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Heidegger on ‘Possibility’
Mark Sinclair
Martin Heidegger’s project in Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit, 19271 ) involves a critique of a form of ‘actualism’ in philosophy together with the promotion of a certain idea of possibility. This first emerges in the remarks in §7 of the text concerning the idea of phenomenology as a school or method in 20th-century philosophy: the “essential character” of phenomenology, Heidegger writes, “does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement’. Higher than actuality stands possibility (Möglichkeit)” [SZ 38]. Heidegger thus seems to advance the doubtless difficult thought that the possibility of something, here the phenomenological school, is more proper to what or how it is than its actuality. The thought is advanced more deliberately later in the text: “possibility”, Heidegger writes in §31, “is the most primordial and the ultimate ( ursprünglichste und letze ) positive ontological determination” [SZ 143] of being – of, first of all, the being (the Dasein , in Heidegger’s German) that each one of us is. Far, then, from having merely a methodological significance within a reflection on the idea of phenomenology, a notion of possibility as somehow constitutive of the essence of being is, for Heidegger, the base and the summit, the alpha and omega of ontology. Possibility, on this account, is not distinct from being, and it does not constitute a realm of possibilia that is not quite, not yet or not fully in being; it rather belongs to the essence of being itself, and it can do so because being, for Heidegger, is not to be equated with traditional ideas of ‘actuality’. Whatever else the text of 1927 has to say about the meaning of being – with its most fundamental task consisting of showing how time is the “‘horizon of any understanding of being whatsoever” [SZ 1] –, at the very heart of Sein und Zeit stands a reflection on Sein und Möglichkeit, on being and possibility.
(^1) I refer to the fifteenth edition of Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984) in square brackets in the body of the text as SZ. Both published English translations of the text contain the pagination of the German edition as marginalia, and thus I do not refer to them. I am indebted to Matt Barnard and Joseph Carter for responses to drafts of this essay.
In the lecture course of the winter semester 1925-26, Logic: The Question Concerning Truth, Heidegger had signalled the importance of an idea of possibility for his philosophical project. He suggests that his task consists in clarifying the nature of possibility as such:
[t]he concept of possibility is quite obscure [ ganz ungeklärt ] in scientific philosophy hitherto; and the extent to which it is clarified is normally limited to possibility in the sense of modality, of modality which is seen in the context of statements and their possible certainty. In this way, the idea of possibility is bound up with actuality and necessity as determinations of being, and indeed of the being of nature in the widest sense. The meaning of possibility and the type of structures of possibility belonging to Dasein as such have remained wholly concealed from us up to the present day.^2
These remarks contain two important clues for understanding Heidegger’s thinking in the 1920s and its relation to traditional doctrines of modality. First, possibility will not be determined according to what can be said and conceived, and this indicates that Heidegger’s problematic transcends the question of whether conceivability is merely a guide to rather than a test for possibility, and also any de re / de dictu distinction in modal statements.^3 If one can justifiably claim that there are “in Western thought, three broad conceptions of possibility”,^4 Heidegger is concerned neither with a critical theory of modality in a Kantian sense, nor with a doctrine of possibilia as distinct from the actual world, but rather with – though he aims to radicalise it – possibility in an Aristotelian sense of potentiality as an ontological determination of real things that is the condition of, and contrasts with, their actuality. Second, Heidegger’s radicalisation of possibility in this sense will not focus on the things that we are not – ‘nature in the widest sense’
- but rather on the being that we are. It is by focusing on human being that Heidegger aims to grasp a sense of possibility as constitutive of the very essence of being, and thus to rethink the very idea of possibility.
This emphasis on an idea of possibility does not end with the Daseinsanalytik of Being and Time and Heidegger’s project of ‘fundamental ontology’ in the 1920s. It is equally essential to his later work. According to Contributions to Philosophy, a text written between 1936 and 1938 that is often held to constitute Heidegger’s second major work, it is precisely by means of a notion of possibility that ‘another beginning’ ( ein anderer Anfang ) in philosophy can be instituted: “the
(^2) Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgae vol. 21: Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit , ed. W. Biemel (Frankfirt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), p.228; Logic: The Question of Truth , trans. T. Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana, 2010), p.191. After having initially provided a full bibliographical reference to a volume of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe , and to its English translation, I refer to it with the abbreviation GA followed by the volume number, page number, and, after a forward slash, the page number of the translation. I have often modified the translations, as in the passage cited: translating ganz ungeklärt as ‘wholly unclarified’, instead of ‘quite obscure’, makes Heidegger contradict himself in the following sentence. 3 For a range of contemporary treatments of this issue see Conceivability and Possibility , ed. T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4 J. N. Mohanty, ‘Husserl on “Possibility”’, Husserl Studies 1 (1984) 13-29, p.21.
being and time , Heidegger had attempted to retrieve a conception of being as Möglichsein from the Stagirite.
