Abstract
In this chapter I argue that the mode of affective togetherness we are interested in discloses an essential character of our human nature: we are beings that can exist as some particular group we (together with certain others) constitute. I begin by explicating Heidegger’s proposal that Dasein essentially is its possibilities. This discussion results in the following suggestion: to care about something in a particular situation presupposes being able to exist as such-and-such in the context of this situation. Pulling together a number of thoughts articulated in different parts of this book, I discuss the sense in which the idea of an affective attunement to the world is related to the claim that a person essentially is her existential possibilities. A central thought of this discussion is that only against the background of certain already defined ways of valuing the occurrences one faces, one can come to press ahead into the actualization of some concrete possibility, thereby coming to project oneself into this specific possibility—thereby coming to be this possibility. On this basis, I come back to the claim that the emotional responses by means of which a number of individuals participate in a moment of affective intentional community characteristically have a for-the-sake-of-which that encompasses a plurality in some particular unity. I reformulate this claim by arguing that our capacity to participate in episodes of collective affective intentionality is grounded in our ability to exist as some specific group in the context of particular situations.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter (and in the next one), I am going to make use of a convention in order to differentiate two uses of the first-person plural possessive adjective ‘our’. With the word ‘our’ (italicized) I will qualify something as belonging to (or possessed by) a particular multipersonal unity we (the involved individuals) take ourselves to constitute. That is, I shall use the italicized form to refer to something we together possess or own. In contrast, I shall employ the word ‘our’ (non-italicized) to refer to something that may be said to be merely common to us (the involved individuals), in the sense of being something each of us individually (i.e. in a non-necessarily interrelated way) possesses. In the same vein, I shall differentiate between we and we, us and us, they and they, and them and them—whenever I deem it necessary. (Margaret Gilbert [1989, Chapter 4] prefers to indicate this difference, or a similar one, by means of an asterisk [we* vs. we].) My use of this convention will not be absolutely systematic. I will make explicit the difference at issue only in those passages in which ambiguity may be expected to arise.
- 2.
Schmid (2001; 2009, Chapter 9) argues for the possibility of a genuinely joint [gemeinsames] Dasein. In this context, he touches on the idea that we humans can exist in terms of certain possibilities we share with others. Schmid is particularly concerned, however, with the issue of the authenticity/inauthenticity of such a shared existence. He does, in my view, not offer an elucidation of what it is to exist in terms of our (shared) possibilities comparable to the one I shall prepare in this chapter and articulate in Chap. 8 below.
- 3.
I do not aim at an exhaustive elucidation of the structure Heidegger calls care. A number of important issues are, thus, going to linger untouched, for instance, the issue concerning the equiprimordiality of the constituents of the ‘structural moment’ Heidegger calls being-in as such [das In-Sein als solches] (i.e. attunement [Befindlichkeit], understanding [Verstehen], and discourse [Rede]) and their relation to the falling [Verfallenheit] of Dasein (cf. Heidegger [1927] 1962, §§28–38). The very notion of discourse is going to remain completely unthematized here. An introductory, though very detailed, discussion of some of these issues and their relation to the care-structure can be found in Blattner’s already mentioned book (1999, pp. 31–88). (For a somewhat shorter version of this discussion, see Blattner 1996.) For those who read German, I recommend Barbara Merker’s (2007) interpretation of §§39–44 of Being and Time. To the extent to which I am able to make the points that are pertinent to my own proposal, without having to compare divergent views concerning Heidegger’s suggestions, I shall avoid exegetical discussions. The reason is simply that the present proposal is not conceived as an exercise in Heidegger-scholarship, but as an attempt to make certain of his ideas fruitful for thinking about the phenomenon of collective affectivity intentionality.
- 4.
In §9 of Being and Time, Heidegger makes a strange claim we shall come to understand in the course of this discussion. He writes: ‘The “essence” of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not “properties” present-at-hand of some entity which “looks” so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that. All the Being-as-it-is [So-sein] which this entity possesses is primarily Being. So when we designate this entity with the term “Dasein”, we are expressing not its “what” (as if it were a table, house or tree) but its Being’ ([1927] 1962, p. 67).
