DOI: 10.

5840/philtoday201411547

Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’:

Preliminary Reflections for a New
Paradigm of the Self
PAOLO DIEGO BUBBIO

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.

Key words: Hegel, Heidegger, the ‘I,’ subjectivism, mineness

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

© 2015. Philosophy Today, Volume 59, Issue 1 (Winter 2015).

ISSN 0031-8256 73–90
74 Paolo Diego Bubbio

a community) that might or might not be desirable in social or political terms.

One of the tasks of philosophy is to put such immediate or common sense un-
derstandings under scrutiny, to provide a richer understanding of such a subject
matter, and to possibly develop an alternative account.
Throughout the history of philosophy, the development of the concept of the
‘I’ has been a constant concern. It was Descartes who developed the Aristotelian
notion of a self-sufficient underlying subject into the idea of the ‘I’ as a thinking
subject, an idea that gave modern philosophy its peculiar subjectivistic twist. By
‘subjectivism’ here, I mean the philosophical tenet that the nature of reality, as
related to a given consciousness, is dependent on that consciousness. This subjec-
tive account of the ‘I’ is characteristic of modernity and, as observed by Malpas,
indissolubly connected with “the way in which modernity also seizes upon, and
thematizes, the objective.” In other words, “the attempt at a purely ‘objective’
understanding of the world (the prioritization of physical science)” is strictly
related to subjectivism (“the prioritization of the ‘cogito’”).2
Even Kant was not immune from this subjective account. According to Kant,
experiences must be held together in the transcendental unity of apperception:
the I-think. We can trust our knowledge, provided we admit that we know things
as they appear to us (phenomena) and not the things in themselves (noumena),
which can never be known. In other words, objectivity for Kant does not mean
extra-subjectivity but universal and necessary subjectivity.
The Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself quickly became a subject of dispute.
Fichte questioned its very existence—after all, if we cannot know the things in
themselves, they might also not exist. In his radicalisation of the Kantian ‘I-think,’
however, Fichte built on the Kantian idea that the I-think is self-consciousness
(not only ‘I know,’ but ‘I become conscious that I know’) to argue that the ‘I’ must
be self-positing and self-determining. Thus, Fichte put into jeopardy the very
distinction between subject and object on which the entire Cartesian and post-
Cartesian metaphysics is based.3
Now, consider current debates regarding the conception of the self. Gener-
ally, such debates still polarize subjectivist and objectivist readings of the ‘I’ into
irreconcilably opposed camps. They both assume, however, a fundamental dis-
tinction between subject and object, a distinction on which the very possibility
of conceiving a ‘subjectivist’ or ‘objectivist’ position is grounded.
I submit that it is possible to elaborate an alternative account of the ‘I’ that
overcomes Cartesian subjectivism and bypasses traditional oppositions between
subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the self. I also submit that the intellectual
resources needed to elaborate such an account can be found in the philosophical
views of Hegel and Heidegger. As this is clearly a very large project, this paper
necessarily has a narrow focus and is limited to preliminary work and reflections.
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 75