The second section of the essay address Heidegger’s account of Dasein as a being-possible in terms of its movedness, while the third shows how this movedness is ultimately to be thought as the movement of time – time in the particular sense in which Heidegger accounts for it, namely as temporality. The fourth section then shows how a proper grasp of Dasein’s movedness as a being-possible allows us to understand Heidegger’s controversial analysis of death as the ‘possibility of the impossibility’ of existence. Yet the scope of this paper is limited neither to Heidegger’s account of Dasein as a being-possible nor to his philosophical project in the 1920s. For after having examined the modal sense of the account of tool-being in Being and Time in the first section of the paper, the fifth section is concerned to show how Heidegger’s reflection on the ‘modality’ of art production in the 1930s introduces a shift in his interpretation of possibility and his interpretation of Aristotle’s modal thinking in a way that is pivotal for his Kehre.
1. Handiness and Being-Possible
In Being and Time possibility is both a ‘category ( Kategorie )’ and an ‘existential ( Existeniale )’, which is to say that it characterises the being of things as well as the being – the Existenz – of Dasein, the being that we are. Although Heidegger does not dwell on this dichotomy, it is important to recognise it for, as I will show, it is a changed conception of possibility in relation to the things that we are not that is at the heart of his Kehre in the 1930s. The brief remarks on possibility as a category in §31 of Being and Time , however, presuppose the famous analysis of tool-being or handiness earlier in the text. §§15-18 advance the claim that prior to being the isolated objects of a disinterested theoretical gaze, things shows themselves as pointing beyond themselves within the horizon of my practical concerns. Things are apprehended as ‘useable for’, ‘good for’ a particular purpose, and in the given situation each thing is seen in relation to others: the hammer, for example, points beyond itself to the nails and to the boards within the horizon of the task at hand. Things in their individuality withdraw themselves from my attention to the degree that they are used, to the degree that I am absorbed by my practical project, but, for Heidegger, this claim has ontological and not merely psychological significance. Things encountered within the horizon of my practical concerns are zuhanden – their being, in other words, is not objectivity, or an indeterminate notion of ‘reality in general’, but rather Zuhandenheit , being-ready-to-hand. Being ready-to-hand is not simply a property of something, of something vorhanden, as Heidegger puts it
- which is to say, explicitly present as an object.^9 It is still less the product of a merely subjective judgment or valuation. Being-ready-to-hand is rather a pre-thematic purposiveness that is intrinsic to things, and which determines how they exist, their way of being.
Certainly, this intrinsic purposiveness does not occur without the practical project of the agent; the thing cannot be purposeful without someone with a purpose. According to §31, the purposiveness of the thing is a function of Dasein’s pre-predicative, pre-conceptual understanding, which constitutes the horizon in which things appear. This practical horizon is one aspect of what Heidegger understands as ‘world’, which is not a thing or a collection of things, and rather belongs to Dasein’s being as in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world.^10 The understanding of this practical horizon of world is no mere passive reception of the given, but a projection or Entwurf that structures the agent’s dealings with particular things. Yet projection here is not to be understood in the sense of a secondary, and ultimately fictive interpretation of intrinsically purposeless things vorhanden. Instead, the pre-thematic purposiveness at once understood and projected by the agent determines, on Heidegger’s account, the very being of things ready-to-hand. In our every comportment towards beings, Heidegger contends, there is an understanding of these beings in their being, and in engaging with what is ready-to-hand, there is and must be an understanding of their being -ready-to-hand.
In §18 Heidegger had discussed Dasein’s encountering of things ready-to-hand within the horizon of a practical project as a Freigabe , as a making-free or freeing-up of the thing for what it is good for; things, insofar as I engage with them, are freed up to be what or, better, how they are, namely ready-to-hand. However, in §31, which contains some of Being and Tine’s most programmatic remarks on possibility , he accounts for this freeing-up, briefly but no less emphatically, in modal terms: “when that which is in the world is itself freed, this entity is freed for its own possibilities. The ready-to-hand is discovered as such in its service ability , us ability , detriment ality [Dien lichkeit , Verwend barkeit , Abträg lichkeit ]” [SZ 145]. Within the horizon of my practical projects thing are encountered as useful, useable, available, or, on the contrary, as unavailable or as detrimental, and this practical possibility, this form of practical modality, does not just reside in the agent’s thoughts – in my, as Kant would have it, merely subjective teleological judgments. There is an awareness of modality prior to explicit conceptual thought,
(^9) The sense of the reference to the hand in the term Vorhandenheit – which for Heidegger serves to translate existentia [SZ 42] – is clarified only by Heidegger’s ‘destruction of the history of ontology’, an essential element of his project of fundamental ontology. One aspect of this ‘destruction’ concerns the way in which being in the philosophical tradition means being-produced, being-(hand)made. On this point, see Chapter 1 of my Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art. 10 See §15 of Being and Time.
