Research

in
Phenomenology
Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 brill.nl/rp

Temptation, Self-Possession, and Resoluteness:

Heidegger’s Reading of Confessions X and What Is the
Good of Being and Time?

Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Boston University

Abstract
In Heidegger’s 1921 lectures, he presents an extensive interpretation of Book Ten of Augustine’s
Confessions. The present paper elaborates parallels between that interpretation of Augustine’s Con-
fessions and Heidegger’s interpretation of existence in Being and Time, with special reference to
the themes of self-possession (continentia) and resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) as respective anchors
of the two interpretations. The study also highlights ways the two interpretations diverge, i.e.,
the aspects of the interpretation of the Confessions’ themes of the good and desirable, the joyful
and endearing, the delectatio that Augustine deems the end of our care ( finis curae) that do not
find their way into the existential analysis. By way of conclusion, questions are raised about the
significance and plausibility of Heidegger’s prima facie omissions of these themes from his exis-
tential analysis.

Keywords
self-possession, resoluteness, pride, temptation, confession, existential analysis

Finis enim curae delectatio est.1

An der herrschenden Richtung der delectatio hängt alles.2

In the spring and summer of 1921, roughly five years after completion of
Heidegger’s habilitation and five years before completion of Being and Time,

1)
Augustinus, Ennarrationes in Psalmos VII 9 (v, 10), in vol. 36 of J. P. Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus
Completus, Series Latina (Paris: Garnier, 1861/62), 103 (hereafter PL).
2)
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, ed. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly,
and Claudius Strube, vol. 60 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), 275
(hereafter cited as GA, followed by volume and page numbers).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156916409X448193
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 249

he gives lectures on Book Ten of Augustine’s Confessions.3 Book Ten is where,

as Augustine puts it, he turns from confessing his past to confessing what he
now is.4 Perhaps not coincidentally, Heidegger delivers these lectures at a crit-
ical juncture in his own life and thinking. When he gives these lectures mid-
way through his first stint at Freiburg, he is a thirty-two-year-old veteran and
parent of two young boys, three years removed from a war that scarred him,
and a recent convert from Catholicism to a form of Protestantism, heavily
shaped by his intensive reading of Schleiermacher and Luther.5 At the time
of this phenomenological investigation, he belongs to the Husserl circle in
Freiburg during a period of religious conversion among the circle’s members,
from Edith Stein’s embrace of Catholicism to Heinrich Ochsner’s and Hei-
degger’s turns to Protestantism. In this context, a phenomenology of religious
life (to which the Augustine lectures belonged) clearly had more than academic

3)
Martin Heidegger, “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus,” in GA 60: 157–299. These lectures
are one of three sets of lectures compiled in this volume. For an English translation, see Martin
Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-
Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Since the headings of the English trans-
lation include the pagination of the German original, hereafter pagination only of the German
original will be given. All translations are my own, however. For useful accounts of these lectures,
see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 192–219 and S. J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenom-
enology for the Godforsaken (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007),
185–203. All references to the Confessions (hereafter Conf.) are by book (Roman numeral) and
chapter (Arabic numeral); for a helpful edition with commentary, see Augustine, Confessions,
edited with commentary by James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). All references
to Being and Time are cited as SZ, followed by the page number of the German edition: Martin
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972).
4)
Conf. X, 4: “Hic est fructus confessionum mearum, non qualis fuerim, sed qualis sim, . . . .”
5)
Thus, in a poignant letter to Engelbert Krebs (the friend and priest who had performed Hei-
degger’s marriage ceremony) on 9 January 1919, Heidegger writes that, with all respect for
medieval Catholicism’s accomplishments, “epistemological insights extending to the theory of
historical knowing have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me—
but not Christianity and metaphysics (these however in a new sense).” This remark, at least the
part about metaphysics in a new sense, aptly characterizes a main theme of Heidegger’s efforts in
the remainder of the decade of the 1920s, something he corroborates with his remark in 1947
about “the language of metaphysics” of which he availed himself twenty years earlier in an unsuc-
cessful attempt to articulate the turn from subjectivity; see Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken,
revised and expanded edition (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), translated by William
McNeill as Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 249f., 256, 271, 288f.;
Bernhard Casper, “Martin Heidegger und die theologische Fakultät Freiburg 1909–1923,”
Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 100 (1980): 541. See John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of
the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 134, 147–54; 157–202.
250 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

