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BUBBIO, Paolo. - Hegel, Heidegger, and The I
BUBBIO, Paolo. - Hegel, Heidegger, and The I
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Abstract: In this paper, I contend that both Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophies can
be regarded as attempts to overcome Cartesian subjectivism and to by-pass traditional
oppositions between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the ‘I.’
I explore Hegel’s notion of the ‘I,’ stressing how Hegel takes up Kant’s ‘I-think,’
freeing Kant’s philosophy from its subjectivism. Then, I submit that Heidegger, in the
twentieth century, was similarly concerned with the overcoming of subjectivism, and
that an analysis of his notion of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) and its development in the
context of Heidegger’s thought can support this argument.
Finally, I suggest that Hegel’s and Heidegger’s analyses can be used to elaborate
an alternative and more flexible model of the ‘I,’ which avoids individualism, allows
thinking of the formation of the self as a collective enterprise, and thus provides the
conceptual resources to transform our identity without losing it.
I
n the scholarly community, there is general agreement that the notion of
the self has become indispensable to contemporary social and political
discourse and that specific models of the self have specific implications
for politics and society. In a superficial sense, everyone knows what it means to
be an ‘I,’ in the sense that everyone has a basic practical knowledge underlying
the use of this indexical utterance, as everyone must learn the rules governing
the use of the pronoun ‘I’ in order to become a speaker.1 However, the immediate
or common-sense understanding of this idea may imply an account of the self
that is not fully exhaustive and, more importantly, has practical consequences
(for example, regarding one’s relationships with others and one’s integration into
Therefore, Hegel’s ‘I’ is not opposed to a world composed of ‘merely given’ ob-
jects that exist independently of the ‘I’ (dogmatism), but neither is it solipsistically
and egotistically conceived as positing a world opposed to itself (Fichte’s subjective
idealism). Of course, natural objects exist independently of the ‘I.’ However, at the
very moment that the ‘I’ enters into a relation with any object—that is, when an
object becomes ‘an object of thought’—it is mediated, that is, conceptualised.19 At
this point, it might be objected that Hegel’s idealism does not appear to significantly
differ from Kant’s transcendental idealism. However, recall that the key point of
discussion here, and indeed our starting point, is the question of the retention of
the ‘thing-in-itself.’ Kant himself had suggested, despite significant ambiguity on the
topic, that metaphysics could and should be reconceived from a practical point of
view.20 Fichte followed Kant’s lead, eliminated the ‘thing-in-itself,’ and established the
primacy of practical over theoretical reason through the activity of the self-positing
‘I.’ Hegel took the self-positing ‘I’ as the model or prototype of his conception of
‘concept,’21 which is the object of his idealistic metaphysics (the realm of absolute
spirit): neither something merely given nor merely posited by an absolute ‘I’ but
collectively generated through intersubjective acts of mutual recognition. The
choice of the ‘I’ as model is not arbitrary, nor is it simply determined by the fact
that it was already developed, to some degree, by Fichte. The point here is that the
‘I’ cannot exist without thought. After all, what am I without my thoughts? And how
can there be a thought without someone thinking it? Thought cannot be thought
of as separate from the objects that are thought. Therefore, the opposition between
subject and object was a false problem from the very beginning. By the same token,
it was wrong, on Fichte’s part, to view this opposition as posited by an absolute ‘I,’
considered as an immediate starting point. The development of the ‘I’ requires both
mediation (conceptual thought) and mutual recognition (recognition by another
‘I’). Only the combination of these two aspects can generate an identity between
the subject (the bare self-aware ‘I,’ which is not properly an ‘I’ for Hegel) and the
(Absolute) ‘I’ (that is, the human subject associated with its concept). The absolute
‘I’ is, therefore, not the starting point but the final point of the human enterprise.
