Becoming Who We Already Are

[DraftPlease do not cite or circulate, though I welcome your comments!]

Becoming Who We Already Are: Heidegger on Repetition

Nate Zuckerman, University of Puget Sound

May 17, 2013Introduction

Become who you are is the categorical imperative of existentialism. Just like Kants version, it tells us the shape or form that our willing must take if we are to count as willing at all. You must be making the movement of faith, or else you despair at not being a self; you must get behind your leading drive and will the eternal recurrence of the same, or else you are just a weak and subordinate part of some other will to power; you must anticipate death resolutely, or else you have fallen into being an inauthentic anyone. But unlike Kants imperative, which demands that our willing have a kind of logical form characteristic of practical reason, the existentialist imperative demands that our willing have a kind of temporal form that characterizes that willing as a distinctively human activity. That is to say, the existentialist imperative demands that our willing unfold in time in a certain way, if it is to count as human willing at allhence the claim that we can be human only by becoming human.

But what kind of activity is becoming human supposed to be, and how exactly is it meant to unfold in time? Today Im going to be focusing on Heideggers answer to this question, as it is inspired by Kierkegaard. Now, Kierkegaard talks about the specific activity of becoming Christian through the movement of faith, whereas Heidegger speaks more generically about becoming who we are as Dasein by resolutely anticipating the possibility of death. But Heidegger follows right in Kierkegaards footsteps (however much he hides, denies or plays this down in the footnotes to Being and Time) by describing the temporal form of these activities in terms of the concept of repetitionand Heideggers descriptions live right up to Kierkegaards, in their air of paradox and their defiance of easy sense.

Kierkegaard's famous quote from Repetition the book says that[r]epetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition, properly so called, is recollected forwards. [B]ut it takes courage to will repetition. [H]e who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is.

Will yourself such that you repeat yourself, would be his formulation of the existentialist imperative. Heideggers formulation says that you must repeat yourself by coming towards yourself in a future that is not later than the past, in such a way that you come back to yourself in a past that is not earlier than the present. In a slogan, their shared imperative is to become who you already are. But how could we have to become something if were that thing already? How could we already be something that we are not yet?

Im going to argue that there is a familiar activity that we do every day, which makes sense in terms of this non-sequential form of time: the distinctively human activity of commitment. That probably sounds off, at firstusually, we think of human life and action in terms of a sequence of beginning, middle and end: First, I go to school, then I get a job, then I raise a family, and so on until my life is over. And we usually treat the idea of a commitment as referring to a mental state or an attitude thats true of someone in any given instant: If youre committed to being a student, for example, we think this is because you currently want to get certain things out of your academic life, or because you happen to value them or have a disposition to pursue them in certain circumstances.But Heideggers view, as I read it, suggests that commitments are not just states or traits that are true of us in any given instant. Instead, he says we should understand commitments as activities, things that we are doing in timein fact, he thinks theyre the basic thing that were responsible for doing if we want to go on living out meaningful human lives. And he argues that commitments unfold in time non-sequentially because we have to act in ways that engage with the past, the present and the future of our own commitments all at once. So he says, for example, that the structure of human life does not fill up a track or stretch of lifeone which is somehow occurrentwith the phases of its momentary actualities ; and that it does not first build itself up through and out of the adjoining of instants; rather, these originate in the already stretched temporality of a repetition that is futurally and already [der zuknftig gewesenden Wiederholung].