significance. At the same time and perhaps not surprisingly, his lectures by no
means simply complement Husserl’s phenomenological project. They are far
more part of Heidegger’s effort at the time to reform phenomenology funda-
mentally, shifting the basic locus of investigation from a perceptual intention-
ality to a loving existence.6
This religious conversion coincides with another sort of soul-searching—
again, not coincidentally, if one recalls Catholicism’s rich tradition of relating
faith with reason. In the initial years of lecturing after the war, Heidegger seems
to be unsure, if not always of what precisely he is up to, then at least of how to
characterize it.7 In his first lectures after the war, he begins by noting how the
task of articulating a worldview and that of a scientific, critical philosophy are
actually counterparts, even bedfellows despite their alleged differences, and he
uses this paradoxical connection to introduce the unresolved, “core” problem
of what philosophy itself might be, before commencing to outline and defend
the idea of it as a “primordial science” (Urwissenschaft), divorced from any
worldview.8 A year later he cautions against thinking of phenomenology as the
grounding science of philosophy (Grundwissenschaft), and he denies that phi-
losophy can be a science at all.9 After criticizing the psychologically oriented
projects of Natorp and Dilthey, he declares philosophy’s task to be that of
sustaining and strengthening the facticity of life, albeit with a rigor that is “more
primordial than all scientific rigor.”10 So construed, philosophy is, to be sure,
unabashedly negative and destructive, but Heidegger makes it clear that he
sees no reason to apologize for this.11 Nevertheless, an indication of the rest-
lessness of his self-understanding at the time can be gathered from his note to
Löwith shortly thereafter, coinciding with timing of the early Augustine lectures,
where he insists: “I am not a philosopher. . . I am a Christian theo-logian.”12

6)
See my “The Phenomenological Reformation in Heidegger’s Early Augustine Lectures,” in
The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger: The Emergence of an Augustinian Phenomenology, ed.
Craig J. N. de Paulo (Lewiston, New York: Mellen Press, 2006), 187–219.
7)
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die religiöse Dimension,” in Heideggers Wege (Tübingen: Mohr,
1983), 142.
8)
Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel, vol. 56/57 of
Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999), 12.
9)
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, ed. Claudius Strube,
vol. 59 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 30ff., 170.
10)
Ibid., 36ff, 174; GA, 56/57: 110.
11)
GA, 59: 38, 171.
12)
Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, Bd. II, ed. Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), 28f.; see, too, Heidegger’s remark about forging a
path to “a primordial, Christian theology—free of Hellenism” (GA, 59: 91).
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 251

Heidegger deliberately spells “theo-logian” in this way, probably to distance

himself from speculative theologians. Within the year, however, he proposes a
philosophy that must be in principle “a-theistic,” only to affirm, less than two
years later, in his first Marburg lectures: “It is my conviction that philosophy
is at an end.”13
To be sure, the different aims and contexts for these pronouncements must
be taken into consideration in weighing them. Nevertheless, they strongly
suggest that Heidegger is unsure of precisely how he should characterize what
he is doing during this tumultuous period, even though it is perfectly clear to
him, as he notes in the early Augustine lectures, that his line of questioning
does not fit the mold of what went by the name of “theology” or “philosophy”
in academia at the time (GA 60: 173).
Despite or perhaps because of the tumultuous character of Heidegger’s
thinking at the time, these early Augustine lectures are an eye-opener for
anyone trying to come to terms not only with Heidegger’s intellectual devel-
opment but, even more pointedly, with his existential analysis in Being and
Time. The aim of the following study is to demonstrate how these lectures
clearly anticipate various themes of that analysis, while raising fundamental
questions about its presuppositions, motivation, and value. To this end I
devote the body of the study to identifying parallels between the interpreta-
tion of Augustine’s confessions and the later interpretation of existence, with
special reference to the themes of self-possession (continentia) and resoluteness
(Entschlossenheit) as respective anchors of the two interpretations. In part one,
I discuss three general parallels between Heidegger’s existential analysis and
Augustine’s account of a life beset with constant temptation. In part two, I
turn to the significance of the temptation of pride in particular for Heidegger’s
account of authentic existence. I hope to show that Heidegger’s interpretation
of continentia as an always incomplete self-possession (thanks to the relentless-
ness of temptation) provides a template for his interpretation of the resolute-
ness characteristic of authenticity—the cornerstone of his existential analysis.
But some caveats are in order. I am not attempting to demonstrate, as a
matter of Heidegger’s intellectual biography, that his reading of Augustine
directly motivated the existential analysis or even that he had his eyes specifi-
cally on the content of Confessions X as he drafted key parts of the existential

