-be' (268). Recognizing being as a 'choice' in this atypical sense, and hence as only possibility, frees Dasein to make an issue of being and thus to reveal possibilities of being which have been covered over by the superficial averageness of the Anyone. In this way, Dasein determines its able-to-be 'out of its own self.' By 'appropriating anew' the possibilities of understanding being that have been covered up by the Anyone, Dasein makes them available as possibilities (270). In making possibilities available as possibilities, authentic Dasein is 'choosing' possibilities rather than merely actualizing given ones. It frees them from their concealment in our everyday understanding of things so that we can explicitly see the world in a new way.
If we think again about Heidegger's German terms, we can now see more clearly why he labels authentic disclosedness 'Entschlossenheit' or resoluteness and its outcome the 'resolution.' As 'ent-' suggests, Dasein does enter into a new disclosedness: the peculiar disclosedness of anxiety in preliminary resoluteness is followed by the resolution's new insight into being. In English we should ignore the meanings of 'resolute' and 'resolution' connected with strong willed determination, since neither anxiety nor insight into being can be willed, and consider the optical meaning of 'resolution.'A microscope may disclose something as an indefinite blur, which is analogous to the way anxiety discloses what-is, but then adjusting its resolution will enable us to see what the thing in question is. We can also think of a resolution as re-solving the question of being, that is, a re-solution. Resoluteness places the question of being before us, and then the resolution brings a new answer into focus.
Being resolute requires recovering a choice, but in order to make a resolution it is also necessary to 'forerun' Dasein's death and 'repeat' its possibilities of being.40 To understand how such insight is possible, we must look to the authentic ecstases of the to-come and having-been which 'release' it, or in other words, to the 'forerunning' of death and 'repetition' of Dasein's historical possibilities. The anxiety of resoluteness which brings Dasein face to face with the necessity of choosing to be itself does 'not imply that existence is already taken over in the resolution by repetition. On the contrary, anxiety returns to thrownness as possibly repeatable' (343 ). This return is the rebound of forerunning death. Resoluteness thus refers us to the other dimensions of authentic timeliness.
Although its importance may be obscure initially, especially in the standard accounts of being toward death, Heidegger assures us that the forerunning of death as the future and most important ecstasis of authentic timeliness is not something incidental or 'tacked on' to resoluteness as an 'after thought.'41 Rather the forerunning of death is necessary for a disclosure of a new existentiell understanding of being which in turn can only come when Dasein frees itself from the conventional wisdom of Anyone through preliminary resoluteness. Hence, resoluteness 'harbors in itself authentic being toward death as the possible existentiell modality of its own authenticity' (305). The "ecstatical character of the primordial future lies precisely in the fact that the future closes the able-to-be. that is to say, is closed itself' (330). The forerunning of death puts an 'end' to the indefiniteness of resolute Dasein's able-to-be. There are some ways Dasein cannot be.
The equation of the future ecstasis of authentic timeliness with authentic being toward death has been carefully prepared for by Heidegger's exposition, but it has still remained rather mysterious in most commentaries. As suggested before, this has been the result of a personalistic misreading of the whole text of Being and Time and, in particular, a failure to distinguish the existential death of Dasein from the demise of a person. Now that we understand that death is a limitation on ek-sistence imposed by the concealedness of being, we can begin to see why the authentic future involves a 'forerunning' of death and why its analysis would lead Heidegger to an investigation of historicality and then, at least as projected in the originally proposed format, to the meaning of being in general.
About the function of forerunning Heidegger says:
In forerunning, the freedom for the proper death is freed from the possibilities which press upon Dasein in its accidental falling in such a way indeed that the factical possibilities which are laying before the one that cannot be overtaken can be understood and chosen. The forerunning discloses to existence the uttermost possibility of giving itself up and thus shatters any rigidity in the existence reached at any time.
(264)
How Dasein takes itself to be in its inauthentic fallen state is an 'accident' in the philosophical sense or just one particular possibility of its being, one we fall into depending on when and where we were born,"42 Clinging to this particular understanding of being closes Dasein off to its essential being as the site through which being reveals itself. The authentic Dasein that understands its limit as the 'there' of being is ready to give itself up to the disclosure of being.
Through forerunning, Dasein first acquires the 'wholeness' that Heidegger sought in investigating its death. 'In forerunning Dasein can first make certain of its ownmost wholeness - a wholeness which is not to be overtaken' (265). Heidegger's notion of 'certainty' here is not a matter of explicit knowledge or indubitable propositions. Rather, 'the explicit appropriating of what has been disclosed or discovered is being-certain' (307). The explicit appropriating may be disclosed through the Greek temple or the symbol of the cross, not primarily or necessarily in prepositional thought. Even the appropriating at work in the texts of poetry or philosophy, such as Plato's dialogues or Kant's Critique, is not so much present in the particular propositions or arguments as in the 'unsaid' or 'unthought' understanding of the being of what-is manifest through them.
