1. Dasein’s Eigenste Being

The second part of Being and Time shows that dasein is the unifying basis for its own self-disclosure and authenticity. In section 53, the last section of part II, chapter I, he sketches out what he will have to establish, namely that dasein’s existential structure makes possible an individual’s authentic (eigentliche) being to death. Because this possibility is dasein’s own—is constitutive of dasein—it is said to be eigentlich or proper, true, and essential. The name of this condition for the possibility of an individual’s proper, mortal way of being is the disclosiveness of situated understanding. Disclosiveness is to be read in Heidegger’s sense of showing forth, opening up, or clearing; and understanding, in his sense of dasein’s alert, projecting ability to be. Dasein’s constitutive ability to be is a forecasting process of disclosure that manifests temporality as it projects forward, and in that sense understands, in its historical, social situation.

Heidegger interprets dasein’s ability to be, in the language of possibility. In this context it is not a possibility for a future realization of something determinant, nor is it a possibility that takes place at a distance from dasein and can be known objectively by contemplation. Dasein’s proper and true ability to be is mortal possibility, and is characterized as the possibility of the impossibility of existence: being to death. Dasein’s world-openness, its clearing for the self-showing of beings, is an ability to be that is sheer, mortal possibility. Possibility [Möglichkeit], Heidegger says, is disclosed [unverhült] as the impossibility [Unmöglichkeit] of existence. Being to death, then, is the meaning of dasein’s ability to be, although we shall find that meaning is used in this context in a highly specific way. “Death, as possibility, gives dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing which dasein, as actual, could itself be.” Meaning does not suggest any kind of supersensible world.

Vorlaufen, or ‘running ahead’, is, with proper, possibility, understanding, and being to death, the fifth organizing term of this section. It addresses this movement of being to death and possibility. “Being to death as running ahead in possibility first of all makes possible this possibility and makes it as such free.” Dasein’s ability to be discloses itself [erschliesst sich] in the running ahead of being to death. It is a movement in which the most extreme possibility of human being, its death, is brought forth and uncovered in its possibility. What is most dasein’s own, its ability to be, is not something to be realized. Authenticity for Heidegger is not a matter of self’s actualizing itself. There is no self there when dasein’s ability to be is addressed. Its movement is one of running ahead to its impossibility in its mere ability to be. It is not, we shall see, a movement of self-constitution or of the unfolding of an essence that has a nature to unfold or of a truth that is to find its adequacy in an identity that is constituted on the basis of truth’s form or content. The movement of dasein’s proper and true possibility is mortal temporality in its difference from possible identities that we might become, the possible lives that we might lead, and the selfhood that we might achieve.

This movement is dasein’s most essential [eigenste] possibility for interpreting its proper existence [eigentlich Existenz]. Existential understanding, in contrast to interpretation, is found in the projective aspect of dasein’s temporal movement. Human being, in its care, continuously projects and designs [Entwirft] in the midst of its relations. Heidegger has shown in Section 31 that its projective character opens up [erschliesst] in and to the world as well as reveals the being of dasein as possibility of being. Projection is being possible. In the section at hand he indicates in a preliminary sketch that the temporality of understanding and its projective character [Entwurf] are revealed in its mortal running ahead. Heidegger’s intention is to show how dasein “auf eigenstes Seinkonnen sich entwerfen kann”—how dasein can project itself on and by its most proper ability to be. Running ahead shows itself as the possibility for understanding the most proper, uttermost ability to be. If he can show this possibility and let it be shown in his account of it, he will have an interpretation that is designed after the temporal and mortal design of dasein’s understanding. He will then be in a position to show how dasein might live in a way that, like the interpretation of Being and Time, opens to its being. Dasein’s temporal and mortal movement, its Vorlauf, would then be the basis for the way we design our lives.

But this basis has no definitive or determinate nature. Dasein’s most proper course of conduct takes place as it lets its disclosure disclose itself in whatever activity one undertakes. Heidegger says that his own work must uncover the structure of running ahead in death as dasein’s truest possibility. If his writing succeeds and is proper to dasein, it will be responsive to its own “vorlaufenden Erschliessen,” to its own understanding in running ahead disclosively. That does not mean that the correctness of Heidegger’s analysis will be guaranteed if he is true to the being of dasein. It means that an anxious desire for correctness will be experienced in the mortal possibility of dasein’s being, which in its occurrence is not subject to correctness or incorrectness; and although Heidegger does not entirely face his own anxiety regarding unity, the impact of his account means that the book’s project regarding unity is also in question by virtue of dasein’s mortality of design. On the basis of dasein’s movement, as Heidegger finds it, even the language of being, running ahead, and design do not escape the unfixing quality of dasein’s truth. We shall see that its truth comes most clearly to bear as it puts itself in question in consequence of its own claims. Dasein’s disclosive running ahead in mortal temporality and the ek-stasis that it constitutes undercut any predisposition to complete certainty, most particularly that predisposition that inclines one to canonize Heidegger’s writings or to think on their basis rather than on the basis of their possibility for no possibility at all. Heidegger’s interpretation of dasein is not the result of “staring at meaning” and coming up with the best reading of the meaning of life. It is designed, rather, to express dasein’s ability to be in its disclosive being to death. It clears the way for dasein’s world-openness as the temporal course of being to death. The account of Dasein’s authenticity takes its departure from the finite, temporal movement that is the condition of possibility of both meaning and no meaning, that is, from the questionableness of meaning in being to death.

When dasein’s eigenste Möglichkeit (most proper possibility) is named death (BT 263), the meaning of most proper or ownmost or most essential is thus interrupted. Dasein’s eigenste ability to be, its truest can-be, is not something that properly can be said to be its own in the sense of a property at its disposal. Nor is its truest capacity to be self-relational in the sense that a subject relates to itself. The continuity of self-relation is ruptured by a course of coming to be that does not reflect or represent the self. It rather discloses human being as non-selflike possibility without identity or subjectivity. Dasein is clear [offenbar] not only in its difference from its everyday self-understanding but in its difference from selfhood. There is a wrenching [entrissen] quality in dasein’s deathly openness. It lives out its existential understanding as it is torn from the meanings and values by which it makes its way in its society and as it is torn from its inherited interpretation of itself as self-founding. In this wrenching aspect dasein lives its disclosure of its being in the midst of its activities and connections. It stands out of—ek-sists—everything that it lives for. Dasein’s deathly openness ek-sists its selfhood as well as its ethos.

Dasein in its most proper possibility is not finally defined by its linkage to people or things. This is not to say that it is not linked to people and things. It is found only in social, historical matrices. Human being occurs only in multiple human connections. But dasein is in excess of its definitive way of being. The human world’s ability to be, its clearing for all beings, interrupts the matrix of connections, not in the active sense of doing something to the matrix, but in the sense of pervading and making possible the matrix without being identical to the matrix or having an existence independent of the matrix. Playing on vorlaufen, we can say that the world’s ability to be courses through the connections of our lives as difference from connections and yields their fragility, their mortality, their disconnection in the midst of their connections. When Heidegger says that dasein’s possibility runs forward as dasein’s future, is dasein’s ability to be, and is being to death, he means that dasein goes forward in this interruption: to go in its most proper being means that in moving into its future dasein never leaves its being to death, its possibility for no possibility. Its futural movement is being to death. “Es geht um sein eigenstes Sein” (It goes about its most proper being). One can see why interpreters have often mistaken this claim to mean that dasein is individually alone in its mortality and that Heidegger is a modern stoic who holds that humans must accept the fate of death with singular courage. But we also see that dasein, as an intrinsically social, worldly being, is a being marked by difference in its being from the totality of its relations and values. In its relations and values dasein is the opening [erschliessen] of its ownmost incapacity to own its being by affirming who in fact it is. It comes into its own by disowning its selfhood in the way it is a self.

How is this interruptive nonrelatedness to be lived? What is proper to it? The paradox in this part of Heidegger’s analysis is found in his claim that by disowning the sufficiency of one’s connections and identity vis-à-vis dasein, one owns not only his or her world but also one’s being. Just as Nietzsche’s self-overcoming in his account of the ascetic ideal echoes the theme of self-sacrifice, Heidegger’s interpretation echoes the same thing. The individual individuates itself by discovering the singularity of its being to death and by living its connections with a sensibility informed by that singularity. One loves in the fragility of loving, not in the assumption of its founded meaning. One affirms values with the understanding that he or she and one’s values are able not to be in the possibility of their affirmation. Nothing replaces the individual’s life in its living. But rather than thinking in a connection between self-giving and universal principles, Heidegger thinks in the interruption of the meaning of our lives by the mortal possibility of living and finds in owning the being’s interruption of our lives we may disown the theoretical and existential sufficiency of our selves for defining our being or our ability to be. Individuation means living responsively in the world with the eigenstes Möglichkeit of being to death, which interrupts one’s historical and community identity and puts in question the meaning of life. This is saying something quite different from the statement that the individual must die his or her death alone. In owning one’s being one owns no one, and that ‘no one’ is the truth of one’s being. No one, no history, no community, no subjectivity authorizes the individual’s life. The question is how we are to think of being without authority and meaning for life, without self-relational meaning. When Heidegger says that an individual is forced by the forward run [Vorlaufen] of existence to take over its most proper and true being in possibility, he is saying that the individual’s world and life are decentered and ruptured by the individual’s resolve. In this resolve the thought of selfhood, subjectivity, and self-constitution are set aside. In resolve one opens out in the world in the “understanding design” of dasein’s mortal openness.

Dasein’s situation is thus not one in which it constitutes itself and makes itself present primarily by means of realizing a given potential for selfhood. It intrinsically [eigentlich] lacks reality and is able to come into specific kinds of presence only by virtue of the historically formed world relations in which it finds itself. The ‘wholeness’ of its being is found in the stream of possibility—not a determinant possibility for a specific way of being that dasein may realize in more or less appropriate ways. Possibility is never surpassed, even momentarily, by some form of self-constitution. Rather, the very activity of self-constitution proliferates dasein and moves it away from its wholeness and unity, a wholeness that is found in its attunement “to the nothing of the possible impossibility of its existence.” Dasein’s true [eigenste] situation is found in an attunement that has neither subject nor object. It is the mood of sheer, mortal possibility: anxiety. The thought of whole and unity is pushed by Heidegger to a breaking point as he shows that human being finds its unity in nothing present or realizable. In speaking of this opening to dasein’s whole ability to be, Heidegger uses a middle voice phrase: “Die Angst ängstet sich um das Seinkönnen des so bestimmten Seinden und erschliesst so die äussereste Möglichkeit” (Anxiety (is) anxious in the midst of the ability to be of the being that is so disposed and opens up the uttermost possibility). Anxiety discloses dasein’s ability to be in a wholeness without substance and in the figuration of possible impossibility. Dasein is most true (that is, it is its own disclosure) in possibility that opens to all values and meanings and stands out from everything that makes an individual’s life worth living. The thought of grounding thus falls away in the anxiety that grounds the thought.

Section 53 is entitled “Existenzialer Entwurf eines eigentlichen Seins zum Tode” (Existential Projection of an Authentic Being to Death). We have emphasized that Entwurf ‘projected design’ is closely associated with Vorlauf ‘the running ahead of dasein’s possibility as being to death’. This section appropriates dasein’s proper Vorlauf in its Entwurf by developing an interpretation based on dasein’s existential understanding of its mortal temporality, and in that process prepares to break the traditional thoughts of unity, wholeness, and ground. These thoughts are projected in the forward run of dasein’s anxious possibility and can no longer suggest a transcendental grounding for value and meaning. Human being is uncovered in the process whereby the traditional and everyday sense of self and transcendence are ruptured by anxiety, which is the modal aspect of dasein’s ungrounded mortality. The appropriateness of Heidegger’s Entwurf, in this part of Being and Time, to dasein’s possible impossibility, however, needs further elaboration. We must examine dasein’s Eigentlichkeit ‘its authenticity’ vis-à-vis its eigenste Möglichkeit ‘its most proper possibility’, and the appropriation of its disclosiveness in its resolve to live responsively and alertly with its being.

2. A Recoiling Search for Authenticity

Since dasein does not provide a basis for a metaphysically founded ethics and since its being interrupts and ruptures meaning and values with sheer possibility and being to death, Heidegger investigates dasein’s possibility of being a self that is appropriate to its being rather than a self defined by ethical norms. He uses the language of foundations and conditions for the possibility of selfhood in this discussion, as he does throughout Being and Time. Just as the language of wholeness and unity falls into question in the context of dasein’s ‘essential truth’, this language, too, is broken by dasein’s ability to be, its Seinskönnen. The term eigentliche now refers to specific ways in which an individual relates to its being. What is the proper way for dasein to live with regard to its being? How is it to constitute itself in its being, which interrupts the very meaning of self-constitution with its possibility of no self at all, a possibility that is dasein’s and is most properly so? Whereas in the previous section Entwurf and Vorlauf interplayed to bring together the writing and the subject in question, in this section attestation [Bezeugung] will interplay with resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] around the themes of witness and own. Chapter 2 of Time and Being is entitled “Die daseinsmässige Bezeugung eines eigentlichen Seinskönnens und die Entschlossenheit” (Dasein’s Attestation of an Authentic Potentiality-for-being and Resoluteness). Section 54 is “Das Problem der Bezeugung einer eigentlichen existenziellen Möglichkeit” (The Problem of Attesting to an Authentic Existentielle Possibility). Our issue is, how does Heidegger put ethics in question as he establishes dasein’s proper way to be vis-à-vis its being?

Selfhood, on Heidegger’s account, is a way of being. The struggle for proper selfhood puts the individual at odds with its normal world in which it has its possible roles and identities set for it. To be a proper, self-authenticating self, an individual must take its fundamental cues for living from its being, not from the standards of communal normalcy. There is a double rupture involved in this process. Dasein must break from the normal, ready-made certainties that have formed it from its earliest awareness. This involves the extremely difficult process of retrieving one’s understanding and one’s temporality, which is constitutive of dasein’s being, and finding out how to be in accord with it as one lives in the patterns of life and meaning that have been developed in a trenchant, forceful ignorance of dasein’s being. This direction of thought prepares us to expect some kind of natural knowledge of dasein’s being, some basis for correcting our erring ways of life and for guiding us to a higher fulfillment of our human nature. But instead of an immanent knowledge of human nature, we have found a nonconceptual “understanding,” an alertness that takes place in dasein’s temporal projecting and one that attests to mortal possibility without the possibility of circumscribing itself. The first interruption takes place as an individual finds cultural and social assurances to be without ontological foundation, to be, rather, concerned reactions that have led our Western ethos away from its own being. Heidegger finds that traditional selfhood has been formed in this reaction, and his retrieval of the West’s early thoughts and questions is an effort no less revolutionary than Nietzsche’s to show that who we can be is invested in covering over the questionableness of the ability to be a ‘who’ at all. From the perspective of our traditional meanings and sense of presence, the lack of a selflike basis for the self and the lack of meaning in our meanings constitutes a dismal prospect, and although Heidegger does not invoke Nietzsche at this point, he indicates indirectly that, in agreement with Nietzsche’s genealogy of the ascetic ideal, Western human beings feel that they could not live properly if their being were most properly merely the possibility of no possibility at all. The first appropriate interruption is thus one in which the assurances and sense of presence that constitute us are put in question by the Vorlauf of being to death. This mortal temporality, along with its refusal, are part of who we are. Our existence lives the interruption that Heidegger attempts to reinherit in his analysis of dasein in Being and Time.