13)
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, ed. Walter Bröcker und
Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, vol. 61 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985),
197; Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,
vol. 17 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), 1.
252 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

analysis. Instead, my concern is to show that his interpretation of central

themes of Confessions X, at the very least, instructively foreshadows his existen-
tial analysis and that, as a consequence, consideration of these themes sheds
fresh light on that analysis, opening up a critical space for evaluation of it.
Precisely in this regard, the divergences between the two interpretations are no
less conspicuous than the convergences. For key aspects of the interpretation
of the confessions and the self-analysis they contain do not find their way into
the existential analysis. What I have in mind specifically are themes of the
good and desirable, the joyful and endearing, the delectatio that Augustine
deems the end of our care ( finis curae). Accordingly, by way of conclusion, I
raise questions about the significance and plausibility of Heidegger’s prima
facie omissions of these themes from his existential analysis.

1. Confessions and Existential Analysis: Some Basic Lines of

Convergence
Among the many lines of convergence between Heidegger’s reading of Confes-
sions X and his existential analysis, three are conspicuous: the lifelong burden
of being conflicted thanks to the relentlessness of temptation, the genuine
burden of an existence defined by an inherent potential-to-be, and the factical
enactment of one’s world.

1.1 The Burden (Last) of Being Conflicted

Of all our troubles, Augustine stresses, none is more constant in life and more
definitive for it than temptation. We are thrown into a life of fears and desires,
testifying to a ground-level-disposed understanding on our part. Out of these
fears and desires grow temptations. Moreover, this process is lifelong; whether
we succumb to a temptation or resist it, another set of temptations immedi-
ately awaits us. Should we resist a temptation, we have no assurance that we
will not succumb to a similar temptation in the future and we even engender
some temptations precisely by resisting other temptations.14 In this respect,
the burden represented by a life of temptation testifies to a fundamental ambi-
guity, the fact that we exist equiprimordially in the truth and in untruth. For
Augustine, as Heidegger reads him, this burden is constant and defining,
betraying itself in every attempt to repress or evade it.

14)
GA 60: 209; see the refrain in Conf. X, 28: “. . . et ex qua parte stet victoria nescio.”
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 253

But it is also clear that we are not to shy away from the burden of coping
with temptations or even, if we are honest, that we cannot. In fact, only
through temptation do we have any idea of who we are and are capable of
being.15 When Augustine characterizes himself as being a burden, quite liter-
ally, an onus to himself (Conf. X, 28), he is referring, to be sure, to the fact that
temptations confront him as long as he lives and that, by living, he generates
them willy-nilly himself. But he is also signaling his need to experience temp-
tation to know and become who he is. As a result, he acknowledges not only
that he is conflicted and complicit in being conflicted but also that being
conflicted—tempted—is essential to becoming who he is. In this sense, the
burden of existing, for all its onerousness, is ultimately a welcome burden.
These senses of the burden cast a distinctive Augustinian light on Heidegger’s
own characterization of the burden of existing in Being and Time (SZ 134f.,
284, 345). In the early Augustine lectures, employing several notions that find
their way into the later existential analysis, Heidegger locates this burden in
our being torn (Zerrissenheit), divided (Zwiespältigkeit), distracted and dis-
persed (Zerstreuung), and ultimately conflicted (Widerstreit) (204–10, 250f ).
So, too, in Being and Time, he notes that our collusion with das Man in our
everyday existence is a way we attempt to remove the burden of existing (liter-
ally, to disburden ourselves: entlasten), precisely by piling distraction upon
distraction (SZ 127f., 268, 371). In this connection, it bears noting that in
both analyses Heidegger identifies curiosity as “a major way and opportunity,
precisely by way of being-here, for dispersion” (GA 60: 227; SZ 172).

1.2 Existence as a Potential-to-be

“Possibility,” Heidegger observes, “is the genuine ‘burden’ [die eigentliche ‘Last’ ]
(GA 60: 249). Temptations are not simply events that objectively occur or, in
Heidegger’s jargon, present themselves as something handy or on hand within
the world (GA 60: 248). Instead they are ways in which, in the course of our
“factical lives,” we constantly generate for ourselves possibilities that call for
decisions. When Heidegger in these lectures reorients phenomenology from
consciousness to existence, the existence in question is defined by its determinate
possibilities. Existence is, accordingly, nothing simply present, nor do its deter-
minate possibilities define it as something otherwise present or on hand apart
from them. To the contrary, existence defines itself by its own determinate
possibilities, and such possibilities take shape only in trials or temptations that