Heidegger describes the nineteenth-century poet Hölderlin, for example, as a "precursor' for our modern period.43 The 'precursor' cannot be 'outstripped' in his vision of being. He does not 'go off into a future' but rather 'arrives out of that future' in such a way that the future comes to be through him. He stands at the limit of the clearing but facing us, not the darkness beyond, and lets that future come to us through his insights into being. The authentic poet - or philosopher - also cannot be characterized as 'passed away' because his poetry takes its place as what-has-been (WAPF 142/320) and is continually re-appropriated by future authentic Dasein.44 Heidegger also speaks of Nietzsche's thought of the 'eternal return of the same' as a moment of insight that brings us into the appropriation of the modern epoch. In both cases, Heidegger grants a special privilege to these creators' insights because he can see them as anticipating his own account of Dasein and its unique historicality.45
The notion of Dasein's forerunning of death as its end can be illuminated from another direction if we recall Heidegger's notion of the primordial leap in which being became an issue in Ancient Greece which we described in Section 3.2. This leap is pictured as a beginning which contains its concealed end, and the forerunning of death is the forerunning of this end. What was concealed becomes revealed.
The notion of Dasein's "beginning' and 'end' provides us with a ready image for its authentic way of existing as past, that is, the ecstasis of have-been called 'repetition.' Where does Dasein get the possibilities that it reveals in the moment of insight? Heidegger says 'those possibilities of existence which are disclosed are not gathered from death' (383). The forerunning of death is a way of freeing us for a revelation of being, but the horizon from which we draw the inspiration for the specific, factical possibilities of existence is not that of the unfathomed and unfathomable future. 'Forerunning of the uttermost and ownmost possibility is coming back with understanding to the ownmost "been"' (326). Thus, this future intrinsically involves Dasein in a 'coming to' itself by 'coming back to' what has been. Heidegger's verbal play depends on the notion that the future is a 'to come' which 'comes back.'46
We can forerun Dasein's end only by coming back to its beginning the primordial leap which contains the end concealed within itself. The preparatory anxiety of resoluteness does not just leave us facing forward into the void of death or the realm of the concealedness of being. It turns Dasein back to the way it is thrown into a disclosure of being as the source of possibilities which can be repeated (343). This notion naturally leads Heidegger into a discussion of Dasein's historically, to which we will turn in Section 3.5.
If Heidegger's discussion of the nature of Dasein's insight or what it 'resolves upon' in the resolution seems vague, making it all too liable to a personalistic misreading in terms of individual decisions and actions, we can at least partially defend him by appealing to the difference between the existential analysis and existentiell understanding. Heidegger remarks:
In the existential analysis we cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein ever factically resolves. Our investigation excludes even the existential projection of the factical possibilities of existence. Nevertheless, we must ask where in general Dasein can draw these possibilities upon which it factically projects itself.
(383)
The issue of where Dasein draws its possibilities is existential, but the issue of what possibilities the actual Dasein draws, or has dealt to it, is a matter for Dasein's existentiell understanding in its 'standing toward' being. The investigation in Being and Time only attempts to uncover the 'existential condition for the possibility of its factical existential able-to-be' (280). In the existential analytic of Division One of Being and Time Heidegger only aimed to 'outline the formal structure' of Dasein in a way that would not presuppose or 'bind' it to any existentiell view. His discussion stays on an abstract level (363).
Unfortunately, because of his desire to keep the existential analysis of Being and Time distinct from any existentiell investigation of a particular understanding of being, in the chapters of his discussion of these structures Heidegger does not provide us with any detailed examples of Dasein 'repeating' its historical possibilities by projecting an actual resolution. Writings coming after Being and Time indicate more clearly that Heidegger regards authentic disclosedness as something quite rare and that it is not just a matter of adopting a certain attitude toward one's life or behaving in a certain way. For example, in his Introduction to Metaphysics he suggests that authentic Dasein creates great works of art, the political organisation of a state, and poetry as well as 'thinking' or philosophy.47 Such 'works' come to focus a new understanding of being.
Presumably, Heidegger would have gone on in the unfinished Part Two of Being and Time to give us some concrete examples of Dasein 'repeating' its possibilities of understanding being when he discussed the existentiell understanding expressed in the philosophy of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle. We can glimpse what he would have had to say when he notes that Kant uncritically takes over Descartes's conception of the subject, that Descartes applies the concepts of medieval ontology to the notion of res cogitans when he conceives of it as ens creatum, and that the ancient ontological interpretation of what-is as 'presence' is based on Aristotle's conception of time (24-26). Heidegger comments: 'The seemingly new beginning which Descartes proposed for philosophizing has revealed itself as the imposition of a fateful prejudice' (25). Such a 'pre-judgment' of what-is can only be fully understood after we 'de-structure' the ontological tradition, and only then can we fully understand what it means to 'repeat' the question of being (26).48
The resolution made in authentic timeliness is also the first step on the road back to inauthentic timeliness. Later calling inauthenticity 'errancy,' Heidegger comments:
. . . letting what-is as such he as a whole occurs in a way befitting its essence only when from time to time it gets taken up in its primordial essence. Then re-solute openness toward the mystery is on the way into errancy as such.
