Kevin Aho

A keen athlete in his late forties, philosophy professor Kevin Aho hadn't given much thought to his own mortality, until he suffered a sudden heart attack that left him fighting for his life. Confronted with death for the first time, he realized that the things he thought gave his life meaning, such as his independence or his ability to plan his own future, were in tatters. Aho turned to those thinkers who have reflected deeply on the meaning of life and the anxiety of living when every heartbeat might be your last: the existentialists. Armed with insights from the likes of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir, he found new meaning and comfort in a view of life that strives for authenticity and accepts aging and death as part of what makes life worthwhile. Existentialism asks us to face the frailty of our existence and to live with a sense of urgency and gratitude toward its manifold beauties. It is only then that we can be released from patterns of self-deception and begin to appreciate what truly matters in our fleeting, precious lives.

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance.

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our self-interpretations and future projects. The paper concludes by showing how the uncanny is not simply something we feel in times of crisis; it is, for Heidegger, who we are. This means the secure feeling of familiarity that we embodied prior to the pandemic was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world.

In her article, “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die,” Emily Hughes offers a provocative and powerful analysis of an experiential aspect of depression that is often overlooked in the psychiatric literature. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of ontological death, what he calls “dying” in Being and Time, Hughes illuminates how episodes of major depression can disrupt the synchronous unity of time that structures our experience and gives meaning to our lives. When this happens, the sufferer enters a paradoxical liminal space, one in which we live through our own death, where death is understood ontologically as an inability-to-be. For Heidegger, “to...

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities.

The rise of medically unexplained conditions like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome in the United States looks remarkably similar to the explosion of neurasthenia diagnoses in the late nineteenth century. In this paper, I argue the historical connection between neurasthenia and today’s medically unexplained conditions hinges largely on the uncritical acceptance of naturalism in medicine. I show how this cultural acceptance shapes the way in which we interpret and make sense of nervous distress while, at the same time, neglecting the unique social and historical forces that continue to produce it. I draw on the methods of hermeneutic philosophy to expose the limits of naturalism and forward an account of health and illness that acknowledges the extent to which we are always embedded in contexts of meaning that determine how we experience and understand our suffering.

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities.

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.

By focusing on the unique velocity and over-stimulation of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel pioneered an interpretation of cultural boredom that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory by viewing it through the modern experience of time-pressure and social acceleration. This paper explores Simmel's account of boredom by showing how--in the frenzy of modern life--it has become increasingly difficult to qualitatively distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to us. Furthermore, this emotional indifference invariably pushes us towards more excessive and risky behavior, towards, what I call, "extreme aesthesia." Insofar as novel experiences quickly become routine in the technological age, it appears that only extreme sensations and experiences can break the spell of boredom, allowing us to momentarily feel strongly for something.

The dominance of the medical-model in American psychiatry over the last 30 years has resulted in the subsequent decline of the “talking cure”. In this paper, we identify a number of problems associated with medicalized psychiatry, focusing primarily on how it conceptualizes the self as a de-contextualized set of symptoms. Drawing on the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, we argue that medicalized psychiatry invariably overlooks the fact that our identities, and the meanings and values that matter to us, are created and constituted by our dialogical relations with others. While acknowledging the importance of medical and pharmaceutical interventions, we suggest that it is only by means of the dialogical interplay of the talking cure that the client can both recognize unhealthy and self-defeating ways of being and be opened up to the possibility of new meanings and self-interpretations

Provides an accessible and scholarly introduction to the core ideas of the existentialist tradition. Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers in chapters centering on the key themes of freedom, being-in-the-world, alienation, nihilism, anxiety and authenticity. He also addresses important but often overlooked issues in the canon of existentialism, with discussions devoted to the role of embodiment, the movement's contribution to ethics, politics, and environmental and comparative philosophies, as well as its influence on contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy. The enduring relevance of existentialism is shown by applying existentialist ideas to contemporary philosophical discussions of interest to a wide audience. The book covers secular thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir as well as religious authors, such as Buber, Dostoevsky, Marcel, and Kierkegaard"--Back cover.

In his Contributions to Philosophy, Martin Heidegger introduces "acceleration" as one of the three symptoms--along with "calculation" and the "outbreak of massiveness"--of our technological way of "being-in-the-world." In this article, I unpack the relationship between these symptoms and draw a twofold conclusion. First, interpreting acceleration in terms of time pathologies, I suggest the self is becoming increasingly fragmented and emotionally overwhelmed from chronic sensory arousal and time pressure. This experience makes it difficult for us to qualitatively distinguish what matters to us in our everyday lives, resulting in a pervasive cultural mood of indifference, what Heidegger calls "profound boredom." Second, by drawing on Heidegger's hermeneutic method, I argue that the practice of mainstream psychology, by adopting the reductive methodology of the empirical sciences, largely ignores our accelerated socio-historical situation, resulting in therapeutic models that have a tendency to construct and perpetuate the very pathologies the psychologist is seeking to treat.

Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental ontology and to determine whether or not an account of the body is necessary to complete the project. I defend Heidegger by suggesting that any analysis of the body is ‘ontic’ or regional and is made possible only on the basis of Dasein, understood as a public ‘clearing’ or ‘there’ of intelligibility that determines in advance the way things emerge-into-presence as the kinds of things that they are. Heidegger’s core concern in Being and Time is to unearth the essential, ‘ontological-existential’, structures of Dasein that make it possible for us to begin regional investigations into the problem of the body in the first place.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability.

Drawing on the work of Fowers, Richardson, and Slife, this commentary offers an overview and critical assessment of the theory and practice of virtue ethics in psychology. The commentary highlights the importance of a hermeneutic or relational understanding of selfhood and the value of interpreting human meanings within the context of a shared tradition. I conclude with some critical remarks that focus on reconciling the assumptions of naturalism with hermeneutic philosophy, the issue of conservatism in virtue ethics, and problems of access and efficacy in approaches to psychotherapy. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This paper attempts to reconcile, what appear to be, two conflicting accounts of authenticity in Heidegger’s thought. Authenticity in Being and Time is commonly interpreted in ‘existentialist’ terms as willful commitment and resoluteness in the face of one’s own death but, by the late 1930’s, is reintroduced in terms of Gelassenheit, as a non-willful openness that “lets beings be.” By employing Heidegger’s conception of authentic historicality , understood as the retrieval of Dasein’s past, and drawing on his writings on Hölderlin in the 1930’s and 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 , 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 first place. To this end, leisure re-connects us with wonder 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 of being and is, as a result, allowed into the original openness or space of play of time 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