Zuhandenheit. Yet there is nevertheless an essential difference in their approaches: for Heidegger, it is not simply the case that the actual thing is present within an ultimately practical horizon of pre-delineated possibilities or potentialities. The very being of the thing, Heidegger urges us to recognise, is something other than actuality or Vorhandenheit precisely insofar as it recedes from conscious awareness as an isolated object when I purposefully go about my projects. In short, Husserl sees individual things with a halo or shadow inviting a practical response, whereas Heidegger sees things as intrinsically and pre-thematically interrelated, each pointing beyond itself within the teleological horizon of the given situation.
Certainly, one might wonder whether in his account of tool-being Heidegger exaggerates the extent to which things are pre-objective or non-thematically apprehended in practical experience. One might also wonder why he begins with tools and the world of the workshop in a narrow sense in order to account for practical experience in general.^13 For our present purposes, however, it is sufficient to note that an account of this pre-thematic projective understanding of possibility is no mere ancillary detail in a theory of modality. On the contrary, it constitutes a fundamental awareness of modality, an awareness given prior to the explicit grasp of conceptual possibility, i.e. to concepts of what could be objectively present. This particular form of modal understanding is prior to conceptual possibility, just as, on Heidegger’s account, things are first encountered as zuhanden before their possible apparition as objectively present, as vorhanden. Yet this epistemological precedence is accompanied by an ontological superiority. In the case of possibility as “modal category of Vorhandenheit ”, Heidegger writes, “possibility means what is not yet actual and what is never necessary. It characterises what is merely possible. Ontologically it is on a lower level than actuality and necessity” [SZ 143]. We might understand possibility in this sense as “mere empty logical possibility” [SZ 143], or in in a more real or metaphysical sense, following Kant, as characterising that which accords with the – transcendental – conditions of experience, but in either case it characterises a deficient mode of being. Within Heidegger’s analysis of tool-being, in contrast, possibility determines the fullest and most original mode of the being or existence of things. Traditional doctrines of modality have passed over this sense of possibility; and they have passed over it precisely because of the predominance of an idea of existence understood – in different ways, certainly, at different moments of the tradition – as objective presence. For Heidegger, throughout the tradition the modal categories – actuality, necessity, possibility – are modes of objective presence, i.e. of existence or actuality, with one of the modes standing thus as the measure of the other two – or else all three are taken as modes of
(^13) On both these questions, see the second chapter of my Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).
‘something’ other, i.e. of being, the meaning of which has never been adequately brought into question.
On this basis, and even before examining Heidegger’s analysis of human being or Dasein as a being-possible, we gain a preliminary understanding of the stakes of his critique of actualism in philosophy. ‘Actualism’ here does not simply signify the doctrine according to which only actual things – the table, say, that I am writing on – exist, as opposed to possible things – the unicorn, say, I am thinking about – , which, claims the actualist, have no being at all. From Heidegger’s perspective, ‘actualism’, more fundamentally, amounts to the idea that being or existence is identical to actuality, i.e. to objective presence. Actualism in this more fundamental sense is, in the end, the prior ground of actualism in the narrower, contemporary sense, i.e. of attempts to exclude possible things from the realm of being: it is by assuming that being means objective presence that possibles are excluded from its domain as a result of being insufficiently objective or present. This is not to say, of course, that Heidegger is on the side of the ‘possibilists’ within contemporary debates in the metaphysics of modality. He is little concerned with the status of possibilia, with possibility in the sense of possibly objectively present, i.e. possibly actual things.^14 He rather devotes his entire philosophical career to the commitment that the meaning of being cannot, or at least should not, be restricted to objective presence – and instead of wondering if and to what extent possibilities are actual, Heidegger urges us to question the predominance of ideas of actuality in metaphysics.