We arrive in errancy when the new understanding of being becomes commonplace. Heidegger also suggests that the glimpse into the mystery of being remains such a glimpse only when being remains a question (ET 137/198). To answer the question is to take one stand or another and thus to close oneself off to Dasein's special character as the entity that makes an issue of being.
Dasein's history is intimately tied to the history of being, but the truncated existential analytic of Being and Time only examines Dasein's activity as it takes up and projects an understanding of being. In this section we, too, will focus our attention on the connection between Dasein's timeliness and its historicality, though ultimately both are only made possible by the Temporality of being.49 More fundamental than the historicality of Dasein is the history of being which is manifested through it. The fact that Dasein's historicality is only made possible by the ongoing history of revelations of being is not explicitly discussed in the Dasein analytic, but we can glimpse the path to the phenomenological turn from Dasein to being on the horizon of the discussion. The phenomenological turn is the turn or 'Kehre' required to complete the analysis of the relationship of being and Dasein.
The history of being will be discussed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this book.50 and our discussion of Dasein's historicality will not be complete until we place it in that context. Until then, the notion that being reveals itself remains rather mysterious. But perhaps the connection between the two histories - really two sides of the same coin of history - should be emphasized further at the start of our discussion of historicality in order to clarify what is ultimately at issue. To neglect this connection is to leave ourselves immediately liable to Husserl's misunderstanding of Heidegger's project in Being and Time. Husserl, Heidegger said, in the seminar on 'Time and Being,' understood that early work as the regional ontology of the historical (TB 45/ 48). Husserl took this ontology as fitting comfortably within his own conception of the regional ontologies which investigated the nature of various types of things. Such a regional ontology is precisely what you would end up with if you failed to see the connection between Dasein's historicality and the history of being as well as the distinction between the two. Failing to see this, Husserl, Heidegger says, remained oblivious to the historicality of thought (LR xiv/xv). Thought, especially what Heidegger calls "foundational thought,' is dependent on the history of being. Husserl accepts a particular understanding of being as an ahistorical given, not realizing how thought and its world can change. He assumes that the historicality of human being will have no effect on the being of other regions of what-is. An analysis of these other regions of being, such as the one which Husserl offered, could thus be done quite independently of any analysis of human historicality. Numbers, space, and nature all have a way of being that is independent of all culture and history which can be revealed by a method of descriptive thinking that is also independent of such conditions.
The connection between Dasein's historicality and the history of being also indicates the peculiarity of Heidegger's notion of historicality. As I mentioned in the third section of the Introduction, civilizations which are not vehicles for the revelation of being are not historical in his sense. The Ancient Egyptians or Mayans, for example, were not historical peoples. In fact, it seems that all civilizations other than Western are ahistorical in his sense; for Heidegger, they are 'primitive' Dasein in the sense that they have no future and hence may go on in the same way for centuries or millennia.
Timeliness is the condition for the possibility of Dasein 'happening' in an 'historical way.'51 All Dasein 'happens,' but the Dasein of Western culture has a distinctive authentic timeliness which makes it happen in an historical way. Perhaps we could say that the Dasein of many ancient cultures happened in a 'mythological way' in a reality articulated by the logos of their gods. Now, when, according to Heidegger, the history of being is coming to an end, perhaps Dasein happens in a 'technological way.' None of these three labels seems particularly appropriate for Eastern cultures so we need yet another. Given the direction of the exposition of Heidegger's thought provided so far, it should come as no surprise to the reader that Heidegger can announce that 'authentic being toward death - that is, the finitude of timeliness - is the concealed ground of Dasein's historicality' (386). If it does come as a surprise in the context of Being and Time's discussion of historicality, the reason may be that Heidegger has again, as with the initial discussion of death, rhetorically shunted the reader onto a sidetrack and left the route back to the main line of analysis not clearly marked. However when Heidegger begins to speak of Dasein's birth, he refers us to cultural artifacts.
Heidegger's discussion begins by asking how Dasein can 'stretch out' in a unified way between its 'birth' and its 'death.'52 We already know how unusual his notion of death is, but the comment about 'birth' may again throw us back into a personal interpretation, as if Heidegger is asking how a person can be born, have a personality which manifests unity across time, and then demise. However, when Heidegger goes on to discuss the past that lies between Dasein and its 'birth,' he does not talk about the events of childhood and our personal scrapbooks and mementos. He talks about artifacts found in museums and the ruins of Greek temples. Though Heidegger never says so explicitly, we can infer that the 'birth' of Dasein at issue is its beginning in Ancient Greece.53 And the question is, how is it that the history of Western civilization can exhibit continuity and yet also profound changes? Not a matter of some enduring actuality of substance, this movement happens within a range of possibilities already laid out. It is a matter of a 'sub-stance' as a fundamental stance toward being, originating with the Greeks, which set up this range in advance.