So what we want to understand is this claim that the time of human life involves a kind of repetition of a commitment that is at every moment stretched out in the whole of its past, through its present and into its future. And to do that, we have to take a few minutes to understand where Heidegger gets this idea in the first place, which on my understanding is Aristotles metaphysics of animal life. So Ill start there, by explaining Aristotles suggestion that the bodily movements of animals are not just sequentially-ordered actions, but they can also be seen as participating in an underlying and non-sequential form of activity that has something like the temporal structure that Kierkegaard and Heidegger call repetition. Then well look at how Heidegger puts an existentialist twist on this idea by focusing on the way that our lives as human animals are vulnerable to a kind of practical breakdown that he calls existential anxiety and death. This threat of breakdown is what makes it a constant, open question for us (1) whether we can make sense of and care about who we claim to be here and now, through the way we act in the world, as well as (2) our claim to understand what it means to go on being that person in the future, along with (3) our claim to have been that person living out that human way of life, all along in the past. So, the non-sequential feature of human life, it will turn out, is our having to maintain a commitment to those claims that we are always staking in each new thing that we do, claims that are constantly threatened by the possibility of breaking down, failing us, and being pulled out from beneath our feet. Striving to maintain a commitment to those claims is, I will argue, what Heidegger means by repetition.

Okay, so thats a preview of where were going to go; now lets start filling in the details by getting more of the background in view: Im going to talk about the explanatory role that the concept of repetition is meant to play in Heideggers view, by tracing it back to the kind of explanation that Aristotle gives when he appeals to an animals nature.Aristotle on Kinetic and Infinite Activities

Lets go back to the Kantian imperative for just another minute: This imperative suggests that we can explain why our bodily movements are actions for which we are morally responsible, by understanding those movements as exercises of our capacity for autonomous practical reason. The existentialist imperative suggests a similar explanationbut it seeks to explain why our bodily movements are the living out of some human identity and way of life that can possibly be meaningful and matter to us; and I am suggesting that the source of the explanation here is our capacity for commitment, through which we are responsible for the very possibility of any such meaningfulness and mattering at all. Now, both of these explanations are of the same kind: We want to know what lets some set of phenomena P count as, or make sense as, or simply be, a manifestation of some other kind of phenomenon, Q. To answer this question, we show that P exhibits a kind of order or pattern or form that is characteristic of Q, insofar as P is what you get when you exercise the capacity for Q. So for instance, bodily movements are actions insofar as those movements exhibit the logical order of reasoning from a priori practical principles, which is the result of exercising our capacity for practical reason itself. Or again, bodily actions are the living out of a meaningful way of human life insofar as those movements exhibit the temporal order of repetition, which is the result of exercising our capacity for existential commitment.

Now, the provenance for this type of explanation lies in Aristotles metaphysics of animal life. Aristotle thinks that in order to explain why some set of bodily movements or other physical phenomena is the activity of some animals life, we have to appeal to its nature. Ill explain this with an examplethink about the lion, for a second: It typically weighs about 400 pounds, its four feet tall, it has a tawny coat and a tail. Now, it has these properties and falls under these predicates, not by aiming to be or to do something, but simply, as Heidegger puts it, when we consider it in terms of the way it looks, the state in which it happens to be at a given instant. But these features arent enough to define it as the animal it is, because something else could happen to fall under the same descriptions while being a distinct kind of animal (biologists call that a case of cryptic species). Aristotles view is that what makes something a lion is its nature, a set of capacities for acting in certain ways that characterize the form of life of a lion. This nature makes sense of the animals bodily movements and other physical features by giving us the reason why those phenomena take place and hang together in the particular order or pattern or form that they do. With respect to the animals bodily movements in particular, the concept of a nature provides a kind of imperative according to which those movements must unfold in time, if they are to be the activity of that kind of animal living out its specific form of life. So the thought here would be that only lions perceive, move around, feed and make babies in the specific set of ways that they do, exercising their natural capacities for the sake of marking out a territory, raising and protecting their pride, and so on, in a uniquely leonine fashion.