2. Dasein’s Movedness as Being-Possible
Heidegger points to the peculiar modal status of being-ready-to-hand almost in passing in §31, and his more basic concern in this section is to elucidate, at least provisionally, the being of Dasein as a being-possible. Dasein understands the particular possibilities afforded to it by things encountered pre-objectively, yet it does this only against the background of an understanding of its own projects, projects that are but possibilities of its own being.^15 I can choose to do one thing or another, and this means that I can choose to become, as is sometimes said, one particular person or another – hero or traitor, stoic or coward, dissolute or disciplined. Yet
(^14) As Michael Inwood notes, Heidegger is not directly concerned with any form of modality in a logical sense, and he “has no more interest in logical necessity than in logical possibility”; A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p.172. 15 As Heidegger puts it: understanding “projects the being of Dasein with respect to that for the sake of which it exists with equal primordiality as it projects Dasein ’s being with respect to the significance that constitutes the worldliness of a particular world” [SZ 145].
sense ‘chooses’ and the nature of the possibilities from which it ‘chooses’.^16 Dasein does not sit in judgment on objective possibilities that are simply indifferent to it, and it does not survey these possibilities from a position external to them; on the contrary, it always and already finds itself in a world, with a history, and thus as already having taken up definite possibilities:
In every case, Dasein … has already got itself into definite possibilities. As the potentiality-for- being ( Seinkönnen ) which it is , it has let such possibilities pass by; it is constantly waiving the possibilities of its being, or else it seizes upon them and makes mistakes. But this means that Dasein is being-possible ( Möglichsein ) which has been delivered over to itself – thrown possibility through and through [SZ 144]. 17
Dasein’s understanding of possibilities is certainly a function of a projection or Entwurf, but this projection is itself always and already projected or thrown [ geworfen ] in that we always and already finds ourselves in a given situation, with a world and at a particular point in history. Dasein is bound to this world and history and dependent on it. Possibility in some sense constitutes the essence of Dasein’s freedom, but according to this idea of throwness, Dasein’ s freedom is not absolute; Dasein , to be sure, is not autonomous in the sense of self-grounding.^18
Yet if Dasein is not an ahistorical, isolated, self-grounding subject, then just as little are the possibilities it ‘chooses’ objects for it:
… the character of understanding as projection is such that the understanding does not grasp thematically that upon which it projects – that is to say, possibilities. Grasping it in such a manner would take away from what is projected its very character as a possibility, and would reduce it to the given contents which we have in mind [SZ 145].
The possibilities offered by things can be understood conceptually and reflectively; but prior to this, Dasein has an understanding of a different strata of possibilities, which ultimately are possibilities of its being, and which are pre-thematic, pre-predicative and pre-conceptual. This priority constitutes, again, an ontological superiority rather than deficiency; possibility in this sense, according to Being and Time , is possibility in the most genuine sense. Heidegger even seems to argue that an intellectualist construal of possibility – i.e. understanding possibility as conceptual or ideal – would reduce possibility to actuality, for conceptual possibilities, though not actually present in the world, are nevertheless concepts of possibly actual things or events.
(^16) For a recent discussion of ‘choice’ as irreducible to intellectual deliberation in Heidegger’s text, see Béatrice Han- Pile, ‘Freedom and the ‘Choice to Choose to Oneself’ in The Cambridge Companion to Being and Time , ed. M. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp.291-319. 17 Passages like this suggest that Heidegger aims in some sense to distinguish Dasein ’s potentiality-for-being or ability-to-be, ( Seinkönnen ) from its ‘being-possible’ ( Möglichsein ). It is far from obvious, however, that Heidegger is attempting to mark the difference between “our life projects, on the one hand, and our projecting ourselves into those projects, on the other”, as Iain Thomson claims without elucidating or substantiating his claim in any way; ‘Death and Demise in Being and Time ’, The Cambridge Companion to Being and Time , ed. M. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 260-290, p.269. 18 On this point, see Section III of William McNeill, ‘Rethinking the Possible: On the Radicalization of Possibility in Heidegger’s Being and Time ’.
Heidegger may well be gesturing here at a combinatorial construal of possibility: conceptual possibilities are, in the end, actualities, because these concepts, like all concepts, as one might claim, derive from sense-experience. For the combinatorialist, unicorns, though not actual, are possible precisely and only insofar as their idea is combined from those of actual horses and horns. If this is Heidegger’s intention, his approach, it is worthwhile to remark, shares common ground with the account of possibility that Henri Bergson, a thinker to whose conception of time as duration Heidegger is evidently indebted, was developing at around the same time. In his ‘ Le possible et le réel ’,^19 Bergson argues, in endorsing a traditional identification of possibility with conceivability, that the possible does not precede the real, as, say, Leibniz had it, but rather follows from it, since our ideas of what can be possible derive only from reality. On this basis, Bergson offers a particular and radical response to the oft-invoked difficulty of accounting for novelty within a combinatorial construal of possibility: things or events, in their novelty, are not possible before they occur. Macbeth , say, was not possible before it was written precisely because it was not foreseeable, i.e. conceivable before it was written; and it became possible, i.e. conceivable, only as an actually existing work of art. Now, Heidegger could accept all of the elements of this critique of possibility as conceivability, but, in distinction to Bergson, he aims to think under the heading of ‘possibility’ a more fundamental sense of modality that is irreducible to conceivability.^20
According to Being and Time, in any event, Dasein is not distinct from the pre-conceptual possibilities that it projects and understands, for these possibilities are, at bottom, possibilities of its own being. Yet is not enough to say that Dasein is not distinct from the possibilities that it projectively understands, for Heidegger’s fundamental claim is that Dasein is the possibilities that it projects:
… projection, in throwing, throws before itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as such. As projecting, understanding is the kind of being of Dasein in which it is its possibilities as possibilities [SZ 145].