The unity of Dasein's 'stretching out,' that is, the unity of its history, is made possible by the fact that authentic timeliness is a 'coming toward' that 'comes back,' or, in other words, that forerunning necessarily includes repetition. Dasein's 'history' is not 'the past' as something gone by and over with.54 Rather, the history in question is a matter of how Dasein 'comes from' its past (378). Because of the interplay of the ecstascs of authentic timeliness, Dasein can, 'by handing down to itself the possibility which it has inherited, take over its thrownness and have the moment of insight into 'its time." Only authentic timeliness, which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate, that is, authentic historicality' (385).
Heidegger describes Dasein's authentic historicality as 'fate,' but he is careful to indicate that his term does not indicate any sort of 'fatalistic' determinism but rather the way that being has been 'sent' to Dasein.55 Successful sending requires successful receiving. Resoluteness makes manifest to Dasein its inheritance of an indeterminate range of possibilities which Heidegger calls its 'heritage.'56 The heritage of Dasein's history does not specify some one resolution, some one particular new understanding of being, as the only possible one for Dasein in some particular period. Dasein's heritage has the indefiniteness of its general able-to-be. In fact the 'situation' which will be brought into focus in a resolution is not something present-at-hand which is waiting to be grasped. It 'only gets disclosed in a free resolving which has not been determined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such determination' (307).
Heidegger believes that Dasein's history and hence its successive resolutions have been determined through the creative contribution of its own grasp of being. Taking up possibilities from the unarticulated range offered by being through the cultural background practices involves an active response on Dasein's part, not a passive determination.57 In authentic historicality Dasein's possibilities are 'inherited and yet chosen' (384). Dasein's 'repetition' or 'fetching again' always includes a 'counterclaim' upon its past (286).58 Indeed, if this were not true, then Dasein's understanding of being would not have changed since Ancient Greek times and we would not be trying to account for the continuity of its 'stretching out.'
The continuity of Dasein's existence enables us to see our age as the product of its past. But for Heidegger the motivating force behind this history is, of course, nothing mechanical or material but rather the creative insight of Dasein as the vehicle for the changing disclosure of what it is to be. The continuity of existence was prepared for by the primordial leap which disclosed being as at issue in Ancient Greece. Heidegger seems to think that all Dasein's possibilities for understanding being within the horizon of presence, that is, all the possibilities of metaphysical thinking, were laid out by the way the Greeks posed the question of being and the stance they took toward it. He comments that 'In resoluteness lies the existentiell constancy which, by its very essence, has already taken up beforehand every possible moment of insight springing from it' (391). Giving up a 'resolution' by making another one, that is, 'countermanding' one existentiell understanding of being by disclosing a new one, is not an arbitrary or haphazard process but is called for by, to use Heidegger's word, the 'situation' in which Dasein finds itself. This situation is a product of Dasein's relationship to being as existence. Ultimately situations are made 'possible' by revelations of being, though they are made actual by Dasein's creative insight.
In Heidegger s Introduction to Metaphysics he notes some examples or the 'world-building' which is 'history in the authentic sense.' The 'creators, poets, thinkers, and statesmen' are the ones who build worlds, the authentic Dasein who make the leap of insight that brings Dasein's history from its future. They 'run forward' into death, reach into the shelter of being in order to uncover what 'can be in a time' and bring it to light in the clearing. 'Against the overwhelming chaos they set the barrier of their work, and in their work they capture the world thus opened up' (IM 62/47f.). Later in that book Heidegger elaborates:
We know from Heraclitus and Parmenides that the unconcealment of what-is is not simply given. Unconcealment happens only when it is achieved through work: the work of the word in poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word in thought, the work of the polis as the abode of history in which all this is grounded and preserved.
(IM 191/146)59
In the Greek state all of these ways of world-building worked in harmony to let the being of what-is reveal itself in various ways, that is, to reveal itself, as we shall see in Chapter 6, first as chreon, phusis, and aletheia, and then, in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, as idea and ousia. The 'working of the work' lies 'in a change, happening from out of the work, of the unconcealedness of what-is, and this means, of being' (OWA 72/60). The significance lying unarticulated in the cultural practices suddenly comes into focus in the Greek temple or the 'saying' of a thinker and the cultural dealings can begin to take on new shape, as we will see in Section 6.3,60
In Being and Time Heidegger labels Dasein's 'happening as being-with others' its 'destiny' (386).61 This notion is called forth by the realization that Dasein's authentic historicality takes place in a community. Solitary creators, the artists, poets, thinkers, and statesmen, cannot make Dasein historical alone.
Bui if fateful Dasein as being-in-the-world exists essentially as being-with others, its happening is a happening-with and is determined as destiny. This is how we designate the happening of a community, a people. Destiny is not put together out of individual fates any more than being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several subjects. Fates have been already guided in advance in being with one another in the same world and in resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and struggling does the power of destiny become free. The fateful destiny of Dasein in and with its 'generation' makes up the full, authentic happening of Dasein.
(384f.)
