Kevin Aho

This paper attempts to reconcile, what appear to be, two conflicting accounts of authenticity in Heidegger's thought. Authenticity in Being and Time (1927) is commonly interpreted in 'existentialist' terms as willful commitment and resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) in the face of one's own death but, by the late 1930's, is reintroduced in terms of Gelassenlieit, as a non-willful openness that "lets beings be." By employing Heidegger's conception of authentic historicality (Geschiclidichkeit), understood as the retrieval of Dasein's past, and drawing on his writings on Hölderlin in the 1930'sand 1940's, I suggest that the ancient interpretation of leisure and festivity may play an important role in unifying these conflicting accounts. Genuine leisure, interpreted as a form of play (Spiel), frees us from inauthentic busy-ness and gives us an opening to face the abyssal nature of our own being and the mystery that "beings are" in the flrst place. To this end, leisure re-connects us with wonder (Erstaunen) as the original temperament of Western thought. In leisurely wonder, the authentic self does not seek purposive mastery and control over beings but calmly accepts the unsettledness ofbeing and is, as a result, allowed into the original openness or space of play of time (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) that lets beings emerge-into-presence on their own terms.

Many critics have attempted to give an account of a gendered incarnation of Dasein in response to Heidegger’s “neutral” or “asexual” interpretation. In this paper,I suggest gendered readings of Dasein are potentially misleading. I argue Dasein is gendered only to the extent that “the Anyone” (das Man)—understood as relational background of social practices, institutions, and languages—constitutes the space or “clearing” (Lichtung) of intelligibility. However, this reading misrepresents the core motivation of Heidegger’s early project, namely to arrive at “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) as the original source of any intelligibility whatsoever. For Heidegger, Dasein is to be understood in terms of the twofold movement of being “thrown” into the Past (Vergangenheit) and “projecting” into the Future (Zukunft). It is only the basis of the neutral temporal structures of “thrown projection” that beings can emerge-into-presence as such, enabling us to make sense of our Present (Gegenwart) gendered practices in the first place.

Heidegger's assessment of animals in his 1929/30 Freiburg lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, has been the focal point of much recent debate. In this course, it appears Heidegger preserves the prejudices of metaphysical humanism by establishing an opposition between animal "behavior" (Benehmen) and human "comportment" (Verhalten) to the extent that humans, unlike animals, embody an understanding of being and, therefore, encounter beings as such. In this essay, I suggest this distinction can be properly understood only by turning to Heidegger's earliest Freiburg lectures where the question of "factical life" (das faktische Leben) is explicitly addressed. In these lectures, I argue Heidegger develops a three-tiered distinction that allows us to differentiate human life from animal life: (1) Humans, unlike animals, can articulate how things in the world matter to them in terms of where they fit in a meaningful nexus of social relations. (2) By becoming absorbed in these everyday social relations, human life has a unique tendency to secure itself from the abyssal structure of its own temporal "movement" (Bewegung). (3) Human life has the capacity to announce its abyssal structure, an announcement that affects us as anxiety, and makes it possible for us to own up to our temporal and historical constitution. Finally, I suggest that, for Heidegger, any interpretation of animality--whether anthropocentric or not--is itself made possible by a horizonal "event" that is more-than-human, that is always prior to and makes possible any understanding of being whatsoever.

Heidegger's Being and Time is often interpreted as an important contribution to the canon of Existentialist philosophy. This popular interpretation is due largely to the theme of "authenticity" that is carefully developed in Division II. Here, Heidegger explains how we, as human beings, can temporarily sever ourselves from our bondage to a "fallen" public world by owning up to the anxious awareness of our inevitable death. It is in resolutely facing death that we can become individuals for the first time and see through the illusions of stability and comfort that our roles in public life offer us. As "beings-towards-death" we can soberly come to grips with our finitude and bring this awareness back into our everyday lives, realizing and accepting that there is no security or permanence to our existence.But this existentialist interpretation fails to acknowledge the fundamental role that historicity plays in Heidegger's conception of authenticity. The experience of anxiety that can motivate us to authenticity and resoluteness is only initially an individuating experience. Our historicity determines the structure of our existence in such a way that the authentic human being is never an isolated individual. Human beings can never rebel against or overcome their own socio-cultural and historical world because they are always already interwoven to a specific historical situation. In this paper I will attempt to explain the relevance of historicist authenticity as a critical response to the common, existentialist interpretation. I will focus on the crucial role that one's historical background, in the sense of community and heritage, has on Heidegger's interpretation of authenticity.

Written in a jargon-free way, Body Matters provides a clear and accessible phenomenological critique of core assumptions in mainstream biomedicine and explores ways in which health and illness are experienced and interpreted differently in various socio-historical situations. By drawing on the disciplines of literature, cultural anthropology, sociology, medical history, and philosophy, the authors attempt to dismantle common presuppositions we have about human afflictions and examine how the methods of phenomenology open up new ways to interpret the body and to re-envision therapy.

The instrumental classification of depression made possible by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the widespread pharmacological approach to treatment in mainstream biopsychiatry has generated a cottage industry of criticism. This paper explores the potential shortcomings of the DSM/bio-psychiatric model and introduces the value of philosophical counseling—specifically by means of integrating the insights of Existentialism and Buddhism—as a way to overcome a number of diagnostic and methodological problems. Philosophical counseling, in this regard, is not overly concerned with the objective question of “What we are?” as biophysical beingswith overt behaviors but with a more fundamental question, namely, “How we are?” that is, how do we experience our existence as finite, impermanent beings, how does this experience shape and determine depressive episodes, and how can we come to accept our own finitude and impermanence?

This short essay offers a critical overview of David Nowell Smith's book Sounding/Silence, focusing on, what the author calls, the “ontologization of poetry” as a way to grasp Heidegger's critique of traditional aesthetics and the novel claim that the human body is already implicated in Heidegger's account of language and poetry. To this end, there is a brief discussion of Heidegger's controversial views on the human/animal relation, the connection between poetry and thinking, and the value of Heidegger's poetics for future scholarship in the area.

With the increasingly close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) there has been a growing tendency in the mental health professions to interpret everyday emotional suffering and behavior as a medical condition that can be treated with a particular drug. In this paper, I suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology is uniquely suited to challenge the core assumptions of medicalization by expanding psychiatry's narrow conception of the self as an enclosed, biological individual and recognizing the ways in which our experience of things--including mental illness--is shaped by the socio-historical situation in which we grow. Informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, psychiatry's first priority is to suspend the prejudices that come with being a medical doctor in order to hear what the patient is saying. To this end, psychiatry can begin to understand the patient not as a static, material body with a clearly defined brain dysfunction but as an unfolding, situation existence already involved in an irreducibly complex social world, an involvement that allows the patient to experience, feel, and make sense of their emotional suffering.

Dostoevsky's disturbing and groundbreaking novella appears in this new annotated edition with an Introduction by Charles Guignon and Kevin Aho. An analogue of Guignon's widely praised Introduction to his 1993 edition of "The Grand Inquisitor," the editors' Introduction places the underground man in the context of European modernity, analyzes his inner dynamics in the light of the history of Russian cultural and intellectual life, and suggests compelling reasons for our own strange affinity for this nameless man who boldly declares, "I was rude and took pleasure in being so.”