At Home with Hegel and Heidegger

Abstract

The idea of philosophy as an attempt to correct humanity's mythical fallen state develops in many directions in the philosophical tradition.1 In The City of God Against the Pagans, St Augustine argues that the reason for our fallen state is a perverse kind of elevation by which humanity forsakes the foundation upon which the mind should rest, to become and remain, as it were, one's own foundation. one takes delight in his own self-sufficiency, [man] falls away from the one who truly suffices him.2 Through their pride the residents of the Garden of Eden turn away from the immutable good of God and pursue their own pleasure. The hope for redemption and spiritual regeneration lies with aligning our will with God's will. However, once we have fallen, the path to re-establishing human completeness is entirely a matter of God's determination. In our fallen state only God is capable of delivering us from the wretchedness of our homelessness. In modernity however the hope for regeneration, salvation, and overcoming our homelessness is invested in the very capacities that Augustine considers the marker of humanity's flawed character-self-grounding and self-sufficiency. Self-determined freedom is in modernity assigned the role of making humanity whole again. If humanity through its reason can be demonstrated as grounding, authorizing, and legitimating its own norms then humanity has (at least) the potential to develop a social and political environment that an autonomous subject can identify as her own.My concern in this paper is to examine the respective ways in which Hegel and Heidegger respond to the myth of the fall. Heidegger and Hegel represent two alternative paths to this quest for homecoming. In Hegel's thought alienation and homelessness are key elements of the structure of experience that underlies the method of the Phenomenology. The text progresses through the misalignment of the norms by which successive shapes of spirit hold their knowledge to be true and a skeptical intuition that those norms are inadequate explanations of that world and the subjects that inhabit it. At the heart of this self-correcting trajectory of experience is a self-determining subject that strives to be at home with itself in otherness. Heidegger by contrast argues that the quest for a whole in which a self-determining subject could be at home is a delusion that runs through modern philosophy reaching its highpoint in Hegel. The core concepts of Being and Time such as care, anxiety, death, and the call of conscience do not provide Dasein with respite from her homelessness. In Heidegger's later writings there is however a fundamental shift: there he argues that human beings can be at home when they are considered as creatures whose fundamental characteristic is dwelling, but that home is of a very different order than the self-governing and self-relating freedom that Hegel describes.The notion of being-at-home or at-one-with-oneself (Beisichsein or Beisichselbstsein) pervades Hegel's thought from the Phenomenology of Spirit to his later lectures. Being-at-home-with-oneself is how he conceives human freedom. Why he conceives freedom as Beisichselbstsein has to be understood against the Enlightenment's view of freedom and Rousseau's critique of it. The Enlightenment is commonly understood to have as its central platform the dismissal of all forms of unreflective life. Traditions and cultures that perpetuated themselves through the absolute certainty of their animating norms were abandoned and replaced with interminable reflection, critique, and unceasing change. While the Enlightenment might have refuted forever the idea of such easy certitudes it was unable to offer anything like a coherent and unified culture to which subjects could belong as second nature, since such unreflective belonging is precisely what it sought to dismiss as the very condition of progress and freedom. Such unreflective forms of life are however the necessary ground of all cultures. …