Dasein’s secular and religious rituals must thus be interrupted, and both its questions and answers must undergo the second rupture, that of dasein’s truth, its disclosure, of being possibly impossible. The second interruption is like that of self-overcoming. The move natural for dasein, given its history, is to find a body of certainties to replace those that have proved to be inadequate. The certainty of Heidegger’s ‘strict’ and careful description of dasein, for example, might give us assurance that we have our meaning in our temporality, or another account might be taken to prove that Heidegger is mistaken and to constitute more reliable analysis on the basis of which to conduct our lives. But there is a recoil at this point in Heidegger’s thought. On the one hand, he is providing an account that he takes to be well founded and preferable to the metaphysical tradition from which it departs. On the other hand, his account leads him to the truth of dasein, its disclosive mortal temporality, which puts in question desire for certainty, the neutrality of accurate thought, and the ability of meaningful discourse to circumscribe and express dasein’s being. What his analysis finds recoils on both the meaning and historical subjectivity of his finding and makes it doubtful that his grasp definitively holds the sheer possibility that it designates. Heidegger’s thought in Part II of Being and Time expresses the meaning of dasein’s being, which on its own account runs ahead and ‘possibilizes’ outside the circumscriptions of meaning.

As we proceed in the investigation of Heidegger’s account of dasein’s proper resolve and response to its own being, we are involved in a reflective movement that puts in question its own certainty, its structure of expression, its perceptive reach, and its prescriptive possibility. His word Entschlossenheit, which is translated as ‘resoluteness’, also has the normal meaning of decisiveness or of bringing something to a conclusion or end. The Ent, however, can have both an intensifying function or one of opposition; for example, entkommen means to escape, entschlüsseln means to decode or open up. When the ent of entschliessen is taken as intensifying, as it usually is, dasein resolves and decides for its being; it makes up its mind. But the ambiguity of ent allows Heidegger, in the context of his account of Being and Time, to say in effect that dasein unlocks or opens itself to its being, to erschliessen or disclose its being, and to be opened to its continuous closing, its mortal temporality. To be resolved in one’s being to death provides no ground for concluding anything with certainty and puts in question the appropriateness of the kind of thinking that expects human existence to find its fulfillment on the basis of structures like those of good and evil that are decided by human being or human nature. Although Being and Time cannot be read as proposing a historicist position, neither can it be read as finding an enclosed universal basis for normative ethical judgment. Resolution, by opening to dasein’s disclosive mortality, interrupts the enclosing structures necessary for traditional systems concepts and universal principles. The priority of both judgment and universality is in question by virtue of the mortal temporality that constitutes dasein, its language and its conceptuality.

The tension that we thus have to work with in Being and Time, when we consider dasein’s propriety regarding itself, its authenticity, is found in Heidegger’s emphasis on dasein’s ontological structure as the unifying origin, in the sense of condition for the possibility, of all relative, ontic ways of existing, and his showing that this ontological structure and its account are in question by virtue of dasein’s own disclosure. Dasein’s ontological structure provides the basis for raising the question of being, for interpreting its historicity, and for showing how it might exist appropriately with regard to its being. But the basis is more like abyss than like anything that can be properly called normative. Given our inherited senses of ultimate meaning for reality and the intrinsic value of human existence, this discovery appears at first nihilistic. If we have no solid reference to support the values of individual lives, then anything can be justified. But anything has been justified in our history by appeal to universal values and meanings, including the most severe repressions, torture, extreme cruelty, wars, and the morbid enslaving and destructive segregation of vast groups of people. The proliferation of ‘universal’ norms whereby we justify certain values and contend against other values mirrors our fear of what the world would be like if we lacked an adequate basis for justifying our values and realizing the best possibilities of ourselves. The tension in Heidegger’s thought between the search for a normative basis for thought and the discovery of a ‘basis’ that puts that search in question arises directly out of the fear to which our tradition responds by supporting its ideals and highest hopes with a combination of axioms, authorizing disclosure and careful judgment, be that disclosure God’s, reason’s, nature’s, or humanity’s.

The tension in Heidegger’s thought, we shall see, puts in question the combination of axioms, authorizing disclosure and judgment, as well as the belief that with a proper normative basis for our values we can hope to overcome the destructive proliferation of violently opposing ways of life. The question we are approaching is whether people can find options to grounded normativity as the basis on which they come to be who they “should” be. Do options to the traditionally ethical ones arise for our language and thought when the tension between ontological grounding and being that cannot be a ground, but is like an Ab-grund, defines the space for thought? Does Heidegger’s account of the basis for authenticity twist free of its ethical desire for grounding presence?²

Heidegger uses self to refer to ‘who’ dasein is. The term is meant to suggest not universality but the relative activity of a socialized, acculturated individual making its way in life. The self is a mediating agency who ordinarily chooses on the basis of something other than itself. Even if it chooses itself it chooses an agency that has been constituted in a history by language and customs that are not selves or like selves. Usually the ‘something’ that functions normatively is the vague, general, and pervasive image of normalcy that Heidegger calls ‘das Man’. It functions as the general, anonymous agency by which we desire, decide, and constitute ourselves within a range of options that define proper identity in our broad culture and specific society. Only if we make our decisions on the basis of our being, Heidegger says, are we who we are as I myself (ich selbst). Being an authentic self is a modification of our normal, quasi-anonymous identity, a modification that takes place when our way of life makes manifest and in that sense is based on our being, not primarily on selfhood. The self twists free of its inherited way of being by coming to attend to its being, its disclosiveness. As we have seen, this movement of twisting free is not incidental to the authorship of Being and Time or to Heidegger’s account of resoluteness. One characteristic of our everyday identity is a quality of certainty that seeks universalization in our daily personal and professional disciplines. Most things are already decided and known by virtue of the rules and standards, the assignments of values, the sense of relative urgency and range of applicability that structure and provide meaning and significance in our environment. We are relatively at ease in our communities of value even with regard to what shocks and horrifies us or inspires us unless something occurs to interrupt or to unavoidably challenge the shared values of our lives. When our ethos is threatened we naturally bristle and become hostile and resistant.

Heidegger’s analysis suggests that our ‘natural’ identities are formed within complex histories and communities that structure our identities as though the inherited values were absolute. It further suggests that their conceptual structure is based on the assumptions that being is continuing presence and is simple, that time is linear and quantifiable, that death is the end point of life, and that human being has a kind of nature that is available to objective discovery. Our everyday, “fallen” lives are thus the basis of traditional metaphysical thought and the manner of evaluating that accompanies it in the name of ethics. He further shows that dasein’s ability to be, its ungraspable running ahead in the possibility of no possibility at all, is not only not a clear part of everyday identities, but that our sensibility is formed in a traceable movement away from our being. Analogously to Nietzsche’s making plain that philosophical thought as such, given its lineage, invokes the ascetic ideal, Heidegger shows that to be who we normally are and to think as we normally think is to live out a history that is adversative to the being that we are.³ And, analogous to Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic priest’s giving hope to desperate people by relieving them of the burden of meaninglessness is Heidegger’s account of normal selfhood as providing the benefit of relieving people of the burden of confronting themselves with regard to their being. The middle voice of dasein’s being is silenced for all practical purposes in the structures and processes of normal living, and the perplexity of being without reality in the midst of everything that we experience as real and of being abysmal in the ground of our being is relieved.

The normal is thus improper, not true, not essential [uneigentlich] and lost [verloren]. When we hold in mind that the possibility of ethical thought and action is found in traditional ‘normalcy’ and its history, we see the cutting edge of Heidegger’s thought concerning dasein’s resolve: as we turn to the possibility of Eigentlichkeit ‘authenticity’, we are turning away from ethics as we know it. This turning away is nothing less than a twisting free of a body of selfhood that is given in its investment in not knowing its being or its propriety vis-à-vis its being. Heidegger’s position is far stronger than one that provides only a formal basis for determining what our normative values should be. We shall see that the metaphysical strategy of formal-positive determination is changed by his thought. The question is whether we are able in our normalcy to recognize our suffering and pleasure or the meaning of the institutions and disciplines by which and in which we become who we are.

The “voice” of dasein’s possibility “calls” in the midst of our involvements. Heidegger uses the experience of conscience, not its contents, as his phenomenal field. In his account, we undergo a calling away from our identities and selves to the possibility of our being. This call is corrupted by religions and moralities that make it seem as though it were calling to a specific way of life or ethos and as though it were initiated by specific violations that arouse guilt in a given individual. But the call itself discloses not the power of an ethos but the difference of human being, in its being, from its traditional ways of life. One undergoes, in the disclosiveness of dasein, a continuous “call” to its propriety, its eigenste Selbstseinkönnen, its most appropriate ability to be itself. Dasein’s call to itself is like a voice that comes to dasein in the midst of its traditional life, like an appeal or summons to undergo the difference, in its being, from its self: “It gives dasein to understand” that its being is found in the disclosiveness of its ability to be the possibility of no possibility at all, not to be its values or the objects of religious and philosophical projections. The voice of conscience as the disclosure of dasein’s being in the midst of its everyday values and standards functions to make those values and standards uncertain and to “call” dasein to its difference from who it is in its efforts to be someone recognizable in its culture.⁴

The wrenching away from dasein’s self and the interruption (Heidegger says breaking into) of our identities by the call of conscience are constitutive movements of dasein that put it in touch with itself. Dasein’s self, Heidegger says in Section 57, is clearly not in the call of conscience which presents neither a person nor a definitive and definite way of life. Nothing familiar is encountered. In our experience of ourselves we ordinarily say that we are lost when we find no landmarks or customs to which we can relate with familiarity. But on Heidegger’s account we begin to find ourselves when we are dislocated and displaced by the disclosure of our being that has no ‘stand’, no name or heritage in our environment. The wrenching movement and displacement are aspects of the disclosure of being in our everyday world. In this “call” we began to hear the “understanding” that constitutes the Vorlaufen of our finitude. There is no observer, no judge, no clear definitions or standards. But instead of being lost, we are homing in on our being. In the context of Being and Time, this wrenching movement means that we are being freed from our “lostness” in the familiar world of our cultural inheritance and from the surveillance of the identities that make us who we are. To be eigentlich—proper to our being—and attuned to our being in our everyday lives, we have to overcome the monopolizing power of the valences and exigencies that define who we are.

Heidegger’s account of the call of conscience provides for his interpretation the possibility of this overcoming, this twisting free. It further establishes the difference that constitutes our lives and shows that in this difference we, as culturally determined identities, have access to the being whose erasure is part of who we are traditionally to be. To trust our meanings and values by giving them axiomatic status, to stake our lives on them, and to know ourselves in their mediation is to forget our being and the possibility of living appropriately as the being that we are. Only by the severity of the wrenching, recoiling, twisting movement out of the surveillance and authority of our normalcy and identity can dasein come into its own.

If the being of dasein were determinate and if it provided immediately a nature to be realized by individual action, it would not put ethics in question. We could in principle find out what our nature is and how to meet its standards. But since dasein, in being called to itself, is called to a being whose meaning is mortal temporality and thus has no intrinsic, determinate meaning at all, the structure of ethics as such is in question. To be in question does not mean that we may hope for a time when ethics will be abolished and we will live a higher life, unstressed by the difference between our being and our cultural lives. The “lostness” of everyday life is itself not to be lost, on Heidegger’s account. It does mean that as we follow unquestioningly the patterns of our best ideals and values in a state of mind that knows, at least in principle, what is genuinely and universally good and bad, we are lost to our being and to our mortal indeterminacy. Whereas in the traditional thought of subjectivity one expects some type of self-realization consequent to conformity to the reality of the subject, whatever the subject might be, in the instance of Being and Time authenticity means the disclosure of human-being-in-question without the possibility of resolving the question or the problems that follow it. Is it possible that our systems of self-realization and self-sacrifice for higher values make inevitable a maiming of human life that is recognizable only when our best ways of being are profoundly disturbed by the nonpresence of our being? Do our axiomatic values at their best constitute a blindness to who we are and what we do? Does the disclosure of our being and its appropriation, along with the pain and disruption that constitute it and follow it, make possible a profound and thoroughgoing uncertainty that itself reveals the limits of ethics?

The question of ethics in the context of Being and Time is a way of being that is concerned in the world and with other people. Heidegger’s analysis in Part I of Being and Time has made clear that dasein is constituted in world relations. Dasein is not a simple thing existing with other single things to which it may or may not relate. Solipsism is an ontological impossibility for dasein since dasein occurs only in disclosive relations. It happens in language and practice and comes to itself as an individual who is already constituted by such relations. The difference between being and everyday existence takes place only in world relations, hence the emphasis on continuously twisting free of cultural domination in cultural life, never outside of it. The terminus is not a life that is withdrawn from culture and history, nor is it projected experiences that are ahistorical and purged of secular corruption. The aim involves an individual’s being with others in a specific environment and history, attuned in its relations to the Vorlaufen of its being without presence. The “perversion” that inevitably occurs in our standards for living is found in their insensitivity to mortal temporality.

Heidegger articulates his interpretation in the traditional language of being as presence. Existential understanding is “given.” Being “presents itself.” Dasein “comes to itself.” His interpretation is no less involved in the wrenching, twisting recoils than in dasein’s authentic movements. In association with this articulation, Heidegger shows that as being presents itself, no subject or substance or nature come forth. The possibility of no possibility at all comes forth. Mortal disclosure takes place. As dasein comes to itself, no specific course of action is indicated. The given existential understanding—dasein’s Verstehen—has neither a subject nor an object. Dasein’s being does not name anything present, but names rather mortal, temporal disclosure that forecasts itself as temporal possibility rather than as a standing nature. The language of presence in this text is thus in a process of twisting free from its own inevitability in the tradition in which it occurs and in which Heidegger thinks. This movement in Being and Time articulates dasein’s recoiling movement toward the possibility of propriety regarding its being.

The issue of dasein coming to itself is thus one of dasein allowing its difference in its being vis-à-vis the status of its life. If an individual can allow and affirm its mortal temporality, in contrast to the invested obfuscation of mortal temporality, and can allow also the question of the meaning of being in its historical identity, if it can want the ‘address’ of its being in spite of wanting a sense of continuous and meaningful presence, it can, perhaps, come to appropriate the difference of its own being as it decides its daily issues. This alertness is like a person’s affirming or loving another person with a full sense of mortality in the relationship.⁵ Or it is like experiencing the validity of a system of values without a sense of certainty or universality. Nothing specific is there to will in dasein’s owning its being, hence the anxiety to which Heidegger gives attention. Allowing its being, dasein allows the “calling forth” of its continuous need to take care, given its primordial lack of stasis. This allowing, given the constitution of its identity, is like dasein unburdening itself of traditional resistances and opening itself to the inevitability of being without foundations. Resoluteness thus cannot be conceived in terms of self-constitution. Rather, self-constitution requires a basis for validation, and authentic experience itself falls into question as dasein comes into its own through resoluteness.