(^19) It was published in the 1934 volume La pensée et le mouvant , ed. F. Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009). 20 In La poétique du possible: phénoménologie herméneutique de la figuration (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984, p.35), Richard Kearney thus rightly notes that, from Heidegger’s perspective, we have to distance ourselves from Bergson’s conception of possibility. Felix O’Murchadha’s contrasting claim ( The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronis in Heidegger, London: Continuum, 2013) that Bergson and Heidegger “share the thought” that “if we are to understand possibility on the basis of freedom, then it can no longer be thought as a realm of present options which can be chosen” (p.24) is unhelpful in that it goes beyond anything that Bergson actually says about possibility. On the question, however, of how Bergson’s philosophy does require a more positive sense of modality than the critique of possibility he presents in 1934, see my ‘Bergson on Possibility and Novelty’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 96/1 (2014) 104-125.
has not finished that the possible can genuinely appear as the possible. Of course, given that the realisation of a possibility, in the case of a movement, is the abolition of that possibility, Heidegger’s is also claiming that possibility genuinely appears only on the way to its abolition. Despite its air of paradox, Aryeh Kosman has more recently advanced a similar interpretation: Aristotle’s definition of movement attempts to reveal “the activity of being able to be”,^25 an activity that does not yet characterise the idle potentiality of the wood to form a statue and that is no longer possessed by the statue as a finished product.
In order to understand Aristotle’s definition of movement, and Heidegger’s interpretation of it, it is crucial to see that there are levels of potentiality: the potentiality of the wood to form a statue is latent and inactive when the wood is not being worked on, but manifest as an “active potentiality”, a tätige Möglichkeit,^26 when the word undergoes change by means of the work of the craftsman. Movement or change in the widest sense is certainly movement from something to something, from one state to another, from potentiality to actuality, but it is the peculiar being of this from-to structure, of this being on the way to completion, a being on the way where possibility fully exists as possibility , that is the focus of Heidegger’s interest in Aristotle’s conception of movement.^27 It is the peculiar “presence ( Gegenwart ) of this being-from-to ( Von-zu-Sein )”^28 structure that is at issue, as Heidegger claims in 1924 – and it this that he will incorporate within an account of the movedness proper to Dasein. Dasein is somehow stretched out between its possibilities and their realisation. Indeed, as Heidegger will put it in Part II of Being and Time , the movedness of Dasein is a function of a “stretching”, which is necessarily a “ stretched out self- stretching [ erstreckten Sicherstreckens ]” [SZ 374-5] since there is no external agency which stretches Dasein out. It is insofar as Dasein is stretched out in this way that, on the one hand , its possibilities
(^25) Aryeh Kosman, The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), p.68. Kosman acknowledges a kinship with Heidegger. 26 Heidegger writes this in his Handschriften to the lecture course of the summer semester 1924: GA18 378/256. In his ‘Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode as Radicalization of Aristotle’s Definition of Kinesis ’ ( Epoché 18/2, 2014, 473-502), and by showing that Heidegger is offering an account of levels of potentiality in Aristotle, Joseph Carter easily rebuts Francisco Gonzalez’s claim (‘Whose Metaphysics of Presence? Heidegger’s Interpretation of Energeia and Dunamis ’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 44: 533-68) that Heidegger offers a muddled interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of movement in the lecture course of 1924. 27 Heidegger was certainly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard’s transposition of Aristotle’s modal categories within his religiously motivated psychological reflections, but another essay would be able to show that it is precisely through this interpretation of movement as a mode of being that the German philosopher goes beyond the remarkable and enigmatic reflections of the Dane. 28 Heidegger, GA18 315/212. Husserl’s account of the horizons constitutive of experience was certainly significant for Heidegger’s account of being and possibility, as we saw in the first section of this essay, and as Iain Macdonald contends in ‘“What is, is more than it is”: Heidegger and Adorno and the Priority of Possibility’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19(1): 31-57. It is, however, only an idea of movement that enables the break-through to an account of Dasein’s being as a being-possible; Husserl’s static analysis of the ideal horizons constituting the present thing does not yet bring us to an idea of Dasein as stretched out beyond itself, beyond the present, according to the peculiar from-to structure characteristic of movement. See also U. Haase and M. Sinclair, ‘History and the Meaning of Life’ in Heidegger in the Twenty-First Century , ed. T. Giorgakis and P. Ennis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015).
can fully and genuinely exist as possibilities, and that, on the other hand , it can exist as these possibilities. In existing, Dasein certainly moves from particular possibilities to their realisation, but the being of Dasein – as a being that is always in ‘movement’, as a being that is not, for as long as it is alive, a ‘finished product’ – consists in the peculiar stretched-out being or activity of the possible that is its movement.
