Chapter 1
1An early version of this chapter appeared in Research in Phenomenology Vol. 46 (3) (2016) under the title ‘Time, Singularity, and the Impossible: Heidegger and Derrida on Dying’.
2On the extent of Heidegger’s commitment to transcendental phenomenology, see Crowell’s (2001: 167–81) reading of Heidegger and Husserl’s failed collaboration on the Encyclopaedia Britannica article. Crowell rightly notes that Heidegger does not abandon the reduction (or some version of it) and that what signals his break with Husserl is his proposal for an ontology of the transcendental subject. That is something that, in Husserl’s eyes, is inconceivable, since there are ontologies only of worldly entities and the transcendental subject is not a worldly entity. Crowell does not consider where Heidegger’s proposal comes from. That is the strain of hermeneutics in his thinking. It is there from his first lecture in Freiburg onward. That puts him at odds with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology on a number of related issues as well, most significantly, perhaps, with the ideal of apodictic evidence, but also with transcendental reflection and description versus understanding and interpretation. See TDP, 85 where Heidegger agrees with Natorp’s criticism of Husserl, that description, being conceptual, modifies the experience that is being described, and TDP, 98 where Heidegger proposes instead a ‘hermeneutical intuition’ of life. On the early Heidegger, see Van Buren (1994) and Kisiel (1995).
3Drawing on the phenomenologies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus (1972) argues in his first book that intelligence presupposes embodiment and embeddedness in a social context and that machines can’t think because they are neither embodied nor embedded. Heidegger, it seems, would disagree. A sufficient condition for human intelligence or understanding, in my view, is historical and/or narrative self-awareness (consciousness of one’s continuity through time, of one’s beginning, middle and end). I cannot think of any good reason for ruling out, from the realm of the conceivable, that a machine could have such an awareness or, said differently, that the most a machine could conceivably exhibit is an instantaneous mind.
4Derrida has pointed out in numerous essays the theoretical and ethical problems relating to Heidegger’s generic use of the word ‘animal’. See, for instance, Derrida (2008). Hence my use of scare quotes around the term.
5Derrida (2001: 58): ‘the most tempting figure for this absolute secret is death’.
6We might think of the relation to death as the antithesis of the transcendental object in Kant. The latter is the unity of the concept of the object that makes possible the unity of the subject, or self-identity.
7That poses a problem for my interpretation of the sentence Ableben aber kann des Dasein nur solange, als er sterbt in section 2.
8Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger’s being-toward-death in Time and the Other is doubtless in the background of Blanchot’s reading here. But Blanchot seems to me to be much closer to the spirit of Heidegger, particularly to the thinking of the ontico-ontological difference – which is what is at stake here – than Levinas.
9Levinas (1987: 71–2) says in Time and the Other that the Epicurean adage ‘insists on the eternal futurity of death. The fact that it deserts every present [is due] to the fact that death is ungraspable’. As I see it, Heidegger and Levinas share the same notion of death, but they draw opposite conclusions from it. Notably, Levinas thinks that it puts an end to the subject’s ‘virility’ and ‘heroism’ and introduces an extreme passivity and a relation to the other human being, whereas Heidegger thinks, at least in Being and Time, that it makes possible an authentic self-appropriation. Even if the latter were possible, which I’m not convinced of, I do not see why it would have to be either virile or heroic. See Chapter 2.
10See also Derrida’s (1991: 100, 107) remarks on Dasein in ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.’
11Two numerically distinct individuals, Plato and Socrates, are materially different but formally the same, since they share the form of humanity. Numerical distinctness presupposes sameness of concept or form. Uniqueness does not.
12To disclose is to project meaning, a horizon of possibility, or world. To be disclosed is to find oneself in a meaningful situation with others, things and oneself.
13Perhaps the problem is that transcendental phenomenology knows no limits. Eugen Fink (1995: 61–2), for instance, remains on the fence when he considers the question whether the transcendental constituting life has a beginning and end in birth and death.