Assuming that this brief sketch represents, in a nutshell, Hegel’s strategy to
overcome the opposition between subject and object and the subjectivism to which
it gives rise, it might be objected that Hegel does not take us much beyond Fichte,
if Hegel’s introduction of recognition is merely an effort to conceive of the activity
of the constitution of ‘idealities’ (Hegel’s self-positing concepts) as distributed over
the species rather than as the prerogative of the (Fichtean) single absolute ‘I.’ This
might lead one to conclude that Hegel’s concepts (idealities) are merely cultural
and social reflections.22 But has not Hegel already clarified that the ‘true objectivity
of thinking’ implies that thoughts, far from being merely ours, must also be the real
essences of things? Isn’t the overcoming of the subject/object opposition, which
relies on recognition, looking suspiciously similar to Kant’s universal subjectiv-
80 Paolo Diego Bubbio
ity—with the only difference being that we now have historically determined and
super-individual, rather than universal and individual, ‘transcendental forms’?
Once again, Hegel might reply that, as close as this account may seem to his
own, the key distinction resides in the preliminary assumption of an opposition
between subject and object. Kant’s transcendental idealism still maintains this
opposition as one of its fundamental presuppositions, and we have seen how
Fichte merely shifts the problem by conceiving of this opposition as posited
by the ‘I.’ In both cases, something is regarded as ‘merely given’—Kant’s ‘thing-
in-itself ’ and Fichte’s ‘I.’ From the point of view of Hegel’s recognitive-theoretic
approach, however, nothing is merely ‘given’—not even the ‘I.’ At a certain cogni-
tive level—the level of, say, our everyday experience—everything is, to some
extent, experienced as ‘given’—empirical objects (a table, a mountain) but also
‘institutional facts’ (I am married, I am a citizen). Considered as given ‘states of
affairs,’ they are representations (Vorstellungen). However, as soon as one starts
to rationally analyse a specific state of affairs and its connections, one recognises
that it is mediated—that is, that it cannot be thought without thinking of it in
relation to the ‘I’ and other objects and ‘states of affairs.’23
Put differently, the mind is not conceivable without the world, and the world is
not conceivable without the mind. Moreover, it is this inextricable fusion between
mind and world that constitutes Hegel’s ‘true objectivity’—which is objective not
in the sense that the ‘things of the dogmatic thinkers’ are objective—but idealisti-
cally objective. It is not a given objectivity but an achieved objectivity—achieved
through recognition. True objectivity is “the agreement of a content with itself,”24
which is the task of spirit (conceived as a “configuration of mutually recognizing
individual subjects”25 whose existence as subjects depends upon a joint act of
recognition): to make a representation consistent with its content, thus generating
a concept. Additionally, one should not forget that the ‘I’ is, in turn, a representa-
tion made consistent with its content.
The last consideration is far from being a secondary aspect of Hegel’s philoso-
phy, but, on close inspection, it has not been properly interpreted by either of the
two factions of Hegel’s followers that split after his death—that is, the right and
left Hegelians. While right Hegelians have tended to interpret Hegel’s philosophy
in a pre-Kantian way, supporting a regression to traditional metaphysics in which
the role of the ‘I’ is greatly reduced, left Hegelians have strongly emphasised the
‘I’—but interpreted it in a metaphysically realist way. Here, one thinks of such
Hegelians as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, whose thought featured
fundamentally realist commitments to the essential properties of humans—con-
ceived as existing ‘anyway,’ that is, independently of any intersubjective links. As a
consequence, the notion of an ‘I’ that takes into account the role of intersubjective
acts of mutual recognition (which, in my interpretation, Hegel’s absolute ideal-
ism was intended to achieve) was almost forgotten and certainly not developed.
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 81
In the field of Hegel studies, one must wait until the final decades of the
twentieth century to witness the rise of an interpretative approach that allowed a
re-consideration of the role of the ‘I’ in Hegel’s thought. Hegel’s theory of recogni-
tion, initially applied to the realm of objective spirit (essentially his moral and
political philosophy26), was taken as playing a role in the realm of absolute spirit.
According to some ‘post-Kantian’ interpreters of Hegel (such as Pippin, Pinkard,
and Redding), left Hegelians had regressed into the philosophical realism that
post-Kantian idealism had circumvented. According to this interpretative line,
Hegel was not a realist regarding the human spirit.