Although Dasein can realise particular possibilities, it can never simply be those possibilities actualised, for it is continually in movement, continually on the way to another possibility of its own being. Dasein can be the possibilities that it understands and projects, possibilities that it is not yet – but it can never simply be the possibilities once actualised since it is always more than it actually is, always on the way to another possibility of its own being. “ 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 towards the potential for being that it itself is” [SZ 191-2], as Heidegger will put it in §42 of Being and Time. It is in precisely this sense that Dasein , in its being, is a Seinkönnen [SZ 144], which is to say a being-possible, an ability to be or a potentiality-for-being. Thus, as Heidegger argues in §31:
Dasein is constantly ‘more’ than it factually is, supposing that one might want to make an inventory of it as something-at-hand and list the contents of its being, and supposing that one were able to do so. But it is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity potentiality-for- Being belongs essentially. Yet as Being-possible, moreover, Dasein is never anything less; that is to say, it is existentially that which, in its potentiality-for-Being, it is not yet [SZ 145].^29
The distinction between factuality and facticity is key here: if one thinks being ‘factually’ and, that is to say, according to a traditional idea of actuality, Dasein , in being stretched out and thus always ahead of itself, is either less or more than what it is. Yet the ‘less’ as much as the ‘more’ here presupposes an ontological standard that is wholly inadequate, Heidegger contends, to the Faktizität or facticity, to the particular kind of worldly and historical being of Dasein as a potentiality-for-being.
(^29) Against the background of this paragraph, Judith Wolfe argues ( Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p.119) that Heidegger’s account of possibility in § of Being and Time “can be criticised on Heidegger’s own terms as a spatialization of being-as-possibility. Because Dasein is its possibility (in the present) rather than relating to any particular possibility (in the future), no particular choice or event actually matters for its essence”. On the contrary, every particular choice Dasein makes matters for it, because what it decides and does becomes – as we will see – its factical and thrown having-been which is constitutive of what, or, better, who Dasein is. This analysis of possibility in Part I of Being and Time, as will become clear below, does not contradict Part II of the text, but leads to it. Wolfe does not elucidate why exactly Heidegger’s analysis in these pages amounts to a spatialisation of Dasein , and the additional contention that “in thus ‘spatialising’ possibility, Part I retains, despite its phenomenological method, characteristics of a philospohia perennis: a philosophy arrogating to itself a God’s-eye-view from outside factic experience” is little more than an arbitrary assertion.
expression of a deep-rooted ‘metaphysics of presence’. The eternalist merely extends the domain of the actual in holding that the past and future are equally as real or actual (i.e. present), as the present, the difference between these aspects of time being merely one of our limited perspective, of our frame of reference.^31 Heidegger’s concern, in contrast, is to question the primacy of actuality and of presence, and their role as ontological standards. Being, he argues, at least in the case of Dasein’s being, involves the past and the future in such a way that being ‘is’ not simply presence. Dasein is its past, and is its future; and it is both in a way that goes beyond any ordinary or traditional conception of time reducing existence to the standards of the present. The past and future somehow exist – which is not to say that they are present or that they are in any sense things – because Dasein ’s past and future are not a series of now-points that are, respectively, no longer or not yet present.
“‘Future [ Zukunft ]”, in the most profound or original sense, “does not mean a now that has not yet become actual and that sometime will be for the first time, but the coming [ Kunft ] in which Dasein comes toward itself in its ownmost potentiality for being” [SZ 325]. The future thus understood is so fundamental to Dasein’s being as an ability-to-be that Heidegger can claim its pre-eminence in relation to the past and present [SZ 337]. Nevertheless, the future is what it is only by means of the past, understood in the particular sense of the ‘beenness’ or Gewesenheit of Dasein ; “only insofar Dasein is as ‘I have been’ can it futurally come toward itself in such a way that it comes back” [SZ 352]. The past in this sense is what it is by means of Wiederhölung [SZ 375], which is not merely a reiteration of the same, but repetition with a difference , a productive repetition that takes up what has been as a source of possibility for the future. Dasein’s having- been is not a realm of dead necessity, and yet the possibilities it bequeaths are what they are only in their repetition through the openness of the future. If the future presupposes the past, therefore, it does so only to same degree that having-been itself presupposes the future: “Dasein can only be its been-ness insofar as it is futural” [SZ 352]. There is a mutual inherence of Dasein’s having-been and its futurity, and time as temporality in this sense “does not mean a ‘succession’ (‘ Nacheinander ’)” of what Heidegger terms the “ecstases” of past, present and future; “the future is not later than having-been, and this is not earlier than the present” [SZ 350]. Beenness is not a series of ‘nows’ that are no longer, and the future is not a series of ‘nows’ that are not yet. Instead, the past, the present and the future all ‘occur’, as it were, ‘at the same time’.