14Derrida seems to be modelling the structure of mourning on the structure of the subject’s encounter with the other in Levinas. Levinas claims that the other who stands before me in a conversation transcends the idea I have of him, which reveals his alterity or uniqueness.
15Some of the language is reminiscent of What is Metaphysics?: ‘In the clear night of the nothing’. (BW 103).
Chapter 2
1David Wood (2005: 65) contends that Levinas’s argument is too weak to produce that desired conclusion. All that the relation with the alterity of death shows is that the self is in relation with something with which it has nothing in common. It leaves ‘indeterminate as to whether [this something] refers to a god, a rock, a cloud, nothingness’. I think that Wood is right. Why should absolute alterity mean the alterity of the other human being rather than, say, the alterity of being in relation to beings, which is what it signifies for Heidegger (see Chapter 3.2)? The translator of Time and the Other, Richard Cohen, inserts a footnote at this point of the argument on p. 75, presumably to reassure the reader that the text is not prey to ‘an intellectual confusion or a fallaciously employed ambiguity’, clearly sensing that something is awry here. Levinas is on more solid ground, I think, in Totality and Infinity, where he turns the encounter with the alterity of my death into a modality of the encounter with the other human being, instead of making the encounter with the other human being a modality of the alterity of my death. See Levinas, 1979: 234.
2Levinas does not distinguish between the self and the ego in this text, that is, between the accusative me that is there at the pre-reflexive level of awareness, and the nominative I, the product of self-consciousness and self-identification, as he will do in later works.
3The evocation of the dialectic as the method used in the text is perhaps not incidental. See Levinas (1987: 92).
4On formalization versus generalization, see PRL 39–46.
Chapter 3
1Bernasconi (2005: 172): ‘My claim is that without addressing Darwin directly, Levinas uses Heidegger’s ontology as a surrogate for Darwinism, social Darwinism and related ideas. By doing so, he finds a way of confronting the idea of a struggle for existence in terms of his own choosing.’
2I sympathize with David Wood’s (2005: 54) suggestion that it would be better to take Levinas’s misreadings of Heidegger as a point of departure for a reflection on what is involved in reading another philosopher and on the ethical dimensions of that relationship. I wonder whether one of the reasons for Levinas’s mischaracterizations of Heidegger’s position, other than the fact that Heidegger joined the NSDAP in 1933, might be what Harold Bloom called anxiety of influence.
3Many more could be cited. For instance: Jean Greisch (2005) in Ethics and Ontology: some Hypocritical Reflections, Rudi Visker (2004) in The Inhuman Condition, or Françoise Dastur (2002) in The Call of Conscience: The Most Intimate Alterity.
4That means that the notion of theory or of the theoretical that becomes predominant in philosophy after Plato and Aristotle is understood as a suspension of work, that is, always by reference to work and production.
5Levinas (1979: 46) also identifies ontology with a philosophy of power on the ground that, given the primacy of the theoretical attitude, the relation with the other human being consists in comprehending him, in grasping him under the identity of an impersonal concept. The violence of that impersonality, for Levinas, is concretely realized in the state.
6See MFL 219 for Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s expression in The Republic and Levinas, 1979: 102–4.
7That statement is the antithesis of Nicholas of Cusa’s (1973: 31) definition of God, which is thought on the basis of identity pure and simple: ‘the “not-other” is not other than the not-other’.
8No doubt that dis-identification of the feminine with empirical beings of the female sex or gender doesn’t temper the manifest androcentrism of Levinas’s text, as Chanter (2005: 319) rightly observes. I think that Diane Perpich (2001: 36) is right when she remarks that, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas relegates the feminine being ‘to those domains that have traditionally been both her purview and her lot: on the one hand, the home and domestic arrangements, and on the other, the erotic relationship and maternity’, even though it is also true that his conception of the feminine being is anything but traditional and that it bears no resemblance to the conventional picture of the woman as wife/mother.
