Abstract
In Heidegger’s thought, the question of being turns on the ontological difference, in that being cannot be reduced to positive states of entities or to objective conditions independent of human involvement. Being is not a matter of objects but of meaning, of how the world matters to Dasein; the meaningfulness of being is essentially related to Dasein’s finitude, to the encounter with negative conditions (e.g., absence, malfunction, loss, and death), such that we care about the world because of finite limits. The question of being for Heidegger (in all periods of his thought, I would argue) is always implicated with human existence and its experience of finitude—and yet being is never reducible to human beings.
I want to explore the being-question from the vantage point of selfhood as a focal term for human existence. The emphasis will be on the Dasein-analysis in Being and Time and Heidegger’s critique of the modern subject-object distinction. I hope to add some depth to this discussion by taking up the strange history of the word “subject” and how this history bears on the question of being. I will show that the notion of the subject is far from simply a matter of human psychology or mentality because it figures in how philosophy has come to understand the world as well. I close with a brief examination of how this analysis helps illuminate Heidegger’s concept of authenticity in Being and Time, with the hope of supplementing Charles Guignon’s important contributions to this topic.
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- 1.
I am using standard pagination of the German text indicated marginally in translations and in GA 2.
- 2.
That the world matters to Dasein is all that is meant by the notions of “mineness” and “for the sake of itself,” which therefore do not connote anything egoistic, but simply a challenge to the priority of impersonal (third person) models of being (Heidegger SZ, 41–43).
- 3.
The subject-object split in modern thought is well indicated in the problem of skepticism, particularly in terms of radical doubt about the existence of the external world. In section 43 of Being and Time, Heidegger takes up the problem of skepticism, particularly in terms of the presumed division of self and world into subject and object, an internal conscious mind and things external to the mind. He critiques skepticism, not on its own terms, not by showing how the existence of the external world can be proven, but by dismissing radical skepticism as a problem that needs to be solved. Since Dasein is not originally an internal consciousness over against an external world, but rather is being-in-the-world, then involvement with its world-environment is constitutive of Dasein’s being. The very notion that subjective consciousness must pursue a demonstration that its environment exists shows that reflection has disengaged from a prior mode of being that makes it possible to pose such a question in the first place (see Heidegger SZ, 202, 205).
- 4.
- 5.
In Being and Time, when discussing selfhood in terms of the “I,” Heidegger clearly distinguishes between (1) a merely formal, reflective awareness of the “I” and (2) phenomenological attention to the function of the word “I,” which is to be “understood only in the sense of a non-binding formal indication”—especially as this leads in the direction of Dasein’s selfhood understood as a who rather than a what (SZ, 115–16).
- 6.
It should be noted that in the same SZ passage where Heidegger mentions the possibility of an unreified concept of the subject, he also points out that any reified concept is drawn from subjectum and hupokeimenon.
- 7.
For an account of how dematerialized thought experiments and imagination figured in the science of mechanics, see Bertoloni Meli 2010.
- 8.
In Aristotle there is an important distinction between hupokeimenon and ousia, with the former usually pertaining to predication and the latter to being. Yet this distinction was not a separation along the lines of the modern subject-object split. Being, for Aristotle, is a “fused” concept where the existential and predication functions of the “is” are two sides of the same coin. See Van Brennekom 1986.
- 9.
With respect to the mathematical, Heidegger insists that number is not its source, but a consequence of the original meaning of the Greek mathēsis, or presuppositions required for learning (Heidegger WIT, 70ff/GA 41, 69ff). Descartes bears this out in Rule IV of Rules for the Direction of the Mind (PWD I, 15–20). There mathesis universalis is not universal mathematics but a general universal method of grounding thought by deduction from the intellect’s natural capacity for measuring order (as set out in the Meditations). Descartes knew of the Greek sense of mathēsis as a process of learning (connected with Platonic recollection). And he took mathematics per se to be simply the purest instance of mathesis universalis. See Van Pitte 1991.
- 10.
For Heidegger, what is “natural” is always historical (WIT, 39/GA 41, 38).
- 11.
In Homer, phuō usually refers to plant life, with a specific meaning of bringing forth shoots, and earth is commonly called phusizoos, that which gives forth life (Odyssey, 11.301).
- 12.
- 13.
For Galileo, philosophy is written in the “great book” that is the universe. But this book cannot be understood unless one learns its language and letters—mathematics—“without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.” Without mathematics, one wanders around in a “dark labyrinth” (Galileo 1957, 237–38).
- 14.
It may be that the Meditations is not primarily about the separability of mind and body, but simply the radical distinctness of thought and extension. See Rozemond 1995. Thought and extension are principal attributes of mental and physical substance, and substance is the base of its “modes,” indeed is the “subject” of its modes (Descartes PWD I, 198). Individual bodies are modes of the principal attribute of extension. A substance has only one principal attribute, defining its essence and bearing its modes. So res extensa should not be called “body” but the core defining element of individual bodies. In other words, body can be nothing other than extension. This scheme allows the treatment of all bodies as subject to the singular analysis of mathematical relations, thus supplanting the Aristotelian view of qualitative differences among bodies, and justifying the reductive mechanism of the new physics of nature.
