Becoming Who We Already Are

[DRAFTPlease do not cite or circulate, though I welcome your
comments!]
Becoming Who We Already Are: Heidegger on Repetition

Nate Zuckerman, University of Puget Sound
May 17, 2013
Introduction
Become
who
you
are
is
the
categorical
imperative
of
existentialism. Just like Kants version, it tells us the shape or form

that our willing must take if we are to count as willing at all. You must
be making the movement of faith, or else you despair at not being a
self; you must get behind your leading drive and will the eternal
recurrence of the same, or else you are just a weak and subordinate
part of some other will to power; you must anticipate death resolutely,
or else you have fallen into being an inauthentic anyone. But unlike
Kants imperative, which demands that our willing have a kind of
logical form characteristic of practical reason, the existentialist
imperative demands that our willing have a kind of temporal form that
characterizes that willing as a distinctively human activity. That is to
say, the existentialist imperative demands that our willing unfold in
time in a certain way, if it is to count as human willing at allhence
the claim that we can be human only by becoming human.
But what kind of activity is becoming human supposed to be,
and how exactly is it meant to unfold in time? Today Im going to be
focusing on Heideggers answer to this question, as it is inspired by
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Kierkegaard. Now, Kierkegaard talks about the specific activity of
becoming
Christian
through
the
movement
of
faith,
whereas
Heidegger speaks more generically about becoming who we are as

Dasein by resolutely anticipating the possibility of death. But
Heidegger follows right in Kierkegaards footsteps (however much he
hides, denies or plays this down in the footnotes to Being and Time)
by describing the temporal form of these activities in terms of the
concept of repetitionand Heideggers descriptions live right up to
Kierkegaards, in their air of paradox and their defiance of easy sense.
Kierkegaard's famous quote from Repetition the book says that
[r]epetition and recollection are the same movement, only in
opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is
repeated backwards, whereas repetition, properly so called, is
recollected forwards. [B]ut it takes courage to will repetition.
[H]e who wills repetition
is a man, and the more
emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human

being he is.1
Will yourself such that you repeat yourself, would be his formulation
of the existentialist imperative. Heideggers formulation says that you
must repeat yourself by coming towards yourself in a future that is
not later than the past, in such a way that you come back to yourself
in a past that is not earlier than the present.2 In a slogan, their shared
imperative is to become who you already are. But how could we have
Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Hong and Hong ed., trans. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press: 1983), 172-173.
2
See ibid., 401.

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to become something if were that thing already? How could we
already be something that we are not yet?
Im going to argue that there is a familiar activity that we do
every day, which makes sense in terms of this non-sequential form of
time: the distinctively human activity of commitment. That probably
sounds off, at firstusually, we think of human life and action in terms
of a sequence of beginning, middle and end: First, I go to school, then
I get a job, then I raise a family, and so on until my life is over. And we
usually treat the idea of a commitment as referring to a mental state
or an attitude thats true of someone in any given instant: If youre
committed to being a student, for example, we think this is because
you currently want to get certain things out of your academic life, or
because you happen to value them or have a disposition to pursue
them in certain circumstances.
But Heideggers view, as I read it, suggests that commitments
are not just states or traits that are true of us in any given instant.
Instead, he says we should understand commitments as activities,
things that we are doing in timein fact, he thinks theyre the basic
thing that were responsible for doing if we want to go on living out
meaningful human lives. And he argues that commitments unfold in
time non-sequentially because we have to act in ways that engage
with the past, the present and the future of our own commitments all
at once. So he says, for example, that the structure of human life
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does not fill up a track or stretch of lifeone which is somehow
occurrentwith the phases of its momentary actualities 3; and that it
does not first build itself up through and out of the adjoining of
instants; rather, these originate in the already stretched temporality
of a repetition that is futurally and already [der zuknftig gewesenden
Wiederholung].
So what we want to understand is this claim that the time of

human life involves a kind of repetition of a commitment that is at
every moment stretched out in the whole of its past, through its
present and into its future. And to do that, we have to take a few
minutes to understand where Heidegger gets this idea in the first
place, which on my understanding is Aristotles metaphysics of animal
life. So Ill start there, by explaining Aristotles suggestion that the
bodily movements of animals are not just sequentially-ordered actions,
but they can also be seen as participating in an underlying and nonsequential form of activity that has something like the temporal
structure that Kierkegaard and Heidegger call repetition. Then well
look at how Heidegger puts an existentialist twist on this idea by
focusing on the way that our lives as human animals are vulnerable to
a kind of practical breakdown that he calls existential anxiety and
death. This threat of breakdown is what makes it a constant, open
question for us (1) whether we can make sense of and care about who
3
4
Ibid., 426.
Ibid., 443. (translation modified)

