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William McNeill
Rethinking the Possible: On the Radicalization of Possibility in
Heideggers Being and Time
In his lecture course of winter semester 1925-26, Logic: The
Question of Truth, Heidegger makes a claim that will be altogether
programmatic for Being and Time and for his phenomenological work
of the 1920s. The concept of possibility, he remarks, is entirely
unclarified in scientific philosophy hitherto. [...] The meaning of
possibility and the type of structures of possibility belonging to
Dasein as such have remained altogether concealed from us up to the
present day (GA 21 228).1 The radicality of this claim can scarcely
be underestimated: Heidegger, in his work of the 1920s and beyond,
will in effect inaugurate a new thinking of possibility that will
exceed the parameters set by the first, Greek beginning of
philosophy, which became established in Aristotles ontology.
Central to this re-examination of possibility is, as this quotation
intimates, the uncovering of Dasein as the site where possibility
itself is opened up in a most radical way. In my present remarks I
shall begin to trace what I regard as Heideggers radical
displacement and rethinking of both the concept and the phenomenon
of possibility in his magnum opus of 1927, Being and Time. The
Introduction to that work indeed provides a first indication of
this displacement in its assertion that [h]igher than actuality
stands possibility. The understanding of phenomenology lies solely
in taking it up as a possibility (SZ 38). This statement not only
announces what appears to be a reversal of the traditional priority
of actuality over possibilitya priority that goes back to
Aristotles privileging of energeia over dunamisbut also sees
phenomenology itself as one possibility of philosophizing, a
possibility that, when taken up and enacted in its own
radicalization, may itself undergo transformation, as did
Heideggers own phenomenological thinking of the 1920s. The
transformation and eventual abandonment of phenomenology from 1930
on as inadequate or inappropriate to the thinking of Being is not
unrelated, I would suggest, to the rethinking of possibility
that
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Being and Time initiates.In the present essay I shall suggest
that inherent to
Heideggers rethinking of possibility are two, seemingly
irreconcilable claims: first, thatcontrary to what much of the
political rhetoric of our time would have us believenot everything
is possible. And second, that, nevertheless, Dasein, by its very
way of existing, makes possible even the impossible. What these
claims entail, I shall try to elucidate with respect to Heideggers
thinking of possibility in Being and Time. To this end, I want to
begin to trace the contours of this rethinking of possibility via
the analytic of Dasein presented in Being and Time by outlining six
key points of the analysis. These points, taken together,
emphatically indicate the centrality and primacy of the phenomenon
of possibility for the entire phenomenology of Dasein.
I.
The ontological determination of Daseinthat is, of the being
that we ourselves in each case areis primarily possibility. Dasein,
Heidegger writes, is not something present at hand that in addition
has [or possesses] the ability to do something; rather, it is
primarily being-possible [Mglichsein]. Dasein is in each case what
it can be and how it is its possibility (SZ 143). We are not
primarily something actual that has the additional feature of being
able to do something, or of having possibilities. Rather, insofar
as we are actual, this being actual, this actuality of ourselves as
actual, is already held or suspended, as it were, within the
dimension of possibility. Moreover, we do not simply have
possibilities, we are possibility: our being is primarily
being-possible. Possibility in this sense, Heidegger emphasizes, is
not to be understood as that which is not yet actual; it is not a
modal category that is ontologically lesser than actuality or
necessity:
The being-possible that Dasein in each case is existentially
[i.e., ontologically, in terms of its very being] is to be
distinguished just as much from empty, logical possibility as from
the contingency that attends something present at hand insofar as
something can happen to the latter. As a modal category of presence
at hand, possibility signifies that which is not yet actual and
that which is not always necessary. It characterizes the merely
possible. Possibility as an existential, by contrast, is the most
primordial [or originary] and ultimate positive ontological
determinacy of Dasein; initially, [...] it can only be prepared as
a problem. (143-44)
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The centrality and primacy of possibility for Daseins being
could scarcely be more emphatically stated. Several points bear
emphasizing with regard to this initial sketch. First, if
possibility, in the sense of being-possible, is not to be
understood as that which is not yet actual, it is because it is
that which already is, the dimension within which everything actual
is already suspended. But this indicates only that the being of
possibility, its already being, is not reducible to, and cannot be
understood phenomenologically in terms of, actuality. What kind of
being pertains, then, to possibility? What is strange, peculiar,
even uncanny actuality, or perhaps better, force? In what way is
Dasein as possibility? Second, in hinting that the modern, Kantian
understanding of possibility as a modal category refers to the not
yet actual and the not always necessary, Heidegger indicates how
the traditional understanding of being as primarily the actuality
of presence at hand has itself led to a reductive understanding of
the possible as that which is less than either the plenitude of
actual presence or of that which always is, the eternal. The task
of the phenomenology of Dasein, unfolding in and through a
destructuring of the history of ontology, will thus be to begin to
thinkor to prepare, if only as a problemthe being of possibility
outside or beyond the parameters of the traditional prioritizing of
presence or actuality. Thirdand this is a more general pointwe
might do well to remind ourselves here that to exist primarily as
being-possible characterizes not only the being of Dasein, but the
being of the living in general. If all living is a being underway,
then every living being, as living, has always already surpassed
what and how it actually is, surpassed it in entering into and
maintaining itself within the dimension of possibility or
potentiality: its living is its being capable, its possibility of
being otherwise than it already is. Where such a being is no longer
able to breathe, to sense, to nourish itself, or to die: there we
say the being is dead. And correlatively, death is a possibility
only for the living. Of course, there is much more to be said here,
and we cannot simply conclude from this that being means the same
thing for Dasein as it does for other living beings, or that
being-possible is the same, or that death and death are the same.