Hegel’s Idealistic Objectivity

According to Beiser, German idealism was, from its inception, a reaction to sub-
jectivism.4 As such, it was also inevitably an analysis of the concept of the ‘I.’ In
particular, Hegel’s idealism can be conceived as a type of philosophical expres-
sion of a self-conception as an ‘I.’ Put differently, it can be argued that one of the
main concerns of Hegel’s idealism was what our conception of the ‘I’ (das Ich)
must be like to be consistent with how we conceptualise our activity as thinkers
and moral agents.5
A starting point for an analysis of Hegel’s concept of the self might be taken
to be Kant’s notion of the ‘I,’ as in the context of Hegel scholarship there is now
almost general agreement that Hegel builds on some aspects of Kant’s philoso-
phy—although various approaches differ in their assessment of the extent to
which Hegel builds on Kant and in their interpretation of which aspects of Kant’s
philosophy Hegel builds on.6
Kant’s novel idea consists in the suggestion that the ‘I’ actively contributes
something to all objects of knowledge—their ‘form.’ The I-think, Kant argues,
must be able to accompany all our representations (Vorstellungen). This is indeed
a revolutionary step, but in Hegel’s view, the Kantian approach to experience
might lead to a conception of the ‘I’ still marked with subjectivism. An oft-cited
quotation from the Encyclopaedia illustrates the point:
[T]he Kantian objectivity of thinking itself is in turn only subjective insofar
as thoughts, despite being universal and necessary categories, are, according
to Kant, merely our thoughts and distinguished from what the thing is in
itself by an insurmountable gulf. By contrast, the true objectivity of thinking
consists in this: that thoughts are not merely our thoughts but at the same
time the in itself [das Ansich] of things [Dinge] and of the object-world [des
Gegenständlichen] in general.7
This is undoubtedly a strong attack on Kant’s subjectivism. Indeed, despite the
Copernican revolution, Kant continued to maintain the existence of ‘things in them-
selves’—things certainly unknowable to us because we can only know phenomena,
that is, things as they appear to us, as they are subsumed by the I-think, but (qua
things in themselves) nevertheless posited as existing independently of the ‘I.’ As
long as the subject-object opposition is maintained (in Hegelian language, as long
as “the Idea has been posited in absolute opposition to Being”8), knowledge is not
possible;9 we remain prisoners of the fundamental subject/object opposition. There
is general agreement among Hegel scholars that Hegel wanted to overcome the
(Kantian) opposition between subject and object. However, if the negative aspect
of Hegel’s critique of Kant seems (apparently) clear, the constructive aspect of it is
much more controversial. Some scholars interpret Hegel’s claim that “thoughts are
not merely our thoughts but at the same time the in itself [das Ansich] of things”
76 Paolo Diego Bubbio

in a conceptual realist way, that is, as suggesting that Hegelian metaphysics is an

inquiry into fundamental ‘features’ or ‘structures’ of the world itself (indepen-
dently of the ‘I’). Thus, for example, Stern argues that “the characteristic feature
of Hegel’s absolute idealism is his freeing of the Idea from Mind and from the
thinking subject”—a distinction, that between Idea and Mind, that, according to
Stern, was “impossible for Kant’s merely subjective idealism.”10 A discussion of the
sustainability of the ‘conceptual realist’ interpretation of Hegel against alternative
interpretations is beyond the scope of this paper; however, it is important to sug-
gest that, on the ground of the so-called ‘post-Kantian’ or ‘revisionist’ approach to
Hegel pioneered by Pippin and Pinkard, another interpretation is possible. From
an exegetical point of view, it might be argued that one should not underestimate
the importance of the last few words in the quotation of Hegel above: “the true
objectivity of thinking consists in this: that thoughts are not merely our thoughts
but at the same time the in itself of things and of the object-world [des Gegen-
ständlichen] in general.” What does Hegel mean by das Gegenständliche? Usually,
the term is translated as ‘objective,’ but this translation can sometimes be slightly
misleading. Wallace translates the term as ‘whatever is an object to us’—which
on the one hand somehow captures the etymological sense of Gegenstand, ‘that
which stands over against’—but on the other, it does not properly capture Hegel’s
attempt to get away from Kantian subjectivism. While Kant regarded thoughts
as imposed by us on things, Hegel regards them as constituting the essences of
things. The question is: can thoughts constitute the essences of things indepen-
dently of the mind?11 From this perspective, Brinkmann-Dahlstrom’s translation,
‘object-world,’ is more accurate. Stern interprets Hegel as criticising Kant for being
unable to distinguish between ‘idea’ and ‘mind’; but what if Hegel’s critique of Kant
were effectively the opposite—that is, what if he were criticising Kant for being
unable to unite subject and object?12 After all, in The Difference between Fichte’s
and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Hegel writes that
[t]he Kantian philosophy needed to have its spirit distinguished from its letter,
and to have its purely speculative principle lifted out of the remainder. . . . In the
principle of the deduction of the categories Kant’s philosophy is authentic ide-
alism; and it is this principle that Fichte extracted in a purer, stricter form and
called the spirit of Kantian philosophy. But the things in themselves—which
are nothing but an objective expression of the empty form of opposition—had
been hypostasized anew by Kant, and posited as absolute objectivity like the
things of the dogmatic philosophers [die Dinge des Dogmatikers]. . . . All this
springs at best from the form of the Kantian deduction of the categories, not
from its principle or spirit.13
Let us consider Kant’s inability to unite subject and object as our working hypoth-
esis. It might be argued that, in Hegel’s view, Kant’s problem is the conservation of
noumena considered as objective ‘features’ or ‘structures’ of the world itself and thus
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 77

