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December 11, 2004
In his article Heidegger's Challenge and the Future of Critical Theory Nikolas Kompridis highlights how Heidegger turned away from the Hegelian moment in his ethics. As we have seen that moment understood freedom for self-determination (authenticity in Heidegger's vocabulary) to be both dependent upon, and facilitated, by our relationships with others.
Nikolas says:
"Unfortunately, Heidegger stranded this important insight in the first division of Being and Time and thereby undermined the development of his conception of authenticity in terms of the notion of resoluteness. When Heidegger lays out the meaning of resoluteness in the second division, it appears to belong to a dialogical structure of "call" and "response." Yet the relationship between "the one who calls"and "the one to whom the appeal is made" is not developed on the model of the relationship between self and other, but exclusively on the model of one's relationship to oneself. Heidegger clarifies the meaning of resoluteness as an openness or receptivity to the "call of conscience" independently of our obligations to others. The call of conscience is the call of care, and it comes from Dasein itself. Heidegger deliberately formalizes the existential-ontological meaning of this "call" so that all obligations "which are related to our concernful being with others will drop out" (BT 328/283). The whole construction of resoluteness suffers from this regressive step: each individual Dasein must get into the proper relation to itself before it can clear the way for others, before it can become the "conscience" of others. Consequently, Heidegger cannot win back that ethical dimension of self/other relations constitutive of freedom as self-determination."
Very insightful. I've gained more from this passsage and the one in the previous post, than my struggles with Joanna Hodge's Heidegger and Ethics, which I picked up in a second hand bookshop in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago.
Resoluteness means holding onto anxiety (the breakdown of the world) rather than fleeing it, and then getting back to the public world. Resoluteness needs to be understood in terms of Heidegger's anti-mentalist, anti-subjectivist conception of human existence and practice. Human understanding and practice are essentially situational and context-dependent. (The latter Heidegger replaces "resoluteness" with the idea of releasement or Gelassenheit.)
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