For it is not possibility as such, Heidegger will argue, that is
the sole or critical issue here, but the relation to possibility,
the opening up of possibility as possibility.2
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II.
This question of the opening up of possibility as such, as
possibilityan opening up that Heidegger will elsewhere describe as
an irruption into possibilitybrings us to a second major point (GA
29/30 531; Metaphysics 365). Not just Dasein itself as possibility,
but the being of all beings, is first opened up, as possibility, in
what Heidegger terms projection (Entwerfen). Projection is what
enables understanding, which is always an understanding of the
being of beings. Dasein understands not only itself in terms of
what and how it can be, in terms of its potential for being
(Seinknnen), but also and at the same time all other beings within
the world: we understand the tree, the wood, the table in terms of
what and how they can be, what we can do with them, how we can let
them be, and so on. The tree grows, flourishes, or decays, but the
possibilities of its growth, flourishing, or decay are not
disclosed as possibilities except in and through the projective
happening of Dasein. Likewise, we understand the other Dasein in
terms of how we can be with him or her in terms of our worldly
engagements. At one and the same time as this opening up of other
beings as such, as potentially being this or that, what is opened
up is the horizon of a world, in terms of which or from out of
which beings are given as a whole.3 Already in Being and Time,
Heidegger describes this projective opening up of possibility in
terms of an antecedent giving, a freeing and releasing (Freigabe)
that first enables beings to appear within a world: the freeing of
intraworldly beings releases these beings with respect to their
possibilities (SZ 144). Projection thus opens up the realm of
freedom: it opens up both the being of Dasein and the being of
other beings in terms of the meaningful possibilities that are
given within a particular worlda world that, as we shall later
indicate, is also always already given as a historical world. As
projection, understanding projects the being of Dasein with respect
to that for the sake of which it exists with equal primordiality as
it projects Daseins being with respect to the significance that
constitutes the worldliness of a particular world (145). That for
the sake of which Dasein exists is its own potential for being, the
possibility of its own being, or its own being as possibility. Yet
such being, as being-in-the-world, is never separable from, but is
intimately bound up with, the being of other beings that have
appeared within a world, and, before and beyond this, with the
world itself that constitutes the primary horizon in terms of which
such beings appear. This antecedent binding or directedness
constitutes Daseins facticity;4 projection opens up what Heidegger
terms the leeway of [Daseins] factical potential for being
(145).
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III.
A third point follows from this. The fact of facticitywhich,
like possibility itself, can at this stage be grasped only as a
problem (SZ 56)constitutes, as it were, an ineluctable restriction
on the freedom of Dasein as possibility. To say that Dasein is
primarily possibility does not mean that it is sheer, free-floating
possibility, an undifferentiated freedom that can be determined by
the will: [p]ossibility as an existential does not mean a
free-floating potential for being in the sense of the liberty of
indifference (libertas indifferentiae) (144). Daseins freedom is
not absolute: to say that it exists for the sake of its own being
is not the equivalent of autonomy, for its own being is a
being-in-the-world, and thus a being that never entirely belongs to
Dasein as a self. This is to say that all projection is thrown
(geworfen), and this thrownness complicates and restrains the
freedom opened up in projection. Dasein is thrown possibility
through and through (144). This thrownness also comprises the way
in which Dasein has already found itself, its bodily attunement in
its here-and-now situation in the world:
Finding itself essentially attuned and situated [...] Dasein has
in each case already entered into particular possibilities. As that
potential for being that it is, it has let certain possibilities
pass it by; it is constantly waiving possibilities of its being,
taking them up or mistaking them. This means, however, that Dasein
is being-possible that has been delivered over to itself, thrown
possibility through and through. (144)
The possibility of being has in each case its own historywho and
how I can be at the next moment depends on and comes out of,
approaches me from, who and how I have been, not exclusively (for
it also depends on events and beings beyond my history), but
nevertheless essentiallyand yet this history can never entirely own
itself, for it is enabled by and already inscribed within (thrown
into) a greater history, which is that of a historical world. As
directed in advance toward a world that precedes and exceeds it,
Daseins being as possibility is always situated by, and only ever
responsive to, an already prevailing historical world into which it
has been thrown. Not everything is possible in any given era or at
any given time.
I shall come back to this point. For now, I want to highlight
what Daseins having already found itself as possibility
necessarily
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implies, namely, that such possibility has also and unavoidably
already lost itself, that it can never entirely be itself. Which is
to say that the possibility that I can be, can, nevertheless, never
be mine, can never appropriate itself. I can only ever pursue this
possibility of being. I can only ever anticipate this possibility
of being that I potentially can and must be, yet never will be.
(This anticipation, this pursuit, is what Heidegger will designate
as a running ahead [Vorlaufen]which, as pursuit, is always a
running after, a running after something that has shown itselfthe
running ahead that constitutes Daseins very way of being, or Dasein
itself as way, as the opening up of a path, a path that is not
pregiven, but opened up only in a being underway.) Heidegger
insists that this loss is not only possible, but necessary and
inevitable: it is intrinsic to the being of possibility, to the
possibility of being. Through projection, Dasein understands
itself, the potential for being that it is:
And only because Dasein is its There in the manner of
understanding [i.e., projection] can it run astray [sich verlaufen,
this time] and be mistaken with regard to itself. And insofar as
understanding finds itself attuned and situated, and as such
exposed existentially to thrownness, Dasein has in each case
already run astray and failed to recognize itself. In its potential
for being it is, therefore, delivered over to [berantwortet: more
literally, it must answer or respond to] the possibility of first
finding itself again in its possibilities. (SZ 144)
Dasein, as the potential for being, has always yet to
appropriate itself in terms of what is possible for it at any
moment. Yet the necessity of this task is only a testament to the
antecedent disappropriation to which it itself, as the potential
for being, is exposed. Disappropriation, the force of thrownness,
which is that of a continual being thrown, or finding oneself in
the throw, is primary here; appropriation is secondary and can
occur only after the event (the event of being that Heidegger will
later term Ereignis). We have always yet to be, we have always yet
to find ourselves again in terms of the possibilities of our being,
only because we have always already lost ourselves. As Heidegger
elsewhere puts it: Possibility falls away, and an ever new
appropriation is called for (GA 18 190).