analogous to the ‘things’ of pre-Kantian dogmatic thinkers—a move that is not,

according to Hegel, consistent with the ‘spirit’ of Kantian philosophy. Fichte is then
seen as trying to rectify the situation and turn Kant’s philosophy into a ‘genuine
idealism’ by ‘lifting out’ its ‘speculative principle’—the self-positing ‘I.’ However,
this interpretation could be considered counterintuitive. If this reading of Kant is
correct, it might be objected: does not the unity of subject (Mind) and object (Idea)
lead to more rather than less subjectivism? Attributing intellectual intuition to the
self-positing I, is not Fichte’s philosophy the most radical example of subjectivism?
Before answering this objection, let us briefly consider Fichte’s solution and
the way Kant’s project is transformed in the context of Fichtean subjectivism.
Fichte clearly believes that Kant’s problem consists in the retention of the thing-
in-itself. In light of our working hypothesis, the retention of the thing-in-itself is
connected with Kant’s inability to overcome the distinction between subject and
object. As Fichte puts it in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, there are only two options:
either one maintains the notion of the ‘thing-in-itself ’ and believes that the ground
of experience resides in a world of ‘merely given’ objects that exist independently of
the ‘I’ (dogmatism)—or one accept the idea that the self-positing ‘I’ is the ground
of all possible experience (idealism).14 Fichte clearly advocates the latter position.
Therefore, Fichte’s ‘I’ is pure self-identity (I=I), an undifferentiated ‘I.’ In more
ordinary language, we might say that Fichte’s ‘I’ precedes any distinction from
other ‘I’s’ and from nature; self-consciousness is also rooted in this self-identity,
and therefore the ‘I’ is self-positing—it exists because it is aware of itself. With
no more ‘things-in-themselves’ in existence, only the ‘I’ now exists ‘anyway.’ It is
inevitable, therefore, that in Fichte’s philosophy, the ‘I’ is opposed to the world of
its objects—after all, one cannot think absolutely but one must always think of
something; and the presence of something other than the ‘I’ (the object) contrasts
with the absoluteness of the self-positing ‘I’ (the subject). The opposition between
subject and object is, in Fichte’s view, posited by the ‘I’ itself; the ‘I’ and the world
(subject and object) are, nonetheless, still opposed.
Now, let us consider Hegel’s position vis-à-vis Fichte’s account. Hegel agrees
with Fichte that the Kantian retention of the ‘thing-in-itself ’ is a metaphysical
leftover, which should be rejected in light of the true spirit of Kant’s ‘Copernican
revolution.’ Fichte’s diagnosis of the problem is, therefore, correct in Hegel’s view.
Fichte is also right, according to Hegel, in looking to the ‘I’ to find a solution to
this problem. Thus, if Fichte is right in looking to the ‘I’ to resolve the Kantian
problem, what is wrong, in Hegel’s view, with his attempted solution?
First, Fichte’s ‘I’ is, for Hegel, too abstract and immediate.15 In fact, Fichte’s
suggested solution—that is, the coincidence between the subject and an imme-
diately self-aware absolute ‘I’—inevitably leads to subjectivism. Second, and as an
implication of the previous point, subject and object are still opposed in Fichte’s
(subjective) idealism, and Fichte is therefore unable to overcome the problem
78 Paolo Diego Bubbio