Going beyond the field of Hegel studies, and taking a broader view of
the history of philosophy, I submit that another philosopher, from a different
philosophical school and whose philosophy is often seen as opposed to Hegel’s
idealism, came to surprisingly similar conclusions about the conception of the
‘I,’ presenting a theory of the self with differing yet complementary nuances to
those of Hegel: Heidegger.
claims, become an authentic self. The way of being that calls Dasein’s individual
self out of its inauthenticity is “being-toward-death” (Sein zum Tode).
There is, I suggest, a sense in which Heidegger’s preoccupation with the no-
tion of mineness is symmetric with Hegel’s preoccupation with the notion of the
‘I’ and its involvement with the world. As noted above, the problem for Hegel was
to overcome the polarisation between subject and object while maintaining that
this ‘unity’ between subject and object had some (idealistic) ‘objectivity.’ Sym-
metrically, for Heidegger, the problem was to overcome the polarisation between
subject and object while maintaining that this ‘unity’ between subject and object
has some (existential) ‘subjectivity.’ It should also be noted that the ‘objectivity’
and ‘subjectivity’ that Hegel and Heidegger want to (respectively) achieve must
be taken as expressing something different from their traditional meanings.
Here I have tried to mark the difference by adding the qualifiers ‘idealistic’ in the
case of Hegel’s objectivity and ‘existential’ in the case of Heidegger’s subjectivity.
However, the ambiguity remains, as it is revealed in the split between right and
left Hegelians in the case of Hegel, and in Heidegger’s later hesitation in using the
term ‘mineness’ and in his coining of the word Subjektität (‘subjectity,’ or ‘subject-
ness’),37 as an alternative to Subjektivität (subjectivity) to avoid any reference
to subjectivism (in contrast to objectivism) and its apparent restriction of the
subject to the mental and the ‘I.’
One of Heidegger’s main concerns after 1926/1927 was that his suggested
solution to the problem of the authenticity of the self, together with the terminol-
ogy he adopted in Being and Time, could present his work as marked by the very
subjectivism from which he had been trying to free Western philosophy since
the beginning of his philosophical enterprise.38 After all, the idea inherent in
‘being-toward-death’—that one must focus on one’s own death to be an authentic
self—seems difficult to reconcile with our essential being-with-others. For this
reason, Heidegger’s philosophy has often been criticised for not properly address-
ing the relationship of Dasein to others and for depicting the image of a ‘solitary
self.’ This is also most likely why the notion of mineness seems to disappear from
Heidegger’s terminology after the Being and Time period.
We can observe this trend in the development of Heidegger’s thought. Later,
although the reference to selfhood does not disappear,39 Heidegger appears to
shift from a focus on the ‘I’ to a focus on peoples. In his ‘Logic’ lectures of 1934,
he focused on the shift from ‘I-Myself ’ [Ich-Selbst] to ‘We-Ourselves’ [Wir-Selbst],
arguing that the authentic self is found not in the ‘I’ but in the ‘We.’40 This looks very
similar to a Hegelian move—and indeed, it could even be argued that, starting
from different but symmetric concerns (a positive need for greater objectivity, for
Hegel, and a negative need to distance himself from subjectivity, for Heidegger),
Hegel and Heidegger find common ground in the idea of a community bound
together by common ‘idealities’ or values. However, at least for Heidegger, this
84 Paolo Diego Bubbio
appears to have been achieved, at least in part, at the expense of the ‘subjectity’
(to use Heidegger’s term) of the self. Is there a way to preserve both Heidegger’s
‘mineness’ and his attempt to give normative content to the self without shifting
to subjectivism?