Now this possibility, namely, the possibility of first finding
itself again in its possibilitiesthis possibility is not just any
possibility (SZ 144). As the primary possibility that Dasein is, it
is an altogether distinctive one, even thoughand this is what is
most peculiarit is not a determinate one, despite what the
grammatical
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use of the definite article might seem to indicate here. This
leads us to our fourth point.
IV.
Dasein as possibility is, in Being and Time, thought
hyperbolically, as it were, in terms of its most extreme
possibility: that of its death, of the possibility of
impossibility. This negativity, the not of impossibility,
continually haunts Dasein as the being that exists as possibility.
Where there is possibilitywhere possibility is disclosed as such,
as possibilitythere lies, necessarily, the possibility of
impossibility, of failure, of not actualizing or realizing, of not
accomplishing, what could have been and nevertheless was not to be.
Is this not to say that Dasein makes possible even the
impossiblenot in the sense of actualizing it, but in the sense of
letting the impossible be as a possibility, of raising even the
impossible into the dimension or element of the possible? Indeed.5
Yet, one might argue, the converse is surely just as much the case:
if the impossible becomes a possibility, everything possible is no
less an impossibility. Or to put it another way, every success on
Daseins part, every actual accomplishment, is, in a sense, an
impossibility, for it can never be fully actual. Yet would this not
be to reduce possibility to the possibility of actuality, or of
pure presence, once again? Far from being an impossibility, all
accomplishment (Vollbringen), which Heidegger comes to see as the
essence of action, occurs within and actualizes itself (presences)
from out of the element of the possible.6 The possible is its very
dimension.
Now it is this dimension that Dasein has always already assumed
in taking upon itself the possibility of its death as a possibility
of being. A number of points need to be emphasized here. First,
Dasein has to take upon itself this possibility in order to be: it
is not Daseins choice; Dasein does not decide to assume or take on
this possibility. Thus, Heidegger writes: whenever Dasein exists,
it is also already thrown into this possibility (SZ 251). It is
thrown into this possibility as into the mode of being of
projecting itself, for being thrown into this possibility first
enables and anchors projection as such.7 To be thrown into this
possibility means: to have been projected, continually and already,
in the direction of and right into this possibility, in a
projection that constitutes our very way of being as such. This
projection of our way of being as a being toward death as
possibility is the primary projection of our being, for, prior to
any determinate choice or decisionprior, that is, to any
appropriation of this or that possibility on Daseins partit has
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always already happened. It is as this excess or excedance that
will always already have surpassed every determinate possibility
that death as possibility is not to be outstripped or surpassed
(nicht zu berholen), and it is as this excedance that death as
possibility is projected hyperbolically, as the most extreme
possibility (250). Strictly speaking, Dasein cannot take this
possibility upon itself, however, because prior to this hyperbolic
projection it is not yet a self, or does not yet have the
possibility of being a self. It is the subjection (of something
that is not yet Dasein) to this projection that first enables and
necessitates individuation, that makes this most extreme
possibility Daseins ownmost possibility. It first brings Dasein
before itself: [w]ith death, Dasein stands before itself in its
ownmost potential for being (250). To say that this possibility is
Daseins ownmost possibility, however, does not mean that Dasein
owns this possibility. Quite the contrary: for to say that Dasein
owns this possibility would mean that Dasein had exceeded or
outstripped it. Rather, being thrown into this possibility means
having been subjected to, having undergone, the disappropriation
that first enables any and all appropriation. This possibility has
taken hold of, hasquite literallypossessed, Dasein. We seen here
the entire paradox of Daseins mineness or (in a weak, non-modern
sense) subjectivity: what is most my own, that which no one else
can undergo for me or in my place, is nevertheless not my ownit is
not something I own or possess, or dispose over.
Second, however, death as possibility, as the possibility of the
impossibility of existence as such, is not the possibility of
nonbeing, or of sheer nothingness, but a possibility of being (SZ
262). Or rather, if it is the possibility of nonbeing, or of
impossibilityof the impossibility of my existencethen the genitive
here does not signify a relation of belonging. This possibility
does not belong to nonbeing or to impossibility. It belongs to
being as such as its innermost preserve. Dasein relates to this
possibility of impossibility constantly and always in one way or
another; its relation to this possibility is what constitutes
Dasein as mortal and its way of being as dying. Dying, in this
existential-ontological conception, is not, therefore, a one-off
event that occurs at or near the end of a life; rather, [d]ying is
to be taken as a title designating that way of being in which
Dasein is in relation to its death (247). Dasein, accordingly, is
factically dying, so long as it exists (SZ 259).8
Third, and very briefly, I want to draw attention here to the
profoundly paradoxical and aporetic structure of this happening of
death, of this being toward death as the possibility of
impossibility. It is paradoxical not only because the impossible is
not the opposite of the possible here, and is thus precisely
possible as im-possible; it is
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also paradoxical because death as this possibility is on the one
hand utterly determinateit is irremediably mine and as such
absolutely certainand yet indeterminate, as that which is possible
at any moment (SZ 258). This paradoxical structure indeed
constitutes, Heidegger says, the ownmost character of possibility
pertaining to death: certain and yet indeterminate, that is,
possible at any moment (258). This determinate indeterminacy is
fundamentally temporal: it is the indeterminacy of the future that,
as indeterminacy, precisely already iswhich, however, is to say
that it is within the determinacy of the unfolding of my
thrownness, my having-been. It is the element within and from out
of which my being thrown unfolds.