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we claim to be here and now, through the way we act in the world, as
well as (2) our claim to understand what it means to go on being that
person in the future, along with (3) our claim to have been that person
living out that human way of life, all along in the past. So, the nonsequential feature of human life, it will turn out, is our having to
maintain a commitment to those claims that we are always staking in
each new thing that we do, claims that are constantly threatened by
the possibility of breaking down, failing us, and being pulled out from
beneath our feet. Striving to maintain a commitment to those claims is,
I will argue, what Heidegger means by repetition.
Okay, so thats a preview of where were going to go; now lets
start filling in the details by getting more of the background in view:
Im going to talk about the explanatory role that the concept of
repetition is meant to play in Heideggers view, by tracing it back to
the kind of explanation that Aristotle gives when he appeals to an
animals nature.
Aristotle on Kinetic and Infinite Activities
Lets go back to the Kantian imperative for just another minute:

This imperative suggests that we can explain why our bodily
movements are actions for which we are morally responsible, by
understanding those movements as exercises of our capacity for
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autonomous practical reason. The existentialist imperative suggests a
similar explanationbut it seeks to explain why our bodily movements
are the living out of some human identity and way of life that can
possibly be meaningful and matter to us; and I am suggesting that the
source of the explanation here is our capacity for commitment,
through which we are responsible for the very possibility of any such
meaningfulness and mattering at all. Now, both of these explanations
are of the same kind: We want to know what lets some set of
phenomena P count as, or make sense as, or simply
be, a
manifestation of some other kind of phenomenon, Q. To answer this

question, we show that P exhibits a kind of order or pattern or form
that is characteristic of Q, insofar as P is what you get when you
exercise the capacity for Q. So for instance, bodily movements are
actions insofar as those movements exhibit the logical order of
reasoning from a priori practical principles, which is the result of
exercising our capacity for practical reason itself. Or again, bodily
actions are the living out of a meaningful way of human life insofar as
those movements exhibit the temporal order of repetition, which is
the result of exercising our capacity for existential commitment.
Now, the provenance for this type of explanation lies in
Aristotles metaphysics of animal life. Aristotle thinks that in order to
explain why some set of bodily movements or other physical
phenomena is the activity of some animals life, we have to appeal to
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its nature. Ill explain this with an examplethink about the lion, for a
second: It typically weighs about 400 pounds, its four feet tall, it has
a tawny coat and a tail. Now, it has these properties and falls under
these predicates, not by aiming to be or to do something, but simply,
as Heidegger puts it, when we consider it in terms of the way it
looks,
the state in which it happens to be at a given instant. But
these features arent enough to define it as the animal it is, because

something else could happen to fall under the same descriptions while
being a distinct kind of animal (biologists call that a case of cryptic
species). Aristotles view is that what makes something a lion is its
nature, a set of capacities for acting in certain ways that characterize
the form of life of a lion. This nature makes sense of the animals
bodily movements and other physical features by giving us the reason
why those phenomena take place and hang together in the particular
order or pattern or form that they do. With respect to the animals
bodily movements in particular, the concept of a nature provides a
kind of imperative according to which those movements must unfold
in time, if they are to be the activity of that kind of animal living out
its specific form of life.6 So the thought here would be that only lions
perceive, move around, feed and make babies in the specific set of
ways that they do, exercising their natural capacities for the sake of
5
Being and Time, 88-89; cf. 200-201, 412-413.