of subjectivism. If our working hypothesis is correct, Hegel therefore wants to

unite subject and object—that is, he wants to close the Kantian ‘impassable gulf ’
between thought and thing—but he also wants this unity to be realised not a
parte subjecti, that is, subjectively (which is Fichte’s way: the opposition between
subject and object is posited by the subject), but a parte objecti, that is, objectively.
This may appear to be a desperate move. How can Hegel ask for a unity of
subject and object and demand objective validity for this unity (“the true objec-
tivity of thinking” of the Encyclopedia)? Is Hegel not trying, so to speak, to have
his cake and eat it too?
Let us see what Hegel suggests to overcome the problem of Fichte’s sub-
jectivism. Fichte’s ‘I,’ it has been said, is too immediate. In fact, Fichte’s absolute
‘I,’ despite being the result of a process of abstraction (and, in Fichte’s account,
precisely because it is the bare self, that is, what remains once everything else
has been abstracted from the ‘I’), is presented by Fichte as absolutely immediate.
For Hegel, however, this is a naïve assumption. The ‘I’ cannot be immediate: the
desire is the source of the I-awareness (awareness of one’s bare self-identity),
but “I-awareness is only the beginning of self-consciousness and of spirit.”16 The
process of the development of the ‘I’ is far from being complete. Conceiving this
‘I’ as already completed is equivalent to considering it as a ‘given’—as something
that is there prior to any mediation. For Hegel, this is not the case: the ‘I’ must
be thought of as (to quote Schmidt) a “mediated and achieved identity, which is
realised through the process that Hegel calls ‘World-history’”17—that is, it is the
result of a historical process.
Historical determination is completely absent from Fichte’s model of the ‘I,’
which is also why Fichte’s infinite strife (ein unendliches Streben) produces, in
Hegel’s view, an ‘unsatisfied I.’ The only object that, for Hegel, can satisfy the ‘I’ is
another I, another self-consciousness.18 For Hegel, ‘subject’ (Subjekt) and ‘I’ (das
Ich) are not equivalent or interchangeable.‘Subject’ is a much broader notion than
the ‘I’ and has, for Hegel, different meanings, depending on the context in which
the term is used. Conversely, the ‘I’ is the human subject, which is associated
with the concept (Begriff). This association between the human subject and (its)
concept is not a natural process but a cultural one that is, in Hegel’s view, driven
by the process of recognition (Anerkennung). Only the encounter with another
‘I’ and the process of mutual recognition (two human subjects recognising each
other as ‘I’s’) can make the ‘I’ consistent with its concept—which is Hegel’s way
of expressing the idea that, properly speaking, there is no ‘I’ prior to this process
of recognition. The ‘I’ only exists as such in as much as the ‘I’s’ mutually recognise
themselves as existing. In this context, Hegel’s absolute idealism can be conceived
as an attempt to approach the ‘I’ from a perspective that takes into account the
role of intersubjective acts of mutual recognition for the genesis of self-conscious
thought and of human culture (the realm of Hegel’s absolute spirit).
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 79

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.