V.
Daseins relation to possibility is, precisely through this
hyperbolic projection, shown to be one of anticipation or running
ahead (Vorlaufen)but this means that its relation to possibility is
always futural in the radical, ekstatic sense that Heidegger gives
this futuricity. In its average everydayness, Dasein tends to
avoid, to conceal and cover over, the most extreme and ownmost
possibility of its own being by falling, by interpreting itself in
terms of determinate possibilities, ways of being proffered by
others and by a world into which it has been thrown. Seeking to
actualize itself through action in enacting real life, it forgets
itself in its ownmost possibility, loses itself in the They. It
overlooks or fails to see the very element of the possible. In
contrast to such evasive being toward death as possibility,
Heidegger, in section 53, sketches what an authentic being toward
death must entail. Daseins maintaining itself (sich halten9) in an
authentic being toward death, as a way of being in relation to this
possibility, must, by contrast, not evade or cover over this
possibility, but let it be as a possibility. An authentic being
toward this possibility, as a way of being, cannot mean actualizing
this possibility: within the field of everyday concern, which is
concerned to actualize possibilities, such actualization has the
tendency to annihilate [or abolish] the possibility of the possible
by actualizing it (even though, Heidegger notes, such actualization
is only ever relative); in terms of the possibility of my death,
actualizing this possibility, perhaps through suicide, would
abolish the possibility of being in relation to this very
possibility (SZ 261). In an authentic being toward death this
possibility must, by contrast, be understood without being weakened
[or, hyperbolically: ungeschwcht] as possibility, be cultivated
as
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possibility, and in relating to it, be sustained as possibility
(261).10 Such being toward possibility is termed a running ahead
into possibility [Vorlaufen in die Mglichkeit] (261). Now such
running ahead, which is a projection and thus a disclosive
understanding of possibility, not only unveils possibility as such,
as Heidegger writes, but it unveils it hyperbolically, as that
which has altogether no measure, as the possibility of the
measureless impossibility of existence (262). In a sense, it
intensifies or enhances possibility, but only because this
possibility is already there, latent within all existing as such.
It brings to the fore the measureless within the very possibility
of existence (and the measureless here also means: that which
cannot be measured, thus calculated, the incalculable). To say,
therefore, that [b]eing toward death, as a running ahead into
possibility, first possibilizes11 [ermglicht] this possibility and
sets it free [or releases it] as such does not, it would seem, mean
that running ahead first makes possible this possibility, but only
that it intensifies this possibility that is already thereand yet
not yet there as possibility, not yet unveiled and set free as such
(262; my emphasis in bold). It is running ahead into the
possibility of impossibilityinto the impossibility of existence as
such, which is to say, into the impossibility of possibility, the
impossibility that attends all possibilityit is this running ahead
that first releases the possibility of existence as such, first
lets it be as the possibility it is. Yet if running ahead unveils,
hyperbolically, the possibility of the impossibility of existence,
this is only because this authentic mode of being is itself only
the retrieval, the self-recovery or auto-recovery, as it were, of
that very way of being that first enables itself as possibility:
[b]eing toward death is running ahead into a potential for being of
that being whose mode of being is running ahead itself (262).
Running ahead, thus retrieved (wiederholt), therefore means:
understanding oneself in the very movedness of ones being, existing
fully within the unfolding of ones ownmost being from out of its
ultimate ground.
The phenomenon of running ahead articulates the movement of
Daseins being, its way of being as being always already ahead of
itself, which is the primary moment of Care. Daseins being ahead of
itself is its projective being toward itself as potentiality for
being, as possibility:
Being toward its ownmost potentiality for being means
ontologically, however: Dasein is in each case already ahead of
itself in its being. Dasein is always already out beyond itself,not
as a relating to other beings that it is not, but as being toward
the potential for being that it itself is. (SZ 191-92)
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Now this being ahead of itself first enables Daseins coming
toward itself as a coming back to itself, a return to or retrieval
of itself as a thrown having been, as being-there-in-the-world. Yet
this not only means, once again, that the Dasein whose being is
enabled as possibility, in and through this being ahead of
itselfthat such Dasein is not yetnever yetitself. It also means,
more radically, that this primary not yet that Dasein is does not
belong to Dasein itself, to Dasein as an already existing self, for
it first enables Daseins coming toward itself, that is, it first
enables the appropriation of itself that has always yet to happen.
It is this, Daseins coming toward itself, that constitutes the
ekstatic phenomenon of the future, according to Being and Time. In
section 65, Heidegger unfolds this sense of future
phenomenologically starting from the phenomenon of being toward
death. Daseins being toward its ownmost possibility
is possible only in such a way that Dasein can come toward
itself in its ownmost possibility in general, and sustains this
possibility as possibility in this letting itself come toward
itself. Such letting itself come toward itself in this distinctive
possibility and sustaining this possibility is the original
phenomenon of the future (325).