Heidegger admits in a later interview that the concept of destiny in Being and Time is left underdeveloped and consequently what he was trying to express in such passages is not clear.62
Some points can be drawn from his scant remarks. First, this contrast between 'fate' and the happening-with of 'destiny' does not indicate that fate is 'personal' in the sense of being manifested in the events of one's personal life, for example, one was 'fated' to meet a particular person or be hired for a particular job, or that the Dasein to whom a particular fate is 'sent' is only an individual person. Neither is the collective destiny something independent of fate. In addition we can note that Heidegger does not call destiny itself 'authentic historicality,' which was the title he gave to fate. Rather the last sentence above says that fate and destiny go together to make up Dasein's 'authentic happening.' Dasein's fate as authentic historicality depends on having a community of like-minded people.
To understand the relationship between fate and destiny and the process in which they cooperate, we can use the example of the authentic thinker since Heidegger makes some relevant remarks about this way of world-building. First of all, philosophy is 'based on the mysterious ground of freedom, on what we have called the leap.' Thus it involves the repetition of the primordial leap in Ancient Greece. Heidegger's added remark that 'all essential philosophical questioning is necessarily untimely' may seem to go against the notion that the authentic present involves an insight into what 'can be in a time.' However, the emphasis in the latter phrase should be on the word 'can.' Authentic thinking is a break with the current Anyone's conception of what it is to be, and, as such, it may be regarded as outrageously wrong by the philosopher's contemporaries. 'Philosophy is essentially untimely because it is fated to be one of those few things that can never find an immediate echo in its actual day' (IM 8/6). Especially since Heidegger considers Nietzsche such an authentic thinker, one is reminded of the madman crying out 'God is dead' and finding ridicule and disbelief as the response. Nietzsche could see that the cultural practices of the late nineteenth century were eliminating the place of God in human existence. The drama of life had shifted from salvation to acquisition. But, it takes time, after the flash of lightning, for the thunder to reach the ears of the man in the street.
How does authentic thinking build a world, then? Heidegger says that authentic thinking can never directly supply the energies and create the opportunities that bring about historical change because such thinking is only the concern of the few creators, the profound transformers (IM 10/8). But philosophy's insight, if it is authentic, neither comes in a void nor is sent out into one. It must be an insight into what can be 'in a time,' and it must strike a responsive chord in others who can come to share in the insight. This is why fate as authentic historicality involves destiny as a happening-with others. Machiavelli expressed a view of human nature similar to the common modern, Nietzschean conception, but no one in sixteenth-century Italy took him up on it.63 'The preservers of a work belong to its createdness as essentially as its creators' (OWA 71/58). Initially, the work's preservers, that is, those who do have ears for its message, seem to deserve the title of 'authentic Dasein' as much as the creator. If this preservation is lacking, there is no authentic creation.
As suggested before, the Dasein that is authentically historical need not be an isolated, individual person. The artisans who planned and built the Gothic cathedrals worked as a group to express a shared new insight into what it is to be. However, the 'destiny' referred to in Being and Time does not seem to indicate this kind of joint authentic historicality as much as what must be the case if a particular, newly projected understanding of being is to be taken up by society at large. Take the example of the insight of philosophy again: 'It spreads only indirectly, by devious paths that can never be laid out in advance, until finally at some indefinite "when," after it is forgotten as primordial philosophy, it sinks down to a commonplace self-understanding' (IM 10/ 8). The 'when' in which insight into being ceases to be authentic and becomes commonplace is as indeterminate as the 'when' in which authentic insight happens. The process in between is the happening-with of destiny, and we could say it ranges from being authentic or what preserves authentic insight, when it still involves the same fundamental questioning of what it is to be, to being fallen inauthenticity. Thus, Dasein's full 'authentic happening" involves both authentic historicality, either individual or collective, and the happening-with of destiny that preserves. Both are necessary for Dasein to be the 'there' in which being reveals itself.
The fact that the history of Dasein is indeed that of its changing understanding of being is far from obvious in the published portion of Being and Time. We have to be aware of what Heidegger intended to accomplish in both the projected section Time and Being' and the missing Part Two on the destructuring of the history of ontology. The thought of human beings does not create ex nihilo an understanding of what it is to be. As mentioned above, just as an insight into being is not cast toward a void but rather 'toward the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group of men,' it never arises in a void either. Using 'poetic' in a broad sense to cover all the modes of authentic disclosure, Heidegger adds:
What is thus cast forth is, however, never an arbitrary demand. Truly poetic projection is the opening up or disclosure of that into which Dasein as historical is already cast.
(OWA 75/63)
Hence authentic Dasein finds the being of what-is already revealed in a certain way. We find that things have started to show up in new ways. A new understanding of being comes as a discovery of the being of what-is - a dis-covering - and not an invention. As Heidegger remarks in another work: 'What a curious leap, presumably yielding the insight that we do not yet sufficiently reside where authentically we already are' (ID 33/97). Without our explicit recognition, our cultural practices had already started letting things show up in new ways; the creator only brings this being into focus. Curious as well, perhaps, is that, in Heidegger's view, when we do come to reside 'there,' that is, when Dasein does become 'at-home-with' a disclosure of being, it ceases to be authentic and becomes inauthentic.
