Abstract
In the previous chapter I argued that Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s responses to the problem of history are one-sided and a synthesis of their views is required in order to acquire a fuller and richer picture of the nature of history. Hegel points to knowledge of the past as the only ob(ective feaiure of history, while Kierkegaard emphasises the role of personal choice In making history. A tension Is created thus between an ‘objective’ and eplstemological view of history and a ‘subjective’ and ethical one. Both views leave crucial elements of hlslory out of their analysis of the nature of hlslory.
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, translated by Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 9.
Arendt, Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, edited by Michael Murray, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 296.
Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ can offer us a very illuminating example of Heidegger’s approach. See, for example, what Heidegger states when he refers to modern sciences: ‘But the establishing of a law is accomplished with reference to the ground plan of the object-sphere. That ground plan furnishes a criterion and constrains the anticipatory representing of the conditions.’ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, translated by William Lovitt, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 121.
Hoffman, ‘Death, Time, History: Division II of Being and Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to HEIDEGGER, edited by Charles B. Guignon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 195.
Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 123.
Jere Paul Surber, ‘Heidegger’s Critique of Hegel’s Notion of Time’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 39, No. 3 (March 1979), p. 360.
As Wyschogrod puts it: ‘the determination to death eliminates all accidental and temporary possibilities and reveals Dasein’s destiny, which is the possibility of Dasein’s determining itself as possibility.’ Michael Wyschogrod, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, The Ontology of Existence, (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 110.
That can raise suspicions of a Hegelian approach to history. We will examine closer these suspicions when we will refer to the relation of Heidegger to Hegel. J. L. Mehta makes an interesting remark on this: ‘Historically, the light of truth has taken possession of the Western mind in various forms from one epoch to another... Truth is therefore not only history but destiny (Geschick), in the sense that, from epoch to epoch, man finds himself thrown into and in the grip of the particular form in which truth prevails...’ J. L. Mehta, The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), p. 232.
Of course, that’s because Being and Time was left unfinished; a late essay like ‘On Time and Being’ is meant to give such indications. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambauch, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 1–54.
Heidegger never gave us even the way in which Dasein’s temporality leads us to Being. All we have is Being and Time, which examines Dasein in terms of temporality. He left us with the ‘anticipation’ of temporality. See, for example, the definition of temporality as Ernest Daniel Carrere understands it: ‘this distinctive quality of anticipatory resoluteness, of Dasein’s authentic Being, Heidegger calls “temporality”. Only as temporality is one authentically “there”, embracing the having been of throwness into futural death through the moment of vision — or insight — of the authentic present.’ (The italics belong to the text.) Ernest Daniel Carrere, Creating a Human World, (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2006), p. 53.
For Heidegger the subject-object antinomy is a direct philosophical product of the ‘obsession’ of western philosophy with knowledge. He regards epis-temology as a wrong way to approach Being. Heidegger, instead of creating knowing subjects, tries to prove the dead ends of them. As Stephen Mulhall points out: ‘Dasein can truly question the meaning of Being only by recognising that none of its time-hallowed ontological categories are self-evidently necessary.’ Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 210.
Heidegger’s persistence at situations rather than subjects leaves us open to fragmentation. If all we have is our activities and if only through these activities we can have a possible indication of our agency, then we lose from our sight a steady point of reference. Heidegger speaks of ‘being authentic’ instead of ‘I’. He maybe escapes the problems that come along with it but he nevertheless cannot secure our unity. This is the reason why Berel Lang argues that ‘the individual self then appears as a series of contingent and dissociated moments of agency, divided so sharply that efforts at reconstruction must also be transparently partial and fragmentary. Connections discovered among such moments must then be either imposed externally or devised by the subject — in any event, created out of whole cloth and excluding any intrinsic or conceptual link between the theoretical and the practical.’ Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 84.
David Couzens Hoy in his ‘The Owl and the Poet: Heidegger’s Critique of Hegel’, boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 2, Martin Heidegger and Literature (Winter 1976), pp. 395–396
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© 2014 Georgios Patios
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Patios, G. (2014). Heidegger’s Response to the Problem of History. In: Kierkegaard on the Philosophy of History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383280_6
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