But heres the most important and interesting point: Aristotle doesnt think that being a lion is simply the sum of those kinds of activities, either. Its one thing to do what lions do, but another thing to be a lioneven if these two kinds of activities coincide in the same bodily movements. So, to explain this, Ill introduce a distinction: Lets call doing what lions do a kinetic activity, and lets call being a lion an infinite activity. Now, the two terms are meant to pick out different kinds of practical and temporal structures (forms or patterns) that activities can have: So, lets start with kinetic activities. Kinetic activities are structured in such a way that they come into being from a kind of lack or incompleteness. Maybe our lion starts hunting because it needs food. It will maintain this kinetic activity and continue to be hunting as long as it does whatever will progress the activity further toward the end of getting food. When it finds and eats its victim and attains the activitys end, then the activity ceases to be. That episode of hunting is complete, its over, and no longer taking place.

But heres the thing: If you cease to do a particular thing that lions do, or in my terms, attain the end of some kinetic activity, that doesnt mean that you have ceased or completed the infinite activity of being a lion. The reason is because, in order to go on being the living creature that it is, the lion not only has to do all those kinetic things in some sequential order, it also has to do this for the sake of maintaining its nature, which for Aristotle means maintaining its bodys capacity to do all those kinetic things that characterize it as the animal it is. And the reason why it has to act for the sake of maintaining those natural capacities is because they face a constant possibility of biological breakdown, in deficiency, degeneration and death. So, although the various things that an animal accidentally happens to be doing are always changing and different, they are all done in the name of doing something that is non-accidental, unchanging, ongoing and sustained, namely, going on being able to do what lions do. In this sense, the end of being a lion isnt a kind of state or status that is to be attained; its better thought of as a capacity that is to be maintained. As Aristotle puts it, the expression to be acted upon has more than one meaning; it may mean either (a) the extinction of one of two contraries by the other [thats a kinetic change from one state to another], or (b) the maintenance of what is capable by the agency of what is active and already like what is acted upon [that is the ongoing, sustained, infinite activity]. And so, for any given thing that an animal is doing, its current bodily movements are going to mean something different and be something different, depending on whether we take them to manifest a kinetic activity or an infinite activity.

Heres another way of explaining why that is: The actions that make up a kinetic activity are parts; theyre ordered in a purposive sequence, from beginning to end. Infinite activities, in contrast, are not made up of parts; instead, we can say, theyre made up of instances. And unlike parts, instances dont fill up or exhaust the thing that they are instances of, so their practical and temporal relation to that thing has to be different. And furthermore, Aristotles pointat least as Heidegger interprets itis that the only way we can understand any kinetic activity as the kinetic activity of a lion is by situating it in a broader pattern and a deeper context, by seeing it as an instance of an underlying infinite activity, the activity of the lions going on being able to be the lion that it isor in other words, the lions becoming what it is.Heideggers Conception of Human Existence as an Infinite ActivityOkay, now lets look at how Heidegger develops this idea in the existential context of human life, in particular: Heidegger is going to pick up on Aristotles distinction between kinetic and infinite activities, and he will argue that our actions in the world are not simply parts of some broader kinetic activity, theyre also instances of a deeper, infinite activity that we are always engaged in non-accidentally, insofar as were living out some possible human way of life or other. And the thing we want to understand here is, what is the nature and structure of this infinite activity that Heidegger has in mind in the human case, and why does the threat of existential death and anxiety make this activity unfold in a different way than it does in the case of non-human animals? That is what Im going to explain in terms of the idea of commitment and Heideggers concept of repetition.Just to pause and motivate this approach to reading Heidegger for one more moment: The reason I think this is important is because even though there are readers who pick up on Kierkegaards and Heideggers allusions to Aristotelian natural movements, these readers tend to focus on the kinetic form of movement, to the exclusion of this more basic and underlying form of movement that I am calling infinite activity and that I think needs to be in view in order to make proper sense of these existentialists philosophies of human being. Now, to be fair, this is because Kierkegaard, for his part, writes explicitly about the concept of kinesis. But then I think both Kierkegaard and his readers didnt know what they were missing! So, just to give two quick examples of this focus on kinesis: Claire Carlisle writes that

Aristotles theories and categories, which were developed above all in order to account for kinesis, provided Kierkegaard with a conceptual framework that could be adapted to his own analysis of religious becoming. [Freedom] makes the transition from potentiality to actuality a real event, a genuine movement, a qualitative change. Kierkegaards understanding of human freedom draws on this concept of kinesis as expressing an actualizing power, a kind of capability of becoming. This is illustrated very concisely by his remark, recorded in his journal, that freedom means to be capable.