1 For an etymological explanation of the translation of 'Zeitlichkeif as 'timeliness,' see 'Texts and Translations'.
2 A long history of scholarship assimilates Heidegger's concerns with notions of time-consciousness found in Kant and Husserl. For example, see Charles M. Sherover's book Heidegger, Kant and Time, first published in 1971 by Indiana University Press and reprinted in 1988 by University Press of America and Daniel O. Dahlstrom's 'Heidegger's Critique of Husserl' published in 1994 in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, edited by Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), especially pages 239-244.
3 Commentators have suggested that the character of Chance in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There is an amusing parody of this conception of Heidegger's authentic being-there. In Chance's life of wide-eyed openness the television screen plays the role of the truth of being. The subjective voluntaristic view of authenticity can be found in some of Kosinski's descriptions of Chance. For example, he says: 'by changing the channcl he could change himself... he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else who made himself be.' The irony of Chance's name only gives a more close approximation of Satire's view since this philosopher's supposed radical voluntarism frequently sounds more like a radical spontaneity over which the individual has no control. Kosinski does capture the role of the television as the central work of art in the middle of the twentieth century. See Being There (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1970), p. 5.
4 See, for example, MFL 149-150/188-190. These remarks occur in a section dealing with 'The Problem of Transcendence and the Problem of Being and Time? an issue which Heidegger never clarified enough to keep readers from identifying 'transcendence' with consciousness's contact with the 'outside' world, a total misconception of our being in Heidegger's view.
5 I substitute 'timeliness times' for Heidegger's 'Zeitlichkeit zeitigt.' See discussion below for a fuller explanation.
6 The German term for 'future' is 'Zukunff or literally 'to come,' a meaning Heidegger frequently plays on, and I will substitute 'to-come" for 'future' when this meaning is prominent. Heidegger's term for the past dimension is 'Gewesenheit,' and 'having-been' or 'having-beenness' is the standard though awkward attempt to capture this verbal tense used as a noun. The 'present' is 'Gegenwart,' a term Heidegger frequently turns intoaverbas 'Gegenwärtigen or, as we will put it, 'making-present,' to emphasize that the present is an active process ot making things present (326). When Heidegger hyphenates the latter term as 'Gegen-wartigen to emphasize the meaning of the prefix and root, the more literal term 'waiting-toward' is substituted. The translation of 'present' as 'pre-sent' is explained in the text. See Section 3.3 on inauthentic timeliness for further explanation of these terms.
7 The term translated as 'timing' is Die Zeitigung.'
8 The awkward phrase 'the future making-present as having-been' substitutes for Heidegger's equally awkward, neologistic 'als gewesend-gegenwärtigende Zukunft.'
9 In Heidegger's own wordplay, he describes Dasein's Erschlossenheit as always having something unsettled (Unabgeschlossenheit).
10 See Chapter 5 for further discussion of this issue.
11 The 'dialectic' of such conversions and the manifestation of 'the eternal' in them has been explored with great insight by Kierkegaard. He describes the way that an individual receives a new understanding of his past, present, and future in the 'leaps' from the aesthetic sphere to the ethical and the ethical to the religious. For the notion of the 'dialectic' of the eternal, see Sickness Unto Death (Lowrie translation), p. 157. For various 'case studies' see the brief sketches of lives in this book under the different types of despair or the more extended creations in both volumes of Either/Or.
12 Jean-Paul Sartre, 'The Humanism of Existentialism,' Essays in Existentialism, edited by Wade Baskin (New York: Citadel Press, 1968), pp. 42-15.
13 This terminology was first suggested to me by Professor Peter Manchester.
14 His phrase 'Zeitlichkeit zeitigf uses the verb 'Zeitigen
15 Heidegger's 'Das Zeitige' is translated as 'Timely.'
16 Heidegger's discussion of these technical terms is scattered throughout Division Two's first four chapters, but see section 68, 'The Timeliness of Disclosedness in General' (335-389), for the most compact comparison of their usage. To some degree I have had to choose which term to use when Heidegger gives us too many or uses two terms interchangeably, as he apparently does with 'Gegenwart' and 'Gegenwart: For example, in contrasting the authentic and the inauthentic future Heidegger suggests in one place that, if we need a formal, general term for the future ecstasis we could use his phrase 'ahead-of'-itself' by which he had already designated this aspect of the care structure (337 ). But since he himself continually uses 'the future (Zukunfty)' in reference to this ecstasis and plays off its literal meaning of 'to come,' I prefer to try to capture this meaning in our term and leave 'ahead-of-itself' to label a dimension of the care structure. See footnote 22 in Section 3.3 for the ambiguity surrounding 'Gegenwart.'
17 Heidegger's term is 'Gewärtigen The verb 'warten' does mean 'to wait for" or 'to await,' and the adjective "gewärtig' does mean 'awaiting.' But the verb 'Gewärtigen' suggests an ability to deal with what is to come, whether it happens after the final stroke of a hammer or after enrollment in college.
18 His term is 'Erwarten,' which has etymological ties with 'Gewärtigen' (awaiting), 'Gegenwart' (the present), and 'Gegenwärtigen (making-present or waiting-toward).