I believe we can make sense of this through a transcendental interpretation
of Heidegger, that is, an interpretation that regards as central the question of what
it is to be the type of beings that comport themselves in distinctive ways toward
things or other human beings. As Kolb writes, “Heidegger does not legislate a
priori. While this sounds humble and finite, it still enacts the transcendental
move.”41 This interpretation also has the merit of reconnecting Heidegger to
Kant and to post-Kantian idealism. In particular, Malpas emphasised Heidegger’s
“externalist” conception of the self—namely, the idea that our ‘self ’ is not only the
result of what is going on inside but of what occurs or exists outside ourselves.42
The application of the transcendental interpretation of Heidegger to the
notion of mineness, I suggest, allows us to address the central question of what
it is to be an ‘I’—that is, what it is to be the type of being that comports itself in
distinctive ways toward things and other human beings. From this point of view,
Heidegger is close to Hegel in their common non-subjectivism and in moving
away from the egological construction of consciousness. As Schmidt notes,
In naming subjectness as the domain of the presence of the Absolute, Hei-
degger is not accusing Hegel of a naive subjectivism. . . . Heidegger is quite
aware that it is in this very concept of subjectness that Hegel finds the real
and true ground of Being itself. Accordingly, Hegel does not find subjectness
as identifiable with the individual ego, but rather uncovers subjectness as the
universal and common ground which is ontologically prior to any individual
subject; that is, subjectness is the structural meaning of Spirit itself.43
that overcoming the ‘metaphysics of subjectivism’ requires thinking of the ‘I’ not
primarily in subjective terms. However, Hegel’s dialectic of recognition can itself
be regarded as an attempt to overcome the subjectivism of modern philosophy.
As we have seen, Hegel’s position is not properly an anti-subjectivist one, as,
to properly be an anti-subjectivist, one must subscribe to a prior opposition
between subject and object—which is precisely the view that Hegel wished to
challenge. Both Malpas and Kompridis have emphasised that Heidegger’s posi-
tion “stands aside from both subjectivism and objectivism” and that, therefore, it
would be “misleading to characterize it as ‘antisubjectivist.’” Instead, they argue,
we should use “nonsubjectivism” to refer to his position.46 As explained above,
however, beyond the problems of the ‘letter’ used to express it, with respect to the
‘spirit,’ Heidegger’s and Hegel’s approaches have more in common than is usually
acknowledged.
As previously remarked, I believe that Heidegger’s main contribution to
the reformulation of the ‘I’ consists in his ideal of authenticity of the self, which
Being and Time seeks to preserve while avoiding any subjectivist drift. As noted
above, this concern is not without foundation, as Heidegger’s emphasis on ‘being-
towards-death’ comes dangerously close to a regression of the analysis of Dasein
into a ‘solitary self.’
I submit that Heidegger’s relation to Hegel provides a privileged entry-point
into the exploration of this issue. There is no doubt that Heidegger appreciated, at
least to some degree, Hegel’s elegant solution provided by the dialectical process
and—to use Gadamer’s words—“remained in a constant and tense confrontation
with the seductive appeal of dialectic.”47 Nevertheless, he remained convinced that
the Hegelian dialectical process was metaphysical in the traditional sense—not
in the idealistic sense that I briefly sketched in the first section. Did Heidegger
fully appreciate the novelty of Hegel’s idealist metaphysics, which builds on
Kant’s ‘Copernican’ revolution and is driven by the notion of recognition? This
is an interesting question in itself, one that requires critical and exegetical work
that cannot be pursued here. Therefore, the following concluding remarks will
be limited to a brief outline of three inter-related questions. First, to what extent
can the philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger contribute, in complementary ways,
to the formulation of a new paradigm of the self? Second, what approach would
be most fruitful in bringing attention to Hegel’s and Heidegger’s contributions?
Third, assuming this philosophical project is feasible, why should it be pursued?
I believe that Hegel’s theory of recognition and Heidegger’s account of mine-
ness and authenticity (or, to use the language of the later Heidegger, ‘subjectity’)
are complementary in the development of a more comprehensive account of the ‘I’
by virtue of their emphasis on an intersubjective component according to which
the ‘other’ is someone faced in a recognitive relationship. The philosophical goal
of such an operation is to conceive of objectivity without falling into objectivism
86 Paolo Diego Bubbio
NOTES
1. The use of the word ‘I’ evokes a more ‘existential’ grasping than the use of the word
‘self,’ especially if the latter is spoken about in the third person, as in the expression
‘the self.’ In the context of this paper, however, I will, for the sake of clarity, use the
terms ‘I’ and ‘self ’ synonymously.
2. Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 356.
3. See Paul Redding, Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (London: Routledge,
2009), 109.
4. Fredrick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
5. I borrow this expression from Michelle Kosh, who uses it, in the context of her
discussion of Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s philosophical agenda, not in relation to the
conception of the ‘I,’ but more broadly in relation to “our metaphysical views (includ-
ing our conception of the divine and its relation to the human).” See Michelle Kosch,
Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 140.