This may be true of what Kierkegaard thinks of the movement from one sphere of existence to anotherthat would indeed be a qualitative change from A to B. But even if Kierkegaard uses the concept of kinesis to think about that form of movement, there is still room to read his use of becoming in the phrase becoming a Christian as a reference to a being capable that is a movement but not a change from A to B, not an alteration from potentiality to actuality, but instead, an activity that maintains the capability of what is capable by manifesting and sustaining someones freedom against the threat of it degenerating or dying off or lapsing into a mere pretense of itself. I think a similar confusion or coarseness of language shows up in John D. Caputos discussion of Derrida and Heidegger on Aristotles notions of movement and time: Caputo says that [Derrida] points out, quite rightly, that in Aristotles conception of time as the measure of motion, motion is peculiarly resistant to the binary presence/absence schema of metaphysics. Motion is the act of a being in potency while it is still in potencywhich is all right so far, as long as he means the maintenance of a capacity through the exercise of that capacitybut then he goes on to say that [t]he being in motion neither is (what it is in motion toward) nor is not (what it was at the point of departure of the motion), and again, the very idea of departing from something seems fixed on the case of motion from A to B instead of the motion that actively maintains somethings being what it is. I want to see if I can find room for the notion of infinite activity, and not just kinesis, in Heideggers account of repetition as the temporal form of human life. (And I am hoping you might have suggestions for how we could do the same in the context of Kierkegaards philosophy!)***So, Heideggers view is a lot like Aristotles, except he replaces the term nature with a term of his own: ability-to-be (Seinknnen)and the new term is meant to introduce a new philosophical meaning. Both of these terms, ability-to-be and nature, are terms for somethings capacity to actively go on being whatever it is. But when we act for the sake of maintaining our ability-to-be, it turns out there is a lot more at stake than when a non-human animal acts for the sake of maintaining its nature, because were responsible for facing the threat of deficiency, degeneration and death in a uniquely fraught way.Heidegger indicates this in one of the first and most basic things he says in Being and Time about what it means to be human. He writes that human existence is as an understanding ability-to-be for which, in its being, this being itself is an issue. This is claiming two important things: First, the central capacity that makes our lives to be human lives is a capacity to understand; and second, in order to have this capacity, exercise it and maintain our grip on it, we have to have that capacity itself be an issue for us. So let me say a bit more about each of these two points:

