POLI 3306 - Heidegger on Subjectivism

In today's class, I got the impression that many of the students regarded Heidegger's treatment of art and thinking as a confirmation of subjectivity as individual autonomy. I find that this reading does not agree with Heidegger's body of work as there seems to be a very distinct historical argument being put forward that is in fact counter to the subjectivist thesis (as it was articulated in the Letter on Humanism). To regard a subjectivism as emerging from nothing, an essence that proceeds existence, is the impossibility of a precondition of nothing. What point would there be of the subjective if in its essence it were of nothing? Does it not resemble a metaphysical and even contradictory assertion? Even if we so charitably concede in favor of the “autonomous subjective” as possibility, there must be some origin to allow for such an exchange. The subjective is restricted to a place and time in the world. It is this limitation that therefore structures our experiences within history through the subjective. In otherwords, we cannot use the language to signify the thing, in the act of speaking, without confessing at the same time our relation to it.

Historically there have been a number of claims to what is to be considered truth through metaphysics, whether in the Platonic or Christian traditions. Though there was a significant inversion of metaphysics by existentialism in the mid 20th century both of these narratives share a fate as truth. Modern autonomy is rooted in the act of the will as truth and the failure of essentialism, but let us not forget that this perspective was itself conditioned by the particular historical tension it was formed in.

Heidegger invites us to focus in on what "withdraws" from our understanding, for in regarding what withdraws we are immediately placed not only within a historical perspective but we can begin the meticulous work of tracing what has been forgotten. This however does not remove us from history, it definitively situates us within as contributing to its formation. Subjectivism is itself only a byproduct of historical circumstance and not at all the impetus for which historical change emerges. There is something much nearer to our everyday experience that is indeed a point of origin, what Heidegger calls Being.