Future here, Heidegger emphasizes in alluding to the sense of
coming or approach (Kunft) inherent in the German Zukunft, does not
mean a now or present that is not yet actual and has yet to be, but
means that coming in which Dasein comes toward itself in its
ownmost potential for being. Just as possibility is the primary and
most originary determination of Daseins being, so the ekstatic
phenomenon of the future is primary within the unity of the
ekstases, first enabling having-been and the yet more derivative
presence that futural having-been awakens (329). It is the
disappropriation that grounds the possibility of the futureof the
future as the possibility of Daseins coming toward itselfit is this
disappropriation, however, which is thus also more primordial than
having been, that undermines the coherence and unity of the
supposedly self-like, unitary structure of ekstatic temporality as
the ekstatikon pure and simple, as the originary outside itself in
and for itself, thereby grounding the very selfhood of Dasein in
irrecoverable loss (329).
Indeed, this not yet, the ekstatic happening of this originary
future or coming as the grounding possibility of Dasein, is so
primordial that one must question whether the term disappropriation
adequately articulates what is to be thought here. For
disappropriation implies that appropriation has already
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occurred, that Dasein has already been constituted as such to
thus undergo the expropriation of its being. Yet must there not be
a closure that antecedes, or is more primordial than, such
disappropriation, if the future is indeed more primordial than
having been, if having been (Gewesenheit) in a certain way first
springs from the future (SZ 326)? This, presumably, is why
Heidegger here, in discussing the finitude of the future, writes
not of a disappropriation, disowning, or expropriation, but of a
closure as the most fundamental characteristic of the futural
ekstasisa closure that first opens the possibility of projecting or
understanding ones own being in terms of nothingness (Nichtigkeit)
or the possibility of impossibility: a closure, therefore, that
first opens possibility as such. The fundamental question
concerns
how such coming-toward-oneself is itself originarily determined
as such. Its finitude does not primarily mean a cessation, but is a
characteristic of temporalization itself. The originary and
authentic future is the toward-oneself, oneself, [already] existing
as the unsurpassable possibility of nothingness. The ekstatic
character of the originary future lies precisely in the fact that
it closes our potential for being, that is, it is itself closed,
and as such makes possible [ermglicht] a radically open
existentiell understanding of nothingness. (330)
Heidegger here indicates how this primordial, originating
closure, this closed (geschlossen) dimension of the future, first
enables an authentically and radically open (entschlossen)
projection of ones own being upon the possibility of the
impossibility of existence, or the possibility of nothingness.12
Authenticity, an authentic relation to ones ownmost finitude, is
thus itself a derivative possibility of being in the sense that it
is grounded in and presupposes this more primordial closure. Even
though the originary and authentic future share the same formal
structure of the toward-oneself, Heidegger here suggests that they
do not coincide: it is the originary future that first enables or
makes possible the authentic future as an explicit running ahead, a
recuperation or retrieval of a movement of being that has always
already happened.
VI.
This futural dimension of Daseins Being must ultimately be
understood in terms of historicality: that is, in relation to the
phenomenon of birth that testifies to what Heidegger calls the
quiet force of the possible [die stille Kraft des Mglichen] (SZ
394-
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95). What is important here is that it is the irrecoverable loss
of presence, the finitude implicit in Daseins futural ekstasis,
which is essentially closed, compelling the disappropriation in
being toward death, that first gives birth to individuation, and
thereby to finite possibilities of being. The disclosive running
ahead into possibility as such, sustaining the possibility of
impossibility, individuates Dasein in casting it back upon and
returning it to its factical There, turning it toward and into the
horizon of possibilities that approach it from out of an already
existing world. Daseins birth, its coming into being as the birth
of the possible, which is the originary event of individuation, is
implicit within, and compelled by, the closure of the future that
constitutes Dasein as being toward death. Just as death,
ontologically conceived, is not an event at the end of life, so too
birth is not an event at the beginning. Factical Dasein, Heidegger
emphasizes, exists in the manner of birth, and in being born it is
also already dying in the sense of being toward death (374).13
The factical historicality of Dasein, as the concrete, horizonal
event that coincides with the birth of the possible, is thematized
in Being and Time in response to the question of the source of the
factical possibilities of existence (SZ 383). The factically
disclosed possibilities of existence cannot, as such, be drawn from
death as possibility, since the latter precisely has no content and
no measure. Rather, Daseins way of being ahead of itself, as being
toward death, intrinsically casts or directs it back toward the
factical, already existing world that is in itself a world of
others, a world borne and sustained by the already existent Dasein
of others to which it has been abandoned, a world that thus
precedesand, as an event, continues to precedeeach and every birth.
Each and every birth of Dasein, as the birth of the possible, is
thus nourished in advance, so to speak, by the historical ground or
heritage (Erbe) that it has had to assume in its thrownness (383).
And this means that implicit within the very disclosure of the
possible there lies concealed a quiet force, a latent power that as
yet approaches us, that has yet to arrive, whose content and
direction we do not dispose over, but to which we can, at most, be
responsive. The openness (Entschlossenheit) of Daseins factical
coming toward itself as a coming back to its having been conceals
within it a transmission of possibilities that have come down,
although not necessarily as having come down (383).