See, for instance, his argument for classifying animals functionally, in Parts of Animals
I.1, 640b30-641a18 and I.5, 645b1-28, as well as his description of the capacities of the
soul in terms of their characteristic acts, in On the Soul II-III..
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marking out a territory, raising and protecting their pride, and so on,
in a uniquely leonine fashion.
But heres the most important and interesting point: Aristotle
doesnt think that being a lion is simply the sum of those kinds of
activities, either.7 Its one thing to do what lions do, but another thing
to be a lioneven if these two kinds of activities coincide in the same
bodily movements. So, to explain this, Ill introduce a distinction: Lets
call doing what lions do a kinetic activity, and lets call being a lion
an infinite activity. Now, the two terms are meant to pick out
different kinds of practical and temporal structures (forms or
patterns) that activities can have: 8 So, lets start with kinetic
activities. Kinetic activities are structured in such a way that they
come into being from a kind of lack or incompleteness. 9 Maybe our
lion starts hunting because it needs food. It will maintain this kinetic
activity and continue to be hunting as long as it does whatever will
progress the activity further toward the end of getting food. When it
finds and eats its victim and attains the activitys end, then the
activity ceases to be. That episode of hunting is complete, its over,
and no longer taking place.
But heres the thing: If you cease to do a particular thing that
lions do, or in my terms, attain the end of some kinetic activity, that
7
All other things that we state, [e.g., about a human being,] such as that he is
white, that he runs, and so on, are irrelevant to the definition [of what it is for him to
be a man]. Categories 5, 2b34-37.
8
Aristotle discusses such a distinction in Metaphysics IX.6, 1048b18-34.
9
See Metaphysics XI.9, 1066a20.

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doesnt mean that you have ceased or completed the infinite activity
of being a lion. The reason is because, in order to go on being the
living creature that it is, the lion not only has to do all those kinetic
things in some sequential order, it also has to do this for the sake of
maintaining its nature, which for Aristotle means maintaining its
bodys capacity to do all those kinetic things that characterize it as
the animal it is. And the reason why it has to act for the sake of
maintaining those natural capacities is because they face a constant
possibility of biological breakdown, in deficiency, degeneration and
death.10 So, although the various things that an animal accidentally
happens to be doing are always changing and different, they are all
done in the name of doing something that is non-accidental,
unchanging, ongoing and sustained, namely, going on being able to do
what lions do. In this sense, the end of being a lion isnt a kind of
state or status that is to be attained; its better thought of as a
capacity that is to be maintained. As Aristotle puts it, the expression
to be acted upon has more than one meaning; it may mean either (a)
the extinction of one of two contraries by the other [thats a kinetic
change from one state to another], or (b) the maintenance of what is
10
See On the Soul, II.2, 412b18-413a4: Suppose that the eye were an animalsight
would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which
corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing
is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in nameit is no more a real eye than
the eye of a statue or of a painted figure. [T]he soul is activity in the sense
corresponding to the power of sight ; the body corresponds to what exists in
capacity; as the pupil plus the power of sight constitutes the eye, so the soul plus
the body constitutes the animal.