9I have been unable to identify any claim that Levinas makes to that effect. However, his description of the feminine in Totality and Infinity and Time and the Other certainly makes it seem as if he had said that. See also Chanter, 2005.
10Following Hölderlin, Heidegger also describes the home at one point as an ‘asylum’ in his lecture on Der Ister (see HH 20).
11The question remains: Who or what welcomes feminine alterity? Having no determinable identity, feminine alterity would be welcomed under the terms of an unconditional hospitality. But the subject that would welcome feminine alterity in that way would also have to be without a determinable identity (as subject, self, ego, consciousness, etc.).
Chapter 4
1I do not distinguish between what Hölderlin means when he writes something in a poem or letter and what Heidegger takes him to mean, unless it is necessary, as in section 6 where I distinguish between the standard reading of Hölderlin on the relation between the foreign and the proper and Heidegger’s unusual interpretation of it.
2This talk of the look is reminiscent of Derrida’s (1994: 7) talk of the visor effect in Spectres of Marx: to ‘feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross’.
3Is this a thinking of the homeland beyond nationalism or the identity of the nation?
4See de Beistegui (1998: 128–45) and Strong (2018) for an interpretation of Heidegger’s reading of this expression.
5Heidegger draws this polemical logic of appearing from Heraclitus’s Fragment 53: ‘War is the father of all and king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.’ He sees that logic at work in Hölderlin’s notion of nature or the holy.
6Kearney’s explanation of this phenomenon is different than the one proposed here. On his account, the stranger incarnates the monstrous or divine owing to our fractured psyche. Instead of acknowledging that there is an inner alterity that haunts us, we repudiate it by projecting it onto others (Kearney, 2003: 4). That psychological account seems to me to be insufficient, since what calls for an explanation is the strangeness of the other, not the inner strangeness of the self. The former, as I argued in Chapter 2, is not reducible to the latter.
7The blowing of the northeasterly wind in Andenken can be read both ways, as the greeting sent by the foreigner from the Orient to the Hesperian poet or as the poet’s remembrance of the same. That greeting, or its remembrance, sets the Hesperian poet on his journey home.
Chapter 5
1A version of this chapter appeared in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Vol. 44 (3) under the title ‘Nietzsche and Heidegger: ethics beyond metaphysics.’ I thank the editor, Ulli Haase, for permission to use it.
2For example, Aquinas explains that truth is primarily in the intellect and secondarily in the thing: in the former, because the conformity of the intellect to the thing cannot be expressed anywhere but in the intellect; in the latter, because the thing has a quality or form that makes it adequate to the intellect in the sense that it causes knowledge of itself by means of its species received in the soul (Aquinas, 1998: 171, 178, 185). Let me add that both Aristotle and Aquinas offer non-propositional accounts of truth as well. Aristotle (2014) speaks of the truth of non-composite essences at the end of Metaphysics IX.1051b24-25, which are made available in an intuition rather than in a judgment. So also for Aquinas: truth is known by the divine intellect intuitively not in a judgment.
3Heidegger insists in the Parmenides lecture that Luther is the first to connect truth with justice: ‘Luther asks how man could be a “true” Christian, that is, a just man, a man fit for what is just, a justified man’ (51). Truth here becomes a matter of justice. See also Bret Davis (2007: 166).
4Tracy Colony (2011: 207) suggests that the formulation of the will to power as the essence and the eternal return as the existence of the world in the 1936–7 courses on art and the eternal return is a late editorial addition of Heidegger’s.
5Although I cannot explore this here, Heidegger contends in section 110 of his Contributions to Philosophy (from the Event) that there is in fact no discontinuity between modern idealism and the emerging naturalism of the mid-nineteenth century, as they are both offshoots of Platonism (see CP 173). I am thankful to Dan Dahlstrom for pointing this out to me.
6Is there a connection between the understanding of being as subjectivity and the twofold legacy of the Enlightenment, as Frederick Beiser (2000) describes it, namely scientific naturalism and rational criticism, and the so-called crisis of the Enlightenment that it brought about, that is, scientific materialism and scepticism?
