Jesús H. Ramírez

I develop a connection between racial identity and Heidegger’s early phenomenological perspective from Being and Time. This effort offsets the critique that Heidegger is too abstract in his use of Dasein to have any practical application to racial identity. I examine how the underlying issue of racial identity is rooted in the composition of an “existentiell,” where one grows up in a variety of ways to be, compelling one to choose and neglect them. I then examine Mariana Ortega’s critique of Heidegger’s idea and how she describes it as a limiting concept that is too abstract to deal with everyday issues of race. By recovering the concept of Dasein from the “abstraction critique” via re-imagining an existentiell, I show how everyday discourses about racial identity are part of the phenomenological world Dasein grows up in, necessitating analyses about how to be in the world through racial, ethnic, and cultural dimensions.

This paper explores Sigmund Freud's concept of repression in the existential strife exhibited by two main characters, Makar Alexyevitch and Varvara Alexyevna, in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Poor People." To demonstrate this, I psychoanalyze of how they handle their repressed desires, emphasizing the necessity of Freud's main rule for this method: Openness. Dostoevsky's "Poor People" presents an existential crisis handled through openness and mishandled when an individual represses one's desires. In delving into Dostoevsky's first novel, I demonstrate a link between the existential and psychological, wherein individuals strive to overcome themselves. Surprisingly, this link has a common influence between Dostoevsky and Freud: Immanuel Kant. I briefly discuss this shared similarity to show the basic idea of an "existential middle" derived from a Freudian psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky's "Poor People."

I use Heidegger’s Being and Time to understand and critique racial discourse, but to also determine Heidegger’s reach into issues like racial identity. I start by examining how his introductory statements in Being and Time on the term “existentiell” suggest a path towards a conception of identity. I then go into how a racial identity could, through his terminology, be conceived as what I call a “fear existentiell.” I demonstrate how society assists the individual in maintaining a racialized existence that is embedded in fear. I move toward an examination of Heidegger’s three concepts of death to demonstrate how two of these death concepts are often attached to a racial identity through racial discourse. I move into a discussion that relies on W.E.B. Du Bois’s conception of the black American as a problem for America and, using his seminal question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” I show that the individual’s existence, as discussed in Heidegger, becomes a problem for itself through the racial discourse about its identity. I call this “Being-a-problem.” At first, I discuss it as inauthentic, as it is driven by social fear and generalized discussions about racial identity; however, I later demonstrate how it can move from inauthentic Being-a-problem to authentic Being-a-problem. I end with an analysis of racial discourse, showing that it exemplifies what I call, “race reports,” which are comprised of reports about the individual’s racial identity that conceal a person’s potential for authenticity.