Heidegger, affectedness, and the question of the temporality of being

Abstract

Throughout the entirety of his philosophical path of thinking, Martin Heidegger considers the phenomenon of affectedness to be of the utmost existential-ontological significance. Heidegger’s engagement with affectedness is both extensive, and extended— unfolding across many of the volumes that make up his collected works. Heidegger considers affectedness to be of such significance because, I contend, it is a fundamental means through which the Temporality of Being might be disclosively unconcealed. That which is at stake in affectedness for Heidegger, then, is nothing less than the Temporality of Being itself. Yet, despite being of such integral importance to Heidegger’s overarching philosophical project (that of raising anew the question of the Temporality of Being), Heidegger’s thematization of affectedness has been subject to neglect in Heidegger scholarship. More problematically still, when it has been engaged, interpretations have tended to be restrictively narrow, informed by but a fraction of Heidegger’s extensive writings on the phenomenon. As a result, the existential-ontological significance of Heidegger’s thematization of affectedness has, I contend, been both distorted and diminished in Heidegger scholarship. Given its importance to the development of Heidegger’s overarching philosophical project, it is, I contend, imperative that the significance of Heidegger’s thematization of affectedness be raised anew. The unique contribution of this thesis is, therefore, to retrieve or recover the existential-ontological significance of Heidegger’s thematization of affectedness.

After mapping out the groundwork for Heidegger’s thematization of affectedness, and differentiating between fallen and fundamental attunements, this thesis retrieves the existential-ontological significance of Heidegger’s thematization of affectedness by following the movement of the showing of the Temporality of Being in fundamental attunements. In so doing, it demonstrates how — by transposing Dasein into the sublime terror and joy of the ontological difference itself, by bringing Dasein into a destructive and distressing confrontation with the abyssal Nothing and the absence of time, in which Being itself and time itself prevail — affectedness is, for Heidegger, profoundly disclosive of the Temporality of Being.