6. The ‘post-Kantian’ or ‘revisionist’ interpretation of Hegel pioneered by Robert Pippin
and Terry Pinkard considers Hegel’s thought as an extension of Kant’s transcendental
philosophy. The ‘revised metaphysical’ or ‘conceptual realist’ interpretation of Hegel
advanced by scholars such as Robert Stern, Kenneth Westphal, and James Kreines
rejects any transcendental interpretation of Hegel and tends to consider Hegel as
building on the critical aspects of Kant’s philosophy.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I:
Science of Logic, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 8:116/85 (hereafter E I). For this and other works by
Hegel, I give the volume and page number from the German Werke in zwanzig Bänden,
ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969–1971),
followed by the page number of the mentioned English translation. In this case, the
Brinkmann-Dahlstrom translation has been slightly modified, as I believe certain
terms are better translated in the second edition of the Wallace version (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), 67–68.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy,
trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977),
2:11/81.
9. Cf. Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 83. Cf. also Mark C. Taylor, Journeys
to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 44.
Taylor comments: “If subject and object remain antithetical, the object becomes
an unknowable other, and the subject ‘a noumenal monad,’ a ‘fixed noumenal unit
conditioned by infinite opposition.’”
10. Robert Stern, Hegel, Kant, and the Structure of the Object (London: Routledge: 1990),
115.
11. Skempton refers to the common “confusion” between two meanings of “Gegenstän-
dliches,” which “can mean either ‘concerning things as fixed and determinate objects
88 Paolo Diego Bubbio
of contemplation,’ or simply ‘in the world,’” and argues that Marx’s own confusion of
the two meanings is the basis of his critique of Hegel’s conception of the overcoming
of alienation. Cf. Simon Skempton, Alienation After Derrida (New York: Continuum,
2010), 118.
12. This has been suggested by Mark C. Taylor: “From Hegel’s point of view, Kant’s failure
to unite subject and object leads to a subjectivism that makes knowledge, sensu emi-
nentiori, impossible. . . . If subject and object remain antithetical, the object becomes
an unknowable other” (Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, 44).
13. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 2:9–10/79–
80. I slightly modified the Harris-Cerf translation. The italics are mine.
14. J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 8–9 (I/426). Cf. George di Giovanni,
“Introduction” to Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), xxxix.
15. ‘Abstract’ and ‘immediate’ may appear to be contradictory terms but, in Hegel’s view,
they are not. As di Giovanni explains, “On Hegel’s analysis of both Kant and Fichte,
the problem is that the ‘I’ that figures so prominently in their theories is too abstract
a product of conceptualization. It means to say much but in fact says nothing” (di
Giovanni, “Introduction” xxxiv). Fichte then takes this product of conceptualized
abstraction and presents it as ‘immediate’—and it is supposed to be immediate
because it is meant to be prior to any conceptualization. But even the ‘I = I’ requires
explanatory mediation or, if taken as immediate, is equivalent to pure being (E I §86,
8:182/236). See Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 122.
16. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, 122.
17. Dennis Schmidt, The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of
Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1988), 50.
18. See Paul Redding, “Hegel, Idealism and God: Philosophy as the Self-Correcting Ap-
propriation of the Norms of Life and Thought,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of
Natural and Social Philosophy 3(2–3) (2007): 27.
19. This conception is illustrated by di Giovanni by using the (Fichtean) notion of factic-
ity: “This is not to say that Hegel does not recognize that facticity is an irreducible
element of experience. This is the lesson that he had indeed learned from Fichte.
Hegel’s canonical term for it . . . is ‘immediacy.’ But the point is that such a facticity,
this immediacy of experience, ought to be absorbed conceptually even as facticity. It
has to be comprehended positively. To avoid Fichte’s inevitable slide from logic into
rhetoric, one needs a kind of conceptualization that permeates that facticity” (di
Giovanni, “Introduction,” xxxiv–xxxv).
20. See, for instance, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, xxvii–xxviii.
21. Paul Redding and I advanced this argument in our joint article “Hegel and the Onto-
logical Argument for the Existence of God,” Religious Studies 50(4) (2014): 465–86.