First, for Heidegger, understanding is not a purely cognitive or mental affair; its more a kind of competence, or a kind of practical skill, something we know how to do. And what we know how to do is to make sense of our actions, our identities and our world in terms of distinctions that we draw between ways in which those things can be, and ways they cannot possibly be. In other words, understanding yourself as human primarily means knowing how to be human in some definite way. Lets think about one of those ways: To be a student or a teacher, you have to understand yourself as one, which means you have to know what youre permitted to do in the name of that role, what youre forbidden to do, authorized and obligated to do, and so on, so that you can act in ways that make sense and matter to you as the actions of a student or teacher. In other words, you know how to act in order to exhibit the characteristic pattern of what a student or teacher does, and to the extent that you care about not failing to do this, you find yourself motivated by reasons for doing certain thingsgoing to class, meeting in office hours, turning things in on timeas opposed to doing other things that would be impossible or otherwise unacceptable, ruled out for you, given your identity, role, or way of life. And so, to go on being a student or teacher is, then, to be responsible for staying on the right side of this distinction you grasp between what is possible and what is ruled out for you. If you miss a class, you make up for it or take a penalty; if you make a claim and are challenged, you defend it or else you revise it or give it up.But theres a deeper facet to this point about understanding, which is brought out in the second point, that our ability to understand ourselves is essentially an issue for us: Your ability to be a student or teacher is not just an issue for you in the sense that you care about being a good student or teacher. More fundamentally, what Heidegger claims is an issue for you is whether this is a possible way to be human, at all, whether it is a way for you to go on doing things that make sense and matter to you, and a legitimate and meaningful role you can play in the social, historical and cultural context in which you find yourself. And this brings us to one of the most central existential claims in Being and Time, which is that the ways that we make sense of and care about our selves, our lives and our world are vulnerable to breaking down for reasons beyond our control. In both personal and social ways, we can find ourselves fallen out of love in a relationship, or alienated from our work; we can fail to save a scientific theory from recalcitrant data that it cant explain; we can stop feeling compelled by the authority claimed by our political projects, institutions and leaders; we can fail to reach a consensus on what it takes to count as a work of art in a certain genre; and we can find ourselves in the wake of some major trauma or disaster, where were at a loss about what it could be anymore to go on as the human agents we once took ourselves to be. These are all examples of a kind of practical breakdown in our ability-to-be, which Heidegger calls death. , In the existential condition of death, our lives come out of joint and we dont know how to go onindeed, what would even count as going on.For Heidegger, the possibility of death is the issue on which our human life depends. But its important to be clear: Death is not the end of biological life; its the end of our ability-to-be, our understanding of what it means to live out some possible human way of life. And Heideggers term for our basic attunement to this possibility of breakdown is anxiety. On his view, our anxious attunement to the threat of death is what lets us be responsible, not just for going on embodying our ways of being human well, but more deeply, for the very possibility of there being any practical orientation for us to take up, in the first place, any kind of worldly context in which our actions and identities could make sense and matter to us, at all. In this sense, Heidegger thinks of being human as a kind of fragile task that we have to take up for ourselves, the task of keeping our grip on the distinction between what is possible and impossible for us, given who we understand ourselves to be, and working to find ourselves on the right side of the divide.Lets think about an example to bring this to life: Think about Socrates in the Apology: His worry is that there is no Athenian who truly understands what it means to live a virtuous life. They borrow their so-called understanding of virtue from orators, or sophists, or friends in the marketplacebut they cant explain to Socrates why or how the decisions they make are meant to be embodiments of wisdom or justice or courage (whether that be Euthyphro prosecuting his father in the name of justice, or the Athenian assembly ousting tyrants in the name of democracy, for example). Socrates thinks that Athenian life is face-to-face with the risk of its own existential death, because he thinks his society has failed to responsibly confront his worries about the possibility that their claims to be wise, just and courageous Athenians are empty, that in a sense the Athenians dont really know what it is they are doing and who they are claiming to be. This is a kind of practical disorientation and disruption, because the practical concepts that are meant to structure their life have lost their grip on the sense, the meaning, that once animated them, so that the Atheniansat least those who are struck dumb by Socratess questioningcan no longer find themselves at home with those concepts, cant go on wielding them competently by acting in ways that manifest the Athenian form of life that theyre supposed to make possible.

So, Socrates is challenging the Athenians to face what he takes to be a looming threat of existential death, by urging them to take responsibility for their own answers to the question, what does any of thisthese things that were doing in the name of virtuehave to do with being virtuous? Heideggers term for committing yourself to being responsible for those kinds of claims you stake about the meaning of your actions and your life, is authenticity (or ownedness, from the root of the German term, Eigentlichkeit). And so theres a contrasting case in which one is deficient in the way one exercises and upholds that commitment and responsibility, instead passing it off to some independent or anonymous authority in a way that takes for granted that the threat of death has already been taken care of and the meaning of ones actions and identity simply given or guaranteed to oneself. In this way, authentic or owned human life involves not a biological but an existential resistance to the tendency for our basic human capacitiesthe capacity for existential responsibility and commitmentto slacken and degenerate into this deficient, disowned, or inauthentic (uneigentlich) form.

