Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys
known for his distinctive approach to the study of Being, and infamous for his affiliations with the Nazi party, as rector of the University of Freiburg between 1933 and 1934, Heidegger is one of the most prominent—though thoroughly controversial—philosophic figures of the twentieth century. While it is difficult to separate his overwhelming influence on Continental thought from the controversy that surrounds him, his impact on both Arendt and Derrida should not be overlooked. It is well documented that Heidegger was once Arendt’s teacher, briefly her lover, and someone to whom she turned throughout her life. For her, his work was, in varying degrees, a source of intellectual inspiration and yet, at other times, dangerous and abhorrent in its presentation of certain Nazi tendencies. In spite of this, Arendt’s association with Heidegger is often used as a means of attempting to discredit her work.54 Such harsh critique, verging on condemnation (though unique in the more personal nature of its attack in Arendt’s case, owing to their intimate relationship), did not touch her alone. The work of thinkers from across the Humanities has been similarly criticized, culminating in the so-called Heidegger Affair in France during the 1980s. Derrida, too, found himself under scrutiny and deeply embroiled in this controversy, specifically as a result of the ways in which, by his own admission, he had “received a visible inheritance” from Heideggerian philosophy, though he nevertheless “never really ceased posing many [. . .] very serious, central questions,” doing so “always with a radical disquiet, restless and bottomless.”55
Turning briefly to Heidegger’s philosophy of Being (as Dasein), then, I wish to highlight here how this twentieth-century thinker conceptualized an understanding of Sorge that my Arendtian-inspired, Derridean-informed notion of public, political care ultimately calls into question. Where a Heideggerian understanding of Sorge is futural and self-centric, my theory of care is conditioned by natality and is dedicated to the maintenance, preservation, and development of the public realm: the worldly “space for politics” shared with a plurality of other people. While other schools of philosophic thought also place “care” at the center of their conceptual universe, such as—for example—the field of feminist relational moral theorizing known as the Ethics of Care,56 Sorge is central to Heidegger’s ontology and his distinctive attempt to answer the question: what is the meaning of Being as such?
Responding to a philosophic question he believed had been forgotten throughout the history of Western metaphysics (roughly since Plato), Heidegger developed—most notably in Being and Time (1927)—a phenomenological account of human existence, in which the ontological structure of Being is formed in terms of Sorge. Not simply a broad category of interrelated forms of human activity, Sorge, as Arendt acknowledges in her commentary of Heidegger’s work, is the “basic element” that “underlies all the daily care-taking in the world.”57 Naming the condition after a phenomenon that it facilitates, Heidegger maintains that “care” (as Sorge) signifies the “way the present appears to us on the basis of a past that we reimagine according to a future that we intend.”58 That is, as Joshua Broggi observes, Sorge is the “threefold structure that allows people to care about anything at all,” whereby “‘care’ is actually the background condition for a variety of cases of caring,” even though “there might not be anything especially caring-like about the care which makes every-day caring possible.”59 From Heidegger’s perspective, then, to care about anything in particular is first to care about the general state of one’s beingness in the world.
Concerned with the temporal conditions of human life, Heidegger demonstrated that it is in terms of time that the meaning of Dasein can be found, since people experience their existence temporally in the pre-ontological mode of Sorge. If Being is associated with human temporality, then, for Heidegger, people experience their facticity as beings thrown into the world, and he illustrates how they can be said to realize their unique potential as individuated members of the human community. Sorge is a sense of care, or rather, a fundamental awareness of one’s own finite existence that informs what it means for a person to be a unique human being. “To be, or not to be,” really is “the question,” though it is Heidegger’s response to this query that I contend problematically emphasizes the lonely, self-reflective experience of freedom that he associates with mortality—“when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”60
The distinctive essence of a person, Dasein—a word historically derived from Dass-sein, or the “that-it-is” of a being61 —is that which Heidegger associates with the “who”-ness of a person: the meaning of Being is who you are. In Arendt’s words, the “Who of Dasein” is the “Self,” with “the term ‘Self’ we answer the question of the Who of Dasein.”62 This is something that is ultimately tied to the notion of mortality and the knowledge that one’s own death is certain: “only in death, which will take him from the world, does man have the certainty of being himself.”63 Understood in these terms, the ontological structure of Dasein is both temporal and temporalizing in the sense that one’s life becomes a meaningful totality through an act of projecting one’s self toward that which is entirely one’s own: death. Through what Heidegger describes as “being-towards-death,” the “who” of a person is revealed. By “being-in-the-world” futurally, aware of and concerned with death, Dasein can “find itself [. . .] be ‘shown’ to itself in its possible authenticity.”64 Though “Dasein is already a potentiality-for-Being-its-Self,” Heidegger maintains that there is a need to have this “potentiality attested,” doing so in such a manner that “when one has an understanding of Being-towards-death—towards death as one’s ownmost possibility—one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.”65 By projecting one’s self toward death, that is, one can come to view one’s life as a complete, unified whole, or as a life that is now—as in presently—capable of being understood and made meaningful in terms of a past which is potentially yet to come. Dasein is thus “its past, it is its possibility in running ahead to this past [and] in this running ahead [one is] authentically time, [one has] time.”66 It is in terms of this having of time—of being able to experience in the eye of one’s mind one’s lived existence as a totality—that Dasein can be said to concern itself with itself, self-reflectively establishing a sense of concern, or care (Sorge), for its Self as a finite being with an ever-diminishing amount of time left on Earth.
It is in the face of the possibility of one’s ultimate end—the terminal point at which all people are confronted with the nothingness of the unknown before them—that one comes to care about “Being-in-the-world,” with the accompanying sense of anxiety, angst, apprehensiveness, concern, etc. associated with having limited time on Earth coming to condition how the meaning of Dasein is disclosed to itself. “Who” someone is and how this sense of Self is revealed is thus conditioned by Sorge, which is felt in the face of a death that is unavoidable. It is in terms of this “anxiety” that existence is experienced and that time can be made meaningful. Because Sorge is ontologically prior to the phenomena and practices of care that it facilitates, Heidegger suggests that the meaning of Dasein is to be found in care, whereby the essence of Being can be accessed with the structure of care that informs humankind’s entire experience of “Being-in-the-world.”
Though Heidegger also theorizes the notion of “Being-with-others,” which forms a significant part of his understanding of “being-in-the-world,” I must underscore here that his phenomenology is rooted in a mode of being that is fundamentally “for-the-sake-of-itself.”67 This is a conceptualization of care which is self-centric: “Dasein exists for the sake of a potentiality-for-Being of itself.”68 According to Arendt, the “nature” of Heidegger’s “Dasein is not that it simply is but, rather, that in its being its primary concern [or care] is its being itself,” and thus that “care-taking has a genuinely self-reflective character.”69 This is not to say that the Heideggerian approach is hedonistic or that Heidegger’s philosophy provides the conceptual framework for an ethic of egoism. Rather, my point is that Sorge is engendered in reference to one’s self and one’s death. For Arendt, it is this aspect of Heidegger’s “death-driven phenomenology”70 —this self-reflective form of existing “for-the-sake-of” one’s “ownmost” potentiality—that she directly challenges when outlining her own understanding of the human condition.