An explicit openness toward this concealed force of the possible
is precisely what is enabled by our anticipatory being toward
death, that is, by our running ahead into the dimension of what is
possible at any moment, and yet never calculable or determinable:
the dimension of indeterminacy that permeates all existence as
such. Running ahead into the dimension of possibility to come,
Heidegger
-
writes, holds the moment at the ready: it brings about
(temporalizes) a fundamental readiness for the possibility of a
retrieval or recovery of our own having-been, of existence that has
been there (SZ 343-44). Yet to the extent that our own having-been
is never simply ours, but always also that of a historical world, a
heritage, the enactment of this thos of openness, this readiness,
also bears within it the possibility of an explicit, i.e., knowing,
appropriation of ones heritageand this is the full sense of
retrieval (Wiederholung) for Heidegger. Retrieval, writes
Heidegger, in the sense of a knowing appropriation of ones
heritage, is neither a reactualizing of a Dasein that has been, nor
a return to the past, but is a response or replya reciprocative
rejoinder (Erwiderung)to a possibility of existence that has been
there (386). As such, however, it is a disavowal or revocation
(Widerruf) of what is working itself out as the past in the
present, in the present day.
The task of retrieval, in other words, is understood by
Heidegger as essentially critical with regard to the present. It is
what he explicitly calls an unmaking or undoing of the present
(eine Entgegenwrtigung des Heute14) an undoing that understands
history as the return of the possible. Such authentic historical
inquiry, which is the task of destruction (Destruktion), is a
freeing oneself from today, a critique of what appears to be the
present (SZ 397).15 In other words, destruction as critique
retrieves, and in so doing transforms and rethinks, reappropriates,
the concealed forces at work in the present day, which for its part
is a mere facade of history. It is in this sense that Heidegger
invokes the quiet force of the possible as that which is to be
disclosed by authentic historical inquiry (394): such inquiry has
the (always preparatory) task of disclosing history that has been
there in such a way that the force of the possible impacts factical
existence, that is, approaches that existence in its futural
character (395). The possible, this force of the possible, is that
which approaches us from out of what has been: it is what will be
appropriated in and through a thinking that remains always yet to
come.
***
By way of conclusion, I would simply like to indicate that the
significance of Heideggers rethinking of possibility in Being and
Time is signaled by his own retrieval of precisely this theme and
by his renewed appeal to the quiet force of the possible at the
beginning of what is arguably his most important text from the
1940s, the Letter on Humanism. In this later essay, Heidegger
-
again recalls the necessity of freeing our thinking of
possibility and of the possible from the orientation of logic and
of metaphysics that has dominated the history of philosophy and
that thinks possibility and potentiality only in relation to
actuality and existentia (that is, in relation to presence,
conceived as mere presence-at-hand):
Our words possible [mglich] and possibility [Mglichkeit], under
the dominance of logic and metaphysics, are thought solely in
contrast to actuality; that is, they are thought on the basis of a
definitethe metaphysicalinterpretation of being as actus and
potentia, a distinction identified with that between existentia and
essentia. When I speak of the quiet force of the possible I do not
mean the possibile of a merely represented possibilitas, nor
potentia as the essentia of an actus of existentia; rather, I mean
being itself, which in its favoring [mgend] presides over [vermag]
thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means
over its relation to being. To enable [vermgen] something here
means to preserve it in its essence, to maintain it in its element.
(GA 9 316-17; Letter 242)
The quiet force of the possible is now thought as that of being
itself, as the element that enables (ermglicht) thinkinga thinking
that is more originary than philosophy as determined by the Greek
beginning. From the perspective of the Letter on Humanism, we can
now appreciate that it is this element, from out of which the
historical destruction or retrieval of the history of philosophy
itself comes to pass, that was first uncovered and exposed as such
through the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time. In the Letter,
the essence of the possible is conceived in terms of an enabling
(Vermgen) that refers, not to the capability to accomplish
something, as the ability belonging to Dasein or to a Subject, but
to a more originary embracing, loving, bestowal, or favoringthus in
each case to the felicitous giving of a gift, an excess that first
gives rise to the possible, that constitutes its very
emergence:
Thinking isthis says: Being has embraced its [i.e., thinkings]
essence in a destinal manner in each case. To embrace a thing or a
person in their essence means to love them, to favor them. Thought
in a more original way, such favoring means the bestowal of their
essence as a gift. Such favoring [Mgen] is the proper essence of
enabling [Vermgen], which not only can achieve this or that but
also can let something essentially unfold in its pro-venance
[Her-kunft], that is, let it be. It is on the strength [or, by
force: kraft] of such enabling by favoring that something is
properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly possible
-
[das Mgliche], whose essence resides in favoring. From this
favoring being enables thinking. The former makes possible
[ermglicht] the latter. Being is the enabling-favoring, the may-be
[das Mg-liche]. As the element, being is the quiet force of the
favoring-enabling, that is, of the possible. (GA 9 316; Letter
241-42)
Here, the quiet force of the possible is thought as the
propriative force of being that, in a destinal manner, lets
thinking itself be, that is, lets it arrive in its very coming, its
provenance. Heidegger here hyphenates the German word for
provenance, Her-kunft, to indicate once again the primacy of that
coming (Kunft), of that originative force that, in Being and Time,
was thought in terms of the priority of the futural ekstasis in
which Dasein comes toward itself. Here, in the Letter, however,
this coming is thought in terms of the arrival of being itself as
the element of the possible. Heideggers discussion of the quiet
force of the possible in terms of favoring, embrace, and bestowal
here, moreover, unfolds what, in Being and Time, remained
relatively undeveloped within this invocation of a quiet or gentle
force: namely, that the word Kraft, which in German does not carry
the overtones of violence that the English force may suggest, is
not to be understood in terms of any metaphysical or modern
conception of potentiality, power, or energy, but rather in terms
of a gentle strength or resourcefulness that comprises the hidden
preserve of being.16
In this displacement from the futural happening of Dasein to the
destinal happening of being itself as the quiet force of the
possible the emphasis is still on the primacy of the future as the
dimension of the possible. The thinking of being, however, entails
a shift into a happening and a force of thrownness from out of this
very dimension that antecedes and exceeds any subjectivity of
Dasein.17 This force of thrownness, the destinal happening of being
itself as the transmission and freeing of possibility, neither
belongs to Dasein, nor is it a possible object of hermeneutic
phenomenology, which seeks to appropriate and bring to
manifestation, through interpretation, the being of beings that has
already been understood implicitly, that is, projected in advance
in terms of its possibility. The dominant interpretation and
implicit understanding of being in terms of presence-at-hand and
actuality, emerging from the Greek beginning of philosophy, is, in
Being and Time, traced back destructively to the horizon of its
possibility in temporality and thereby shown to be but one,
historically configured interpretation that itself emerges from,
and is itself a response to, a destinal and historical happening of
being itself, an antecedent configuring of
-
possibility, or, in other words: the quiet force of the
possible.