22. Brandom appears to suggest such an instrumentalist view when he insists that “[f]or
Hegel all transcendental constitution is social institution.” Robert Brandom, Tales of
the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 216.
23. Heidegger perfectly captures Hegel’s position on this issue by commenting: “The
subject has its essence in a representational relation to the object.” Martin Heidegger,
Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 89
University Press, 2002), 5:121/99. For this and other work by Heidegger, I give the
volume and page number from the German Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
1975–), followed by the page number of the mentioned English translation.
24. E I 8:86/62. To clarify this idea, Hegel uses the example of the definition of someone
as a “true friend,” signifying that the friend acts in accordance with the concept of
friendship.
25. Redding, Continental Idealism, 149.
26. See the work of Robert Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997).
27. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), 20:210/156.
28. Ibid.
29. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 105.
30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 2:319/305; cf. also Martin Hei-
degger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track.
31. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 20:305/223.
32. Ibid., 20:223/165.
33. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 162.
34. Heidegger, Being and Time, 2:322/307.
35. To date, the notion of ‘mineness’ has received little attention, other than from François
Raffoul in Heidegger and the Subject (New York: Humanity Books, 1998) and Wolfgang
Fasching in “The Mineness of Experience,” Continental Philosophy Review 42(2)
(2009): 131–48. Jeff Malpas makes a very interesting observation about the origins
of this notion, which, in his view, should be tracked back to the mystical tradition of
the Middle Ages: “The linguistic precedents for Heidegger’s use of the adjective ‘own’
(eigen) for his concept of a personal Er-eignis, and for his notions of ‘mineness’ and
eigentlich (own-ish, authentic) are to be found not in the troubled waters of subjectiv-
ism and decisionism, but rather in Scotist ‘haccaeity,’ Eckhartian life that lives ‘out of
its own,’ Schleiermachean ‘ownness,’ and the ‘ownmost own’ of the ‘individuity’ that
Natorp finds in the mystical tradition.’” Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 333.
36. Heidegger, Being and Time, 2:42/42.
37. Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in Off the Beaten Track, 5:122f./100f.
38. Cf. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 162.
39. Francois Raffoul has brilliantly shown that, although “it is often assumed that after the
‘turning’ in his thinking, when Heidegger engages in a thought of Ereignis no longer
centered on human Dasein as the locus of the meaning of being, the reference to
selfhood would fade away,”“a renewed thinking of selfhood, of what Heidegger calls
‘self-being’ (Selbst-sein), is enacted precisely at the same time that the subjectivistic
understanding of the self is more radically abandoned.” See François Raffoul, “Re-
thinking Selfhood: From Enowning,” Research in Phenomenology 37(1) (2007): 76.
40. Martin Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, trans.
Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2009), 38:38/34. See Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, 58. Safranski says that the lectures
were published in “a mutilated form recorded at the time,” and that Heidegger’s
original notes featured the “transformation of ‘mineness’ (Je-meinigkeit) into ‘ourness’
90 Paolo Diego Bubbio
(Je-unsrigkeit).” Cf. Rudiger Safranski, Heidegger: Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 266.
41. David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 175.
42. “Yet what seems to remain consistent throughout is the attempt to articulate what
might be thought of as a certain experience or insight that essentially concerns the
‘situated,’ or better the ‘placed,’ character of being, and of our own being, so much so
that we may describe the thinking that is associated with the name ‘Heidegger’ as a
thinking that does indeed consist, as he himself claimed, in an attempt to ‘say’ the
place of being—as a topology of being.” Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 306.
43. Schmidt, The Ubiquity of the Finite, 132.
44. As Gadamer observes, it was the dialectic that enables Hegel “to go beyond the
subjectivity of the subject and to think mind as objective.” Hans-Georg Gadamer,
“Destruktion and Deconstruction,” in Heidegger Reexamined: Language and the
Critique of Subjectivity, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (London: Routledge,
2002), 78.
45. Cf. Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1986, 1993), 16f.
46. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 355; cf. Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure:
Critical Theory Between Past and Future (Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 53.
47. Gadamer, “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” 108–09.
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