The middle voice is particularly important to Heidegger’s account of authenticity. His claim that dasein’s wanting to have conscience, its affirmation of the difference of its being and the dislocation that this difference makes in its life, is a self-understanding [Sich-verstehen] in its most proper [eigensten] ability to be. Affirming conscience includes allowing a self-understanding that is “a manner (Weise) of dasein’s disclosure.” If, however, self-understanding is taken as a reflexive state or as a self-constituting state, his claim is missed. Understanding and dasein’s disclosiveness determine willing to have conscience. We might say that they stand out of the circumscription of action and of will. Self-understanding is to be read as understanding understands (itself) in dasein’s ability to be; that is, dasein’s ability to be is at once mortal, temporal awareness which, in understanding itself, is unmediated and beyond willing. Further, affirming conscience is not circumscribed by an individual’s action. Affirming conscience is conscience-in-act and the (self-)understanding of dasein’s ability to be is determinate with it. Although an individual may incline to hear the call of conscience in conscience’s call, understanding is neither active nor passive on this account. The call of conscience is an occurrence that is constitutive of dasein and that is neither active nor passive in the context of an individual’s action. And the occurrence of dasein’s ability to be is neither active nor passive. The call of conscience and the ability to be refer to themselves in their occurrence without the mediation of a subject. The middle voice gives articulation to dasein’s ability to be, its understanding, and its wanting to have conscience, each of which constitutes a manner or Weise of disclosiveness [Erschlossenheit] that also is not a subject or object with regard to an action. We are in a position to see that in resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] and authenticity [Eigentlichkeit] disclosure discloses and time times, that Heidegger’s emphasis is not on self-constituting action or intentional action, but is on the (self-)disclosure of dasein’s disclosiveness. In opening to its being and allowing its being, dasein does not constitute itself. It stands outside the possibility for self-constitution and finds itself in question in all of its reach and stretch. Dasein’s disclosiveness is its being. It is being to death, the possibility of no possibility, the Vorlaufen of no continuing presence that disrupts dasein’s presence. Dasein’s being is its difference from the finite continuity of its identity and its being in the world. In its most proper being, no ‘I’ controls. Rather, the I is interrupted and something other than a self takes place.

‘I’ is always situated in a locality of specific determinants. It does not enjoy the benefits of an ontologically founded ideal that can guide it to right decisions. Decisions are made in the power of the values and possibilities for action that are allowed by the situation. This is not a version of historical relativism, however, since the ontological indeterminacy of the specific situation is made inevitable by dasein’s being, not by the control of history. This inevitability is the possibility of no possibility that is heard in dasein’s being. The proliferation of values and meanings that characterize our history has its meaning in dasein’s being, in its situated ability to be, as we have seen. The I that resolves properly opens to its being in its situation, twists free from the control of predominant standards of judgment by attending resolutely to its being, and makes its judgments and commitments in the loosening of the bonds of the everyday by virtue of concerned and open attunement to its being. Insofar as the I, as it judges and chooses, is always in the heritage and culture that is invested in turning away from its being, Heidegger’s and Foucault’s positions are similar in this respect: every decision and involvement is dangerous because of its inevitable everyday drift toward universalization and totalization in defiance of its temporality. Their interpretations of time are different, but both see that distortions of time are distortions of human being and that time does not tell people which specific decisions are right or wrong. The silence of being/time, in Heidegger’s terms, regarding how we are to take our stand in life, is a part of dasein’s mortality and the close distance of being in our lives. Hearing in this silence is finding oneself in the question of ethics. It is like acting without knowing the necessity of the action. It is like having to be without resolving the question of being. As dasein lets itself be called forth in its most proper being, the I is modified by the non-I of its being. It becomes strange to itself in its clarity of purpose and certainty, and it acts forthrightly in understanding the collapse of clarity in its being. No less situated, no less concerned or committed, the individual’s attunements and expectations, its perceptiveness, satisfactions, and priorities are conditioned by, as it were, an open door to mortal time that lets in an element different from the presence and totality of value. It acts, but now it acts in the questionableness of the possibility of its actions and in the transgressions of being that mark its living. To be this way is to be resolved, and to be resolved is to attest to the difference of being in the value-laden situation that one lives in and through. Hearing this difference might well include a pause, an interruption, a standing out of the law of rightness. What can be heard in such a pause? I am persuaded that what can be heard is not predictable by the law of rightness, that an other to rightness and wrongness may be heard, and that in such hearing an obsessiveness regarding both right and justification, an obsessiveness that determines who we are, is given pause in an indeterminacy to which we belong and that is other to us. We stand out in the questionableness of our ethos, knowing less who we are and who we are to be, in silence before the decisions that we have to make. In Being and Time this silence is proper to dasein’s being, and it makes dangerous the values by which we give ourselves common lives and establish the rules within which we are constituted and become clear to ourselves.

3. The Question of Suffering

We all know what suffering is when we experience it: starvation, intense and unchosen pain, enforced and radical restriction on movements that are natural for a conscious being, the many forms of paranoia regarding others, despair and depression, schizophrenic dissociation from oneself and an incapacity to intend with continuity, oppressed human life without dignity or value. The question of ethics as we are thinking of it puts in question the ‘we’ that knows what suffering is. Heidegger’s account of authenticity as well as Nietzsche’s genealogy of good and evil and Foucault’s genealogy of institutions and self-constitution give us pause in our judgments. The question is not whether the suffering we know is suffering. It is whether the ‘we’ that knows is constituted by suffering that is difficult or traditionally impossible to identify.

Nietzsche made it evident that the ascetic ideal institutes multiple forms of suffering by dividing body and soul and blinding us to the pain of the division. Foucault showed that the close yet obscured link between punishment and social-intellectual discipline, as well as the association of curing and radical alienation, and that of sexuality and the marginalization of the body’s pleasures suggest a high degree of blind suffering in our culture that is systematically (rationally) excluded from recognition. Heidegger’s account of traditional living means that within that living we are unable to perceive or think of profound distortions in our existence as long as we are ill-attuned to our being. These accounts differ significantly in their context, but they have a common suspicion: that what we ordinarily take to be satisfaction and the good conceal suffering that we have an investment in maintaining because of who we have come to be.

Temporality and continuing presence are two of the foci for these accounts. A systematic loss of the meaning of our temporality, that is, a covering over of the experience of thoroughgoing mortality by the ways in which we have objectified mortality, and a systematic loss of experiences of the limits of meaning are major aspects in all of these accounts. Experiences of thoroughgoing mortality and the limits of meaning are in our heritage and are accompanied by the erasure of our knowledge and values. Continuing presence and meaningful time have occupied the space of these experiences. The result is a proliferation of human life that is at odds with its own conditions. The ‘at odds’ names the condition and movement of possible suffering. This thought draws heavily from the inherited notion that a human’s deepest suffering is constituted by its alienation from itself or from its creator. But as we have seen, this idea recoils on itself in the three accounts that show that the individual does not have a being that is selflike. To know oneself is to experience oneself in a historical proliferation of meanings and events that reveals nothing to fall from or to fulfill. In Heidegger’s language, dasein’s most proper being makes the self questionable; dasein’s proper existence takes place in affirmed questionableness and not in fundamental accomplishments of personal virtue or community practices. When human existence is at odds with its own conditions of being, it lives as though there were a nature or an essence to fulfill. The question of suffering arises with urgency, since, if suffering is present and optional, ‘we’ want to eliminate it.

The question is vexing because we who ask it are the we who are in question. We have found that the subject who investigates and knows undergoes a measure of recoiling transformation in the writings of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger. All three think from, in, and toward transformation and delimitation of the organizing authorities of their language, thought, and discursive identities. The very thought of question in the context of the question of ethics arises from the transformations that are figured and resisted in our heritage. The strategy is to intensify the question and to hold at bay the answers that press themselves on us—as well as the predisposition to definitive answers—out of the form and content of the inheritance that constitutes us. We attempt to hold in play the recoils that make the questions and that are alien to the tradition in which they occur. The range of our suffering thus will not be clear. We can experiment with options and partial insights, with styles of thought and writing that recast the hierarchies and capacities by which we know and feel, and with the formulations that have defined our problems and solutions. Nietzsche, for example, experiments with universals, Foucault with mainstreaming marginal voices, identities, and values, and Heidegger with retrieving thought that has been lost to the philosophical canon. If we do not maintain the recoiling, transformative movement of thought that puts in question our concepts, systems of meaning, and values, we can be reasonably sure that the habitual patterns will dominate and that we will be involved in a spiral not unlike that of the obsessive person who becomes obsessive over the strategies and behaviors that are supposed to relieve the obsession. With these cautions in mind we shall consider a type of suffering that is related to the ontological difference of temporality and appears to be a part of our normal ideals and satisfactions. If we do undergo blind suffering in the patterns of our lives, we shall want to be alert to the possibility that this unrecognized suffering contributes to or even generates suffering that we can easily recognize in our everyday lives.

Does the everyday, metaphysical experience of time as linear and countable occasion human suffering that is unique to this experience of time? For Heidegger this experience is forecast and given definitive expression in Aristotle’s concept of time. In his Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Part II, Heidegger introduces his analysis of Aristotle’s concept of time with a reminder that is not incidental to the question of suffering: our understanding “must be based in temporality.” He turns to Aristotle and the Aristotelian interpretation of time in order to show the concept of time that is “basic” for dasein in its everyday life and in its philosophical heritage, and hence the concept of time that is basic in his own thought. He turns to Aristotle in order to destructure and put in question the temporality that characterizes dasein in its everyday way of existing and that will necessarily involve a destructuring movement in his own experience of time.

Further, Heidegger’s turn to Aristotle indicates the historical contingency of dasein’s experience of time. He carries out his destructuring process in reference to a traditional way of living, not in reference to a continuously present ‘Time’. The mortality of Time’ is forecast in this move: constituted as they are by this ‘concept’ of time, our life, as well as his life and thought, are to be implicated in his destructuring analysis. This use of Aristotle to develop his own interpretation of existence suggests not only that Heidegger’s interpretation of dasein is thoroughly historical, but that dasein, that being that is formed historically and linguistically, is in its structures a factical network of finite meanings. These structures of dasein constitute an historical, inherited lived interpretation of time that is made in part by Aristotle’s lineage, both by the interpretation of time in this lineage and by its suppressions and quandaries regarding mortal temporality.⁶

According to Aristotle, now is both countable (it is a particular being) and “a continuum of the flux of time” (it is not a particular being, but the ground for the particularity of the countable now) (BP 249). Now is countable as continuity in transition with moving beings. It is in some sense always the same while it is also always different in each instance. The stretching out of time thus cannot be understood solely by reference to a series of ontic now-points. A “basis” must be found for time in its function as a conditioning dimension of all moving beings. If time as numbered is not bound either to an intrinsic content or to a mode of being, if the now is “intrinsically transition,” and yet can be counted as different points, how is one to think of time fundamentally? Some notion of ontological difference is called for, but is not explicitly conceived, in Aristotle’s interpretation. This call for ontological difference and its obfuscation is one of the constituents of everyday dasein. We shall say more about the ontological difference in a later section.

Further, Aristotle’s claims that our access to time is “the counting perception of motion as motion” is “at the same time the perception of what is counted as time” (BP 257). This perception of the counted what has led to an emphasis on perception without alertness to the temporal basis of perception. According to Heidegger, this leads to “inadequately founded methods of interpreting time,” and this seemingly abstract problem in turn leads to the dominant Western experience of time in which time is something we can count and something we are in.

Aristotle’s experience of time calls for the ontological difference between temporality and countable time and puts in question the priority of perception regarding time, a priority that it nevertheless also establishes. It raises the issues of how the now demands a temporality that is a continuous, transitional stretch beyond the circumscription of any now or group of nows, a stretch that is also not conceivable within the given limits of this thought. We can see that there is in the ordinary experience a quandary that tears through the apparent coherence of the experience.

We can see the tearing effect in Heidegger’s account of Aristotle’s concept of time. Although Heidegger uses the language of a priori structures when he speaks of founding the concept of time in temporality, in effect he also shows that the continuous now that is implied by the idea of a priori structures is a part of the tradition that he puts in question. Heidegger’s thought of a priori structures is founded not in a transhistorical being, but in the broad Aristotelian tradition. Our normal philosophical confidence in such words as original, sufficiently clear, fixed, unity, wholeness, and systematic order, the very words that punctuate Heidegger’s introduction to his discussion of Aristotle, is equally in doubt. Given his reading of Aristotle, the use of these terms seems to arise from a common interpretation of time that has stated temporality’s status in terms of a timeless transcendence in relation to changing beings. As Heidegger develops his claims that “original time” is founded in dasein’s expecting, retaining, and preventing, a claim that his own thought brings to articulation in a horizon of interpretation markedly different from Aristotle’s, he shows also that his thought of time is buried in Aristotle’s concept of time. He also shows in contrast to Aristotle that the movement of time carries away each moment of time in a strange removing or remotion [entrücken] and opens each movement “out to openness” in temporal overturning [Umschlag]. This account of temporality recoils on itself in the sense that it, too, must include remotion and overturning. The movement of Heidegger’s thought away from Aristotle’s, and its opening out to a horizon that it cannot comprehend and that tears away from his own experience—this movement becomes, in the course of the essay, the issue at the forefront of Heidegger’s thought. As the recoiling, removing, opening process addresses his own “method,” a “temporal ecstasis” takes place, his thought comprehends that it does not comprehend time, and the philosophical technique that Heidegger sought to develop fails before the horizon that it has opened up.

Outside Heidegger’s thought and its tradition, this tearing effect appears to be insignificant. He claims, however, that in this rift we find not only the “obsolescence” of his “method” (BP 328), but the suppression of aspects fundamental to Western temporality. This suppression is a definitive part of our normal experience of time, and it includes closure to the ecstasis, the remotion, and “opening out to openness” that are fundamental for our temporality. The opening beyond his thought removes the authority that defined his thought and invokes a considerable transition in his thinking: dying away, loss, discovery of illusion, removal of the focus of his passion for many years—and the exhilaration of an opening that he was able to welcome. Within the context of his thought, this marks a transformation of dasein as he lives it, a radical, if momentary, shift in the structure of his everyday world, and a repeated experience of the fissured temporality of dasein that is never without its costs and passions as it opens to its own Umschlag, its own overturning and transformation.

Loss of “animation and vibrancy” [Schwung, Schwingung] in beings accompanies the everyday experience of time. This vibrancy, on the other hand, is intimately connected to the nothing, the nonpresence, of temporality and its difference from our everyday experience of time. The loss is lived in a flattening of things and people into their usefulness, their roles, their “fit” in a circumscription of meaning in a given setting. The dimension of being other than their traditional significance is lost—on occasion Heidegger uses annihilated. Their being is ensnared by their value and cultural meaning. Beings are conservable, arrangeable, cultivatable, disposable—in the broadest sense, humanly usable. But they are not known in their excess of meaning, nor is the activity of knowing experienced in its excess of meaning. Their lack of cultural meaning, their standing out from meaning and value in their mortal temporality, their transgression of value and the recoil in their being from accountability threaten the structure of our everyday experience of them. The direct connection between our dominant experience of time and the priority of disposability of beings signals not only the danger of radical objectification that was found by ‘existential’ thought but also the danger of well-intentioned institutional and governmental disposition of people, which Foucault recounts, and the danger of environmental destruction, which is now so apparent. The danger arises according to Heidegger’s thought from the obliteration of time’s meaningless excess and transgression of the possible presence of all things.

