Construcciones

Haugeland’s account of existential death is closely bound up with his interpretation of what Heidegger referred to as Dasein. The standard view of this concept is cogently expressed by Taylor Carman: “The analytic of Dasein is an account of the existential structure of concrete human particulars, that is, individual persons” (2003, 42). Haugeland instead identifies dasein as a way of living that embodies an understanding of being. That way of living can only be lived by individual persons and thus only occurs so long as persons live it.

Moreover, their individuation within that overall way of life is constitutive of dasein’s way of being, which is “in each case mine.” Nevertheless, dasein is the way of living that its “cases” take up together, and not the individuals themselves (whom Heidegger refers to as “others”).

On the standard reading of dasein, existential death concerns how one comports oneself toward one’s own possible nonbeing as an individual person: what else could “death” refer to? For Haugeland, by contrast, death concerns the possible collapse of an understanding of being, in which it discloses entities in ways that show its own and their impossibility, that is, unintelligibility. Haugeland’s revisionist interpretation does agree with other accounts of existential death at many points. Existential death is not an actual event but a comportment toward the ever-impending possibility of dasein’s own impossibility. Moreover, dasein’s ontological character centers on this ownmost possibility. Its own being is at issue for it because in understanding itself as an entity that might not be, it thereby does not have to be what it “is.”

Dasein’s ordinary response is to flee from its own responsibility for that and

how it is, and for the disclosedness of entities made possible by its being-in-the-world. Each of these claims is differently inflected, of course, depending on which construal one gives to dasein and its possible “nonbeing.”

I will not try to unravel the textual basis for these competing interpretations, at least not directly. I begin my explication and defense of Haugeland’s reading by recognizing that standard readings have seemed not only correct, but obviously correct, to most readers of Division II, chapter 1, and related texts.

Haugeland’s reading depends primarily on its place within his careful, systematic attentiveness to key features of the overall argument in Being and Time: the referential-individuative apparatus by which dasein is “the entity that we ourselves are,” the methodological role of “formal indication,” how the discussion of death develops the immediately preceding discussion of truth, and how it thereby sets the problem of understanding dasein “as a whole.”

Perhaps above all, Haugeland’s account turns on how existential death matters not just to the existential analytic of dasein but as preparatory to the unwritten Division III of Being and Time. Haugeland’s reading nevertheless confronts the interpretive problem of why Heidegger would characterize a possible collapse of intelligibility in terms of death. In addition to Haugeland’s own justifications of his account, I offer three philosophical responses to this interpretive challenge.

My first response is that Haugeland’s account can accommodate the orthodox readings while developing a deeper understanding of their ontological significance. Traditional conceptions of existential death as an existential orientation to the prospect of human mortality turn out to be an important special case of Haugeland’s more general conception of existential death as the possible impossibility of an understanding of being. Everyday dasein has its own predominant understanding of its own being, as publicness.

This mode of understanding is an existentiale, an essential structural dimension of dasein’s way of being as constituted by existence and mineness.

Any case of dasein must press into possibilities that are only possible for it through a certain level of conformity to social norms. In those everyday comportments, dasein also confronts a constant inclination to go further and let the public understanding of its social roles govern its self-understanding as a

“for-the-sake-of-which.” Understanding the anonymous norms of “what one does” as that for the sake of which one comports oneself is nevertheless incompatible with facing up to the ever-present possibility of one’s own nonbeing. The possibility of the impossibility of continuing to press into

possibilities disconnects one’s own case from dasein’s everyday anonymous modes of comportment, whose understanding of being as publicness is unaffected by the perishing or demise of any particular case of dasein. For this public understanding, dying is an event that happens to others, and to oneself at some future time that one needn’t take into account now, except as anyone does, by writing a will, buying insurance, crossing the street carefully, exercising regularly, and so forth. Each of us cannot avoid dealing with this ever-present possibility, if only by thus fleeing from it. Haugeland could therefore recognize that the possibility of the impossibility of each of us pressing into possibilities, in each of our own cases, is the most proximate manifestation of a possibly impossible understanding of being. Traditional interpreters are right to recognize this specific case as especially important in Heidegger’s analysis, since it introduces the shift in self-understanding from publicness to resoluteness that individuates dasein. The importance of this specific case also helps explain why Heidegger would pose the more general issue by thinking through and beyond the everyday understanding of human mortality. The more general issue, of which grasping the existential import of individual mortality is only a special case, would nevertheless still be what matters for posing the general question of the meaning of being.