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capable by the agency of what is active and already like what is acted
upon [that is the ongoing, sustained, infinite activity].
11
And so, for
any given thing that an animal is doing, its current bodily movements
are going to mean something different and be something different,
depending on whether we take them to manifest a kinetic activity or
an infinite activity.
Heres another way of explaining why that is: The actions that
make up a kinetic activity are parts; theyre ordered in a purposive
sequence, from beginning to end. Infinite activities, in contrast, are
not made up of parts; instead, we can say, theyre made up of
instances. And unlike parts, instances dont fill up or exhaust the
thing that they are instances of, so their practical and temporal
relation to that thing has to be different.12 And furthermore, Aristotles
pointat least as Heidegger interprets itis that the only way we can
understand any kinetic activity as the kinetic activity of a lion is by
situating it in a broader pattern and a deeper context, by seeing it as
an instance of an underlying infinite activity, the activity of the lions
11
On the Soul II.5, 417b2-5. (See also Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1103a34-1103b5.)
A finite end [in my terms: an end of a kinetic activity] explains an action as a part
of itself. When I am doing A because I want to do B, then I think that, in doing A, I
am doing part of doing B. An infinite end [the end of what I call an infinite
activity] explains an action as a manifestation of itself. When I am doing A because it
is healthy, then I think that, in doing A, I am doing what someone does who is
healthy. I think of myself as exemplifying a healthy man. When I am doing A
because such a man does A, my action manifests my being such a man. This explains
the infinity of infinite ends. A whole is exhausted by its parts; what is manifested is
not exhausted by its manifestations. Sebastian Rdl, Three Forms of Practical
Reasoning, in Bluhm, Nimtz, eds., Selected Papers Contributed to the Sections of
GAP 5 (Paderborn: Mentis, 2004), 751.
12
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going on being able to be the lion that it isor in other words, the
lions becoming what it is.
Heideggers Conception of Human Existence as an Infinite Activity
Okay, now lets look at how Heidegger develops this idea in the
existential context of human life, in particular: Heidegger is going to
pick up on Aristotles distinction between kinetic and infinite
activities, and he will argue that our actions in the world are not
simply parts of some broader kinetic activity, theyre also instances of
a deeper, infinite activity that we are always engaged in nonaccidentally, insofar as were living out some possible human way of
life or other. And the thing we want to understand here is, what is the
nature and structure of this infinite activity that Heidegger has in
mind in the human case, and why does the threat of existential death
and anxiety make this activity unfold in a different way than it does in
the case of non-human animals? That is what Im going to explain in
terms of the idea of commitment and Heideggers concept of
repetition.
Just to pause and motivate this approach to reading Heidegger
for one more moment: The reason I think this is important is because
even though there are readers who pick up on Kierkegaards and
Heideggers allusions to Aristotelian natural movements, these
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readers tend to focus on the kinetic form of movement, to the
exclusion of this more basic and underlying form of movement that I
am calling infinite activity and that I think needs to be in view in
order to make proper sense of these existentialists philosophies of
human being. Now, to be fair, this is because Kierkegaard, for his
part, writes explicitly about the concept of kinesis. But then I think
both Kierkegaard and his readers didnt know what they were
missing! So, just to give two quick examples of this focus on kinesis:
Claire Carlisle writes that
Aristotles theories and categories, which were developed
above all in order to account for kinesis, provided Kierkegaard
with a conceptual framework that could be adapted to his own
analysis of religious becoming. [Freedom] makes the
transition from potentiality to actuality a real event, a genuine
movement,
qualitative
change.
Kierkegaards
understanding of human freedom draws on this concept of

kinesis as expressing an actualizing power, a kind of capability
of becoming. This is illustrated very concisely by his remark,
recorded in his journal, that freedom means to be capable.
13
This may be true of what Kierkegaard thinks of the movement from

one sphere of existence to anotherthat would indeed be a qualitative
change from A to B. But even if Kierkegaard uses the concept of
kinesis to think about that form of movement, there is still room to
read his use of becoming in the phrase becoming a Christian as a
reference to a being capable that is a movement but not a change
13
Kierkegaards Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (Albany, NY:

SUNY Press, 2005), 9, 16.
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from A to B, not an alteration from potentiality to actuality, but
instead, an activity that maintains the capability of what is capable by
manifesting and sustaining someones freedom against the threat of it
degenerating or dying off or lapsing into a mere pretense of itself. I
think a similar confusion or coarseness of language shows up in John
D. Caputos discussion of Derrida and Heidegger on Aristotles notions
of movement and time: Caputo says that [Derrida] points out, quite
rightly, that in Aristotles conception of time as the measure of motion,
motion is peculiarly resistant to the binary presence/absence schema
of metaphysics. Motion is the act of a being in potency while it is still
in potencywhich is all right so far, as long as he means the
maintenance of a capacity through the exercise of that capacitybut
then he goes on to say that [t]he being in motion neither is (what it is
in motion toward) nor is not (what it was at the point of departure of
the motion), and again, the very idea of departing from something
seems fixed on the case of motion from A to B instead of the motion
that actively maintains somethings being what it is. 14 I want to see if I
can find room for the notion of infinite activity, and not just kinesis, in
Heideggers account of repetition as the temporal form of human life.
(And I am hoping you might have suggestions for how we could do the
same in the context of Kierkegaards philosophy!)
*
14
Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 198-199.
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So, Heideggers view is a lot like Aristotles, except he replaces
the term nature with a term of his own: ability-to-be (Seinknnen)
and the new term is meant to introduce a new philosophical meaning.
Both of these terms, ability-to-be and nature, are terms for
somethings capacity to actively go on being whatever it is. But when
we act for the sake of maintaining our ability-to-be, it turns out there
is a lot more at stake than when a non-human animal acts for the sake
of maintaining its nature, because were responsible for facing the
threat of deficiency, degeneration and death in a uniquely fraught way.
Heidegger indicates this in one of the first and most basic things
he says in Being and Time about what it means to be human. He
writes that human existence is as an understanding ability-to-be for
which, in its being, this being itself is an issue.
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This is claiming two
important things: First, the central capacity that makes our lives to be
human lives is a capacity to understand; and second, in order to have
this capacity, exercise it and maintain our grip on it, we have to have
that capacity itself be an issue for us. So let me say a bit more about
each of these two points:
First, for Heidegger, understanding is not a purely cognitive or
mental affair; its more a kind of competence, or a kind of practical
skill, something we know how to do. And what we know how to do is
to make sense of our actions, our identities and our world in terms of
15
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distinctions that we draw between ways in which those things can be,
and ways they cannot possibly be.16 In other words, understanding
yourself as human primarily means knowing how to be human in
some definite way. Lets think about one of those ways: To be a
student or a teacher, you have to understand yourself as one, which
means you have to know what youre permitted to do in the name of
that role, what youre forbidden to do, authorized and obligated to do,
and so on, so that you can act in ways that make sense and matter to
you as the actions of a student or teacher. In other words, you know
how to act in order to exhibit the characteristic pattern of what a
student or teacher does, and to the extent that you care about not
failing to do this, you find yourself motivated by reasons for doing
certain thingsgoing to class, meeting in office hours, turning things
in on timeas opposed to doing other things that would be impossible
or otherwise unacceptable, ruled out for you, given your identity,
role, or way of life. And so, to go on being a student or teacher is,
then, to be responsible for staying on the right side of this distinction
you grasp between what is possible and what is ruled out for you. If
you miss a class, you make up for it or take a penalty; if you make a
16
In understanding, as an existentiale [i.e., a structural feature of human being],

that which we have such competence over is not a what, but being as existing. The
way of being of human existence as ability-to-be lies existentially in understanding.
Ibid., 183. In the projecting of the understanding, entities are disclosed in their
possibility. The character of the possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the
way of being of the entity that is understood. Ibid., 192. (translations modified)
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claim and are challenged, you defend it or else you revise it or give it
up.
But theres a deeper facet to this point about understanding,
which is brought out in the second point, that our ability to
understand ourselves is essentially an issue for us: Your ability to be
a student or teacher is not just an issue for you in the sense that you
care about being a good student or teacher. More fundamentally, what
Heidegger claims is an issue for you is whether this is a possible way
to be human, at all, whether it is a way for you to go on doing things
that make sense and matter to you, and a legitimate and meaningful
role you can play in the social, historical and cultural context in which
you find yourself. And this brings us to one of the most central
existential claims in Being and Time, which is that the ways that we
make sense of and care about our selves, our lives and our world are
vulnerable to breaking down for reasons beyond our control. In both
personal and social ways, we can find ourselves fallen out of love in a
relationship, or alienated from our work; we can fail to save a
scientific theory from recalcitrant data that it cant explain; we can
stop feeling compelled by the authority claimed by our political
projects, institutions and leaders; we can fail to reach a consensus on
what it takes to count as a work of art in a certain genre; and we can
find ourselves in the wake of some major trauma or disaster, where
were at a loss about what it could be anymore to go on as the human
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agents we once took ourselves to be. These are all examples of a kind
of practical breakdown in our ability-to-be, which Heidegger calls
death.
17, 18
In the existential condition of death, our lives come out of
joint and we dont know how to go onindeed, what would even count
as going on.
For Heidegger, the possibility of death is the issue on which
our human life depends. But its important to be clear: Death is not
the end of biological life; its the end of our ability-to-be, our
understanding of what it means to live out some possible human way
of life. And Heideggers term for our basic attunement to this
possibility of breakdown is anxiety.
19
On his view, our anxious
attunement to the threat of death is what lets us be responsible, not