15)
Augustinus, Sermones II.3.3, in PL 38: 29: “Nescit se homo, nisi in tentatione discat se.”
254 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

constitute our lives, primordially and completely (for as long as we are alive).16
Precisely by calling attention to the determinate possibilities of our factical
existence, necessarily generated by the way we live and constituting its lifelong
burden, the life of temptation provides a key to a phenomenological analysis
of existence.
In this connection we cannot forget the battle that Heidegger is waging
against tendencies to construe existence as a way of being on hand (vorhanden),
with or without possibilities. Not just a Scholastic tendency, this proclivity is
abetted by the grammatical structure of language and, arguably, is intensified
by the structure of quantification or second order logic, according to which
there is a subject, name, or variable to which a predicate, including disposi-
tions and other potentials, can be affixed or not, without loss of its status. This
tendency, traceable to Greek thought, explains Heidegger’s search, during
these years, for a Christian theology free of the Greek world. For a believer
cannot define or think of her life apart from the possibilities that temptation
presents her with, possibilities that can lead to her downfall or salvation.
Herein lies a fundamental sense in which Heidegger’s reading of religious life
as a life of temptation clearly prefigures the notions of existence and potential-
to-be (Seinkönnen) in Being and Time.

1.3 Factical, Wordly, and Historical Self-Enactment

The concepts of facticity, worldliness, and historicity (all metonyms for the
notions of existence and Seinkönnen just considered) fill the pages of Hei-
degger’s early Augustine lectures. Though neither these notions nor the links
and boundaries among them are always patent, Heidegger seems to triangu-
late them in the following way: our facticity is comprised of the ways we are
“always already” co-constituting and historically enacting (vollziehen) a world
into which we have been thrown. But his precise use of these notions in the
early Augustine lectures sheds further light on their significance, at once antic-
ipating and illuminating the roles they play in the existential analysis.
With respect to facticity, for example, Heidegger applauds Augustine’s knack
for conveying the sexual drive “not in a biological-psychological theoretical
attitude but as it is factically experienced” (GA 60: 212); he also speaks of “the
factically unreflected ways of experiencing” other temptations (GA 60: 218f.,
223) as well as of achieving and being capable in a factical manner (GA 60: 232).

16)
The parallel to this constant and defining character of the burden of existing is its primordial-
ity and completeness, the very criteria on which the second section of the published part of Being
and Time pivots.
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 255

The facticity of our lives is such that each of us at one level unremittingly
undergoes, at another level ceaselessly facilitates and precipitates, and at yet
another level doggedly relates to temptations that bear the stamp of the worldly
situations into which we have been thrown, and we do so both reflectively and
unreflectively. Thus, in the early Augustine lectures, Heidegger remarks that
being-lived by others is a manner of facticity (GA 60: 228); so, too, is the
uncertain, undecided, even dangerous character of our lives, all of which
intrudes on existing authentically (GA 60: 215, 218, 222). Our facticity is
precisely a form of necessity, embodying needs that we have as a matter of
living and the temptations to pursue excesses relative to those needs.17 So con-
strued, our facticity entails the allure of various forms of excess and thereby
forces a highly personal challenge on each of us, a challenge to genuine
self-possession.
But the temptations themselves come in all sizes and shapes relative to the
complex worldiness—the environmental world, the shared world, and the
world of the self—that each human being co-constitutes relative to herself.
What Augustine appreciates, Heidegger contends, is the world-directedness of
factical experience as a way of having or possessing oneself (ein Wie des Sich-
habens) (GA 60: 242f.). In Being and Time Heidegger glosses the link between
facticity and worldliness in a comparable manner: “the concept of ‘facticity’
comprises within itself the being-in-the-world of an ‘innerwordly’ entity such
that this entity can understand itself as, in its ‘fate’ [Geschick], bound up with
the entities that encounter it within its own world” (SZ 56).
In the Augustine lectures, Heidegger often juxtaposes “factical” and “his-
torically enacted” (vollzugsgeschichtlich), arguing that facticity must always be
understood in terms of a historical enactment—i.e., what is actually happen-
ing in the course of our doing it (GA 60: 232, 245, 274). An historical enact-
ment in this sense is not just any historical experience, but the experience of
oneself being questioned, tested, or challenged in all the ways that a life replete
with temptation presents. In the experience of temptation sans répit, we expe-
rience our selves making and remaking choices. What matters with regard to
the problem of temptation, according to Oskar Becker’s notes, is “the context
of the enactment [Vollzugszusammenhang] of my full, concrete experience of
myself: how I decide for myself,” and he immediately adds that “we come to
the basic sense of the experience of the self as historical experience from the