- 5.
As we shall immediately see, Heidegger’s notion of existence also exhibits a profoundly technical character.
- 6.
‘Existentialia’ is the term Heidegger introduces to refer to those characteristics of Dasein that come into view in the course of an analysis of its way of being. An existentiale, hence, is a character of the particular way of being that, according to Heidegger, deserves to be called ‘existence’, as opposed to being a property of the sort of entity an individual human is. That is to say, we touch on existentialia when trying to give an answer to the question as to what it is like to be (or to exist as) a person. Heidegger writes: ‘All explicata to which the analytic of Dasein gives rise are obtained by considering Dasein’s existence-structure. Because Dasein’s characters of Being are defined in terms of existentiality, we call them “existentialia”’ ([1927] 1962, p. 70). Heidegger wants existentialia to be systematically distinguished from categories, which, as he argues, capture characteristics of the way of being of those entities the character of which is not that of Dasein. It is important to note, however, that an existentiale is also to be determined on an a priori basis.
- 7.
I am aware that this suggestion may lead us too far away from what Heidegger is explicitly asserting in the considered passages—i.e. it could mislead us.
- 8.
In an attempt to explain what he calls a ‘metaphysically “light” sense of self’, Peter Goldie introduces the expression ‘[being] riveted to one’s past’ (2012, p. 109). In so doing, he elaborates on the following thought Emmanuel Lévinas has developed in the context of a discussion on shame: ‘What appears in shame is […] precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself [du moi à soi-même]’ ([1935] 2003, p. 64).
- 9.
- 10.
The phrase ‘handling oneself in a given circumstance’ makes, thus, clear that we can speak of an implicit understanding of one’s situation both in the sense of a non-thematic understanding of the circumstances one is facing and in the sense of an understanding of oneself as being able to handle oneself in these concrete circumstances.
- 11.
I have warned my reader about the potentially misleading character of my suggestion that Heidegger is committed to the following view: in our encounters with other worldly entities, by revealing that we know how to deal with them in certain ways, we bring to light what kind of person we are, at this moment, seeking to (continue to) be. My last remark should serve as a first measure to avoid that my reader is misled by this proposal. As we shall see, existing in the projected way Dasein does is not essentially a matter of having some concrete and explicit goals in life. As discussed in detail by Theodore Kisiel (1993), Heidegger began to develop many of the motives that are central to his ‘analytic of Dasein’ in the context of the lectures he held (in Freiburg and Marburg) during the early 20s. These lectures were devoted to a particular reading of certain texts of Aristotle. Particularly the discussion developed in his Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle allows us to see that Heidegger’s notion of care is not only based on some considerations related to Aristotle’s notion of phronesis (and on the intuition that our practical knowledge is prior to the form of knowledge we qualify as theoretical), but also on Aristotle’s notion of energeia—a notion that captures a number of ideas to which Heidegger devotes particular attention when seeking to determine what he calls ‘the basic categories of life’ (cf. [1921/22] [1985] 2001, pp. 64ff.). We shall come to better understand the claim that our human way of being exhibits a projected nature in discussing Heidegger’s notion of an Entwurf. The point I am trying to stress here is that the claim that our way of being is teleologically structured by care (i.e. that we live in a grounded forward-regarding manner) is not based on the intuition that we possess the ability to make explicit some ‘ultimate goals of our life’. Rather, it is based on the idea that we human beings are, in a way, ‘always on the move’. Indeed, the notion of care we are seeking to elucidate is related to the Aristotelian thought that the way of being of those entities that are always on the move is intranquility. Heidegger writes: ‘The movedness [Bewegtheit] of factical life can be provisionally interpreted and described as unrest’ ([1921/22] [1985] 2001, p. 70). (For those who read Spanish, I recommend Gutiérrez Alemán [2002, pp. 98ff.].)
- 12.