So then, here is the take-home point about the difference between Heideggers view and Aristotles: Unlike other animals, I have to go on becoming who I already am by committing myself to some stance on what it is, what it can be, and what it already has been for my kinetic, purposive activities in the world to manifest my infinite activity of being human in some possible way. Heidegger calls this kind of owned commitment resoluteness. To be who we are resolutely is a task unique to human life, because no other animal faces this existential question or issue about the very possibility and intelligibility of its own form of life. For non-human animals, the possibility is simply given to them by their natural endowment and constitution, and the question is only how well they embody it. For us, however, there is no antecedent guarantee that we are, have already been and can continue to go on being who we understand ourselves to be; instead, were constantly responsible for becoming who we already are, by confronting the possible deficiency, degeneration and death, not of our vital functions, but of our capacity to find that things make sense and matter to us in some human way, in terms of some possible way of living out a human life.The Repetitive Structure of Resoluteness

So now that we have a sense of how Heideggers existentialism develops out of Aristotles view of animal life and nature, we can finish up by turning to the temporal structure of this resolute way of being human. Heres the main passage of text that we want to understand: Heidegger writes,

The owned [eigentliche] coming-toward-oneself of anticipatory resoluteness is at once a coming back to the ownmost [eigenste] self that is thrown into its individualization. This ecstasis makes it possible for human existence to be able to take over resolutely the entity that it already is. In anticipating, human existence pre-collects [holt vor] itself again in its ownmost ability-to-be. We call owned alreadiness repetition.

Now, usually we think of repeating something as kind of rotely doing the exact same thing you did before. But Heideggers asking us to stop and think about this more closely: When a comic repeats a stand-up routine, does she always tell the jokes in exactly the same way to different audiences? When you repeat a philosophy class, do the students and teachers always have the exact same discussions? If youre married and you renew your vows with your spouse, will the general things that youre promising to do play out in exactly the same way as they did before, at this current stage of your married life? Nothe idea is that sometimes you have to do different things in order to go on doing the same thing. And Heidegger thinks human life is like this most dramatically, because when we live out our lives in the world, were trying to go on being who we understand ourselves to be, and repeat our commitment to our lives and identities in that sense, but we have to negotiate this with others in a public, social and historical world, in ever-changing circumstances; and these negotiations will revise, specify and set future precedents for the very meaning of the claims that we stake about what we are doing, what it is that we have done, and what it would be to go on doing that kind of thing in the name of whoever it is that we put ourselves forth as being. And I think Heidegger uses the extreme example of existential death, the total breakdown of any identity or way of life, just to bring out most sharply that it is not always obvious, or even possible to know, which different things we could do in order to go on doing the same thing and being the same person. This dramatic point, though, still applies to the most mundane decisions we make every daythose too are ways that we continue to stake, revise, reinterpret, adapt and sometimes give up claims that we make about who we are and what it is that were doing.