just for going on embodying our ways of being human well, but more
deeply, for the very possibility of there being any practical orientation
for us to take up, in the first place, any kind of worldly context in
which our actions and identities could make sense and matter to us, at
17
[Death] is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than human existences
being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-human
[Nicht-mehr-dasein-knnens]. Ibid., 294. (translation modified)
18
As the previous citation suggests, Heidegger seems to conceive of death as a
breakdown, not just in any particular human way of life, but in any and all human
ways of life. Thus, he writes that death is the possibility of the impossibility of
every way of comporting oneself towards, anything, of every way of existing. Ibid.,
307. (my emphasis) Whether it is interpretively correctand indeed what it would
even meanto understand death in this way is a point of debate among Heideggers
readers. But for the purposes of my discussion here, I am going to focus on the more
local sense of death as a breakdown in a particular way of being human, because it
better illustrates the ultimate point about repetition I am trying to draw out of his
text, and I dont think anything important in that discussion turns upon which side
of the death debate one comes down on.
19
That which anxiety is anxious about is being-in-the-world itself. Ibid., 232.
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all. In this sense, Heidegger thinks of being human as a kind of fragile
task that we have to take up for ourselves, the task of keeping our
grip on the distinction between what is possible and impossible for us,
given who we understand ourselves to be, and working to find
ourselves on the right side of the divide.
Lets think about an example to bring this to life: Think about
Socrates in the Apology: His worry is that there is no Athenian who
truly understands what it means to live a virtuous life. They borrow
their so-called understanding of virtue from orators, or sophists, or
friends in the marketplacebut they cant explain to Socrates why or
how the decisions they make are meant to be embodiments of wisdom
or justice or courage (whether that be Euthyphro prosecuting his
father in the name of justice, or the Athenian assembly ousting tyrants
in the name of democracy, for example). Socrates thinks that Athenian
life is face-to-face with the risk of its own existential death, because
he thinks his society has failed to responsibly confront his worries
about the possibility that their claims to be wise, just and courageous
Athenians are empty, that in a sense the Athenians dont really know
what it is they are doing and who they are claiming to be. This is a
kind of practical disorientation and disruption, because the practical
concepts that are meant to structure their life have lost their grip on
the sense, the meaning, that once animated them, so that the
Atheniansat least those who are struck dumb by Socratess
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questioningcan no longer find themselves at home with those
concepts, cant go on wielding them competently by acting in ways
that manifest the Athenian form of life that theyre supposed to make
possible.20
So, Socrates is challenging the Athenians to face what he takes
to be a looming threat of existential death, by urging them to take
responsibility for their own answers to the question, what does any of
thisthese things that were doing in the name of virtuehave to do
with being virtuous? Heideggers term for committing yourself to
being responsible for those kinds of claims you stake about the
meaning
of
your
actions
and
your
life,
is
authenticity
(or
ownedness, from the root of the German term, Eigentlichkeit). And

so theres a contrasting case in which one is deficient in the way one
exercises and upholds that commitment and responsibility, instead
passing it off to some independent or anonymous authority in a way
that takes for granted that the threat of death has already been taken
care of and the meaning of ones actions and identity simply given or
guaranteed to oneself.21 In this way, authentic or owned human life
20
In anxiety one feels uncanny [unheimlich]. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of

that which human existence finds itself amidst in anxiety, comes proximally to
expression: the nothing and nowhere. But here uncanniness also means notbeing-at-home [das Nicht-zuhause-sein]. [T]he everyday publicness of the
anyone brings tranquillized self-assurancebeing-at-home, with all its
obviousnessinto the average everydayness of human existence. On the other hand,
as human existence falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the world.
Everyday familiarity collapses. Ibid., 233. (translation modified)
21
The self of everyday human existence is the anyone-self [das Man-selbst], which
we distinguish from the owned selfthat is, from the self which has been grasped
ownedly [eigens ergriffenen]. [T]he anyone itself prescribes that way of
interpreting the world and being-in-the-world which lies closest. Usually, factical
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involves not a biological but an existential resistance to the tendency
for
our
basic
human
capacitiesthe
capacity
for
existential
responsibility and commitmentto slacken and degenerate into this