Here, I am quoting from Blattner’s translation of the relevant passage of Being and Time (and not from Macquarrie and Robinson’s [1962] ‘standard’ translation) for terminological reasons. Blattner translates Heidegger’s ‘Seinkönnen’ as ‘ability-to-be’, which Macquarrie and Robinson translate as ‘potentiality-for-Being’. I have no view concerning whether Blattner’s translation is more accurate, but in the rest of this study I will be making use of his term ‘ability-to-be’.
- 13.
Heidegger’s point of departure in his ‘analytic of Dasein’ is the conviction that, in order to determine what a human being is, we have to answer the question concerning what it is like for us to be (to exist as) determinate persons. In other words, Heidegger is committed to the idea that an ontological account of our human way of being amounts to a phenomenology of what we may call a personal existence. To be sure, Heidegger systematically avoids the term ‘person’ and its cognates. As Andreas Luckner (2007, p. 154) observes, this is due to the fact that Heidegger wants to distance himself from the philosophical notions of a person developed by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler in the context of their ‘personalistic’ accounts of man; accounts that, in Heidegger’s view, exclusively address the ‘what’, and systematically neglect the ‘how’, of a personal being (cf. Heidegger [1927] 1962, pp. 72ff.).
- 14.
This response certainly involves a sort of dualism. This dualism pertains to a difference that is assumed to hold between the physical individual and the person one is. To this extent it could fail to satisfy our materialistically-minded imagined objector. It is important to note, however, that in accepting this sort of dualism one is not denying that there is a clear sense in which a person is determined by the physical characteristics she or he as a concrete individual exhibits. The idea is, hence, not that we are qua persons radically open to all thinkable possibilities. Rather, the point is that, even though our individual possibilities are always determined, among other things, by a number of state-characteristics we possess, this form of determinacy does not define what the specific possibilities are in terms of which we (are able to) exist at a given moment. Anticipating myself, I would like to remark that the dualism at issue here is related to the difference that can be taken to hold between what we may call our being simpliciter (what is usually called existence) and our qualified being. (Only the latter corresponds to what Heidegger calls existence.) This dualism could also be thought to be related to an ambiguity of our modern notion of life to which both Giorgio Agamben ([1995] 1998) and Heidegger ([1928/29] 1996, p. 168) point by observing that the ancient Greeks had two words for what we call life: ‘zoë, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ (Agamben [1995] 1998, p. 1).
- 15.
Blattner observes that in conceiving of a person factually (as opposed to conceiving of her factically), i.e. by focusing on her state-characteristics (and abstracting away from her ability-characteristics), one is grasping an aspect of this being that does not correspond to its ‘proper occurrence’ (p. 36). That is to say, one is grasping an aspect of this being that is irrelevant to its being what it is qua Dasein.
- 16.
George Stack (1972) argues that Kierkegaard’s notion of existential possibility may be traced back to Hegel and, indirectly, to Aristotle.
- 17.
Heidegger writes: ‘Projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself towards a plan that has been thought out, and in accordance with which Dasein arranges its Being’ ([1927] 1962, p. 185). In this context, and following John Caputo (1986), Blattner observes that the German word ‘ent-werfen’ can be literally translated as ‘to throw or cast forth’ (1999, p. 39).
- 18.
In a very influential paper Robert Brandom (1997) argues that Heidegger is committed to a view of Dasein as the being that thematizes. Besides arguably being something that partially amounts to the so-called ‘anthropological difference’, this capacity to make thematic—and in this case, particularly, to make thematic what we are seeking to (continue to) be—could be claimed to be central to our human capacity to exist in the mode of authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]. That is, our capacity to exist in such a way that our manner of comporting ourselves may be said to express our having assumed our personal possibilities; our ‘having taken these possibilities into our hands’, as we often say.
- 19.
Blattner emphasizes, however, that actuality in the sense of factual occurrence is not attributable to Dasein qua Dasein (cf. p. 43).
- 20.