17)
Temptations to overindulge, for example, draw on our natural need to nourish ourselves,
temptations to pride are initiated in seemingly innocuous senses of self-satisfaction or an all-too-
human need for validation and praise.
256 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

problem of this trial or temptation.”18 In Heidegger’s notes, he makes the same

point: the problem of temptation is “the basic sense of the self as historical
[historisches]” (GA 60: 263). Cognizant that his own glosses might suggest an
objective characterization, he insists that it is decisive to conduct the problem
from the outset in accordance with this basic sense of historical experience as
a trial—something that, in his opinion, Augustine did not always manage to
do (GA 60: 230f.). Not surprisingly, we again find this juxtaposition of factic-
ity with historicity in Being and Time and, indeed, with a comparable accent
on the factical choice of the historicity of Dasein (SZ 395).

2. Resoluteness and Pride: Being Authentic and the Danger of

Dispossessing Oneself
In concert with the converging themes sketched in the foregoing section,
arguably the most fundamental and encompassing theme from Heidegger’s
reading of Confessions X that finds its way into his existential analysis is a
variation on the theme of continentia. The notion surfaces in chapter 27 when,
in an effort to explaining why it took so long for him to love God (sero te
amavi! ), Augustine describes how he flung himself headlong into created
beauties and became dispersed among so many things.19 In the very next chap-
ter Augustine acknowledges that, because he is not full of his beloved, he is a
burden to himself, and human life on earth is replete with temptation, trou-
bles, and difficulties that no one wants (Conf.: X, 28). Then in chapter 29,
throwing himself on God’s mercy, he explains why continence is both a divine
command and a divine gift, “for through continence, we are, indeed, collected
and brought back to the one from which we have flowed away into the many,
losing ourselves to them” (Conf. X, 29: per continentiam quippe colligimur et
redigimur in unum, a quo in multa defluximus). Heidegger calls particular
attention to the contrast drawn here between being re-collected into the divine
one, after having slipped into and become dispersed among the many. With
this contrast in mind, he urges that continentia be understood not as absti-
nence (Enthaltsamkeit), but as “keeping together [Zusammenhalten], tearing

18)
GA 60: 280. Thus, the breakdown of a tool is a key indicator for Heidegger’s existential
analysis but hardly as significant as the real and potential breakdowns indicated by the trials and
tribulations that lead to the existential interpretation of Dasein as Sorge.
19)
Conf.: X, 27: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new, late have I loved you! and,
behold, you were within and I was away and there I looked for you and, deformed as I was, I
plunged into the beauties which you made. You were with me and I was not with you.”
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 257

away from defluxio, standing in mistrust towards it” (GA 60: 205). On this
interpretation, the operative contrast between the one and the many is at the
same time a contrast of the centered and de-centered, between ‘keeping one-
self together’ and ‘losing hold of oneself.’
This contrast provides a kind of template for Heidegger’s own conception
of the fundamental distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. Con-
sider the following sentence from §27 of Being and Time: “The self of everyday
Dasein is the they-self that we distinguish from the authentic, that is to say, the
explicitly grasped self. As the they-self, the respective Dasein is dispersed [zer-
streut] into the they and must first find itself ” (SZ 129; see also SZ 297f.). This
sentence echoes Heidegger’s repeated glosses of Augustine’s account of the self
who, by succumbing to temptation, dispossesses herself and becomes inau-
thentic, losing herself in the many (GA 60: 238f, 244f.). In terminology closer
to Being and Time, we might say that temptations are our ways of generating
and confronting ourselves with possibilities of lapsing or falling away from our
genuine potential or, equivalently, our potential to be authentic. In the early
Augustine lectures, Abfall (which literally means ‘garbage’ or ‘refuse’) is Hei-
degger’s preferred term for this lapse, though it unmistakenly prefigures the
notion of fallenness (Verfallenheit) in Being and Time.20 In Being and Time
Heidegger hearkens back to this very connection between temptation and
fall when he observes: “Dasein prepares for itself the constant temptation to
falling. Being-in-the-world is in itself replete with temptation [versucherisch]”
(SZ 177). The response to this fallenness built into our facticity is not a single
decision but a resoluteness, a condition of being resolved (not unlike a hexis)
that prepares us for our fallenness and the constant trials it entails.
As we noted above, one of the basic lessons that Heidegger draws from his
reading of Augustine’s Confessions is the ineliminability of a certain ambiguity
in the burden of existing. Augustine characterizes this as part of the trouble-
someness (molestia) of life. In Heideggerian terms, the fact that we need to
project our possibilities authentically is as certain as the fact that, thrown into
the world as we are, we are not the ground of those possibilities and that the
projection, insofar as it is ours, is groundless. But this resoluteness is an
acknowledgment of our feebleness, our mistakes, and even our failure to be
resolute. Hence, for Augustine, continentia is a practiced, repeated vigilance