deficient, disowned, or inauthentic (uneigentlich) form.22
So then, here is the take-home point about the difference
between Heideggers view and Aristotles: Unlike other animals, I
have to go on becoming who I already am by committing myself to
some stance on what it is, what it can be, and what it already has
been for my kinetic, purposive activities in the world to manifest my
infinite activity of being human in some possible way. Heidegger calls
this kind of owned commitment resoluteness.
23
To be who we are
human existence is in the with-world, which is discovered in an average way. Usually,

it is not I, in the sense of my own self, that am, but rather the others, whose way is
that of the anyone. Ibid., 167. (translation modified)
22
And as a side note: I think Heidegger deliberately picks up on the biological sense
of degeneration and deficiency, in the term he uses for our tendency toward
disowning responsibility for our lives, Verfallen, because that word in German also
connotes degeneration, decay, deterioration and decline. He writes that The
phenomena identified as temptation, tranquillization, alienation and self-entangling
(entanglement) characterize the specific mode of being of falling. We call this
movedness [Bewegtheit] of human existence in its own being [eigenen Sein]
collapsing away [den Absturz]. Human existence collapses from itself into itself, into
the groundlessness and nothingness of disowned everydayness. But public
interpretation keeps this collapse concealed from it, so much so that it gets
interpreted as ascending and living concretely.
The mode of movement of collapsing away in and into the groundlessness of
disowned being in the anyone constantly drags the understanding away [reit
los] from the projection of authentic possibilities and drags it down [or plunges it
downreit hinein] into the tranquillized pretense [Vermeintlichkeit] of having
or doing it all [alles zu besitzen bzw. zu erreichen]. This constant dragging away
from (and yet always a pretense of) authenticity, along with the dragging [or
plunging] down into the anyone, characterizes the motion of falling as turbulence.
23
[B]ecause being-responsible [Das Schuldigsein] belongs to the being of human
existence, it must be conceived as an ability-to-be-responsible [Schuldigseinknnen].
Resoluteness projects itself upon this ability-to-bethat is to say, it understands
itself in it. This understanding maintains itself, therefore, in an originary possibility
of human existence. It maintains itself in it ownedly if the resoluteness, which it
tends to be, is in an originary way [urpsrnglich ist]. Ibid., 353-354. (translation
modified)
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resolutely is a task unique to human life, because no other animal
faces this existential question or issue about the very possibility and
intelligibility of its own form of life. For non-human animals, the
possibility is simply given to them by their natural endowment and
constitution, and the question is only how well they embody it. For us,
however, there is no antecedent guarantee that we are, have already
been and can continue to go on being who we understand ourselves to
be; instead, were constantly responsible for becoming who we
already are, by confronting the possible deficiency, degeneration and
death, not of our vital functions, but of our capacity to find that things
make sense and matter to us in some human way, in terms of some
possible way of living out a human life.
The Repetitive Structure of Resoluteness
So now that we have a sense of how Heideggers existentialism

develops out of Aristotles view of animal life and nature, we can
finish up by turning to the temporal structure of this resolute way of
being human. Heres the main passage of text that we want to
understand: Heidegger writes,
The owned [eigentliche] coming-toward-oneself of anticipatory
resoluteness is at once a coming back to the ownmost
[eigenste] self that is thrown into its individualization. This
ecstasis makes it possible for human existence to be able to
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comments!]
take over resolutely the entity that it already is. In anticipating,
human existence pre-collects [holt vor] itself again in its
ownmost ability-to-be. We call owned alreadiness repetition.24
Now, usually we think of repeating something as kind of rotely

doing the exact same thing you did before. But Heideggers asking us
to stop and think about this more closely: When a comic repeats a
stand-up routine, does she always tell the jokes in exactly the same
way to different audiences? When you repeat a philosophy class, do
the students and teachers always have the exact same discussions? If
youre married and you renew your vows with your spouse, will the
general things that youre promising to do play out in exactly the
same way as they did before, at this current stage of your married
life? Nothe idea is that sometimes you have to do different things in
order to go on doing the same thing. And Heidegger thinks human life
is like this most dramatically, because when we live out our lives in
the world, were trying to go on being who we understand ourselves
to be, and repeat our commitment to our lives and identities in that
sense, but we have to negotiate this with others in a public, social and
historical
world,
in
ever-changing
circumstances;
and
these
negotiations will revise, specify and set future precedents for the very
meaning of the claims that we stake about what we are doing, what it
is that we have done, and what it would be to go on doing that kind of
thing in the name of whoever it is that we put ourselves forth as
24
Macquarrie and Robinson, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 388. (translation