Notes
1 All translations, whether of works without an existing English
translation or of works with an existing English translation, are
the authors own. Pagination will be given in the German edition,
and where an English translation exists, in the English as well.
The original German pagination of Being and Time, found also in the
margins of both the Macquarrie and Robinson and the Stambaugh
translations, will be used for citations throughout.
2 On the intrinsic belonging of possibility to the essence not
merely of the animal, but of the living being in general, see in
particular the 1929-30 course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik:
WeltEndlichkeitEinsamkeit. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 29/30. (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1983). Translated by William McNeill & Nicholas
Walker as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Here it is
once again a question of the actuality of possibilitythe latter
conceived as being capable (Fhigsein)where possibility is not to be
conceived as mere logical possibility and the actuality of
possibility is not to be reduced to the actual deployment or
actualization of such capability:
In the last analysis, possibility and potentiality [Mglichsein
und Knnen] belong precisely to the essence of the animal in its
actuality in a quite specific sensenot merely in the sense that
everything actual, inasmuch as it is at all, must already be
possible as such. It is not this possibility, but rather being
capable which belongs to the animals being actual, to the essence
of life. Only something that is capable, and remains capable, is
alive. (GA 29/30 343; Metaphysics 235)
Correlative to this sense of being capable as intrinsic to the
essence of life in general is the possibility of death and of being
dead:
Something which is no longer capable, irrespective of whether a
capacity is used or not, is no longer alive. Something which does
not exist in the manner of being capable cannot be dead either. The
stone is never dead, because its being is not a being capable []
Dead matter is a meaningless concept. Being capable is not the
possibility of the organism as distinct from something actual, but
is a constitutive moment of the way in which the animal as such
isof its being. (GA 29/30 344; Metaphysics 236)
Once again, it is significant that Heidegger can here, at this
level of the analysis, move back and forth, apparently seamlessly
and unproblematically, between the animal and the essence of life
in general; and where we can speak of the actuality of possibility
as determinative of life in general, there we can also speak of
death in general, of death as a possibility of life. Yet only
apparently unproblematically: at another level of analysis,
Heidegger will problematize precisely whether death and death are
the same in the case of man and animal, thus whether life and life
are the same, whether (the actuality of) possibility and
possibility are the same (GA 29/30 388; Metaphysics 267). And
Heidegger proceeds here to distinguish between dying (Sterben) as a
possibility of the human being and coming to an end or perishing
(Verenden) as the animals only possibility in
-
relation to its death. At issue here, therefore, is ultimately
the being of possibility, the way in which possibility is as a
relation of being. Possibility, Heidegger will try to show (already
in this 1929-30 course), can be given as possibility, as being
possibility, only where there is logos, and only there can the
possibility of impossibility be disclosed, thus, a relation to
death as or in terms of possibility. The being of logos itself
coincides with the thrown-projective character of Dasein, with its
irruption into possibility, an irruption that ruptures possibility
itself, quite literally takes it apart, dissects it, and only
thereby is able to gather it as such. Here, we can only note in
passing that this question of the being of possibility in relation
to logos will be analyzed more incisively by Heidegger in the
summer semester of 1931, in the course on the being and actuality
of force or dunamis in relation to Aristotles analysis in
Metaphysics . See Aristotles, Metaphysik 1-3: Von Wesen und
Wirklichkeit der Kraft. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 33. (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1990). Translated as Aristotles Metaphysics 1-3: On
the Essence and Actuality of Force, by Walter Brogan & Peter
Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). We should
note, furthermore, that Heidegger will maintain the distinction
between dying (as a possibility of the human being) and perishing
(as the possibility of the animal) throughout his later work, and
ground this distinction in the phenomenon of the as, enabled by
logos or the essence of language. For example, in the essay Das
Ding (1950), where he writes: [t]he mortals are the human beings.
They are called mortals because they can die [sterben knnen]. To
die means: to be capable of death as death [den Tod als Tod
vermgen]. Only the human dies. The animal perishes. In: Vortrge und
Aufstze (Pfullingen: Neske 1985), 171. Translated by Albert
Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971), 178. Or in the essay Das Wesen der Sprache (1957-58):
[m]ortals are those who can experience death as death. The animal
is not capable of this. Yet the animal also cannot speak. The
essential relationship between death and language flashes before
us, but is as yet unthought. In Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1979), 215. Translated by Albert Hofstadter in On the Way to
Language (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), 107. For an exploration
of some of the stakes of this delimitation of the human from the
animal see especially Jacques Derrida, De lesprit (Paris: Galile,
1987), and David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and
Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
3 This opening up of the horizon of a world, correlative with
the irruption into, and configuring of, possibility, is what
Heidegger will thematize more explicitly in 1929 and 1930 as the
antecedent event of world-formation (Weltbildung) that first
enables any particular comportment of Dasein. See in particular the
1929 essay Vom Wesen des Grundes in Wegmarken. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 9
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), 123-75. Translated as On the
Essence of Ground by William McNeill in Pathmarks (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97-135; and the 1929-30 course
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.