19 For the use of 'making-present' and 'waiting-toward,' see footnote 6 in Section 3.2.
22 Heidegger initially suggests using 'waiting-toward (Gegen-wart),' not 'making-present (Gegenwärtigen),' as the term for the ecstasis of the present (Gegenwart) correlated with the general inauthentic future of 'awaiting (Gewärtigen) (337-338). But in the discussion that follows he says that 'making-present' is the more general or fundamental term or simply seems to use the terms interchangeably (338). The resulting ambiguity seems to stem from Heidegger's preoccupation with the etymological wordplay in German which we cannot capture in English, a problem apparent in the translators' struggle with these words. Consequently, I use the English terms in the way that seems to make the most sense in our vocabulary as well as the interpretation this book offers.
23 See Section 2.7, 'Dying and Inauthentic Being toward Death."
24 See the discussion in Section 7.4 of Heidegger's distinction between preliminary 'interpretive thinking' and the 'understanding thinking" which makes the leap of insight (TB 35/ 38). [Chapter 7 is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
25 Heidegger's phrase at llie end is 'aus der Befangheit im Seienden,' which is difficult to capture in English. I assume that he is referring to the fallen understanding of what-is belonging to the Anyone. In English it would be more natural lo say that Dasein opens out of 'its prejudice about what-is,' but the correlate preposition 7in' of the German phrase is also uncommonly awkward.
26 Another 'ent- word, that is, "Entscheidung.'
27 Heidegger's term is 'Selbstsein.'
28 For an indication ol the usual account of the sorts of things that are chosen in resoluteness such as a career or getting married, see, for example, Michael Zimmerman, The Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 1981), p. 80. Zimmerman also discusses resoluteness.as a matter of 'steeling oneself' to face physical death in this book as well as his article 'The Foundering of Being and Time' in Philosophy Today, XIX (1975), p. 104.
29 The conflation of Heidegger's position with Kierkegaard's notion of the ethical sphere can be found in, among other works, Calvin Schrag's Existence and Freedom (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961) and Michael Wyschogrod's Kierkegaard and Heidegger (New York: Humanities Press, 1969).
30 See Being and Time. pp. 235 and 494 in the English translation, footnote vi to section 45. the introduction to Division Two.
31 A good example of such a position can be found in Werner Dannhauser's comments about Heidegger in his article 'The Trivialization of Friedrich Nietzsche,' The American Spectator, Vof 15, No. 5 (May, 1982), p. 8.
For years articles such as Karsten Harries's 'Heidegger as a Political Thinker' and Karl A. Moehling's 'Heidegger and the Nazis.' seemed to settle this issue to Heidegger's credit. For Harries's article see Heidegger and Modern Thought, edited by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 304-328, especially pp. 318-328; for Moehling's see Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing Co., 1981), pp. 31—42, especially pp. 40 42. But controversy recently has swirled again with the publication of Victor Farias's book on Heidegger and Nazism in a number of languages, Heidegger and Nazism, edited by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Heidegger's dubious behavior and statements are documented in detail, although perhaps taken out of context in many cases and their meaning distorted in many others. See Heidegger and Nazism, edited with a forward by J. Margolis and T. Rockmore and translated by P. Burrell and G. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). See the next note for references to scholars who have entered the post-Farías debate.
For Heidegger's own comments about the difficulty of telling when one has authentic insight into being see Section 3.6 as well as the discussion in Section 7.4. |Chapter 7 is available online at: http;//www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.him - Editor's note.]
32 For a wide variety of views on this subject, sec The Heidegger Case on Philosophy and Politics, edited by Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). For an account which summarizes various alternative views of Heidegger's political involvement, see Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). For one which most thoroughly places the 'Heidegger affair' in its historical and social context, see Hans Sluga. Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1993). For a critical review of Heidegger's work as a whole written after the height of the Nazi debate, see John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger.
33 See the remark from TB 29/31 in the last section's differentiation of Heidegger's special use of 'forgetting' in regard to inauthentic timeliness.
34 See Being and Time, p. 264. Heidegger draws on the graphic connection between 'Gewissen' (conscience), 'wissen' (know), 'gewiss' (certain), and 'Gewissheit' (certainty). Heidegger's 'Gewissheit' is translated as 'certainty.' Macquarrie and Robinson note that Heidegger takes pains to dissociate the term 'Gewissen from the adjective 'gewiss' and its derivatives, for example, 'Gewissheit.' Earlier in the book, though, Heidegger took pains to dissociate his own concept of 'Gewissheit' from the ordinary notion of certainty in regard to the 'certainty' of death. It is also the ordinary sense of 'Gewissheit' which Heidegger wants to keep distinct from his notion of Gewissen as conscience. See Being and Time, pp. 291-292 and 307 and the English translation p. 338.
35 Or, in Heidegger's obscure way of expressing (his point: 'Dasein is not the ground of its being . . . rather, as being-itself, it is (he being of the ground' (285).