A second consideration is relevant to Haugeland’s own reasons for reading Heidegger as he does, and is also more germane to the connection I am drawing between his accounts of love and death. For Haugeland, Heidegger’s account of owned being-toward-death as a resolutely finite commitment to an understanding of being is a telling description of the third level of self-criticism that I discussed in the first section. Resolute being-toward-death goes beyond the empirically responsive revision and repair of their own comportments that many nonhuman animals can do, and also beyond a second-order critical reassessment of the very norms with respect to which such revision and repair are undertaken. Haugeland argues that adequately understanding even the most ordinary human intentional directedness depends on attributing to us the (existentiell) possibility of a third level of self-criticism, as authentic, “loving” intentionality. “Authentic” intentionality is a stereoscopic involvement in the world (DD, 270-3). It must sustain a dogged, resilient effort to overcome any obstacles to the intelligibility of its constitutive engagement with the world, alongside a resolute determination not to cover over its failures and even to give up that understanding of being altogether in the face of unsurpassable failure. Nor can this reading be seen as

an extraneous imposition on Heidegger’s text: anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s influence on Division II will recognize his deep kinship with Haugeland’s reading of Heidegger. Haugeland’s account highlights the centrality of Kierkegaard’s (2006) concern with the possibility of having to give up love as an existentially constitutive commitment in faithful responsiveness to its impossibility. In short, for Haugeland, the principle of charity requires reading Heidegger on existential death and owned resoluteness as coincident with an adequate understanding of intentionality as a form of existentially committed love.

My third and most important reason for accepting Haugeland’s reading of Heidegger on death is that it offers an important and revealing new way to understand the project of Being and Time. One of the more perplexing interpretive problems confronting readers is why Heidegger begins the transition to the unwritten Division III through an extensive contrast between his account of dasein’s originary temporality and Hegel’s conception of the relation between time and Spirit in Phenomenology of Spirit. Haugeland’s account of existential death and its place in his overall reading of Being and Time removes the perplexity and brings out new dimensions of Heidegger’s project by allowing us to see the entire book as a critical philosophical engagement with Hegel. Haugeland himself did not recognize this consequence of his interpretation. He occasionally acknowledged Hegel’s conception of Spirit as a precursor to Heidegger’s account of dasein, but only in an attenuated sense. Spirit stands alongside Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception, Husserl’s transcendental ego, Christian souls, Diltheyan historical communities, and other philosophical accounts of the human as alternatives to Heidegger’s conception of human beings as dasein. Haugeland’s account nevertheless brings out illuminating parallels between Heidegger and Hegel, which then confer greater significance to their telling divergences, including the contrast in their conceptions of time that heralds Division III.

Hegel and Heidegger each understand human ways of life as historically situated openings onto the world as a whole that allow entities to show themselves intelligibly. For Hegel, human life in its various historical forms constitutes Spirit’s self-recognition in otherness; for Heidegger, dasein is its disclosedness of the being of entities. Hegel and Heidegger also reject the traditional individuation of human bodies, minds, or lives in favor of the complex intertwining of an individuated collectivity: Spirit as “the I that is We and the We that is I,” and dasein as “the entity that we ourselves in each case

are.” Haugeland’s reading of Heidegger brings out an even deeper parallel in the two books’ subject matter and its manifestation. Both books are centrally concerned with the truthful disclosure of the intelligibility of what-is, as in and for itself for Hegel, or as the sense of being in general for Heidegger.⁶ Both Hegel and Heidegger explicitly reject epistemological conceptions of that intelligibility as derivative modes of comportment whose intelligibility depends on a more-encompassing conception (Spirit’s self-comprehension in otherness for Hegel; dasein’s being-in-the-world for Heidegger) that they cannot accommodate in their own terms.⁷ Moreover, this issue comes to the fore in each book through encounters with the impossibility of an entire mode of disclosure, which is how Haugeland interprets Heidegger on existential death. The Phenomenology of Spirit reconstructs world history as a logical succession of “forms of consciousness,” each taking itself as a truthful uncovering of its characteristic object. In each successive formation, the

“experience” of living in terms of its constitutive orientation discovers its intended object(s) as recalcitrant to its understanding of, and comportment toward, that object: the object in itself turns out to be radically opposed to its being for consciousness.