20)
In his notes (GA 60: 272) Heidegger also places Abfall in apposition to Verfall, albeit in a
slightly different context; see too GA 60: 239f. He is also clearly drawing on the phrase “vom
Glauben abfallen” meaning to lose one’s faith or fall away from it.
258 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

that must also be a gift (nemo potest esse continens, nisi deus det).21 One hears
something akin to this aspect of continentia in Heidegger’s characterization of
resoluteness as a matter of “holding oneself open and free”—ent-schlossen—for
one’s factical possibilities, including the possibility of taking back resolutions
or decisions (Entschlüsse) (SZ 307f.). Like continentia, “authentic resoluteness”
is repetitive and constant, not least, as Heidegger puts it, because “it knows
about the indefiniteness by which an entity that exists is dominated through
and through” (SZ 308). Existential analysis is confessional in this sense, an
admission of our existential questionableness, made transparent by the con-
stant trials that confront our fallen condition as long as we live—the facticity
of existence itself. In this way “confession” discloses our existential finitude, our
fallibility and frailty.22
Whereas a continent and loving person is an integral unity, collected and
gathered into herself, each of the three forms of temptation singled out by
Augustine tempts her to dispossess herself—a process abetted by the factical
circumstance that self-possession is a constant, always incomplete process.23
The first two temptations—concupiscentia carnis, concupiscentia oculorum—

21)
Conf. X, 29; the experience of God for Augustine, Heidegger observes, does not consist in “an
isolated act . . . but in a context of experience, a context proper to the historical facticity of one’s
own life. This is what is authentically primordial ” (GA 60: 294).
22)
Not only are we pre-disposed to fall but to varying degrees we in fact inevitably succumb to
temptations in our fallen state such that any resoluteness remains tenuous. “No human being is
endowed with so much justice that for him no temptation of tribulation would be necessary”
(Augustinus, Contra Faustum Manichaeum XXII, 20, in PL 42: 411). See my “Truth and Temp-
tation: Confessions and Existential Analysis,” forthcoming, in A Companion to Heidegger´s Phe-
nomenology of Religious Life, ed. Sean McGrath and Andrzej Wiercinski (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2009), especially n. 12.
23)
The three forms of dispossession correspond to the basic ontological economy at work in SZ.
In the first form of temptation, we face the threat of losing ourselves to the senses as Werkzeuge,
tools of pleasure; to the extent that we succumb to this temptation we relate to things, including
our own bodies, as merely ready-to-hand. In the second form of temptation, we are in danger of
being captivated by the sheer sight of what is present-at-hand as it momentarily satisfies curiosi-
ty’s insatiable craving for novelty; in this sure sign of ennui and tedium with oneself, we are on
the way to losing ourselves as we come to equate all existence, including ourselves, with being a
part of the passing spectacle. In the third form of temptation, the danger of dispossession comes
not so much from a kind of flight from ourselves to what is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand,
the threat is not lasciviousness or curiousness where our body becomes a tool or the object of
some out-of-body experience. The threat is, rather, to dispossess ourselves by attempting to be
something we are not, pridefully projecting ourselves to be more than we are. The first two forms
of temptation—lust and curiosity—attempt to seduce us to misidentify ourselves with ways of
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 259