In the relevant passage Heidegger writes: ‘Dasein is its basis existently—that is, in such a manner that it understands itself in terms of possibilities, and, as so understanding itself, is that entity which has been thrown. But this implies that in having a potentiality-for-Being [an ability-to-be] it always stands in one possibility or another: it constantly is not other possibilities, and it has waived these in its existentiell projection’ ([1927] 1962, p. 331).
- 21.
Blattner speaks of two functions projections have.
- 22.
This claim does not hold true for those behavioral expressions that cannot be understood as genuine acts, but have to be understood as mere (mechanical) reactions that do not presuppose an understanding of some situation.
- 23.
Someone could be inclined to object that this formulation does not allow us to make thematic those situations in which we are not able to decide which project we should pursue. It is important to note that in those situations in which we have difficulties in choosing between two mutually exclusive possibilities our indecision is articulated in certain terms (and not in others). The point is that the terms in which the indecision at issue is formulated are defined by a particular projection, i.e. by a particular understanding of one’s own situation as one in which this or that possibility (but not both possibilities at the same time) can (begin to) be actualized.
- 24.
Moreover, there are circumstances in which one cannot be indifferent to the fact that one’s situation is not offering a given possibility (yet). To see a possibility as one that is lacking in one’s actual situation does not only mean to understand this possibility, but furthermore, to understand oneself in terms of this extremely remote possibility. What is more, even an extremely remote possibility could be seen as one that is central to what one is seeking to (continue to) be.
- 25.
The respect in which a possibility can be taken to define the best terms in which one can exist at the relevant moment can, of course, be a moral one.
- 26.
Moreover—and this, I think, is at the basis of a number of philosophical puzzlements that concern the relation between affectivity and rationality—, an emotion in itself, and particularly when considered atomistically, can be seen as a ground-as-a-cause for some of our responses; as something one just is in the grip of, or as something that is (almost) unresponsive to one’s calm and allegedly more rational interpretation of the situation at issue.
- 27.
The reason for quoting the relevant passage from Blattner’s translation here is that the affective character of the determinacy at issue here gets lost in Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of ‘Befindlichkeit’ as ‘having a state-of-mind’.
- 28.
There are situations in which one can distance oneself from a given affective evaluation. But one can do so only to the extent to which the relevant situation has already been evaluated in an affective way.
- 29.
- 30.
Drawing on Blattner, we could differentiate in this context between one’s factual situation (what I have often called the circumstance one faces) and what one could call one’s factive situation. (I have tried to reserve the expression ‘the situation one finds oneself in’ to refer to one’s factive situation.) Indeed, the terms in which Blattner explains this difference allow us to further understand the sense in which our affectivity can be said to situate us. Blattner writes: ‘That [a given person] is in a certain factual situation, say, having stolen something, does not itself have any motivational import. She is motivated rather by shame, or pride or a fear in the face of this fact [i.e. by her factive situation]. And shame pride and fear can have the motivational impacts only in virtue of the way they reveal her possibilities to her’ (p. 53). Blattner summarizes below: ‘What situates her is not the deed, but the affective interpretation of the deed’ (ibid.).
- 31.
The grammatical inadequacy of combining the plural possessive adjective ‘our’ with the singular reflexive reference ‘self’ is intended to emphasize that the oblique intentional reference of an emotion by means of which one participates in a moment of affective intentional community characteristically points back to us (the involved individuals), as far as we (a definite plurality of people) as a (singular) group are concerned. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, ‘[the pronoun ‘ourself’ is] used instead of “ourselves,” typically when “we” refers to people in general rather than a definite group of people’. The term ‘ourself’ as used here has, thus, a clearly technical character.
- 32.
As we have seen (cf. the example of Mrs. Harnett in Sect. 6.3), the sheer fact that two individuals have a different reason to emotionally respond to one and the same occurrence does not preclude them from understanding their respective feelings as contributions to some joint feeling of theirs.
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Sánchez Guerrero, H.A. (2016). Caring (with One Another) and Existing as (Our Group). In: Feeling Together and Caring with One Another. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33735-7_7
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