Suffering in this structure of life arises not only through the policies of use that it makes natural, but in the closure to beings that it makes inevitable. The welcoming of temporality and being that Heidegger notes in Being and Time as well as in his ‘later’ writings can be interpreted in the language of meditative serenity. It can also be interpreted in Nietzsche’s language of Dionysian creativity, in which types of ordinary suffering—isolation and alienation, intense and destabilizing uncertainty, self-rejection, and psychosomatic sicknesses that are analogous to the trauma induced by earthquakes: these painful symptoms of radical, cultural change—are the “benefit” of overcoming the lived distortion of improper, normal temporality in which dimensions of creativity, joy, and life-affirmation are thoroughly blocked by the meaningful fabric of our daily lives. Controlling the blockage, managing the stress of living in blind resistance to mortal temporality, intuitively forcing the senses of continuous presence, proliferating systems of value by totalizing gestures and strategies, the warping effect, the unconscious hostility, the aggravation, competition, acquisitiveness, and belligerence among individuals and groups bred of fighting both time and its meaningless difference in our lives: all of this constitutes a depth of suffering that traditionally we are pleased to overlay with symbols of transcendent meaning and with values that hide their anxiety and their incalculable temporality. This suffering takes the form, initially addressed by Nietzsche, of making a virtue of its ignorance by means of anxious beliefs and affirmations that hide their dread of time. Communities find their bonding in repeated assurances of the absence of meaningless temporality, in rituals of spiritual and intellectual pleasure that create devitalizing designs of normalcy and everyday complacency. The expenditure of energy in this contratempo produces a metabolism that denies its own movement and institutes an invisible cruelty in which life fights itself to its infinite satisfaction. This account, however, assumes a form of thought in which the conditions of human life are countermanded by the way that life is lived: a traditional form of thought taken by an ethics of self-realization or obedience to God. It suggests that propriety of life can be found if the contradiction is properly addressed. Impropriety and suffering are aligned. On the basis of this study we must thus assume that the suffering we are approaching is also in our approach to it and that the implied ideal of proper life will in all probability advance the stress that it addresses. ‘Proper’ and ‘authentic’ fall further into question as they appear in this context of hidden and manifest suffering.

We are clear about many types of suffering in our world. We have reason to believe that temporality is distorted in our traditional lives. And we find in our noun-dominated account of the possibility of hidden suffering that we seem to perpetuate the hiddenness that we wish to expose. Have we repeated a spiral of suffering, or have we found an opening that shuts almost as quickly as it appears? A trace of suffering that we found inexpressible? A quest that misleads as it leads? A psychological anxiety is manifest in this discussion of suffering, not the anxiety that is the mood of mortal temporality which Heidegger describes in Being and Time, but a specific and pervasive unease that arises in the question of suffering. This mood points toward resolution and arises out of an area of uncertainty with high stakes. The question of suffering seems aesthetic, like a theoretical luxury, in the presence of ‘real’ suffering. And yet the implication is that we can become absorbed by our everyday suffering, that another obscure suffering can be advanced, and this second kind of suffering might indicate a historically perpetuated context that makes our everyday suffering unavoidable, even by virtue of the measures that we take to eliminate it. We find reason to believe that our ethical and sensitive response to suffering may be a part of our traditional normalcy which makes the certainty of suffering a manifestation of another kind of suffering that in our everyday perspective seems trivial and abstract.

We are anxiously familiar with the frequent situation in which an alignment of well-intentioned actions boomerang to consequences that are opposite to the projected result: the peace treaties that make war inevitable, political actions that fall prey to subtle intrigue and serve the interests of the opponent, kindness that leads to cruel consequences, types of alleviation that allow pathogenic conditions to remain in force and flourish. We know that in certain people unconscious hostility and malevolence pervert their apparently constructive and supportive action into subtle undercutting. They set the others up for failure or present them with situations that make impossible demands on them or deprive them of the possibility for robust assertiveness and self-confidence. Now we face the possibility that our culture and its forms of evaluation are constituted by human suffering that it not only cannot know without fundamental transformation but that the culture is structured to overlook as it perpetuates the suffering. We discover that our effort to face this possibility is also a part of the issue and that we confront the necessity of putting ourselves further in question even as we make our initial attempt at putting ourselves in question. The reality and moment of suffering seem to fade in this process of multiple recoils. We are anxious in the process as we appear to lose the possibility of grasping the issue of suffering, as the presence of suffering falls apart yet proliferates. But do we in the anxious process become more alert to suffering in its proliferation and its difference vis-à-vis everyday pain?

Is our understanding of suffering part of the issue? Heidegger’s account of anxiety in Being and Time as the disclosure of dasein’s indefinite being shows that ontologically, as distinct from psychologically, anxiety manifests the nonstatus of dasein’s being, its being nothing and nowhere within the circumscription of our traditional ways of being present and meaningful. It is the mood immediate in dasein’s ability to be, its possibility for no possibility at all, and its possibility of propriety with regard to its being. Anxiety is evident in dasein’s everyday, normal concern over use, control, denotation, management, and techniques for purposeful action. Dasein’s energy is fundamentally directed toward making things definite enough to allow for survival and flourishing in the midst of a world that guarantees nothing. It, as an energy, ‘understands’ that it must care for everything that is to play a continuing role in dasein’s environment. Otherwise the presence of things, in the absence of careful structure, passes as though in the night, being no things at all outside of dasein’s world of care and concern. Dasein’s being gives things their worldly continuity by virtue of its taking care of them in social and cultural structures. The continuing presence of things thus arises in an ‘understanding’ of nonpresence in the fabric of the human world and in the nonpresence of being that is manifest in ontological anxiety.

To affirm dasein’s being is to allow, not to resist or to cover over, ontological anxiety. Anxiety is proper to dasein’s being. To live properly with ontological anxiety, in the terms of Being and Time, is to find beings and the world generally, as well as oneself, in their ungraspable, that is, nonconceptual, nonobjectifiable, mortal temporality. Our psychological anxiety in the question of suffering arises, at least in part, as suffering puts in question the assurance of our lives. In the midst of the best that we know to do, suffering occurs. It appears not only to elude our technology, but to characterize it. It can be like a tear in our environment’s fabric, shocking us by its mere facticity and obliviousness to our ideals. We are now focusing on the possibility that suffering may also transgress our ideals and the procedures that are customary in our society for establishing our general welfare as well as assuring our survival. Suffering and its possibility put in question the symbol of an adequately caring community or of a community on the road to ideal human fulfillment. In it is manifest the unquenchable anxiety of dasein’s being, which puts in question the ideal of human welfare achieved by proper values and selected technologies.

Concern for suffering in suffering’s transgression of our certainties does not need to include an expectation of its elimination by ways of life that are right and proper. Because, in the language of Being and Time, anxiety and mortality both constitute the movement of our lives and are, in their indefiniteness, primordially different from our standing in life, human existence, with all of its satisfactions, involves suffering. Human existence is torn by the difference of mortal temporality, and to care for mortal temporality is to care for suffering in its excess of meaning. In more traditional terms, this thought bears the threat of indifference. Can we care for suffering without the expectation of meaningful alleviation? Can we avoid despair if we know that our alleviation of suffering would also reinscribe it? Do we take precautions against another holocaust only to advance other suffering, perhaps less apparent, but no less pernicious and beyond our definitive grasp? Do we hear the ascetic priest in these questions, in the traditional sense that we can survive only if we believe in ideals that deny our being?

The strangeness of suffering, its Unheimlichkeit or alienness in the language of Being and Time, is its affiliation with human being. The question we face with regard to suffering is whether we can care for it without the hope of curing it. Can we work with passion to eliminate torture, to feed and clothe those who suffer deprivation, to recognize and respond to suffering as we find it every day, and yet not domesticate it and thereby proliferate it blindly in a system of meaning and virtue? Can we live in the perpetual mourning that is here prescribed without becoming morbid and ineffectual? These are issues directly related to the question of authenticity in which we face the issue of living properly with our being in the alien, meaningless, and ungraspable difference that we undergo vis-à-vis our being. Our “most proper” living is found not in the rightness of our values or of our ethos but in a demanding alertness that intensifies our sense of suffering in the absence of its resolution or removal.

This account recoils on itself, of course. The psychological anxiety that we confront can make us available to mortal suffering in the failure of our thought before it. The asceticism of this language, its distance as it confronts its subject, its suffering this distance and turning again to the magnitude that dwarfs it, drive it away from itself and make it appear in its paltry dimensions. The satisfaction in this recognition of its paltry dimensions, its invocation in spite of itself of the virtue of humility and self-honesty—does it not, in its failure, also reveal the trace of suffering that it cannot capture? Is it an opening that clears for a moment a dimension that loses its syntax, which itself is a syntax of suffering, one that slips through the fingers of its own grasp?

Heidegger’s thoughts of temporality, ontological difference, everydayness, mortality, and ecstasis, when followed in his discourse, open out to experiences of suffering and alertness to suffering that are inseparable from his thinking. They are also part of his diagnosis of our heritage and part of the transformation of human existence that takes place in the movement of his thought. We are finding this transformation hesitant—painful, I would say—and demanding. It involves far more passion than one finds on first reading. We shall find that the transitory remotion and transformation in Heidegger’s thought put him at odds with himself, remind him repeatedly that he does not own either his language or his thinking, make his otherwise conservative instincts anxious and uncertain. Viewed in cosmic terms, it is a small event. But viewed in its microcosm this process is one of radical human transformation that finds itself and its heritage in question and finds in seemingly abstract texts a body of suffering that can be written very large with enormous consequences for institutions, personal lives, and world events. The claims are that the suffering of time in our heritage is not yet understood and that, until it is, what we actually call suffering is closer to mystery than to certainty.

4. Ecstasis

Heidegger uses middle-voice phrases to speak of temporality in Section 65 of Being and Time: for example, Zeitlichkeit zeitigt, ‘temporality times’. In this instance the middle voice intensifies the ecstatic meaning of Zeitlichkeit, which he makes clear is not a being and cannot properly be said to exist. Rather than something called ‘temporality’ existing, Zeitlichkeit, which is not something, zeitigt. No entity at all refers to itself in temporality’s timing. The quandary posed by this expression arises in the context of the traditional aporia that time must be something and cannot be something. The thought of ‘something’ problematizes the traditional concept of time. Heidegger begins a process of working through and beyond this aporia by the thought that temporality is “outside itself” in its timing and that being outside itself is its “essence.” We shall see that Heidegger’s thought on the ecstasis of time is itself ecstatic in the sense that he finds thinking opening out in a “horizon” that divides his thought from the tradition in which it formed and took its “stand”; the horizon overturns his thought in the manner we addressed in the previous section. The essence in temporality is the “unity” of future (dasein’s being ahead of itself), past (or having passed, dasein’s having been), and present (dasein’s being alongside beings). This unity is more like a “Zuspiel,” as Heidegger will later say, more like an interplay than an entity. We thus begin this discussion of ecstasis by noting that the unity and meaning of dasein is not a being. Rather, ‘it’ ‘is’ a nonactive, nonpassive occurrence, one most appropriately expressed in the middle voice, one that cannot be grasped by a framing structure of concepts. Further, that ‘outside itself’ or ecstasis is the thought that projects our thoughts toward temporality as not a being. As Heidegger’s thought undergoes an ecstatic movement of time, temporality comes to thought.

Dasein’s resolve [Entschlossenheit] opens to mortal temporality as it closes in on its own possibility of being. Mortal temporality is the “essence” of dasein and the ontological possibility of resolve. But mortal temporality is outside itself. It temporalizes in the interplay of being ahead of itself, being already in, and being alongside. None of these ‘ecstases’ of time derives from the others. Dasein happens as coming toward itself in being possible and is never whole in its presence. It comes back to itself in its given having-been. And it is always by or in the presence of beings. Each ecstasis releases itself from the others in its intimate relation with the others. The ‘outside itself’ names the absence of a single defining nature in temporality. Mortal temporality is always outside any given stand or status. The future withholds the completion of presence, and the past denies priority to presence. As dasein ‘resolves’ its temporality by opening to it, uncovering it in its existence with beings, the ecstatic occurrence of temporality is uncovered [erschliesst] in dasein’s resolve. Resoluteness is thus not a way of living that is defined by a system of normative values. It is found in a process of disclosive and owned temporality. An individual will adopt values and customs and will find its identity in them. But in its proper resolve, it stands out from its communal identity as well as from its (everyday) having been, coming to be, and present moment. Its proper “unity” is the ecstatic interplay of mortal temporality, the temporalizing of temporality.

The ambiguity of dasein’s coming to its ending by Entschlossenheit does not mean that ending is a conclusion in a moment. It means that ending is an ecstatic interplay of delimitations, on which we shall elaborate later by using the metaphor of horizon. Present, past, and future delimit each other in their interplay. In being in the presence of beings, for example, dasein’s presence is delimited by having been and coming to be, which cannot be present. Ending is thus not a question of conclusion, but of delimitation and termination within the interplay of time. Resolve is an occurrence of ecstatic temporality, and its occurrence must be interpreted in the horizon of mortal temporality. It is not like a commitment that causes one to stand firm in a set character or virtue, but it is like being alert, undefended, and accepting with regard to one’s finitude. The ending flow of time comes to alertness in resolve, not in the metaphor of a subject’s coming to self-consciousness, but in the metaphor of alert, clearing openness. We shall return to this metaphor. For the moment I emphasize that resolve is of the temporality to which it is available. It is not a formation of character or the opposite of character formation. It is dasein’s explicit availability to its own (and proper) temporality, which sets dasein beyond the reach of the power of traditional life over its thought and emotions. ‘Set beyond’, however, is not like an accomplishment that makes one otherworldly. It is not virtue, but is like a flowing awareness that is not defined by any particular form of life. It is more like frustration than serenity. It is ecstatic in the recoiling sense that it stands out from its own definitions and is, as we shall see, more like a moment than a personality.

The decisiveness indicated by resolve is itself thus put in question by its broken, interrupted unity. An individual’s resolve will be traumatic to the extent that the individual is fixed on its identity or expects to find the proper continuity of its existence in who it fundamentally is. In this context, Entschlossenheit opens up—breaks open—rather than intensifies the identity of the resolving subject. Rather than constituting itself by relating to a deeper, defining essential self, the deciding subject is de-constituted by constituting itself in alert openness to its temporality. It is not only delimited in relation to temporality. It finds its ecstatic delimitation in mortal temporality, in the very possibility of its being. The dissolution of normal self-identity and traditional thought concerning time, self, and will is, in proper resolve, the disclosure [erschliessen] of dasein’s being.

In Section 68 Heidegger shows that proper or authentic understanding, the appropriate way of being alert in dasein’s running ahead in its ability to be, is ecstatic in the sense that it is freed from the dominance of everyday concerns and is able to transpose those concerns in a momentary prospect of temporality [Augenblick]. The proper [eigentliche] moment of presence is not, for Heidegger, one of firm standing, nor a moment of integrated confidence, but a moment of remove from the firmness of an ordinary life-world. This remotion [Entrückung] is integral to resolve and is consonant with the ecstases of temporality: dasein ‘understands’ its ecstatic temporality in its removal from the continuities of daily life and in this proper movement gives voice to its being. Dasein is then able to concern itself with beings out of the care of its being. Its concern for beings occurs in the remotion of time, in dasein’s ecstatic remove within its continuing and constituting relations with beings. It does not stand and care for its being, like a shepherd looking after sheep, but is caring for being in its open availability to mortal temporality. Temporality temporalizing in the temporal openness of dasein is care of being.

