Heidegger on Death and Being by Johannes Achill Niederhauser

Author:Johannes Achill Niederhauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030513757
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

2 The Fissure of the Possible

Based on what I have argued so far, I can now reconstruct in more detail, how Heidegger arrives at beyng as the possible and what role death plays in this regard. As argued in Part I, death as the possibility that gives Dasein nothing to actualise leads Heidegger to privilege possibility in a distinct non-metaphysical sense. Thus, Heidegger’s thought is not simply an inversion of the Aristotelian-Scholastic schema of potentiality-actuality. The German word Möglichkeit takes on another meaning, removed from connotations of power and potency. Heidegger’s Möglichkeit speaks out of the verbs mögen and vermögen. Heidegger properly develops possibility, Möglichkeit in relation to those verbs in the lecture course What calls for Thinking? (cf. GA 8: 5). Yet, that sense of Möglichkeit is already active in Contributions.

It is important to point out here that Möglichkeit or das Mögliche is precisely neither infinite, eternal, nor limitless. There is a “not”, which sways in the possible and this “not” Heidegger wishes to bring to the fore. For Heidegger the “possible” is limited, precisely because it is not some indefinite power that only waits to be actualised. The “possible” is to remain unhurt and mortals accomplish this by cherishing the earth rather than by exploiting it, as Heidegger says in Overcoming Metaphysics (cf. GA 7: 97). The Will to Will wants the opposite. The Will to Will wants the “possible” to be the impossible, i.e., to be limitless and infinite, Heidegger here continues. Thus, we could say that Deleuze with his notion of the “virtual” formulates the technical-instrumental rationality of the current age. Heidegger’s “possible” is something else entirely. Thus, we have to be careful what Heidegger really means by Möglichkeit.

For Heidegger Möglichkeit has to do with the verb mögen first and foremost. That is to say, Möglichkeit does not have to do with power as do potentiality and possibility. These two have their etymological origin in the vulgar Latin verb potere which means to be capable of, to be powerful. Yet, Heidegger wishes to understand Möglichkeit in a similar way as he understands the German word Wesen. I will say more on Wesen in Part III when I address the Wesen der Technik. That is to say, he understands these words in a non-metaphysically charged way, but rather in the way the vernacular would understand them. He may not be entirely etymologically accurate since the German word mögen, in fact, does have to do with power and force. Nevertheless, Heidegger wishes to stress the meaning of “liking” and “loving” as prevalent in mögen and hence also in Möglichkeit and the pivotal verb vermögen. It is thus highly crucial to appreciate that Heidegger wishes to wrest Möglichkeit entirely free from any metaphysical connotations and hence also from prevalent connotations of power and potential. Möglichkeit is about love for Heidegger, but also about force (Kraft) in a non-metaphysical sense. Hence when Heidegger writes in Why Poets? that we have not yet learnt how to love (cf. GA 5: 274/204), in my view, what he is trying to say, is that we have forgotten being.

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