Heidegger’s Existential Subjectivity

To explore Heidegger’s notion of the ‘I,’ it is important to briefly consider his ac-
count of this issue in modern philosophy from Descartes onwards. As Heidegger
explains in the History of the Concept of Time, Descartes’s main error was to focus
on the thinking (the Cogito) and ‘leave out’ the being (the sum).27 In other words,
Descartes’s ‘absurdity’28 was to think of the ego as a ‘world-less’ substance, distinct
from the world—that is, the prior existence of an ‘I,’ “independently of what it
subsequently does and undergoes.”29 Heidegger clearly believes that the Cartesian
“false assumption” has dominated modern philosophy. Eventually, Kant explicitly
rejected the conception of the ‘I’ as substance; the I-think, however, insofar as it
is a “binding together,” is still thought of as a subject, as it might be taken to be
the subjectum (“that which ‘underlies’ or stands under”).30
The opposition between subject and object, Heidegger continues, gives rise
to the contrast between realism and idealism. Realism emphasises the object; it
is right in retaining the extantness (Vorhandenheit, also translated as ‘presence-
at-hand’ or ‘occurrentness’) of the world, but it is wrong in believing that it is
possible to clarify reality by means of merely causal processes. Idealism, by con-
trast, emphasises the subject; it is right to the extent that it sees that reality can
be clarified only when being is “present and encountered”; but it is wrong to the
extent that, in its emphasis on the subject, it “goes to the extreme of solipsism.”31
Realism and idealism correspond to objectivism and subjectivism (or subjec-
tive idealism), respectively: insofar as they are both based on the subject/object
distinction, they are both mistaken.
82 Paolo Diego Bubbio

Heidegger is usually regarded as opposing idealism in the name of an account

of existence that tends to stress either the historical and material nature of the
linguistic ground of thought or some more generally existentialist sense of ‘being’
as the ground of thought that is not reducible to it. But what is Heidegger’s view
of the ‘I’? Is it really opposed to Hegel’s view—are the two views incompatible?
Let us briefly consider Heidegger’s account of the ‘I’—at least as it is presented
in Being and Time and in other writings of the same period. Heidegger appears
to be generally hostile to the notion of the ‘I,’ as it is taken to be isolated from
the world and from other entities—a “snail in its shell,” as Heidegger puts it.32
In Being and Time, he elaborates on this intuition. There is something terribly
wrong, Heidegger says, with this idea of the ‘I’ in isolation. The point here is that
there is, to use Malpas’s words, a “factical involvement of ourselves ‘in’ the world
that is prior to both subjectivity and objectivity.”33 Considered in isolation from
my involvement with things and with others, the ‘I’ is not a true self but merely
an empty category. Heidegger’s central notion of Dasein is meant to capture this
idea. Dasein is ‘being engaged in the world’: each Dasein has a world, that is, a
network of relations that determines its being. Heidegger names the ontological
existential structure of the Dasein ‘Mitsein’ (Being-with). Only because Dasein is
Being-with can it encounter others and relate itself to others.
As Heidegger argues in Being and Time, “The ‘natural’ talk about the I takes
place in the they-self.”34 The They-self (das Man-selbst) is the identity of the ‘I’
in that it is perceived as a ‘natural’ relation with the world. In fact, we are born
into a world that already consists of pre-existing objects, functions, and relations
(‘states of affairs’): ‘I’ do not decide what a bed is for or what ‘my’ relationship
with my mother is: these ‘states of affairs’ are already there—they appear to be
there ‘anyway,’ independently of my ‘I.’ It is, therefore, natural to develop an ‘I’ that
is modelled on other ‘I’s’: the ‘They-self.’
The ‘They-self ’ creates the conditions for the appearance of a notion that,
although often neglected,35 plays a central role in Heidegger’s Being and Time and
that, in my view, is extremely important for an analysis of the ‘I’: that of ‘mineness’
(Jemeinigkeit). Mineness is not on the same level as the ‘I’ versus ‘you’ distinction
of Cartesian subjectivity but is the ontological structure of being that determines
every ‘I’ in its being. Heidegger writes: “In accordance with the character of always-
being-my-own-being [Jemeinigkeit], when we speak of Dasein, we must always
use the personal pronoun along with whatever we say: ‘I am,’ ‘you are.’”36 The
central idea here is that each of us (as human beings) defines existence in terms
of his/her own existence. Therefore, the only way that Being can be understood
is as my Being; notably, this applies even when Being and Dasein are considered
in general. In other words, mineness belongs to any existent Dasein in the sense
that Dasein can authentically regard its Being as its own. The key word here is
‘authentically’: in fact, the They-self is not an authentic self; but I can, Heidegger
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 83