Recognizing this thematic parallel makes Hegel a telling precedent for Haugeland’s Heidegger to talk about the collapse of an entire understanding of the intelligibility of entities in terms of death. This motif is omnipresent in Phenomenology of Spirit. Consider the following version in the preface:

The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. (Hegel 1977, 19)

The book’s two most pivotal junctures involve literal confrontations with death. Spirit recognizes itself in a radically new way, first in “Mastery and Servitude” through the “absolute fear” of death in which consciousness

“trembles in every fibre of its being” and thereby discovers “the absolute melting-away of everything stable [as] the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness” (Hegel 1977, 117). This absolute fear is then collectively recapitulated in “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” whereby the previous determinations of alienated social life “vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom,” whose “sole work and deed is death … the coldest and meanest of deaths with no more significance than cutting off a head of

cabbage” (362, 360). The significance Hegel accords to fear of death is implicitly challenged by Heidegger in his juxtaposition of fear and angst as disclosive moods—angst is the philosophically significant attunement to death.

Neither Hegel’s nor Heidegger’s invocation of death as synecdoche for a collapse of intelligibility is merely figurative. Both emphasize that inquiry and understanding involve vulnerability and risk, such that one’s (way of) life is at issue and at stake in comporting oneself understandingly toward the world.⁸ Hegel takes up this point most explicitly in the introduction’s scathing criticism of the quest for epistemic security as a “fear of error [that] reveals itself as fear of the truth” (1977, 47), but the point is also central to Being and Time: in dasein’s understanding of being, its own being is always at issue.

Phenomenology of Spirit culminates in the striking image of the Golgotha of Spirit, the comprehension of Spirit’s unfolding in time and history as the path to its crucifixion. Hegel argues that this self-understanding (as “being-towards-death” in a rather different sense!) is the achievement of Absolute Knowing, the comprehension and recapitulation of all prior formations of consciousness as its own partial appearances. From this standpoint, the collapse of each prior formation manifests its finitude, a self-undermining dependence on what eludes its own understanding. The completion of modern forms of experience, by contrast, permits recollection and recapitulation of Spirit’s path to that self-recognition as a self-completing, infinite whole.

We can now recognize that each book culminates in reflecting on the temporality and historicity of being, and at that point, Heidegger for the first time explicitly engages and criticizes Hegel, specifically the concluding passages of the Phenomenology on Spirit as “emptying out into Time”

(Heidegger 1962, sec. 82; Hegel 1977, 492). For Heidegger, this critical response to Hegel’s views on time sets the stage for posing the question of the meaning of being in general, which was the task assigned to the unwritten Division III. These parallels between the two projects, in light of Haugeland’s interpretation of existential death, not only show why the critical juxtaposition to Hegel sets the stage for properly posing the central question for Being and Time. Recognizing the centrality of Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel’s conception of Spirit’s “infinitude” also puts in a new light the undisputed importance for Heidegger of Kant’s conception of the finitude of human understanding, now directly contrasted to Hegel on Spirit’s self-comprehension as a self-completing, infinite whole.⁹

Read and extended in this way, Haugeland’s account also provides new

insight into the troubling question of the political significance of Being and Time. For Hegel, prior formations of consciousness are merely finite modes of understanding. Each formation overcomes its recurrent external dependence by giving way to a new formation, until, in Hegel’s concluding adaptation of Schiller, “from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for [Spirit] its own infinitude” (1977, 493). Haugeland’s Heidegger then responds to Hegel with a call for an owned, resolute openness to the ineliminable finitude of any understanding of being. As a challenge to Hegel, that commitment would specifically require us to face up to the possibility of the impossibility of a modern, rationalized “ethical mode of life” (Sittlichkeit). The formidable abstractions of Hegel’s Phenomenology were conceived as a necessarily philosophical response to the French Revolution.¹⁰ For Hegel, the Revolution and its failure made possible a new and adequately nonfinite comprehension of the modern world. This new understanding is the culmination of Spirit’s

“externalizing self-sacrifice that displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening” (1977, 492). Being and Time then looks to be a comparably formidable and necessarily ontological response to subsequent events. The senseless slaughter of the First World War and what seemed to Heidegger to be the humiliation and political collapse of modern Germany put Hegel’s understanding of modernity in serious question. We know all too well what path Heidegger followed from there. The disastrous and repugnant outcome of Heidegger’s existentiell interpretation of his historical situation should nevertheless not deter us from taking seriously his ontological-existential reading of what was at stake in his confrontation with Hegel. In this reading, Being and Time neither suggests nor rationalizes Heidegger’s political commitments or his later deceptions and apologetics. The book does, however, provide a clearer indication of what Heidegger later thought was at stake in his political forays. Moreover, we can utterly repudiate his political commitments and still think that he was right about the finitude of any understanding of being, including the understanding that Hegel saw embedded in modern ways of life. In any case, Haugeland’s interpretation of existential death takes us much further toward adequately understanding the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s challenge to Hegel on Spirit’s infinitude.