modified)
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being. And I think Heidegger uses the extreme example of existential
death, the total breakdown of any identity or way of life, just to bring
out most sharply that it is not always obvious, or even possible to
know, which different things we could do in order to go on doing the
same thing and being the same person. This dramatic point, though,
still applies to the most mundane decisions we make every daythose
too are ways that we continue to stake, revise, reinterpret, adapt and
sometimes give up claims that we make about who we are and what it
is that were doing.
So with that in mind, lets finish up by looking a just a couple of
other ways Heidegger tries to elucidate the structure of human life in
terms of the idea of repetition: He says, The temporality of
resoluteness has, with respect to its present, the character of an instant
[des Augenblicks]. This owned presenting of the situation does not have
command, but rather is maintained in the future that has been already
[in
der
gewesenden
Zukunft].
Existing
in
the
instant
[Die
augenblickliche Existenz] temporalizes itself as a fateful, whole

stretchedness
in
the
sense
[Stndigkeit] of the self.
25
of
the
owned,
historical
continuity
This means: To make sense of myself as
doing what I claim to be doing and being who I claim to be doing now, I
have to do so in a way that keeps the whole of my life in joint, by
maintaining a continuous stance on what it means to be, to go on being,
25
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and to have been this human beingeven if it is not always obvious
what it takes to do this successfully and how to go on doing this
successfully in the ever-new practical circumstances I find myself in.
Since death and anxiety are always possible and theres no time at
which I am definitively finished becoming who I already am, my
commitment to being responsible for my very ability to be a student, a
teacher, an Athenian, a spousethis commitment has to come toward
itself by anticipating what it could mean for the infinite activity of
commitment to go on, and it has to do that in such a way that I come
back to myself by taking over resolutely my claim to have already
been committed to being this person all along. Thus Heidegger says,
[A]nxiety brings one back to ones thrownness as something possible
and repeatable [als mgliche wiederholbare]. And in this way it also
reveals the possibility of an owned ability-to-be, which, in repeating,
must come back to its thrown there [auf das geworfene Da] as
something futural [als zuknftiges].
26
And, to look at just one more
pair of passages, [I]t is in resoluteness that one first chooses the

choice which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in
the footsteps of that which can be repeated,
27
so that [t]he
repetition of the possible is neither a bringing back of what is past

[Vergangenen] nor a readherence [Zurckbinden] of the present to
what has been superceded [berholte]. Repetition does not
26
27

Ibid., 437.
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abandon itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress. In the
instant, owned existence is indifferent to both these alternatives.
28
This, again, is because the end of the repetitive activity of becoming

who we already are is not to perform the exact same kinetic activities
we once did, nor is it to transform our infinite activity into a
completely different form, but rather, the aim is to go on changing (in
our kinetic activities) in such a way that we go on remaining the same
(in our infinite activity of commitment to the claims we stake about
the meaning of our actions, lives and identities). Its in this way that
the existential past, present and future of my human life are not
progressive, sequential stages of a kinetic activity, but instead have to
be understood as instantiations of an infinite activity which is always
at stake and an issue for me as a whole, always my own
responsibility to get and keep in the grip of my understanding.
And so the old existentialist saw, which says that there is no
human nature and that we are free to choose who to be in each
moment, is false and too hastyfor it is precisely our nature as
entities who are capable of commitment which first explains why
anything I do is part of a human life and identity, at all. To exercise
our capacity for commitment is to become who we already are by
willing in accordance with the existentialist imperative, repeating
28
Ibid., 437-438. (translation modified)
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comments!]
those claims we stake about who we are, what we are up to, how it
makes sense, and how it matters.
26

Becoming Who We Already Are

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[DRAFTPlease do not cite or circulate, though I welcome your