- 15.
Along these lines, the turn to the cogito in Descartes is not simply a matter of inward reflection but a radical withdrawal from both outside experiences and internal thoughts that are the effects of past experiences and influences. Such is the mark of indifference (Descartes PWD II, 41) to all possible occurrences in the world and in the mind, which is what underwrites the method of radical doubt. See Dodd 2004.
- 16.
The transformative character of this modern scheme is shown in its reversal of Aristotle’s analysis of mathematics. In Metaphysics 13, Aristotle claims that mathematical form is indeed disclosive of being, but only in the manner of secondary ousia, not the primary ousia of particular phenomena in nature. Mathematical form is derived from primary ousia through the operation of aphaeresis, or “abstraction,” which means to pull away or take away from (Aristotle Metaphysics, 1061a30ff)—a term that Aristotle uses exclusively for mathematics, and that exemplifies his critique of Platonic Forms, which are falsely assumed to be conditions of primary ousia. Analogously, modern physics would count as a comparable distortion of nature by giving primacy to mathematical form. See Heidegger’s analysis of Aristotle in this regard in PS section 15, an analysis that serves as an early precedent for his later critique of modern science.
- 17.
For a general analysis, see Ayers 1998.
- 18.
William Hamilton, who edited the collected works of Thomas Reid (first edition in 1846), provided extensive notes to Reid’s texts, and one note gives a detailed account of the reversal of meaning between subjectum and objectum. In Scholastic philosophy, he says, “a material thing, say a horse, qua existing was said to have subjective being out[side] of the mind; qua conceived or known, it was said to have objective being in the mind” (Reid 2005, 806–09).
- 19.
Formal reality can apply to the mind, however, in the sense of an idea’s actual presence in the mind, as distinct from the objective reality of an idea, namely what the mind grasps when it sees distinctions, particularly in definitions and clear and distinct ideas—where “clear” means being present and accessible to an attentive mind, and “distinct” means being clear plus being sharply marked off from other ideas so as to contain only what is clear (Descartes PWD I, 206–07).
- 20.
Although the phrase “thinking subject” occurs frequently in CPR, Kant also deploys earlier connotations of the subject as the substantive base of properties or the reference of predication (i.e., subjectum understood ontologically or logically). So Kant actually works with three senses of the subject: cognitive, ontological, and logical. It should be noted that Kant critiques theories that move from the “I think” to a substantive self (see CPR, A348-51). The error of rational psychology is taking the cognitive unity of consciousness as “an intuition of the [thinking] subject as an object” and illicitly applying the category of substance to this supposed object (Kant CPR, B421). For Kant here the thinking subject is a precondition for thinking objects, not itself an object of thinking. Indeed, the transcendental cognitive subject is a “logical subject,” not a “real subject” (Kant CPR, A350)—note all three senses of the subject used here. Despite such manifold uses, Kant’s emphasis on the thinking subject seems to have cemented this denotation for philosophy afterward.
- 21.
William Hamilton, cited earlier, surmised that the reversal of meanings between subjectum and objectum began around the mid-Seventeenth Century, in German writers such as Calovius, Leibniz, Wolff, and Knutsen. In Christian Wolff, subject is connected with substance, since the latter is called the subject of constant and variable intrinsic determinations (Gesammelte Werke, III, 15, #683). Leibniz, in Theodicy I.59, says something that could be relevant: “soul and body compose one and the same suppôt, or what is called a person.” Suppôt comes from the Latin suppositum, closely linked to substantia and subjectum. Leibniz provides a clear case of the human subject by joining subjectum and persona in an ethical/juridical sense: “The subjectum of a moral quality is a persona or a thing (res). A person is a rational substance, and is natural or civil” (Nova Methodus II.15). See Zarka 1999 (the Leibniz passage is cited on p. 263). Locke defines personhood in a manner comparable to the Cartesian cogito: A person is an identity, given by “consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seemed to me essential to it: It being impossible for anyone to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive” (1975, II.XXVII.9).
- 22.
When Hegel declares in the Phenomenology that being is subject as well as substance (1977, 17), he was inheriting (and conjoining) a distinction that originally was more a synonymy. Heidegger’s counter-position is that the being of Dasein is “neither substance nor subject” (SZ, 303).
- 23.
I have always benefited from Charles Guignon’s careful and nuanced work on authenticity. See Guignon 1983, 1984, 2000. Guignon emphasizes two elements of authenticity not much explored in my text: (1) how history is part of Dasein’s thrown selfhood; and (2) how authenticity is not simply an “existential” matter but also essential for the philosophical work demanded by existential phenomenology.
- 24.
Note the German word translated as authenticity: Eigentlichkeit.
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Hatab, L.J. (2015). Can We Drop the Subject? Heidegger, Selfhood, and the History of a Modern Word. In: Pedersen, H., Altman, M. (eds) Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 74. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9442-8_2
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