(^31) For some interesting remarks on Heidegger’s account of time in relation to the presentism/eternalism distinction within 20 th-century ‘analytic’ philosophy of time, see Jack Reynolds, ‘The Analytic/Continental Divide: A Contretemps ?’ in The Antipodean Philosopher , Vol. 1, ed. G. Oppy, N. Rakakis, L. Burns (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2011), 239-254.
If Dasein ’s being is a form of movement or movedness, then, as Heidegger argues in Part II of Being and Time, time is of the essence of this movedness. Dasein is the movedness of time, where original time is no simple ‘passage’, ‘flow’ or ‘process’, but ‘ecstatic temporality’ wherein the ‘ecstases’ of future, present and past are not independent parts or mutually exclusive aspects of time.^32 According to this ecstatic temporal structure, it is not the case that possibilities bequeathed by Dasein’s having-been in any given situation simply pre-exist the present. They certainly do not pre-exist the present like the possible worlds that Leibniz’s God surveys before the actualisation of the best among them. They do not even pre-exist the present in the sense of constituting an ever-growing block of former actualities, an independently existing reservoir of possibilities into which Dasein , from time to time, can ‘dip’. On Heidegger’s account, possibilities are rather what they are only through their futural repetition, through their revitalising retrieval, and do not exist independently of the latter.^33 Consequently, it makes little sense to wonder whether possibility chronologically precedes actuality or vice versa. Recall that in Metaphysics IX Aristotle is concerned to determine whether actuality is ontologically, epistemologically but also chronologically prior to possibility.^34 Once we recognise, however, with Heidegger, that ecstatic temporality is ontologically prior to and makes possible chronos or clock-time, then we arrive at the insight that possibility is not temporally prior to actuality. Both arrive, as it were, ‘at the same time’, and, in the event, co-constitute the shock of the new.
Dasein , then, is stretched out ecstatically between its past and future in such a way that the possibilities bequeathed by its ‘having-been’ are intrinsically futural. It is only insofar as it is ecstatically stretched-out in this manner that possibility can be higher than actuality, and that Dasein can exist as a potentiality-for-being. As Heidegger puts it in a lecture course of 1928:
(^32) Joseph Carter (‘Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode as Radicalisation of Aristotle’s Definition of Kinesis ’, p.474) has asked: “if temporality is the fundamental aspect of the being of Dasein , then why does Heidegger also remark that Dasein is constituted in terms of motion? Are these two ways at odds, or might there be something more to Dasein’s temporality that is not made explicit in the text?”. I hope to have clarified that what is not made explicit in Being and Time is how Heidegger’s thinking – in the 1920s as a whole and also in the two published parts of the text – moves from an analysis of Dasein ’s movedness as a potentiality-for-being to the account of temporality that that analysis requires and presupposes. 33 In 1928 Heidegger explicitly criticises Bergson’s version of this ‘growing-block’ theory of the past in itself; see GA 26 266/206. 34 Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, 1049b13. Aristotle’s remarks concerning the chronological priority: “possibility in one sense is prior, in another sense not”. In Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962, pp.442-3) Pierre Aubenque uses this dual response in support of his argument that Aristotle’s account of movement is already ecstatic in Heidegger’s sense: “the debate concerning the respective priority of possibility and actuality is a false debate. Actuality and possibility are co-originary; they are only the ecstases of movement; only the clash of possibility and actuality at the heart of movement is real; only the violence of human discourse … can maintain dissociated … the originary tension which constitutes, in its unity that is ever divided, the being of the being in movement.”