build on using and enjoying things, respectively losing ourselves in the tools
of our senses and what is handy to them or in the feasts of our curious eyes
and what is on hand in the spectacle before them. Pride, the third temptation,
differs from the others by virtue of the fact that, out of love of praise, one’s
significance (Eigenbedeutsamkeit), one’s validation by others, or rather, the
validation that one considers oneself owed, becomes one’s overriding concern.
Others remain in some sense essential but in a quite distinctive manner since
one takes care (curare, sorgen) precisely to gain a position relative to them. So
construed, pride presents a singular threat to self-possession and, though not
duplicated in so many words by Heidegger in Being and Time, is potentially
relevant to his existential analysis in at least the following telling ways.
First, the sense of not living oneself but “being lived by the world” is com-
mon to all temptations but is strongest precisely when, under the grip of pride,
someone believes herself to be living authentically. Here, in what we might call
the “facticity of pride,” the possibilities of losing oneself are particularly acute
since pride ostensibly keeps self-interest front and center. In the course of one’s
single-minded search for approval or pursuit of a life one deems deserving of
approval, this manner of ‘being lived by’ the world is, Heidegger declares, “a
special mode [Wie] of facticity to be explained only from the standpoint of the
authentic sense of existence” (GA 60: 228). This aspect of pride explains how
“das Man itself belongs to others and reinforces their dominance,” and why we
enjoy, read, see, and make judgments in conformity with das Man (SZ 126).
Thus, Augustine’s characterization of pride as ambitio saeculi exposes a power-
ful motivation for falling prey to the crowd, one that no doubt mightily con-
spires with temptations of the flesh and curiosity. It is hardly a stretch to read
Heidegger’s das Man in terms of the “desire to be feared and loved by others”
(timeri et amari velle ab hominibus) whatever the cost, the very sort of valida-
tion that Augustine locates at the base of pride (GA 60: 228f.).
Another source of the potential significance of the interpretation of pride
for the existential analysis is the lack of any observable or, in Heidegger’s ter-
minology, any ontic feature that confirms the presence or absence of pride.
Perhaps Kierkegaard overstates the matter when he insists that the knight
of faith is indistinguishable from a bourgeois philistine, but the general idea
follows from Augustine’s analysis of pride, and it suggests an explanation for
(a) Heidegger’s insistence on the equiprimordiality of Dasein’s fallenness and

using or regarding things. It bears adding that those very ways of using and regarding things are
typically part of our shared life with others.
260 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

disposed understanding (befindliches Verstehen), its projections of possibilities,

authentic or not as well as (b) his reticence to identify any ontic dimension
corresponding to existing authentically, i.e., resolutely. The difference that
pride makes is only available to the individual, and even here there are no
guarantees, since it is so fundamentally a matter of interpretation and, indeed,
an interpretation of and by someone who is, for herself, a question.
Finally, the interpretation of the temptation of pride as a threat to self-
possession sheds light on how Heidegger construes the authentic relation
between the world of the self and the shared world. In this respect Heidegger
draws on the last of the four ways, detailed by Augustine in chapter 39, in
which we can be smugly pleased with ourselves, taking ourselves to be impor-
tant. Augustine writes that we can be so puffed up that we take things about
ourselves that are only quasi or imaginary goods for real goods (as Heidegger
puts it, “Man bildet sich etwas ein”) or we take something good about ourselves
as though it was our doing rather than God’s (note here that Heidegger writes,
“ ‘Gutsein’: eigentliches Existieren! ”), or even if we recognize that it is God’s
doing, we think so highly of ourselves that we consider ourselves deserving of
it. But there is yet another way of taking ourselves to be important, even if
we acknowledge that whatever good we are or have is from God and that we
are undeserving of it, and this fourth way directly entails our ways of being
with one another. Glossing Augustine’s account of this fourth way, Heidegger
writes that “the self finds joy not in sharing it with others, in co-rejoicing with
others about oneself . . . but in having this undeserved good jealously for one-
self, keeping it locked up and not wishing it for others” (GA 60: 239). Accord-
ingly, Heidegger emphasizes that the world of the authentic self is inherently
shared—which is hardly surprising since there is no self-possession (continen-
tia) without love or righteousness (iustitiam) (GA 60: 252).
Hopefully, it is sufficiently evident how pride is rooted in our shared world,
our desire to be feared and loved by others, even in the absence of any known
fear or love on their part. Much as the ontic presence or absence of others need
not affect loneliness or the ontological condition of fundamentally being-
with-them, so pride feeds off our image of others’ fear or love of us, a fantasy
fueled by the prideful assessment of ourselves as fearful or lovable. But Hei-
degger also recognizes a further, even more fundamental source of pride that
adds to the burden of being self-possessed. What is remarkable is how he iden-
tifies this source. “Possessing oneself,” Heidegger observes, “is concern for
one’s own being [Bekümmerung um das Sein seiner selbst]” (GA 60: 245). In
language familiar to readers of Being and Time, he immediately adds: “What
matters is the self [Es kommt auf das Selbst an],” and a few lines later: “Thus,
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 261

our life must somehow concern us ourselves [uns selbst irgendwie angehen].”
But in this mattering and concern, Heidegger observes in the early Augustine
lectures, lies hidden the process of taking ourselves to be important. “In
the concern for itself, the self—in the manner of its ownmost being—forms
the most radical possibility of the fall [the lapse, falling away: Abfall] but at the
same time the ‘opportunity’ of gaining itself.”24

Concluding Questions: What is the good of Being and Time?

