Carol White (2005) – totalidade do Dasein

But, then, what exactly is the problem of Dasein’s ‘wholeness’? The statement of the problem gradually shifts away from the ‘horizontal’ metaphor of the ‘still outstanding’ as something yet to come in an individual’s life span and turns toward the issue of the nature of an existentiell understanding of being. Heidegger realizes that in the opening discussion the problem of wholeness may have appeared to be ‘an arbitrary construction’ (303) but thinks that the ensuing, correct analysis will convince us that the issue and its solution are crucial for understanding Dasein. By Chapter 3 of Division Two he can comment:

The question of Dasein’s able-to-be-whole has now fully sloughed off the character indicated at the beginning, when we treated it as if it were just a theoretical or methodological question of the analytic of Dasein, arising from the endeavour to have the whole of Dasein completely ‘given.’ The question of Dasein’s totality, which at the beginning we discussed only with regard to ontological method, has its justification, but only because the ground for that justification goes back to an ontical possibility of Dasein. (309)

What we need to understand is not the ‘wholeness’ of Dasein as a ‘sum’ of parts which we want to have ‘given’ to our analytic perspective, not even if the ‘parts’ are the various existential structures of Dasein’s being. The completeness of Dasein is not a matter of having a complete theory of it. It is the possibility of Dasein itself being ‘complete’ or ‘whole,’ that is, of Dasein’s ability to be as the entity that ‘exists’ by taking a stand toward being.

In the Heraclitus seminar of 1966/67 Heidegger poses an analogous question about the unity of a library. Is the library simply the sum of its books, furniture, and other items? Is the wholeness of the library jeopardized when some of these books or chairs are removed? Of course not: it is still a library. Heidegger explains: ‘”All” understood as summative is quite different from allness in the sense of the unity of the peculiar sort that is not so easy to specify at first’ (HS 20/37). Evidently even forty years after writing Being and Time Heidegger still found it hard to specify at first this notion of wholeness.

In Being and Time the reader may feel that there is something fishy about the problem precisely because of the misleading way it was introduced. If we heed Heidegger’s warnings and reject the present-at-hand conception of Dasein, it is not clear why Dasein’s ‘wholeness’ should be problematic. Is the difficulty that of how Dasein can be a unified understanding of being across time, particularly the span of centuries, when this understanding of being is constantly changing? This is how the issue might appear once we adequately grasp Heidegger’s notions of Dasein’s timeliness and historicality which follow his discussion of death. For example, how can Dasein unify itself in the past, present, and future? How can Dasein ‘stretch itself along’ in history? Yet why is this to be regarded as a problem? And why do we need to look behind or beyond the phenomenon for something that will guarantee a unity underlies the changes? If this is the problem, it sounds suspiciously like the one Heidegger himself dismissed as a pseudo-problem in his discussion of Husserl’s and Kant’s arguments for the unity of consciousness beneath its changing representations. This supposed problem, he said, was created by a mistaken, present-at-hand view of the self, so it should not be left over after the rejection of such a misconception. We should remember Heidegger’s criticism of the traditional conception of substance as that which ‘underlies’ changes. Would we not be falling into a similar present-at-hand conception of historicality if we wondered how Dasein can be the same and yet change?

The real question is not how Dasein can remain a unity across time and history but how can it be a unity at all. The possibility of existing as a unified ‘whole’ mentioned in the above quote is the possibility of authenticity. How is it that we can have an understanding of being and comprehend what-is as a whole exhibiting a particular way of being? We ourselves are simply one more domain of what-is. How can Dasein make an issue of the being of everything which is and come up with an answer to the question of being?

In the 1928 lectures constituting the text of the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic Heidegger claims that the concept of death in the recently published Being and Time is part of the analysis of Dasein’s transcendence (168/214). In the lectures what precedes the discussion of Dasein’s timeliness is a discussion of its ‘world entry’ as historical happening rather than a meditation on Dasein’s death. In this presentation, Dasein’s ‘freedom toward ground’ or its openness toward the being of what-is seems to provide the entry into the same issues that followed Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s being toward death in the hastily published book. Perhaps he was trying to avoid the misunderstanding created in the earlier work by avoiding its misleading vocabulary in which key words are ordinary words — death, guilt, conscience — but do not mean what they do in ordinary discourse. ‘World entry’ and ‘freedom toward ground’ are more obviously a part of a technical vocabulary to be defined at the author’s discretion.

In Being and Time, the ‘death’ of Dasein is the end of Dasein’s being, its existence as an openness toward being. In order to see how Dasein settles the question of being, we need to understand what puts an end to ‘the entity that we are,’ and this is certainly not the cessation of the life of a person. It is ‘death’ in a very particular sense: existential death.