So with that in mind, lets finish up by looking a just a couple of other ways Heidegger tries to elucidate the structure of human life in terms of the idea of repetition: He says, The temporality of resoluteness has, with respect to its present, the character of an instant [des Augenblicks]. This owned presenting of the situation does not have command, but rather is maintained in the future that has been already [in der gewesenden Zukunft]. Existing in the instant [Die augenblickliche Existenz] temporalizes itself as a fateful, whole stretchedness in the sense of the owned, historical continuity [Stndigkeit] of the self. This means: To make sense of myself as doing what I claim to be doing and being who I claim to be doing now, I have to do so in a way that keeps the whole of my life in joint, by maintaining a continuous stance on what it means to be, to go on being, and to have been this human beingeven if it is not always obvious what it takes to do this successfully and how to go on doing this successfully in the ever-new practical circumstances I find myself in. Since death and anxiety are always possible and theres no time at which I am definitively finished becoming who I already am, my commitment to being responsible for my very ability to be a student, a teacher, an Athenian, a spousethis commitment has to come toward itself by anticipating what it could mean for the infinite activity of commitment to go on, and it has to do that in such a way that I come back to myself by taking over resolutely my claim to have already been committed to being this person all along. Thus Heidegger says, [A]nxiety brings one back to ones thrownness as something possible and repeatable [als mgliche wiederholbare]. And in this way it also reveals the possibility of an owned ability-to-be, which, in repeating, must come back to its thrown there [auf das geworfene Da] as something futural [als zuknftiges]. And, to look at just one more pair of passages, [I]t is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps of that which can be repeated, so that [t]he repetition of the possible is neither a bringing back of what is past [Vergangenen] nor a readherence [Zurckbinden] of the present to what has been superceded [berholte]. Repetition does not abandon itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress. In the instant, owned existence is indifferent to both these alternatives. This, again, is because the end of the repetitive activity of becoming who we already are is not to perform the exact same kinetic activities we once did, nor is it to transform our infinite activity into a completely different form, but rather, the aim is to go on changing (in our kinetic activities) in such a way that we go on remaining the same (in our infinite activity of commitment to the claims we stake about the meaning of our actions, lives and identities). Its in this way that the existential past, present and future of my human life are not progressive, sequential stages of a kinetic activity, but instead have to be understood as instantiations of an infinite activity which is always at stake and an issue for me as a whole, always my own responsibility to get and keep in the grip of my understanding.And so the old existentialist saw, which says that there is no human nature and that we are free to choose who to be in each moment, is false and too hastyfor it is precisely our nature as entities who are capable of commitment which first explains why anything I do is part of a human life and identity, at all. To exercise our capacity for commitment is to become who we already are by willing in accordance with the existentialist imperative, repeating those claims we stake about who we are, what we are up to, how it makes sense, and how it matters. Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Hong and Hong ed., trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1983), 172-173.

See ibid., 401.

Ibid., 426.

Ibid., 443. (translation modified)

Being and Time, 88-89; cf. 200-201, 412-413.

See, for instance, his argument for classifying animals functionally, in Parts of Animals I.1, 640b30-641a18 and I.5, 645b1-28, as well as his description of the capacities of the soul in terms of their characteristic acts, in On the Soul II-III..

All other things that we state, [e.g., about a human being,] such as that he is white, that he runs, and so on, are irrelevant to the definition [of what it is for him to be a man]. Categories 5, 2b34-37.

Aristotle discusses such a distinction in Metaphysics IX.6, 1048b18-34.

See Metaphysics XI.9, 1066a20.

See On the Soul, II.2, 412b18-413a4: Suppose that the eye were an animalsight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in nameit is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or of a painted figure. [T]he soul is activity in the sense corresponding to the power of sight ; the body corresponds to what exists in capacity; as the pupil plus the power of sight constitutes the eye, so the soul plus the body constitutes the animal.

On the Soul II.5, 417b2-5. (See also Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1103a34-1103b5.)

A finite end [in my terms: an end of a kinetic activity] explains an action as a part of itself. When I am doing A because I want to do B, then I think that, in doing A, I am doing part of doing B. An infinite end [the end of what I call an infinite activity] explains an action as a manifestation of itself. When I am doing A because it is healthy, then I think that, in doing A, I am doing what someone does who is healthy. I think of myself as exemplifying a healthy man. When I am doing A because such a man does A, my action manifests my being such a man. This explains the infinity of infinite ends. A whole is exhausted by its parts; what is manifested is not exhausted by its manifestations. Sebastian Rdl, Three Forms of Practical Reasoning, in Bluhm, Nimtz, eds., Selected Papers Contributed to the Sections of GAP 5 (Paderborn: Mentis, 2004), 751.