7Alain de Libera (2007: 98–101) argues that the I doesn’t become part of everyday philosophical discourse before Locke’s Essay, in particular, in the moral-juridical context that deals with the imputation of responsibility to the self.
8If I am not anxious or distressed about what being signifies then that is tantamount to saying that I take for granted (a) the appearing of entities in the world and (b) how I live my existence in the world.
9Tom Stern contends that ‘what Nietzsche wants us to learn to love and make beautiful is the error that conditions our existence [. . .] What he recommends is the artistic appropriation of these errors at a second-order level – to make these errors beautiful’ (Stern, 2013: 9–10). Nietzsche does say in a brief parenthesis in the Genealogy that art is the only antidote to the ascetic ideal – ‘art, in which precisely the lie is sanctioned and the will to deception has a good conscience’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 153). But there are indications in the text that suggest that Nietzsche may not think that art is a sufficient response to nihilism and the ascetic ideal (why does he allude to it only parenthetically?), and that what is required in addition is an ethical appropriation of these errors, that is, an appropriation of them as obstacles to the way we ordinarily understand ourselves and in relation to which we are to test the strength of our character or will.
10Nietzsche is close to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in that regard in which the trajectory of ordinary consciousness is described as a pathway of doubt and despair. When I commit myself to the truth of p, I stake my being on it. So when I become conscious of its untruth, I lose my sense of self as well.
11Laurence Hatab and Christa Davis Acampara have argued that the sovereign individual does not function as a positive exemplar for Nietzsche. I am not convinced by their argument. Acampara contends that the standard view cannot be supported because ‘reference to such a being is limited to the one section under consideration’, that is, GM II 2, and because it commits Nietzsche to certain ideas about subjectivity that he rejects, such as the distinction between the doer and the deed (Acampara, 2006: 152–3). Hatab’s point is roughly the same: ‘[t]he sovereign individual names ... the modern ideal of subjective autonomy, which Nietzsche rejects’ (Hatab, 2005: 54). Acampara’s first claim is incorrect. Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of learning to keep one’s word on two other occasions in his late notebooks, which I cite above. Second, as I read Nietzsche, being able to stand security for one’s word, aside from being a test of one’s strength and character, is an achievement: it is achieved by overcoming internal resistances, such as the power to forget. In that sense, it exemplifies the Nietzschean notion of freedom rather than the modern idea of autonomy as self-determination. Both authors seem to assume that Nietzsche has one ideal type under which all his descriptions of what is übermenschlich has to fit. But it is not clear that this is true.
12Nietzsche provides further examples in Twilight of the Idols of what this training and exercise of the will involves. In order to see well, for instance, we must learn to defer judgment: ‘not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-tacking instincts in one’s control’. The incapacity to resist a stimulus, the need to react and obey every impulse, is a sign of ‘decline’ and ‘symptom of exhaustion’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 76). We must submit to these kinds of exercises to have our volitional and cognitive resources under our control.
Chapter 6
1The translator of Aristotle (1994: 43) notes that substance is a conventional yet misleading term for ousia, a view shared by many authors such as Aubenque, 2000; Loux, 1991; Wedin, 2002 and Witt, 1989.
2See Arpe, 1941; Bos, 2000; Braun, 1977; Courtine, 2003; de Ghellinck, 1941 and 1942; Gilson, 2000. We find the following entry in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: ‘Substance: essence XIII (Cursor M.); a being; (philos.) that which underlies phenomena; material, matter; means, wealth XIV. (O)F substance, corr. to Pr. sustancia, Sp. sustancia, It. sostanza – post-Augustan L. substantia being, essence, material property (formally rendering Gr. hupostasis, but used also for ousia), f. substare, f. sub SUB- + stare STAND. So substantial XIV – (O)F substantiel or Chr. L. substantialis, tr. Gr. hupostatikos.’