36 For Heidegger's discussion of the 'situation,' see, for example. Being and Time, pp. 299-300, 307-308, and 328. The term 'earth' is used in later works such as 'Origin of the Work of Art' to indicate the limiting factor of Dasein's world and its dependency on being.
37 For further discussion of this issue see Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this book on the Temporality of being. [Chapters 6 and 7 are available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/Cwhite.htm - Editor's note.]
38 Sec Being and Time. p. 344 for the suggestion that these two alternatives are the options for preliminary resoluteness.
39 In keeping with their implied interpretation of authenticity as a rejection of conformity, Macquarrie and Robinson translate the phrase 'Nachholen einer Wahl' (to recover or 'hold again' a choice) as 'making up for not choosing.' with the gratuitous insertion of 8 'not' changing the meaning of the phrase to its contrary.
40 Repeat' translates Heidegger's 'Wiederholen or, literally, to hold again.
41 See Heidegger's various demures on Being and Time, pp. 301-303 and 309.
42 I translate 'zufällig' in the passage above as 'aceidental falling' in order to capture both its common meaning of 'accidental' and its graphic connection with verfallen or 'falling.'
43 This time his word is Vorgünger,' rather than ' Vorläufer,' the forerunning that he spoke of in Being and Time, but the idea is the same.
44 The phrase 'passed away' translates Heidegger's 'vergänglich.' Unfortunately, it obliterates Heidegger's etymological allusion to 'Vorgänger
45 Heidegger may seem to have a particularly ambivalent relationship to Nietzsche's philosophy, which is why it is often difficult to differentiate who is saying what in his huge tome on Nietzsche's philosophy. Of course, Heidegger does not agree with Nietzsche that life is will to power or accept such other, specific metaphysical or historical claims Nietzsche makes. But his own interpretation of such doctrines as the eternal return of the same make them close to his own views.
46 His wordplay is between "Zukunft' and Zurückkommen
47 See IM 93/71. One might now shudder to think Heidegger may have been thinking of Hitler as such a founder of a new political stale, nol Lycurgus and Solon.
48 Heidegger's term is 'Wiederholung.' but the translators obliterate its possible connection to his notion of repetition later in the book by using 'restate."
49 The term "historicality" substitutes for Heidegger's "Geschichtlichkeit
50 [Chapters 6 and 7 are available online at: http://www.scu.edu/pliilosophy/CWhite.htmEditor's note.]
51 Forms of the verb 'happen' will substitute for Heidegger's uses of 'Geschehen' while, as usual, historical' translates "geschichtlich.'
52, Heidegger's term is 'erstrecken.'
53 Alternatively, the issue could be that of when an individual acquires an understanding of being such that being is in question, even just tacitly as in the everydayness of an individual brought up in Western culture. The issues are in fact connected, but, given Heidegger's comments about temples and museums, I think that the conclusion I draw in the text is more convincing.
54 Heidegger's term 'Vergangenheit' suggests these connotations.
55 His term is 'Schicksal,' which derives from the verb 'schicken or 'to send,"
56 Heidegger's term is 'Erbe.'
57 In light of the claim that Dasein's authentic choice first 'possibilizes' a possibility, perhaps this range should not be described as a range of possibilities, as if the possibilities are all laid out beforehand, but rather as Dasein's indeterminate able-to-be.
58 The wordplay is between ' Wiederholen' (repetition) and Widerruf (counterclaim). The term ' Widerruf has sometimes been translated as 'revocation.' Taken in its ordinary sense the word fails to capture the way that a resolution draws on Dasein's previous understanding of being and instead suggests a complete rejection of it. But if we thought of the term as meaning 're-vocation,' indicating a repeated commitment to a vocation, then we come closer to Heidegger's meaning. In the ' Widerruf Dasein reaffirms its role as the 'there' of being.
59 Heidegger's 'vorhanden' is translated here as 'simply given.' The being of what-is is not built into things as if it were simply a property of an object sitting before us present-at-hand such as color or shape.
60 [Chapter 6 is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/phiosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
61 The word 'destiny' translates Heidegger's Geschick.' Note its connection with Schicksal and 'schicken(See footnote 54 above.) Under this specific definition, mythological and other ahistorical cultures could be considered as having a 'destiny,' although it would keep them moving in the same circuit rather than down the path of a history. However, such cultures would lack 'fate' as authentic historicality since they do not explicitly make an issue of being and their understanding of being does not change. In later works, though, Heidegger clearly ties the term 'destiny' to the history of being in Western civilization.
62 See Zygmunt Adamczewski 's report on Heidegger's remarks in his 'On the Way to Being (Reflecting on Conversations with Martin Heidegger)' in Heidegger and the Path of Thinking, edited by John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970), p. 24.
63 As we will see in Section 7.4 [available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/ CWhite.him - Editor's note], Heidegger also thinks that attempting to institute a new understanding of being is risky and difficult. Machiavelli himself commented: 'nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders." He leaped' too far for others to follow, and hence his insight failed to catch the public's attention. His words, after all, were intended for the cars of princes, not the Anyone. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by H.C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 23.