Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual

Historizing is the way Dasein takes up possibilities and roles to project itself into the future. It is why we experience continuity throughout our lives, and it is the basis for historicality – our sense of a more general continuity of “history.” In Being and Time, Heidegger identifies both inauthentic and authentic modes of historizing that give rise, respectively, to inauthentic and authentic modes of histori­cality. He focuses on historizing at the individual level but gestures at a communal form of historizing. In this paper, I develop the concept of co-historizing in both its authentic and inauthentic modes. I argue that Heidegger’s unarticulated concept of inauthentic co-historizing is what necessitated the planned (but unfinished) second half of Being and Time – the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.” I consider what it means to take responsibility for our destiny as a people and specifically as a community of philosophers.

Ethics usually focuses on actions, with thinking or unthinking only having significance insofar as they lead to good or bad behavior. Heidegger and Levinas, however, argue that thinking in certain ways, or not thinking in general, is ethical or unethical on its own rather than just by having good or bad consequences. Heidegger’s early work makes unthinking conformity (regardless of to what) an important part of inauthenticity, while his later work turns the thinking of being into our central “ethical” task, intentionally blurring the distinction between thinking and acting. Levinas makes thinking about humans in a certain way – namely as thinkable, as fitting into and exhausted by comprehensible categories – itself an act of conceptual violence, regardless of what deeds follow from it. We conclude with Kierkegaard who criticized humanity’s tendency to sleepwalk through their own lives, only waking up by confronting something unthinkable. This thought can be seen as a common source for both Heidegger and Levinas, as well as a way to keep the two in a continuously off-balance strife with each other.

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” (das Unheimliche) as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” (heimelig) familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our self-interpretations and future projects. The paper concludes by showing how the uncanny is not simply something we feel in times of crisis; it is, for Heidegger, who we are. This means the secure feeling of familiarity that we embodied prior to the pandemic was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world.

This article addresses the many ways the philosophies of the later Heidegger and the later Levinas speak to us in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. I argue that the pause in the world’s busy industrial life provides an ideal opportunity for what Heidegger called meditative thinking. The pandemic is also a time both of extreme bodily vulnerability and of extraordinary ethical responsibility for others, and so causes us to hear Levinas’ extreme language in Otherwise than Being about anarchic ethical responsibility and the self as a hostage in a very different way.

I argue that there is a confluence of authenticity and inauthenticity inherent to the structure of average everydayness in Being and Time. I support this reading by recasting Heidegger’s notion of fallenness in Being and Time in terms of its precursor, ruinance, which he introduces in his 1921–22 lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research (ga 61). In this lecture course, Heidegger explains that ruinance is constituted by a dual movement of relucence and prestruction: the former, an intentional openness to the world; the latter, a securing that conceals that openness. While this dual movement is not expressed explicitly in these terms in Being and Time, I show that it is nevertheless tacitly operative in the structure of falling and that it grounds the duality of average everydayness. I frame this study around the debate on how Dasein can be authentic despite its fallenness, given that fallenness paradoxically renders Dasein essentially inauthentic.

I argue that staying with the movement of attention is the way to being. For attention moves in response to the appeal of being, which means that being shows itself in that movement. We are thus always already on the way to being, always already listening to its call. But something else is required, a special effort of attending to one’s own movement, a taking-heed (In-die-Acht-nehmen) that enables being to be made manifest in a more profound manner, which can transform our being in the world and associated ethical and political realities.

Heidegger develops his reading of a-lētheia as privative unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) in tandem with his early phenomenological theory of truth. He is not simply reinterpreting a word, but rather reading Greek philosophy as having a primordial understanding of truth which has itself been concealed in interpretation. After shedding medieval and modern presuppositions of truth as correspondence, the existential truth-experience shows itself, no longer left puzzlingly implicit in unsatisfactory conventional readings of Greek philosophy. In Sein und Zeit §44, Heidegger resolves interpretive difficulties in Parmenides through his interpretation of alētheia and philologically grounds this reading in Heraclitus’s description of the unconcealing logos. Although this primordial sense of the word has already been obscured in Plato and Aristotle, the structural gradation of their theories of truth conserves the primordial pre-Socratic sense of truth as the experience of unconcealment.