3Boethius (1997: III.91–5): we ‘say that there is one ousia or ousiosis, that is, one essentia or subsistentia of the Godhead, but three upostaseis, that is three substantias. And indeed, following this use, men have spoken of one essence of the trinity (unam trinitatis essentiam), three substantias and three personas. For did not the language of the Church forbid us to say that there are three substantias in God?’ See Augustine (1963: VII.3.11).
4In fragment 100 of the testimonia on Posidonius (1988), Lucan writes: ‘For Posidonius, the Stoic, says, “God is intelligent spiritus pervading the whole materiam [= ousias].”’ In his translation of Plato’s (1975) Timaeus, Calcidius renders ousia once by divitiae (11.11), twice by essentia (22.8, 29.9) and six times by substantia (27.8, 9, 15, 17, 29.11, 51.2). Braun (1977) remarks that Tertullian rejects the word essentia for the being of the divine (167), that substantia presents itself as the normal and natural equivalent of ousia (179) and that he defines substantia as the body (corpus) of each res (81).
5Mansfield (1992: 90): ‘It may safely be assumed that the artificial and to some extent superficial harmonizing of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics ... is not Seneca’s doing, but stems from the early Middle Platonist tradition(s) on which he depends.’ This so-called agreement between Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics is often expressed by Cicero (1994: IV.1.2; 22.61; 1956, I.1.2).
6This division of being echoes Plato’s passage in the Sophist on the gigantomachia peri tes ousias (2002: 246a3–c4). The Friends of the Forms identify ousia with the incorporeal, whereas the Sons of the Earth identify it with the corporeal. Plato of course does not say that ousia is a genus divisible into the corporeal and the incorporeal.
7Note that Seneca presents an unusual Stoic doctrine in this passage. Instead of placing the standard incorporeals in the class of non-existent entities – time, place, void and meaning – he has fictitious entities.
8Arpe (1941: 66), Braun (1977: 172) and Courtine (2003: 56) maintain that it is meant to replicate the Stoic opposition between upostasis and emphasis. But it is difficult to maintain that thesis with much confidence. The latter opposition is fairly unstable and equivocal in Stoicism. Upostasis has at least two different senses in Stoicism: (a) for the Posidonian school, the term signifies a body as opposed to an appearance; (b) but for the earlier Stoics, the term is contrasted precisely with ousia = body, and is reserved for the incorporeals. See Goldschmidt (1972: 331–45).
9Rutledge (2007: 109–21) stresses the importance of rhetoric during the Imperial Age.
10Cicero (1960: 5.23): ‘Whether its subject is the nature of the heavens or of the earth, the power of gods or men . . .’
11Quintilian (1924: II.21.13): ‘philosophers only usurped this department of knowledge [i.e. on the honorable, the good, the just and the expedient] after it had been abandoned by the orators: it was always the peculiar property of rhetoric and the philosophers are really trespassers’. Quintilian adds that since dialectic is a concise form of oratory, whatever is brought before the dialectician or philosopher should a fortiori be regarded as also appropriate for oratory.
12Veyne (1997: 171): ‘Roman epitaphs reflected not some fundamental idea of death but the reign of public rhetoric.’
13Quintilian (1924: III.6.21) reports Hermagoras’s definition of stasis: ‘a status is that which enables the subject [= conflict] to be understood and to which the proofs of the parties concerned will also be directed’.
14Quintilian (1924: III.6.80: ‘there are three things on which enquiry is made in every case: we ask whether a thing is, what it is, and of what kind it is (quod, quid sit et quale sit). Nature herself imposes this upon us. For, first of all, there must be some being (subesse aliquid) for the question, since we cannot possibly determine what a thing is, or of what kind it is, until we have first ascertained whether it is, and therefore the first question raised is whether it is.’
15See Bos (2000: 511–37) for the empirico-nominalistic reading of Aristotle’s Categories in the pseudo-Augustinian Paraphrasis Themistiana, and Courtine (2003: 16–33) for the same in Boethius’ commentary on Aristotle’s text.