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

A New Paradigm of the Self

Now, I briefly consider Hegel and Heidegger together, suggesting that their respec-
tive reflections on the notion of the ‘I,’ when combined, can fruitfully contribute to
the design of a new paradigm of the self. This is clearly an enormous task; thus, I
do not intend to reach any conclusion or suggest any ground-breaking solution in
the space of this paper. What follows, therefore, is a set of preliminary reflections
that introduce a massive research project.
In the first section, I argued that Hegel sought to establish a conception of
the ‘I’ based on the unity of subject and object while at the same time demand-
ing that this unity have objective validity. He sought to reach that goal through a
dialectic of recognition.44 Heidegger is critical of Hegel because he opposes the
“metaphysics of subjectivism,” that is, a metaphysics that assumes a fixed set of
forms of thought or ‘categories,’ as in Kant’s philosophy.45 Heidegger saw clearly
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 85

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

and of subjectivity without falling into subjectivism. The connection of Hegel’s

theory of recognition to Heidegger’s notion of mineness will pave the way for a
novel model of the ‘I’ in which the self is conceived (to use Heidegger’s terminol-
ogy) as fundamentally relational in its mineness.
If this is the philosophical goal, then Heidegger’s philosophy must be ap-
proached from a perspective that emphasises the network of relations that
determine the being of Dasein. A transcendental interpretation of Heidegger,
therefore, is useful, because it reveals more clearly the complementarity of Hei-
degger and Hegel—especially if Hegel is approached from the perspective of
the post-Kantian ‘revisionist’ interpretation. As noted above, mineness is not at
the same level as the ‘I’ versus ‘you’ distinction but is the ontological structure of
being that determines every ‘I’ in its being. However, Hegel’s conception of the ‘I,’
I have argued, is aimed precisely at circumventing the ‘I’ versus ‘you’ distinction
in order to reach the ontological structure determining every ‘I.’
I began this paper by observing that much contemporary debate over the
concept of the self continues to be characterised by a polarisation between
subjectivity and objectivity. Such polarisation, from the perspective of the
Hegelian-Heideggerian line of thought, implies a philosophically misleading
conception of the ‘I,’ as both approaches conceive of the ‘I’ as an entity that can be
thought of independently of intersubjective acts of mutual recognition and of the
network of relations determining it. In fact, both Hegel’s idealist metaphysics and
Heidegger’s existential analytic provide a new sense in which the ‘I’ can be regarded
as (idealistically) ‘objective’ while, at the same time, maintaining its ‘subjectity.’
The main idea here is that the world is neither ‘always already there’ nor merely a
projection of the ‘I’—but both the ‘I’ and the world come into existence through
the interaction of the ‘I’ with other I’s and with the world.
Why should such a philosophical project be pursued? I believe that the rel-
evance of this agenda goes beyond the field of Hegel and Heidegger studies. The
main point here is that an important perspective on the conception of the self
has been excluded from consideration and that the insights arising from this line
of thought have been ignored owing to misunderstanding. Thus, I believe that
a reinterpretation of Hegel and Heidegger’s conceptions of the self may provide
resources useful in re-thinking the modern identity of the self and in developing
a contemporary mode of philosophising about the ‘I’—one that introduces a new
perspective to current debates regarding the conception of the self by providing an
alternative and more flexible model of the ‘I’ that is better suited to contemporary
challenges. There is the need for an alternative and more flexible model of the ‘I,’
a model that avoids individualism, allows thinking of the formation of the self
as a collective enterprise, and thus provides each one of us with the conceptual
resources to transform our identity without losing it.
University of Western Sydney
Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’ 87

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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