If one emphasizes the metaphorical meaning of entrücken, which is ‘to enrapture or entrance’, Heidegger’s proximity to one strand of traditional spirituality is clear. By loving God in God’s disclosure one is able to live with all things in God’s spirit. One can be transported in God’s love beyond the fallenness of human existence by means of God’s disclosure, which makes possible something like what Heidegger means by resolve, but in relation to God instead of human being. Human division from God (original sin) is overcome in God’s self-presentation, and so on. A glimpse into eternity through worship, prayer, or meditation, or a movement of grace by which one knows oneself to be touched by God, will not last in a continuous experience of divine immediacy. But in such moments the meaning of one’s finitude is nonetheless revealed in the eternal love of God, and one may live in light of this meaning by a continuing openness in and to God’s love, which can transform one’s life. God, who cannot be grasped or known in its meaning by categories, is the meaning of this life.

Probably this worrisome proximity moved Heidegger to emphasize in Section 65 that the ideas and experiences of infinity and eternity are derived from mortal temporality and give expression to a “vulgar” time-consciousness that is closed to its own mortal temporality. In such experiences one projects an active status onto time that is conceived and experienced without its mortal ecstatic quality. This projection produces a kind of ecstasis on the basis of time that is lost to its mortal interplay. Eternity and infinity, conceived in terms of rapture and ecstasy, are thus profound perversions of temporality. The transformation of “spirituality” that takes place in Being and Time is one in which dasein undergoes its own ‘proper’ remotion and frees itself, if momentarily, from the experiences that are dominated and organized by countable, entitylike time. In this transformation it discovers its mortal temporality, and in its resolve it allows the hold of traditional time to break open to the open play of mortality, which is dasein’s “truth” and “essence.” The ground drops away for an individual in this moment as dasein’s mortality occurs in alert remotion. One is left shaken, given the temporal ecstasis, and perhaps experiences even fear of remaining available to it. This movement of remotion, which takes place in Being and Time as it undergoes, in the course of its study, the overturning of its domination by traditional time, is an instance of temporal ecstasis. By this movement the traditional experiences of religious ecstasy and rapture are undercut and their authority for human existence is overcome. A temporal ecstasis in resolve takes place in Being and Time and constitutes a movement of thought that is definitive of the book as a whole and that creates a horizon of possibility that is transformative of the heritage in which the book is conceived. The question of ethics, with its implications for ‘spiritual’ life, occurs in this movement.

What am I to do in this resolve? How am I to constitute myself in open, ecstatic temporality? Clearly, no prescriptions are given. If one clears the way for others to find access to their being, if the world no longer appears in the traditional powers of ownership and disposability, if one is sensitized to suffering human life and to the unconscious depression and resentment that are found in our satisfactions, if one is attuned to beings in their being—their ungraspable ecstasis—and if one is careful, alert, and resolved vis-à-vis being, one will still be unguided regarding specific decisions. The possibility of institutional guidance, whether it entails external or internal regulation, appears condemned to misadventure by its very fixations. The danger of totalization and the inevitability of violent entrapment of ecstatic time by the best of social intentions discourages one from making either a policy or a morality of this most proper event of dasein. The morbidity of knowing just what to do or of feeling what is clearly right threatens the possibility of human action.

Or rather, does it indicate the futility of finding human community on the basis of self and I? Does it suggest the depth of our malaise in our traditional efforts to take care of ourselves? A companion to ecstasis in this case is depression in our experiences of cultural inevitability over which we have little effective power—the depression of existing in the attraction of our highest satisfactions and their danger and violence, the depression of wanting what is right to such an extent that right seems to become timeless and then is experienced in violation of its limits and contradictions.

Being and Time suggests that dasein’s recall of its being is through, not around, this kind of depression and discouragement. Dasein must pass through multiple terminations intrinsic to its existence, if temporality in its propriety is to be thought and intimately known. The overturning of our traditional ‘highs’ and our deep sense of peace, our inherited ecstases, is part of the process of coming to the thought of time that is proper to dasein and that emerges on the horizon of our culture. The question of ethics takes place in the depth and intimacy of this overturning. The criteria and force of profoundly human ‘spirituality’ that are based on the projections of our traditional experiences of time are uprooted by dasein’s propriety. This question addresses our deepest emotions as well as our concepts, and until the impact of Being and Time is felt in the regions of our obligation and worship, in our nonvoluntary reactions to suffering, disease, and death, it does not, as a work on and in the question of being, have the possibility of coming to thought. Temporality temporalizes; and what is true comes to pass. This ‘movement’ leaves no place outside itself for neutrality and objectivity, for the comforts of unquestioned observations and strict knowledge, or for belief and commitment without question. Dasein as a whole is involved, and its wholeness is found in the broken, ending ecstasis of nonobjectifiable mortal time.

One indication of the horizon of time and the overturn that it occasions, as well as an instance of Heidegger’s effort to respond to it, is found in the lectures that he gave a year after Being and Time was published. We turn now to those lectures.

5. Overturning in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

In the first two paragraphs of Part Two of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger states that we must see thematically “in a clear and methodologically secure way the like of being in distinction from beings” if we are to carry out philosophy “as a science.” “Being and its distinction from beings can be fixed only if we get a proper hold on the understanding of being as such.” But before we can “fix” being in its distinction from beings in a “sufficiently clear” and “secure” way, we must understand the ontological constitution of dasein. The understanding of being belongs to the ontological constitution of dasein. We must “bring to light the ground of the basic structures of dasein in their unity and wholeness.”

We are thus led to expect that by a strict and disciplined study of temporality we will have laid the basis for a clear differentiation between being and beings. Rigorous, scientific, methodologically secure thought is called for. Our goal is “to fix the ground of the ontological difference.” Then we will be in a position genuinely to raise the question of being without confusing being with a being.

Heidegger turns to Aristotle and the Aristotelian interpretation of time in order to de-structure and overcome the temporality that characterizes dasein in its dominant and everyday way of existing. Heidegger’s use of Aristotle, as we have seen, also uncovers the incomplete and open character of his own account of temporality, and the methodological strictness of his account brings him to the point of showing, by reference to horizon and ecstasis, that a different view of thinking from that forecast at the beginning of Part Two is necessary as a consequence of working through and beyond the Aristotelian concept of time. Dasein’s structures of existence constitute an historical, inherited understanding of time that is made in part by Aristotle’s lineage, both by the positive interpretation of time in this lineage and by its suppressions and inadequacies regarding mortal temporality. Heidegger’s own dasein-analysis is in this understanding as it moves beyond it. Dasein is made of language and history, of Western traditions, that cover over how dasein comes temporally to be in its traditions.

The history of the problem of ontological difference and temporality is not a secondary aspect of the problem of temporality and ontological difference. That history is partially uncovered in a de-structuring reading of Aristotle, as we shall see. But just as phenomenology promises a careful way of thinking that shows the limits and concealments of the Aristotelian tradition, the Aristotelian tradition also shows the limits in the phenomenological approach. As he uncovers the issues and inadequacies in Aristotle’s interpretation of time, Heidegger also shows that the phenomenological method is partially founded in these inadequacies. Phenomenology is limited by the history in which and out of which it develops. This is a peculiarity that we shall think more about: the history of the problem of ontological difference and temporality, as it is uncovered by Heidegger’s de-structuring reading of his own tradition, and the temporal structures of dasein, which are ontologically different from dasein’s factical, historical situation, are in tension in Heidegger’s thought, and this tension between the historicalfactical and the ontological in part constitutes the problem of ontological difference. This tension also opens toward a way of thinking that is neither Aristotelian nor phenomenological, one that we shall see opened up in Heidegger’s thought on the ecstatic, horizonal aspect of temporality.

Heidegger understands Aristotle to be the major contributor to “the traditional concept of time” (BP 231), which Heidegger also calls “the common understanding of time” and “the natural concept of time” (BP 232). So, when we begin with Aristotle, we are beginning with the history of the ordinary, everyday, often intelligent, always metaphysical interpretation of time. Aristotle’s interpretation of time is based on “the phenomenon of time” in the sense that he “forced inquiry back to the phenomena, to the seen, and [he] mistrusted from the ground up all wild and windy speculations” (BP 232). Aristotle was rigorous and also engaged in a nascent version of de-structuring the inherited interpretations of time. By his work an epoch-forming horizon becomes manifest. As we look for a rigorous interpretation of time by de-structuring Aristotle’s lineage, we are engaged in a process that, like the idea of ontological difference, is to be found nascently in Aristotle. Heidegger’s own phenomenological work also shows a horizon different from Aristotle’s, but one that emerges from Aristotle’s horizon.

The context of Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle in Basic Problems is the problem of ontological difference, a problem that is in Aristotle’s thought, but one that Aristotle and his followers were not able to bring to thematic development. That problem is in some way related to the problematic of temporality, and the problematic of temporality as Heidegger conceives it is also nonthematically a part of Aristotle’s thought. The aim of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is to bring out the problem of ontological difference in the problematic of temporality; that is, he intends to thematize aspects of Aristotle’s thought that could not come to speech and interpretation within the horizons of Aristotle’s thought. As we follow his account we can also say that the horizons of Heidegger’s thought are themselves a transformation of Aristotle’s thought, which opens in a different present onto different futures and pasts. This turnabout, or Umschlag, takes place as aspects of Aristotle’s thought that could not play an open, formative role in the process of his thinking come now into a different process, a different Vollzug, a different stretch of history and thought, and facilitate a transformation toward a very different interpretation of time and way of thinking, one that includes a tearing movement within Heidegger’s thinking.

Further, while the phenomenon of time is always in Heidegger’s sight, Aristotle’s interpretation of the phenomenon of time is the subject of Heidegger’s inquiry in Section 19 of Basic Problems. His interpretation of Aristotle is the important point of departure for his account of the problem of ontological difference. Aristotle’s interpretation orients our everyday understanding of time. By uncovering Aristotle’s account of time and at the same time interpreting it with emphasis on transition and difference, Heidegger prepares for a phenomenological account of dasein’s everydayness. The historical account of Aristotle shows the extent to which traditional processes and thoughts give content and factual orientation to what we can and cannot think. Our ability to think time and ontological difference, that is, our understanding of time and ontological difference, occurs in the future-giving, present-forming horizon of the Aristotelian tradition. A peculiarity of this tradition that we shall consider further is that it is within a horizon that is increasingly remote from our own time, although this remoteness is a part of the movement of our time.

This is a puzzling combination. The phenomenon of time is interpreted in order “to put ourselves in a position to grasp the distinction between being and beings . . . to fix the ground of the ontological difference” (BP 228), and our orienting access to this phenomenon is a given, factual, historically formed interpretation of time in which the phenomenon of time is so conceived as to make extremely difficult a clear understanding of the ontological difference between being and beings.

In this section of Basic Problems, Heidegger says, we grant that any interpretation of time presupposes the Zeitlichkeit or temporality of dasein, that the basic structures of temporality are of “dasein’s original constitution.” In other words, we assume the accomplishment of Being and Time. Temporality is “the ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being.” How time is understood implies an understanding of being. But dasein’s “original constitution” continues to be the question partially because it is founded in and constituted by the Aristotelian tradition. Heidegger shows that something approximating the ontological difference between being and beings is found in Aristotle’s interpretation of time and, thus, in the interpretation that structures a significant portion of our everyday lives. By this demonstration he shows that an inchoate understanding of ontological difference is historically constitutive of dasein. For Aristotle, as we have seen, ‘now’ is both countable (it is a particular being) and “a continuum of the flux of time” (it is not a particular being, but the ground for the particularity of the countable now) (BP 249). How are we to think of time fundamentally if the now is “intrinsically transition” (BP 249), and yet can be counted? As Heidegger interprets Aristotle, we find that the ontological difference embedded in Aristotle’s account of time as numbered motion is secreted and obscured, because the relation of number, in its difference from the now, to fundamental temporality is not clear. Yet a fundamental temporality is indicated by the continuing countability of time.

Further, we find that until the very basis for temporal transition is grasped, this obscurity about temporality will be part of the flow of Aristotelian thought. In the language of the first paragraph of Part Two, we need to “fix” [fixiern] the understanding of being “in our grasp” [in den Griff].The grounding of time in dasein’s “basic constitution” is the important, perhaps necessary first step, and this is because our tradition’s interpretation of time, and Aristotle’s interpretation in particular, points to the soul as the foundation of time without clearly showing how time is of the soul or clearly showing how time and soul establish an ontological difference between the countability of time and the continuity of time. Dasein is constituted partially by this drive to understand its own temporality and by deep uncertainty and confusion over its own temporality. And in its history dasein is prone to think of difference in relation to beings rather than in relation to the ontological difference between being and beings. Heidegger’s move to Aristotle is a move in and to Dasein’s own confusion over time and ontological difference, but it is a move also within a changing horizon in which temporal dasein, not soul, shows itself to be the region within which the difference between being and beings can be thought.

Aristotle’s access to time is “the counting perception of motion as motion.” This counting perception “is at the same time the perception of what is counted as time” (BP 257). As we noted above, perception of the counted ‘what’ is associated with an emphasis on perception without alertness or attunement to the temporal basis of perception; this means that the ontological difference in relation to time that is built into Aristotle’s interpretation has been overlooked. Hence, “it leads to inadequately founded methods of interpreting time.” Aristotle’s approach, says Heidegger, is an “initial one,” but his approach has become basic in the fabric of Western experience, thought, and speech. What in fact invests our lives and our institutions in the West is an initial and inadequate understanding of time, one that has not appropriated the difference between temporal continuity and what is counted and one that could not, in its time, account for its own temporality. The Aristotelian interpretation does not think the finite moving fullness of its own time, time’s Vollzug, its continuous, finite stretch beyond anything conceivable as ‘now’. Our living heritage, in its life, in turn fails in its everyday pursuit of life to give way to the ontological difference of temporality that Aristotle foresaw in an epoch-forming, albeit inadequate, beginning. This interpretation could not appropriate either the ontological difference that invests it or the temporality about which it spoke. In its rigorous failure and in ours regarding time we will probably find indications of a difference whose shadow follows us in all our lives like a dark fissure in the light of which everything appears.

Heidegger also grants in Part Two of Basic Problems that everydayness is a basic aspect of dasein. In our tradition we can easily say that everydayness is an a priori structure of dasein, that our everydayness is ontically characterized by Aristotle’s tradition-forming understanding of time, and that another dasein is characterized by some other understanding that has given direction to some other tradition. But our confidence in this language of a priori structures is now less sure. We realize that the language of a priori structures, with its sense of a continuous now, fits nicely into the everyday intelligence of our heritage. Does this thought of everydayness as a priori, like the traditional interpretation of time, also hide some difference, one that is hardly thinkable, but that is built into the ideas of ‘a priori’ and ‘transcendence’?