(op. cit.).
4 The concept of facticity is said to entail the
being-in-the-world of a being within the world, such that this
being can understand itself as bound up [verhaftet] in its destiny
with the being of those beings that it encounters within its own
world Sein und Zeit. 17. Aufl. (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 56.
Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson as Being and
Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). Also by Joan Stambaugh (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996). See also The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. (op. cit)
section 73, where letting oneself be bound (Sich-
-
bindenlassen) by beings is said to characterize the specific
capability of the human, in contrast to the capacity of the
animal.
5 One is here reminded of Hegel, who in the Preface to his
Phenomenology writes of the magical power or magical force
(Zauberkraft) that converts the negative into being and death into
a non-actuality. The proximity of Heidegger to Hegel here is
conspicuous. See Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Meiner,
1952), 29-30. Translated as Phenomenology of Spirit by A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19.
6 In referring to the element of the possible here, and to the
essence of action as accomplishment (Vollbringen), I am alluding to
the later discussion of possibility at the opening of the Letter on
Humanism. (1946). See Brief ber den Humanismus. in Wegmarken. (op.
cit.). Translated as Letter on Humanism by Frank A. Capuzzi in
Pathmarks (op. cit).
7 Thus Heidegger writes that, as thrownprecisely as thrown, thus
as temporalizedDasein has been thrown into the mode of being of
projection. (SZ 145.) This is not Daseins choice. Paradoxical
though it seems, we can catch and hold in presence what has been
thrown only by releasing it, only by letting it go, and we can let
it go, start it on its way, only by projecting it, by projecting it
in terms of a possibility. Yet if it is not primarily or in the
first instance Dasein that is projecting here, then what is it?
What is it that first starts a possibility of being on its way?
This primordial or originating force of thrownness, which Heidegger
will name the quiet force of the possible, I shall suggest, is what
is later thought by Heidegger as the destining or destinal
happening of being (Geschick des Seins).
8 See also SZ 254.
9 See SZ 260.
10 The translation offered here differs from that of the
existing English translations in rendering ausgehalten as
sustained. An authentic relation or comportment toward this most
extreme possibility of being does not merely put up with it
(Macquarrie & Robinson) as something adversial; nor does such
comportment merely endure it (Stambaugh). Rather, ausgehalten, the
only past participle that Heidegger italicizes here, conveys the
sense of a letting be of possibility as such, a sense that will be
further explicated in the following paragraphs.
11 Again, I am suggesting a different translation of ermglicht
here than the Macquarrie & Robinson and Stambaugh translations,
both of which have makes possible.
12 Entschlossen and Entschlossenheit, commonly rendered as
resolute and resoluteness respectively, do not carry the sense of a
willfulness closed off to other possibilities, as these English
translations suggest, but ratherquite to the contrary, as
Heideggers pairing of geschlossen (closed) and entschlossen here
indicatesthe sense of a radical openness toward the closure of the
ekstatic future, thus, toward the nothingness that Dasein must
factically ground as it affirms its own being in and through action
(which, Heidegger insists, must be understood in a broad sense that
encompasses all of Daseins comportments, including theoretical
concerns: see SZ 300).
-
13 The German here reads: Das faktische Dasein existiert
gebrtig, und gebrtig stirbt es auch schon im Sinne des Seins zum
Tode (SZ 374). The existing English translations render existiert
gebrtig by exists as born, implying that Daseins birth is an
already accomplished fact or event, quite contrary to what
Heidegger explicitly states here. It is significant that gebrtig
conveys both the sense of being born, being birthed in the sense of
coming into being, and of giving birth, in the sense of helping
something come into being, and indeed is altogether undecidable
with respect to these two inflections. The natality that Hannah
Arendt would subsequently emphasize as belonging to the essence and
possibility of action is here already seen as intrinsic to Daseins
historicality.
14 See SZ 391, 397.
15 Significantly, Heidegger here embraces Nietzsches conception
of critical history.
16 Again, it is significant in this regard that Heidegger
chooses the German Kraft as the primary translation of Aristotles
dunamis in his 1931 course On the Essence and Actuality of Force
(op. cit.), but also employs the term Vermgen in the (more
restricted) case of dunamis meta logou. The language of possibility
(Mglichkeit) is conspicuously absent for the most part, although
Knnen, potentiality (as in Daseins potentiality or potential for
being) is also used at times. On the issue of terminology, cf.
especially GA 33, 71-74. In his later, 1939 essay On the Essence
and Concept of Phusis in Aristotles Physics, B1, Heidegger chooses
not Kraft, but Eignung, appropriateness, to render its primary
ontological sense: see especially Vom Wesen und Begriff der physis.
Aristoteles, Physik B,1 in Wegmarken. (op cit.), 286-87. Translated
as On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotles Physics, B1,
by Thomas Sheehan in Pathmarks (op. cit) 218-19.
17 In this reading, I am also arguing against Derridas
suggestion, in his interview Eating Well, or the Calculation of the
Subject with Jean-Luc Nancy, that thrownness, Geworfenheitwhich
Derrida rightly identifies as a being-thrown that would be more
primordial than subjectivityis subsequently given to
marginalization in Heideggers thinking. See Who Comes After the
Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc
Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 106-107.
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Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
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- - -. Aristotles, Metaphysik 1-3: Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit
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