Kierkegaards Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 9, 16.

Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 198-199.


In understanding, as an existentiale [i.e., a structural feature of human being], that which we have such competence over is not a what, but being as existing. The way of being of human existence as ability-to-be lies existentially in understanding. Ibid., 183. In the projecting of the understanding, entities are disclosed in their possibility. The character of the possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the way of being of the entity that is understood. Ibid., 192. (translations modified)

[Death] is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than human existences being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-human [Nicht-mehr-dasein-knnens]. Ibid., 294. (translation modified)

As the previous citation suggests, Heidegger seems to conceive of death as a breakdown, not just in any particular human way of life, but in any and all human ways of life. Thus, he writes that death is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards, anything, of every way of existing. Ibid., 307. (my emphasis) Whether it is interpretively correctand indeed what it would even meanto understand death in this way is a point of debate among Heideggers readers. But for the purposes of my discussion here, I am going to focus on the more local sense of death as a breakdown in a particular way of being human, because it better illustrates the ultimate point about repetition I am trying to draw out of his text, and I dont think anything important in that discussion turns upon which side of the death debate one comes down on.

That which anxiety is anxious about is being-in-the-world itself. Ibid., 232.

In anxiety one feels uncanny [unheimlich]. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which human existence finds itself amidst in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the nothing and nowhere. But here uncanniness also means not-being-at-home [das Nicht-zuhause-sein]. [T]he everyday publicness of the anyone brings tranquillized self-assurancebeing-at-home, with all its obviousnessinto the average everydayness of human existence. On the other hand, as human existence falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the world. Everyday familiarity collapses. Ibid., 233. (translation modified)

The self of everyday human existence is the anyone-self [das Man-selbst], which we distinguish from the owned selfthat is, from the self which has been grasped ownedly [eigens ergriffenen]. [T]he anyone itself prescribes that way of interpreting the world and being-in-the-world which lies closest. Usually, factical human existence is in the with-world, which is discovered in an average way. Usually, it is not I, in the sense of my own self, that am, but rather the others, whose way is that of the anyone. Ibid., 167. (translation modified)

And as a side note: I think Heidegger deliberately picks up on the biological sense of degeneration and deficiency, in the term he uses for our tendency toward disowning responsibility for our lives, Verfallen, because that word in German also connotes degeneration, decay, deterioration and decline. He writes that The phenomena identified as temptation, tranquillization, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement) characterize the specific mode of being of falling. We call this movedness [Bewegtheit] of human existence in its own being [eigenen Sein] collapsing away [den Absturz]. Human existence collapses from itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nothingness of disowned everydayness. But public interpretation keeps this collapse concealed from it, so much so that it gets interpreted as ascending and living concretely.

The mode of movement of collapsing away in and into the groundlessness of disowned being in the anyone constantly drags the understanding away [reit los] from the projection of authentic possibilities and drags it down [or plunges it downreit hinein] into the tranquillized pretense [Vermeintlichkeit] of having or doing it all [alles zu besitzen bzw. zu erreichen]. This constant dragging away from (and yet always a pretense of) authenticity, along with the dragging [or plunging] down into the anyone, characterizes the motion of falling as turbulence. Ibid., 223. (translation modified)

[B]ecause being-responsible [Das Schuldigsein] belongs to the being of human existence, it must be conceived as an ability-to-be-responsible [Schuldigseinknnen]. Resoluteness projects itself upon this ability-to-bethat is to say, it understands itself in it. This understanding maintains itself, therefore, in an originary possibility of human existence. It maintains itself in it ownedly if the resoluteness, which it tends to be, is in an originary way [urpsrnglich ist]. Ibid., 353-354. (translation modified)

Macquarrie and Robinson, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 388. (translation modified)



Ibid., 437.

Ibid., 437-438. (translation modified)

PAGE 1

Documents

Becoming Who We Already Are