If the inherited understanding of time, in Aristotle’s wake, is tradition making and is in that sense everyday, the temporality of foundations, unity, and systematic order is in question. The possibility emerges for thinking that temporality is finite and that thinking, to be disciplined, must be founded in its own finitude, that is, it must be founded in the Umschlag of its own tradition as well as within it. The confident beginning of Part Two is shaken, although Heidegger did not clearly intend to challenge his goal of “a clear and methodologically secure way” of thinking, because the very basis of the confidence comes into question only in the course of carrying out his confidence in the most rigorous possible way. He intended nonetheless to show that the clouded thought of ontological difference in relation to temporality simultaneously clouds our interpretation of being. There is a striking simultaneity here. Time and being are simultaneously obscured as ontological difference is obscured. The ‘now’, the Umschlag, the transformation, of the obscurity of time and being is not at all clear: the history of that obscurity and its horizon and present constitution are obscure. How are we to think the ontological difference of time as continuity in the lives of beings in the simultaneous obscurity of time and being, an obscurity that occurs in the disclosure of our language and thought? Are ‘foundation’ and ‘a priori’ part of the obscurity? The question of being that emerges with the obscurity of time and being puts in question the very basis for a strict method for interpreting the ontological difference of being and beings. We will return to this issue when we look at what Heidegger says about the ecstatic structure of temporality.

Our confidence in the possibility of a highly disciplined account of temporality, a confident hope that we can find access to time, is not destroyed, however. Consider the following paragraph:

What Aristotle presents as time corresponds to the common prescientific understanding of time. By its own phenomenological content common time points to an original time, temporality. This implies however, that Aristotle’s definition of time is only the initial approach to the interpretation of time. The characteristic traits of time as commonly understood must become intelligible by way of original time. If we set this task for ourselves it means that we have to make clear how the now qua now has transitionary character; how time as now, then, and at-the-time embraces beings and as such an embrace of extant things is still more objective and more extant than everything else (intratemporality); how time is essentially counted and how it is pertinent to time that it is always unveiled. (BP 257)

In this subsection, 19b, we find Heidegger moving beyond the Aristotelian heritage by giving an account of “reading time from a clock” and by leading us, by means of his account, to characteristics of dasein that point toward “original time,” specifically, toward expecting, retaining, and presenting. This subsection elaborates and expands the Aristotelian interpretation of the now and of motion, as the very horizon for interpreting time expands and transforms: the stretching out of the now is given a dasein-oriented account that shows the “inner coherence” of time in terms of the structures of dasein. We can feel the progress of this account in the sense that we seem to be working on the same phenomenon that Aristotle worked on, something original and already there, independent of Aristotle and of us, too. It is as though by turning to dasein we were looking through a gate that opens to a unified, finite, original time and shows the ontological difference between being and beings.

We know, however, that this section is an elaboration within a tradition, a tradition that is being subtly de-structured. Heidegger interprets the ‘now’ in terms of overturning and passage and by elaborating transition and passage as disclosive stretching out beyond the measure of counting or number. Overturning, we find, occurs within a temporal horizon. Within a horizon, time stretches out, but not as a series of now-points. It stretches out ecstatically. Having been, going to, and presenting—each, Heidegger says, carries away [entrücken] from itself toward each other within a horizon of given, presenting, enabling possibilities. The horizon, like a space of vanishing and appearing, opens out to openness: this ‘opening out to openness’ elaborates both the ‘now’ as overturning [the Umschlag] and the carrying away or remotion of time. Temporality, original time, is the unity of dasein and is thus historical, metabolic remotion into openness. Our language is stretched beyond the reach of the Aristotelian horizon. Another horizon becomes manifest. Something is vanishing, removing another kind of region. Our language has begun to stand out from the Aristotelian stance. The standing-out itself is becoming a problem for thinking.

We also know that our language is in the debt of Aristotle, that our horizon of interpretation occurs in the remove of Aristotle’s horizon, and that our debt to Aristotle is being paid not only in what we can say, but in what we cannot say in our increasingly deferential regard for ontological difference. We understand that the play of saying and not being able to say in some obscure way implicates the stretching out of time in dasein’s understanding of being. How can we think the phenomenon of time in a given horizon that has beyond it nothing to be counted or disciplined into any kind of enumeration? Must we think of time as a phenomenon that is available to all human beings, one that moves in and beyond the motions of daily life, a phenomenon that is beyond and at the basis of all traditions? Can we, in fact, think at so far a distance from our everyday, structuring, enabling concept of time that the stretching out of time itself comes to thought? What makes the difference for thought in the face of the power of our inherited concept of time?

Heidegger’s account of Aristotle suggests that now, in the turnabout, the Umschlag, of the Aristotelian horizon, something original for thinking takes place. It takes place—shall we say—in the blend, the fusion, the fission, the simultaneity of the horizon of Aristotle’s thought and a horizon that opens out in Aristotle’s remove. The remoteness of ontological difference in Aristotle’s tradition now becomes transformed into an originating remoteness, one that moves people to think again of time and temporality in their uncertainty and their ubiquity. This transformation in relation to original time appears to occur like a foundation. But the very idea of ‘foundation’ seems to grow remote in this procession of thinking.

We turn to two paragraphs on the ecstatic aspect of temporality. They are poised within a discussion of original time, which is founded in dasein and consequently in the history of Aristotle’s account of time as well as in dasein’s ecstatic temporality. The discussion is disciplined by a recognition of its own closeness to and distance from Aristotle. The distance from Aristotle originates in part in the dimensions of Aristotle’s own thought that were problematic and remote for him. These two paragraphs combine the Aristotelian problematic of time and ontological difference with the dasein-oriented phenomenological account of temporality. We are now thinking through our history as we think about it. Heidegger’s account also shows that the problems and obscurities of time and temporality are in the language by which we attempt to fix the problems in a unified, disciplined way. This account shows that temporality is a problem in its historical and horizonal presence and that, as a problem in our language and thought, temporality is not to be conceived as a timeless being. As a problem and not as a fixed being, temporality has motivated and driven in our language all attempts to give it articulation. The continuity of temporality is not thinglike, but is, let us say experimentally in the context of ontological difference, ecstatic. In Heidegger’s account of the ecstatic, horizonal character of temporality, the problem of temporality unfixes our fixations on transitory units of time and unfixes our emphasis on the division between temporal and nontemporal beings. This account releases, like a differentiating horizon, the problem of ontological difference in the problem of temporality. The language of ecstasis, in other words, is a horizonal language. Here Aristotle’s horizon fades into a different opening of thought.

As we think through the language of temporal ecstasis, the problem of ontological difference takes place in our language and thought. Something remote on the tradition’s horizon—the problem of ontological difference—removes itself and stands out upon a different horizon. It brings with it the horizonal opening. The very basis of our conceptual grasp loses its steady possibility for self-awareness. In that occurrence the confidence of Heidegger’s lectures in the structural unity of dasein as a sufficient, rigorous answer to the problem of ontological difference is broken: the difference of temporality, in its horizonal ecstasis, from beings and from timeless certainty makes way for something other than what these remarkable lectures can say. The language of this account, its own grounding efforts, its relation to its own history, and its own temporal analysis of dasein come into question. Both the certainties of everyday time on the Aristotelian horizon and the remoteness of the openness of temporality on the horizon of this thought are unfixed and brought to problematic speech in Heidegger’s account of original time, which is not a being but which stands outside itself and perhaps even outside the horizon of its history. If the horizon of the ecstasis of temporality “is the open expanse toward which remotion as such is outside itself” (BP 267), how are we to rethink this language in the remotion of its own history?⁷

Consider this paragraph:

Within itself, original time is outside itself; that is the nature of its temporalizing. It is this outside-itself itself. That is to say, it is not something that might first be extant as a thing and thereafter outside itself, so that it would be leaving itself behind itself. Instead, within its own self, intrinsically, it is nothing but the outside-itself pure and simple. As this ecstatic character is distinctive of temporality, each ecstasis, which temporalizes only in temporalizing unity with the others, contains within its own nature a carrying-away toward something in a formal sense. Every such remotion is intrinsically open. A peculiar openness, which is given with the outside-itself, belongs to ecstasis. That toward which each ecstasis is intrinsically open in a specific way we call the horizon of the ecstasis. The horizon is the open expanse toward which remotion as such is outside itself. The carrying-off opens up this horizon and keeps it open. As ecstatic unity of future, past, and present, temporality has a horizon determined by the ecstases. Temporality, as the original unity of future, past, and present, is ecstatically-horizonal intrinsically. “Horizonal” means “characterized by a horizon given with the ecstasis itself.” Ecstatic-horizonal temporality makes possible not only the constitution of the Dasein’s being, but also the temporalizing of the only time of which the common understanding of time is aware and which we designate generally as the irreversible sequence of nows. (BP 267)

We have seen that Aristotle’s interpretation of time opens out in its temporality to the ontological difference between being and beings, a difference that Aristotle’s interpretation of time could not think. We may say that the thought of ontological difference is on the horizon of Aristotle’s thought. His thought is carried away toward it. The temporality of his interpretation of time is found in an ecstasis that removes his thought from its own stasis. This remotion is a part of the de-struction of Aristotle’s concept of time in the unfolding thought of ontological difference. Heidegger ‘founds’ dasein in a horizonal-ecstatic temporality: “Ecstatic-horizonal temporality makes possible . . . the constitution of dasein’s being.” It is not a thing. “Within its own self, intrinsically, it is nothing but the outside-itself pure and simple.” Temporality in its occurrence temporizes any moment, carries away a moment, opens it out. Aristotle’s concept of time is opened out beyond what he could say. And the discipline by which we have come to think this overcoming of Aristotle’s concept is also under the sway of ecstatic openness, an openness that will not be grasped by the discipline of its discovery.

Heidegger appears to be addressing an ecstatic remotion in his own thinking in the concluding pages of The Basic Problems. He notes that “the method of ontology is nothing but the sequence of the steps involved in the approach to being as such and the elaboration of its structures. We call this method of ontology phenomenology” (BP 328). “But,” he adds, “what is most essential is first of all to have traversed the whole path once, so as, for one thing, to learn to wonder scientifically about the mystery of things and, for another, to banish all illusions, which settle down and nest with particular stubbornness precisely in philosophy.” Then he addresses a distinctive ecstasis in his own thought. He had begun Part Two of this book with a call for a strict phenomenological method, one that would “methodically secure” the ontological difference between being and beings (BP 227). Now, after finding the ecstasis of Aristotle’s concept of time, he says:

There is no such thing as the one phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical technique. For implicit in the essential nature of all genuine method as a path toward the disclosure of objects is the tendency to order itself always toward that which it itself discloses. When a method is genuine and provides access to the objects, it is precisely then that the progress made by following it and the growing originality of the disclosure will cause the very method that was used to become necessarily obsolete. The only thing that is truly new in science and in philosophy is the genuine questioning and struggle with things which is at the service of this questioning. (BP 328)

We are now prepared, through these lectures, for experimentation in thinking that finds its origin in both the Umschlag of the Aristotelian heritage and the Umschlag of the method that has provided access to original temporality. We will retrace this process again and again. But, having “traversed the whole path,” we come to the disclosure of temporality and find again the method in its originality to have moved beyond itself in its original moment. Its temporality has opened it out beyond itself. Thinking begins again and recoils in this overturning. The ontological difference of temporality might have become thinkable in the temporalizing of Aristotle’s interpretation of the now and of our approach to his interpretation. Temporality, not a being, appears thinkable, but not graspable. How is being without grasp to be thought? How can being be thought in the ecstasis of temporality when temporality is found to be not a being at all?

When the transformation of these lectures is interpreted by the concepts of horizon and ontological difference, we find the thought of mortal temporality taking place in the Umschlag, the overturning and transition that characterizes Heidegger’s thought. In it dasein is made insecure. Not only Heidegger’s account of dasein, but the basis for feeling and thinking is shaken in this thinking by the transformation that takes place in it. As always, Heidegger’s abstractness, which we shall confront in the final chapter, makes the tearing effect appear at first gentle and ‘philosophical’. But when we draw closer to it and undergo it without the control of our traditional protections, it appears more like suffering than philosophical discourse. The basis for original thought recoils on itself and puts itself in question. That means, in the context of Heidegger’s writing, that the circumscription of our lives is solicited by a remotion that leaves nothing secure in the mortality of its ecstatic temporalization.

The horizonal aspect of this thought also incorporates the possibility of exhilaration and the feeling of going forward. The reverse side of the depression that we discussed, which is both a part of our heritage and a part of dasein, is found in the expansive feelings that accompany dasein’s opening out to the finite openness of its being, to its “truth.” The question of ethics is no less a part of dasein’s truth than it is a part of dasein’s open resolve.

6. The Truth of Ecstasis

Ecstasis means, in the context of the question of ethics, that the ‘essence’ of human being is not susceptible to conceptual grasp and hence not to definitive judgments concerning it. Dasein’s mortal temporality might be ‘thought’ in movements of transformation in which the structure and methods of a tradition come into question and are overcome in their axiomatic certainty by elements that are in the tradition but are not clear to it or are lost to its values and rationality. Mortal temporality, we found, is such an ‘element’. Ecstasis further means that human being is riven, in a certain sense broken, by the difference of its being vis-à-vis its existence. We have found that the certainty of Heidegger’s own disciplined phenomenological account of dasein recoils on itself and away from itself by virtue of what it uncovers as its own primordial condition of possibility. It is no less subject to mortal temporality than is dasein in its general bearing. “We have not shaken off the tradition,” Heidegger says in his discussion of truth in Being and Time (Section 44.B). “But,” he continues, “we have appropriated it primordially” [die ursprüngliche Aneignung ].⁸ The claim of appropriation is justified if he can show how the ordinary idea of truth is based in a more primordial phenomenon of truth. The process of appropriation generally is one of turning again to the tradition, as we have seen, and turning over or recoiling in that turn to a new horizon and thought. It is a process that implicates and involves dasein’s life and one in which an individual may open to the disclosive openness of dasein’s being. In this process of turning Heidegger finds that dasein’s mortal temporality comes to thought. Thinking takes place, as the universal validity of what is thought falls more and more into question.

Ecstasis also means that dasein’s existence, the context for valuation and action, is characterized by a loss of a sense of what is proper to dasein’s being. ‘Propriety’ is contaminated in its specific expressions. Its appropriation is more like the blink of an eye [Augenblick] or a side glance than it is like ownership. In open resolve an individual is maximally alert to this ontological situation. One relates to things and to oneself in an alert acceptance of one’s inevitable impropriety. All of dasein’s values and actions, all of its forms of power, are in question in the open, proper side glance of resolve. No possibility is offered of avoiding the impropriety of losing touch with the being of people and things and degrading them even in our respect and commitment. In resolve, Heidegger says, we may come to accept this inevitability. This means a continuous reopening of our relations, a continuous destructuring of our defining structures, analogous to Heidegger’s retrieving and rethinking his philosophical heritage.

The reopening of all relations to the disclosiveness of mortal temporality, not the establishment of true and sufficient, that is, ‘proper’, guidelines and values, is the emphasis of Heidegger’s thought. When we remember that his process has nothing to do with destroying values or suggesting a way of life without values, we see that ecstasis in daily life indicates relations that are attuned to the limits, to the ending of values in their value, and not a depreciation of the importance of values. Heidegger’s attention is on human bearing [Verhalten] with values in open resolve regarding mortal temporality. A continuous transvaluation of values appears to be one of the consequences of this bearing. We can evaluate properly a specific process of transvaluation only when we come to think in the ecstasis proper to dasein’s being.