history either concerned or unconcerned with the ‘facts’ amounts to a false debate: if historical facts are understood merely as past actualities, then Heidegger certainly urges us to look beyond them, but if they are understood in their facticity , and that is to say, as a manifestation of Dasein’s potentiality-for-being, then the study of history, at least in the existentialist mode of history that Heidegger presupposes, should begin and end with them.^38
Such an existentialist mode of historical study is grounded on a particular, authentic mode of Dasein’s being-historical, an authentic mode of Geschichtlichkeit or historicity, in which the past as possible is genuinely ‘repeated’ for the sake of the future: “only by historicity [ Geschichtlichkeit ] which is factical and authentic can the history [ Historie ] of what has-been-there […] be disclosed in such a manner than in repetition the ‘force’ of the possible gets struck home into one’s factical existence” [SZ 395].^39 In this sense, the historical world is the domain of the possible not simply because it is the history of former potentialities for being, but also because it is what it is only a function of the futurity of Dasein in the present. We might ordinarily think that the historical past is a domain of necessity since we can no longer do anything about it, but, for Heidegger, the past in its sense and significance for us is still to come. Thus, as he writes in 1928:
The actuality of what has been resides in its possibility. The possibility becomes manifest as the answer to a living question that sets before itself a futural present in the sense of “what can we do?” The objectivity of the historical resides in the inexhaustibility of possibilities, and not in the fixed rigidity of a result.^40
The study of history should not, pace the young Nietzsche of the 2 nd^ Untimely Meditation , be sometimes critical, sometimes antiquarian and sometimes monumental. It should, as Heidegger contends in §76 of Being and Time , be all three all at once; and as always monumental, it should
(^38) Felix O’Murchadha responds to the claim of David Hoy (‘History, Historicity and Historiography in Being and Time in M. Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) that the historian should not be concerned with facts but with possibilities thus: “[i]t is indeed the case that Heidegger states the theme of historiography to be the possibility of having-been existence. The theme is, however, the ‘horizon’ of a projection, which holds a particular region of entities […]. Within this horizon are the objects of the specific sciences, the entities as present-at-hand. Historiography does not disclose its theme in its truth. It remains tied to its objects. Without understanding this difference between theme and object, Heidegger’s attempt to transcend historiography and chronology must remain obscure” ( The Time of Revolution , p.27). Heidegger does not, however, attempt to ‘transcend’ historiography (i.e. the study of history) but rather to lead the historian to conduct it in the right way; and there is no justification for considering the ‘theme’ of historiography as a kind of transcendental condition that is presupposed by but not directly accessible to the historian. 39 See Costantino Esposito, Heidegger. Storia e fenomenologia del possibile (Bari: Levante editori, 1992), and particularly its chapter ‘La storiografia come scienza del possibile’ for a longer exposition of Heidegger’s claims concerning history and possibility. 40 GA 26 88/72.
always be concerned with what we can do now and in the future, with the past as a source of possibility for the present and future.^41
4. Death as the Possibility of Impossibility
No examination of Heidegger’s treatment of possibility could hope to be comprehensive without discussion of his account of death [ Tod ] as the “possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein ” [SZ 262]. This account has long been a matter of controversy, but my aim here is to show how an adequate grasp of Dasein’s being-possible as movedness allows us better to understand it, and allows us to avoid the more extreme positions taken in relation to it within the secondary literature.
How can I understand death? I cannot experience my own death, given that I will no longer exist at the moment it occurs. I can experience only dying, in the sense of the moments before death, but not my death itself. “Death”, as Heidegger writes, “gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualised’, nothing which Dasein , as actual, could itself be ” [SZ 262]. For all that death is the end of my existence is not an actual event in that existence, not even the final one. Yet there is, Heidegger contends, another reason for death’s lack of actuality: I do not experience death when witnessing somebody else ‘pass away’. I certainly witness their passing from being-alive to being- dead, but I do not, despite our ordinary use of language and the gravity of the event, experience their death, for death, in its most proper sense, is always my death. 42 Death is, as Heidegger puts it, “non-relational ( unbezüglich )” [SZ 250], since no one can experience my death with me, and in this sense one always dies alone. Death is the “ownmost ( eigenste )” [SZ 250] characteristic of Dasein , since no one can die in my place and it is radically individualising. Someone can heroically save my life at the cost of his own, but nobody can take my death upon themselves in the sense of experiencing it for me, and nobody can save me from the necessity of facing it at some time.
Is death, then, a necessity? “Nobody doubts that one dies” [SZ 257], and the fact that no exception has yet been found to the proposition that all men are mortal may seem to amount to
(^41) Heidegger’s relatively generous interpretation of Nietzsche’s 2 nd^ Untimely Meditation in §76 of Being and Time is altered significantly in his 1938 seminar on the text; see Gesamtausgabe vol. 46: Zur Auslegung von Nietszches II. Unzeitgemässer Betractung , which is soon to be published in English translation by U. Haase and M. Sinclair as Interpretati 42 on of Nietzsche’s 2nd^ Untimely Meditation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). It is not possible here to address the numerous critiques of Heidegger’s distinction between my death and the death of the other, but see Daniel Dahlstrom, ‘Authenticity and the Absence of Death’ in Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time , ed. D. McManus (London: Routledge, 2015) 146-162 for a recent response to the issue.