What kind of freedom is that of ecstasis? Although Heidegger discusses freedom in Being and Time in relation to a number of topics—dasein’s ability to be, its project, being ahead of itself, anxiety, and resolve—he does not raise the question of freedom in his section on truth. He has shown that dasein is free in its being for its own propriety. It is free in its being for the freedom to choose and to avail itself of itself; that is, it is free for open resolve and in that sense it is free in its disclosure for its proper truth (Section 40). Dasein is free to be true to itself. Dasein’s being true to itself is, as we have seen, its free openness in and with its own disclosiveness, its ecstatic mortal temporality. Freedom is thus closely associated with ecstasis, and this association leads us to his essay “On the Essence of Truth.” In this description of freedom and truth we shall find a turning, a metamorphosis developing in Heidegger’s thought. Various descriptions in Being and Time are advanced, turned by another approach, placed in a different context, or rethought. Heidegger retrieves his own thought in some instances and transforms it in the retrieval. We shall follow in particular what happens to ecstasis and resolve in order to determine how the question of ethics was developing in his thought in the early 1930s (and throughout that decade as Heidegger reworked the essay before it was published in 1943) as we prepare to consider his Rector’s Address of 1933.

When Heidegger turns to freedom in the fourth section of “On the Essence of Truth,” he uses in his first sentence the word erschüttern, which means to shake violently, like a tree in an earthquake, or to convulse. The English translation appropriately uses uproot. Traditional preconceptions about truth are shaken and uprooted when they are seen in their proper connection with freedom, if, Heidegger adds, one is prepared for a transformation [Wandlung] of one’s thinking. Uprooting and transformation are part of the ‘thought’ of freedom. Freedom comes to pass [west] properly, in its essence, as the traditional conceptions of correctness and accuracy are found to be rooted in freedom, which is not subject, as the ‘origin’ of correctness and accuracy, to their categories and proper rationality. Calling to mind in a disciplined way this connection between freedom and truth closely associates us with Entschlossenheit, dasein’s “concealed essential ground” (Section 4). We are poised for an “experience” that is strange to us, in which the ground of our being is disclosed as concealed. This experience, Heidegger says, removes us from the suasion of our inherited convictions and displaces [versetzen] us in regard to ourselves and our culture. Uproot, transformation, displaced—these words are associated with the experience of the concealed ground of human existence and “the essential domain of truth.” The possibility for correctness, when we are available to it and are able to let it come to pass in our awareness, has a strong effect on our lives. The embodiment of a proper investigation into freedom and truth is like a convulsive metamorphosis. A tradition and an individual are shaken and left very much in question. Further, the possible correctness of Heidegger’s account of freedom and truth is based on freedom, which has the effect, in its coming to mind [Besinnung], of uprooting the ‘correct’ way of thinking about truth and of displacing the individual who now, presumably, has a correct account of freedom and truth. The ecstasis of freedom means an uprooting of Heidegger’s own careful account.

Freedom “reveals itself as letting beings be,” and “to let be is to engage oneself with beings” (Section 4). But this engagement is not a matter of managing or disposing or of any other kind of power or valence (value). “To let be—this is to let beings be as the beings which they are—means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, being that openness, as it were, along with itself.” The side glance [Augenblick] that we discussed earlier in this section means in part that letting beings be properly means attentiveness to the disclosure, or unconcealment, of beings. Their disclosure is not something that comes to stand before us in an experience or by mentation. It is not subject to direct encounter. It is “uncomprehended” and concealed as it comes to pass. But our struggle to let be the unconcealment of beings disengages us from those preoccupations in which we are dominated by the issue of what to do with beings or how to treat them: “To engage oneself with the disclosiveness of beings is not to lose oneself in them; rather such engagement withdraws in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are and in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them.” The proper freedom of beings is found in their unconcealment, their disclosure, and dasein’s proper freedom takes place as the individual admits [einlassen] and gives way to the unconcealment that he or she cannot comprehend. Freedom is not a matter of recognizing beings for what they are or relating to them correctly. It is a question of letting beings come to pass so that they can be taken for what they are. In this sense they are engaged properly when they are allowed in their unconcealment. As this letting be comes to pass, freedom reveals itself.

Freedom, then, is “ex-posing” and “ek-sistent.” Its ecstasis is double: letting beings be exposes or displaces a discourse or an individual in relation to its usual place with things in the disclosure of beings; and, second, this account of freedom exposes a freedom that is thoroughly obscured in our heritage. In both cases the individual and its heritage are transposed vis-à-vis subjectivity and singularity. The priority of all relations of force, including the ‘good’ valences, is displaced, and freedom is manifest in the displacement that shows an incomprehensible unconcealment. A proper bearing with beings gives way to their disclosiveness.

The energy and intensity of this account, its passion for propriety, are focused on a bearing [Verhalten] that makes valuation and recognition possible, one that can pervade all relations but is not structured by values. Its incomprehensibility is absorbing. The movement is one of recoiling back again and again on the incomprehensible trace of being that marks Heidegger’s tradition but eludes its grasp. The movement of his thought springs forward out of these recoils by the energy of the displacement that it has occasioned. Nothing in everyday life is trustworthy in this turning. Heidegger’s thought turns out from the reliabilities of his life and is turned by this passage to something that will not quite come to thought. Far from an abstract formalism regarding value, Heidegger’s thought is a passionate engagement with freedom in which freedom is accorded great value and yet cannot be valuable—a conundrum that is not uniquely his, but one that belongs to his cultural inheritance as he finds it. The ecstasis of his account is found partly in his breaking free from the patterns of thought that organized his heritage, by virtue of the fault that traverses it. In the case at hand, the ecstasis is found in the cleft of freedom that comes to pass as dasein’s stance is transposed by the disclosure of freedom’s concealment. This is a movement that recoils ecstatically on its correctness and abandons issues of correct everyday life as well as the priority of correctness. For Heidegger, something momentous is taking place: the sway of a tradition is metamorphosing into something like a process that is unavoidable and unthinkable. It is a process that appears to Heidegger to hold clues to the deepest questions of human deprivation and tragedy. Yet it resounds strangely from a distance and depth that he cannot fathom and that betrays a single-minded obsession to hear within its concealing and unreachable disclosure.

In this strange element Heidegger finds something preserved for human life whereby the ecstasis can take place. It is not a rich inheritance of valuables or a buried nature that will fulfill a human self in its realization. The possibility for a human’s standing out of fixation with beings is found in the preservation of a question, an uncertainty that pervades our inheritance (Section 4). Our history of ek-sistence is initiated by the question that began to loosen the grip on individuals by specific things and communal bonding: What are beings? By this question the unconcealment of beings comes to be an issue. By asking this question, people in our lineage “for the first time experienced” beings, not primarily in the beings’ thingly quality, but in their emerging presence (aufgehendes Anwesen) with regard to their (non-thinglike) emerging presence. The emerging presence of beings referred to itself in this experience. Again a double movement: beings are set apart from their everydayness by their emerging presence, and people are set apart from their everydayness by questioning the emerging presence of beings. Unconcealment provides a sense of wholeness that is strange to the thought of a totality of individual things. Unconcealment (is) whole, but it is not a being or a “sphere of beings.” This experience “conserves” beings in their unconcealment, brings things back to their truth, that is, to their disclosiveness, and sets in motion the possibility of being with beings in a way that does not diminish them to the status of their use, identity, and knowledge. They stand outside their status, and the one who experiences them in this way is transposed to a relation that is outside the inherited region of usage, identity, and knowledge. The possibility of ecstasis is thus preserved in the experienced question, What are beings?

The emergence and loss of the question in relation to beings and unconcealment is the proper history of Heidegger’s thought, the experienced and largely forgotten question that festers in the organizing thoughts and values of Western culture. “History begins only when beings themselves are expressly drawn up into their unconcealment and conserved in it, only when this conservation is conceived on the basis of questioning regarding beings as such” (Section 4). The possibility is opened up for attending to “the open region for every measure,” and thus finding our bearing with beings without the complex and pervasive mediation of all forms of measurement. The momentous quality of this possibility is still to be appropriated. It suggests the diminishing force, in at least certain aspects of our lives, of measuring people and other beings, whether the measure be by means of race, beliefs, family, heritage, professional expertise, quality of mind, or simple ‘spiritual’ depth. We are approaching the possibility of bringing to mind the unconcealment of beings, but we remain for the most part locked in a mindset of valuation, disposal, management, and objectification in our care for our lives, a mindset whose overpowering force hems us in throughout our everyday world, confuses freedom with the condition of possibility for certain types of subjectivity, and gives priority to correctness and measurement in matters of truth.

“The rare and the simple decisions of history arise from the way the original essence of truth essentially unfolds” (Section 4). If we said that history unfolds according to the way we use our freedom, we would exemplify the loss that Heidegger finds in our history. The assumptions that freedom can be used and that it belongs to human beings are parts of the problem of our cultural inheritance. We concern ourselves with the proper use of freedom. Use organizes our concern, and we, the subjects of freedom, are taken to be the agents who determine its propriety. In our commitments we find ways to make ourselves present to each other by reference to values that commonly identify us and have proven trustworthy for our survival and well-being. But the context for trustworthy is a history of thought and practice in which engagement in the disclosure of beings is thoroughly overlooked and excluded from thought. We tend to calculate freedom’s use by intensity of commitment and a degree of responsibility to given standards. The exclusion in our thought of freedom in its dimension of disclosive ecstasis is compounded by the experiences of trust and survival. The question of beings and their disclosiveness is distorted. Their disclosiveness is found in their identifiability, their use, or, in the case of other people, their ability to be answerable to standards, to themselves, or to God. The disclosiveness of beings is thus distorted into their presence and their quality of will regarding other beings. In this sense, distortion expresses ecstasis: the way in which human beings give voice to ek-sistent freedom mistakes and misplaces freedom by making it a property of selves. This distortion constitutes our history of relations with each other and with other beings and both puts in question the authority of our communities of value and yet holds the trace of disclosure, the ek-sistence of beings, in the initiation of the question, what are beings? “The rare and simple decisions” of our history arise from the distortion. They have happened in giving definitive power to derivatives of disclosive openness, for example, in defining the truth of beings by reference to a determinant essence, interpreting time by primary reference to countability in presence, interpreting human being by primary reference to will, and interpreting truth as the adequation of intellect to things. These decisions cover up beings and constitute a history in which the semblance of freedom rather than the disclosure of freedom as letting beings be is the controlling power. The original essence of truth has thus unfolded in our culture by means of semblance and distortion.

Heidegger poses the beginning of an option to the entrapment of beings by the dominance of volition, identity, and valuation. “Every mode of open comportment flourishes in letting beings be” (Section 5). In contrast to contemplative activity, Heidegger makes reference to the specific ways in which people relate to specific beings, to the ways in which we use, identify, evaluate, or address. This issue continues to be one of ek-sistence. There is no question of eliminating usage or valuation. It is rather a question of engaging beings with alertness to their and our ek-sistent, disclosive freedom, the disclosiveness that is not for use, identification, evaluation, or management of any kind. Withdrawal from the world of concern is foreign to Heidegger’s thought. It is an issue of undergoing the strain and uncertainty of engaging beings in such a way that they are allowed their disclosiveness which transgresses their familiarity. Their familiarity ends in their disclosiveness, and our familiarity with ourselves undergoes a similar ending. In this case, we are not confronting being-to-death or the Vorlaufen of the future. The thought of human finitude does not quite fit. Nor is it an ending that marks an entrance of eternity into finite life. It is rather an ending that is marked by nothing identifiable by the categories and experiences of familiarity. We encounter the limits of our thinking and experience in the ek-sistence of letting beings be in their disclosiveness. Heidegger refers descriptively in this context to flourishing: “Jedes offenständige Verhalten schwingt” (Every mode of open comportment flourishes) (Section 5; emphasis added). Schwingen has a connotation of soaring and exhilaration. In accord with freedom in our dealings with beings, this open comportment, this offenständige Verhalten, flourishes and composes a rising anticipation of itself in all situations. Heidegger does not say that the self flourishes or that the community flourishes. Letting beings be and the way of being that stands openly in this freedom flourish.

The entire situation of flourishing appears to be strange “from the point of view of everyday calculations and preoccupations” (Section 5). Heidegger’s emphasis is not on dasein’s coming properly to itself, but is on the disclosiveness of beings. Disclosiveness is not a being. It does not privilege any being or any status; no particular being provides special access to it. “Being as a whole” is indicated by disclosiveness, not by dasein, and Heidegger’s ‘option’ intensifies the question of being rather than indicating a suggested or prescribed way of life. Intensifying the question of being, its incomprehensibility in our ways of life and thought, is the ‘aim’ of the option. Our accord with the disclosiveness of beings comes to pass in the questionableness of being, the questionableness of letting beings be. This is an accord marked no less by uncertainty than by dasein’s resolve with regard to its finite temporality.

The history that Heidegger highlights is thus characterized by the question of being and beings in the context of emerging presence and disclosiveness, a pervasive and damaging loss of both the question and the unconcealment of beings, a pervasive normalization of this loss, and the faint indication of an option to this normalization. This history is also characterized by a Verbergung, the concealment of truth, in distinction to the Unverborgenheit, the unconcealment of truth. The loss of the question of being and beings and the normalization of this loss in our culture hides rather than preserves the letting be of beings. The distortion that we have noted twists the disclosiveness of beings into a culture of usage and valuation, and this distortion constitutes the “unfolding” of truth in our heritage.

Concealment, on the other hand, “preserves what is most proper [das Eigenste] to aletheia as its own [als Eigentum]” (Section 5). The word “points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of being (not primarily of beings)” into which dasein ek-sists. Dasein’s ecstasis in being is freedom, which is concealed in the heritage that constitutes dasein. It is freedom, the letting be of beings, that is “the resolutely open bearing that does not close up in itself.” Open resolve, with strong emphasis on the unlocking and opening-out sense of Entschlossenheit, as the word is used in this essay, is the opening in which dasein ek-sists and which conceals and preserves what is most proper to truth, a propriety that is lost to dasein in its history. The returning step to the open freedom of letting beings be that is part of Heidegger’s ‘option’ is one of allowing the concealment. An opposite to this comportment is “clinging to what is readily available and controllable” and taking “directives from the sphere of readily available intentions and needs.” In this opposite case, a person takes his or her bearings from the values and meanings that structure the familiar life-world and is closed to the concealment that marks the end of familiarity and meaning. One bypasses the ecstasis of dasein and intrinsically, although involuntarily, resists the concealment—Heidegger also calls it the mystery—of disclosiveness. People are “left in the sphere of what is readily available to [them].” They are left to their own resources, which is a needy state that is sharply contrasted, particularly in the instance of value satisfaction, to “flourishing.” We propose and plan “on the basis of the latest needs and aims” and manage our lives with attention directed exclusively to what we can accomplish under the immediate circumstances of our lives. Rather than the flourishing of beings, we have a deeply obsessive attachment to beings and to circumstances whereby everything gets used up in the management of our lives. The boundary of our environment in the disclosiveness of beings is thoroughly obscured. We now find that the concealment of being and not only the finite temporality of our being marks the ecstasis of being.

This concealment means for Heidegger that his own view of concealment and the clarity of his thought are “essentially misleading.” He uses these last two words at the end of Section 7, in which he says the following: dasein is constituted by obsessive entanglements with beings and by the consequent inevitable loss of the disclosiveness of beings; dasein is a continuous turning away from being—it “is a turning into need.” Dasein’s turning away is also dasein’s own disclosure; that is, dasein occurs in its being as the possibility of transposition [Versetzung] out of absorbing involvements, a transposition effected by its ecstatic ending in the total unfamiliarity of disclosiveness. Dasein is tossed about in its being by the simultaneity of disclosure and concealing. It occurs questionably. Its view [Ausblick] of the open region of disclosure “is a question”; such questioning takes the form of the question of the being of beings; that is, one asks the kind of questions that take shape in Heidegger’s work as he elaborates the questions of his philosophical heritage; and the question of the being of beings “is essentially misleading.” The question recoils on itself in questionableness. Dasein’s proper turning into need, its disclosure, turns in its questioning. It enjoys no transexistential neutrality or perspective from which to sufficiently define its propriety. Rather, its propriety takes place as its own thinking and questioning transform metaphysical thought and become questionable in the process. When one recognizes the concealment of concealment by virtue of dasein’s “perpetual turning to and fro” in its ek-static existence, one enters reflectively into the proper, true essence of human being only to find that this turning also comes to question.

The same tension that we noted in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Part II, is found in “On the Essence of Truth.” On the one hand, Heidegger proposes a strictness of conceptualization and method that will enable a movement through and beyond the metaphysical tradition. This movement is appropriate to dasein’s horizonal and ecstatic way of being. Heidegger also finds that his own strictness of approach and his desire for definitive clarity, as well as his formulations, are put in question by the issue under investigation. Dasein is questionable, and Heidegger’s thought is an instance of the overturning that dasein inevitably undergoes. Danger invests his thought as much as it invests the valuation and philosophy that he works through. On his terms, nothing commonsensical, philosophical, or political can properly avoid the questioning recoil that is made inevitable by dasein’s errancy and ecstasis.

7. Ethos/Ecstasis

Heidegger’s troubling division of ethos and ecstasis raises, and is designed to raise, doubt within the certainty that characterizes the values of our culture. Even though we are clear that ecstasis occurs in our daily lives and in our heritage, and even though we are aware that doubts arise in our habits of mind and heart that were formed in bypassing and suppressing the disclosiveness of beings, the questions that are basic to our survival and welfare do not appear to be addressed by Heidegger. He puts off, even foreswears, dealing with the values, maxims, and principles that give us hope of avoiding, or at least judging, the savagery and the wrongs that constantly threaten our lives. The question of being and the question of ethics appear anemic or luxurious when they are held up to the starvation, torture, war, and oppression that systematically result from our ways of organizing ourselves and maintaining power. Our measures of wrong and right are not to be lost, not even to the measureless mystery of being. We cannot believe that our recognition of wrong, our commitment to right, our worship of God, our love of just laws, and our respect for human beings have as part of their fabric the inevitability of what we most abhor. We are certainly not prepared to believe that the loss of the question of being and the failure to maintain the question of ethics constitute grave weaknesses in the structure of our culture at its best. We are rather more inclined to expect that the deepest meanings of our religion and ethics will come to light again as Heidegger peels away the veneer of superficiality from which we and they suffer. A profound reinheritance of divinity or a renewed reverence for life as we find it or the emergence of an almost Eastern, specifically Buddhist piety could give a constructive edge to Heidegger’s destructuring of Western thought. Or, at worst, the absence of such redeeming qualities might be taken to explain his behavior in the early years of the Third Reich. In the absence of a reemergence of the values and beliefs most prized by us, we are driven to believe that the difference between ethos and ecstasis marks a questionable division in Heidegger’s thought, particularly when the question of ethics is under discussion. The issue, however, is whether or not (1) our values are thoroughly in question as we make these judgments, (2) valuing as such is genuinely dangerous, and (3) we have undergone the question that moves Heidegger’s writing and defines what is most proper to us in maintaining such questions. The relations among ethos, nómos (law), and nomós (field) can help us to address this issue, to find questionable again our hopes and assurances, and to provide another look at the division between ethos and ecstasis.

The word éthea in Homer was used to name the places where animals belong. The animal’s éthos is the place to which it returns, its dwelling place. If the animal cannot return to its éthos, a violation of its particular order occurs, as when a wild horse is hobbled in a stall and cannot return to its own environment. In the Iliad (6.506-11) Homer says: “As when a stabled horse, having been fed at a manger, breaks his bonds and runs galloping over the plain, since he is accustomed to bathe in the flowing river, glorying. He holds his head high, and his mane leaps on his shoulders on both sides. His knees swiftly bear him, trusting his splendor, through the éthea and pastures (nomós) of horses.”⁹ In the Odyssey, Homer speaks of ethea to which pigs, specifically sows, return after grazing. In both uses of ethea one finds the connotation of appropriateness for particular animals. In the instance of the horse running free back to his ethea and nomós, he has not been successfully habituated to the stall, and he is returning to his site of eating and bathing. The éthea of animals are associated by Herodotus with the ethea of barbarians and names the places to which the various non-Greeks belong. These places resist Greek civilization. The theme of belonging to a place that is not fully human and that resists civilized transformation also runs through Hesiod’s and Theognis’s uses of the word. Éthea, prior to the fourth century, are also distinct from nomós: the nomós is a specific field for grazing, the ethea are specific environments that are associated with patterns of actions peculiar to the animal.

The association of nomós ‘pasture’ and nomós ‘law’ links the word for law to éthos in the following way. Nomós is associated with the nomad. It is associated with wandering, with random search for pasturage. The nomades were pastoral, nomadic tribes. The word nomós meant division and distribution, such as the distribution of an inheritance, which at one time probably consisted primarily of land. The word could also mean possession or regular usage, and nomós could mean district, province, or sphere of command. The verb nomizo meant to use regularly, to own, to acknowledge. In its passive form it meant to be esteemed or held in honor. This remarkable association in the word of nomadic, pasture, division, possession, regularity, accustomed, and honored is, as we shall see, echoed in éthos. In the latter word, there are the associations of accustomed, familiar, custom, foreignness, separation, belonging, and different. In both words habitual practice—the primary meaning for nómos, which means both law and melody—struggles with nomadic, uncivilized separation. This is a fateful struggle. In it the limiting principles of order and random movement without limiting principles unsettle each other. To overcome randomness, principles of order must be applied beyond the locale to give order to the distances and differences of locales. And to maintain the distance and difference involved in the many ways of belonging and being well placed, one must resist the use of principles of order to overcome the randomness and to order differences in a dominant way.

As éthea increasingly gained usage in the singular, Hesiod and Theognis used éthos to refer to a locale of characteristics and to the hidden but characteristic part of a person—the place, as it were, to which one returned when one was really him or herself. It was the aspect of a person that came to light over a period of time and in a variety of circumstances. Theognis says that he once praised a man before he “knew [his] éthos thoroughly” and that he had lived to regret confusing the man’s appearances with his éthos, which “time shows forth” (Op. 963.70). Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato used soul to name the locale of éthos. As a part of soul, éthos continued to have an habituated and resistant quality and to exist separately from the nómos of the soul. An éthos can be ordered by reason, but its variant structures are not the same as rational logos.

The words éthea and éthos had the connotation of recalcitrance. Both barbarians and animals, once they became accustomed to places and ways of life, were hard to change, even in the direction of civilized happiness. The éthos of a person or a group of people was often hidden from view. One was wise to be cautious in relating to the éthos- reality that could be hidden by appearances, language, and behavior. And because of its difference from the seeming and appearing, it showed itself through time as something that lay behind or within what appeared. To know a creature’s éthos, one had to see where the animal went to be at home, as it were, or where it went when threatened, or where it went to die. One needed to experience a person in good times and bad to discover where he or she really lived. Something like real character only came to view circumstantially.

Éthea also were places and regions. The specificity of éthea, the places of belonging for these sows or those Trojans, allowed the word to give emphasis to differences and to resistance respecting claims and laws that sought to overrule the specific places and ways of belonging. The horse broke loose from the stall and manger and also from his caretakers and returned to his place. His return was not an act of reason, any more than the Trojans’ reception of Helen was rational according to Aeschylus (in Agamemnon, 717-36). The power of an éthos is in its peculiarity, its regional characteristics, its quality of belonging, and its resistance to outside influences. We recall that the Indo-European root of éthos (Swedh) meant “one’s own.” Éthos names how one is properly one’s own or how we are of our own. Once people have grown up in the éthos, they are unlikely to adopt another way of being. The regional aspect of éthea and éthos indicates resistance to expropriation by a different éthos or by the authority of laws and principles that would blur its difference and its arbitrariness, its ownness. The differences of an éthos are deeply associated with its ordering, identity-giving, and nurturing force. Recalcitrance and separation are combined with identity and nurturance. The difference of an éthos also means its identity. To attempt to overcome its difference is to attempt to overcome its own reality.

Most likely the conflicts of various éthea and the range wars for pastures, the suffering of those conflicts, and the hopelessness occasioned by their continual renewal contributed greatly to the attraction of rules and laws that overrode the hostile, recalcitrant aspect of éthea and the nomadic quality of nómos. There is also the self-destructiveness that appears to inhabit humans within the same éthos, our killing self-contradictions and our stubborn refusals to make those adjustments and changes of character that would provide a greater measure of peace and happiness to ourselves and to those whose lives we affirm. If éthea become evident through time and extremities, sometimes to the shock even of the individual whose éthos shows itself, if the element of éthos is contingency and differentiation, do we not need a limited field of nurturance, a kind of nomós, a structure that shows itself differently, that shows itself to be outside time and outside ethnic suspicions and conservative provinciality? Or if manifestation outside time is asking too much, perhaps we need a kind of nomós, a field of laws and principles, that brings with it, into time, indications, more than hints, but patterns that point to a transtemporal circumscription of the writhing, belligerent interplay of éthea. Yet the belligerent play of éthea is closely associated with their nurturing and protective power, and this hopeful goal of peace through unification suggests the establishment of an encompassing éthos at the expense of the difference and singularity of the encompassed éthea.

These issues have more than historical interest. We are now in a time when we cannot avoid thinking of laws and principles for thought and action as regional, as a group of claims characteristic of one cultural and historical segment. Who can doubt the contingency of all claims to transtemporal authority and being? The classical resolution of the problems created by the diversity and unruliness of éthea and their many rules and ways—a direction of thought that has enormous forming power in our history—was the hypothesis of forming powers that were unconditioned by time. Their timeless universality suggested superiority over all time-generated, contingent powers. The relations among the different organizations of life are perhaps governed by laws that are not nomadic and by an organization that is not regional and temporal. The distances and differences that separated éthea and partially defined their belligerence were taken to be under the governance of a reality that, when known and appropriated, would make possible a proper ordering of the temporal differences. The hypothesis of eternal realities filled in, as it were, the distance and disconnection that pervaded the free-flowing life-organizations, none of which could dominate the others without violence and destruction.

The denial of mere and ungrounded difference by the idea of eternal connections has its many and sometimes terrible consequences as it prompts the imposition of goods, rights, and orders that now appear to us to be as ethnic as the expropriated regions, whether geographical or soulish, upon which the regions of ‘eternal realities’ did their work. Ethnic valence took a new turn. It involved the repeated application of the meaning of timeless realities to specific states by those especially privileged by their access to these realities. Meaning founded in the hypothesis of eternity and access to unconditioned beings struggled to overcome the distances among éthea and nómoi.

The present study suggests the possibility that our desire for universal laws and values and a changeless basis for them arises out of human’s clinging to security and familiarity in the face of displacing and threatening differences, in combination with inattention to the mere difference that separates beings, constitutes them, and conditions their lives together. Until the ecstasis of difference and its concealment are thinkable, our desire for universal commonality and either an overwhelming tendency to look for a noncontingent basis for the desire or an insistence on the repetition of some value unaccompanied by the question of ethics will rule like a nómos that divides and possesses even as it functions to unite and set free.

I doubt that the viability of Heidegger’s thought in the context of the question of ethics can be felt if our largely unconscious desire for definitive unity is not experienced as a question. This desire is apparent throughout Heidegger’s writing as he makes wholeness and unity the apparent goals of his retrieval of the question of being. But that question and the abysmal quality of disclosedness, its thoroughgoing unmanageableness and lack of quantified repeatability, turn the desire for unity toward an ecstasis that limits judgment and challenges the presumptions of this desire. Perhaps the exhilaration of the recoiling process, in excess of its trauma and depression, occasions the possibility for the turning of desire toward a “flourishing” that is not measured primarily by the identities of individuals or communities, one that feels no need of transcendental unity, the love of God, the sustenance of enduring being, but that releases people in a direction outside the limits of inspired imagination and spiritual conquest.

This direction, as we have seen, is both tenuously marked and largely erased in our heritage. It is a direction articulated in such distortions as we find in the concepts of the freedom of the will or of presence-dominated temporality. But it appears nonetheless to be one that can attract as well as repel in a process of thought like Heidegger’s when we stay within his discourse and share his passion, mourning, and exhilaration. What comes to language in it recoils in the countervalences of our culture and finds in the recoils an opening for thought that in its violation of the familiar is strangely telling, like an ecstasis during an ordinary day. In the ecstasis vis-à-vis our éthos, the tendency of the éthos to intensify itself without question, to make itself authoritative and encompassing as a nurturing defense: these tendencies of a healthy cultural environment to insist on itself are not eliminated but complemented by an excess that limits the éthos, marks its boundaries as an éthos, and lets something unspeakable and unmeasurable in the éthos emerge strangely and questionably on the horizon of its region.

When our inherited desire for universality and noncontingent grounding is experienced in its questionableness, and probably only then, the relation among the question of being, the question of ethics, and the terrible suffering that encroaches on the order of our lives can also be experienced. The possibility emerges that many types of suffering are produced not only by orders that preserve certain interests at the expense of others, but also by orders that are preoccupied with beings and to which the disclosedness of being is concealed. In such order we could be blind, by overlooking the inevitability of being’s concealment, to human being’s way of coming to pass and to the propriety of beings in the éthos; we could be blocked to our own temporality and truths as well as to that of most beings; we could form massive, uncritical structures of defense against mortal disclosiveness; and we could propagate suffering—radical nonflourishing—under the guise of cultural satisfactions. In the weakening of the insistent desires that are definitive of our éthos, ethnic familiarity becomes questionable, its limits echo at least slightly in its structure, and it is experienced as shaken in its unity. Its contingent difference may stand out momentarily, and questions deeply embedded in its heritage may take a tentative shape in the wake of the ecstatic shaking of ethnic confidence.

Such thoughts and questions as these—rather than, what ought I to do? who ought I to be?—emerge in the question of ethics, because the laws governing the thought and desire of our éthos are themselves in question and in their questionableness have opened the way for a different discourse. In this discourse the stakes appear to be too high not to maintain the questionableness of these laws in the recoils of éthos and ecstasis.