Not least because self-concern slips so readily into pride, it represents, as just
mentioned, the most radical threat to self-possession but also the opportunity
of genuinely taking hold of oneself. Inasmuch as the temptation of pride is
thus necessary for coming to self-possession, it accounts for the sense, also noted
above, in which a life of temptation, while burdensome, is also welcome. In
these early Augustine lectures, Heidegger has no qualms in identifying the
possibility of resisting temptation and becoming self-possessed with the pos-
sibility of “being good,” which he equates with “existing authentically” (GA 60:
238f ). He even speaks of the “supreme and anything but comfortable duty” of
enjoying (Sichfreuen) the gift of existence (GA 60: 235). Yet in the existential
analysis, Heidegger largely eschews talk of motivating desires, goods pursued,
or gifts enjoyed.
One of the aims of this paper has been to sketch just how closely Heidegger’s
interpretation of the challenge presented by temptation to self-possession in
Confessions X anticipates the interpretation of resolute, authentic existence in
Being and Time. Just as Augustine’s account of temptations in Confessions X
parallels the structural distinction between inauthenticity and authenticity
informing Being and Time, so the functions assigned by Augustine to self-pos-
session (continentia) prefigure those assigned by Heidegger to resoluteness
(Entschlossenheit). What is equally remarkable, given these explicit and implicit
lines of convergence, are the different parameters of the two analyses. I have in
mind not only the considerable rhetorical and methodological differences
(i.e., an interpretation of published “confessions” in contrast to a hermeneutics

24)
GA 60: 245: “In der Selbsbekümmerung bildet das Selbst aus—im Wie seines eigensten
Seins—die radikale Möglichkeit des Abfalls, zugleich aber die ‘Gelegenheit’, sich zu gewinnen.
Wir sollen eine vita bona suchen. Also unser Leben muß uns selbst irgendwie angehen”; see too,
ibid., 240f. (“das eigentlich Satanische der Versuchung!”) and 253 (“die unheimlichste Gewalt der
tentatio”). An inherent tendency toward self-centeredness is thus of a piece with the relentless-
ness of temptation and the ineliminable ambiguity of one’s best intentions.
262 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

of human existence) but above all the different accounts given of the motiva-
tional structure of religious life and human existence, respectively.25
The temptations are forms of concupiscence that grow out of or, better,
outgrow natural forms of concupiscence, desires that aim at some good. Hei-
degger himself translates concupiscentia as a “kind of craving” (GA 60: 211:
Begierlichkeit), and after characterizing curare (Bekümmertsein) as a “funda-
mental characteristic of living,” he notes that this caring can be good and bad
(vox media in bonam et in malam partem), which he then glosses as genuine
and non-genuine caring (GA 60: 271). In a revealing diagram preserved in
Oscar Becker’s notes, Heidegger places temptation between self-possession
and dispersion but in such a way that the temptation is on the same level as
“delighting in” (delectatio) and “caring about” (curare). Becker writes under
the diagram: “Using and enjoying make up the caring.—The basic orientation
of life: the delectatio.—The tempation lies in the delectatio itself.”26 Such
remarks leave much unsaid, but they amply demonstrate that Heidegger is
careful to convey to his students just how fundamental notions of desire and
the good are to Augustine’s confessional self-analysis.
Yet, although Heidegger appropriates significant elements of that self-
analysis into his own existential analysis, for the most part in Being and Time
he avoids, as noted, overt references to desires and goods (SZ 345). This omis-
sion, coupled with the otherwise patent convergences that we have been not-
ing, raises the obvious question of whether they play a significant tacit role in
the analysis. The question raised here is one version of the question: What is
the good of Being and Time?—where the point of the question is the presence
or absence of the theme of the good within the analysis of human existence
given in the text.27 What sort of conception of the good, if any, is presupposed
by the existential analysis and, indeed, presupposed as part of the subject

25)
Adequate treatment of the rhetorical and methodological differences alone and their bearing
on understanding the existential analysis is an enormously difficult task, far beyond the scope of
the present paper.
26)
GA 60: 273; see (a) the juxtaposition of “having to seek the vita bona” and “life necessarily
mattering to us” in note 24 above, (b) the two passages cited at the outset of this paper, and
(c) GA 60: 222: “In allem Erfahren als curare ist die Grundtendenz delectatio (uti—frui).”
27)
The question “What is the good of the existential analysis?” can be taken in two obvious
senses. Though these senses are ultimately intertwined, they may be distinguished as senses
respectively immanent to and transcending the existential analysis. Though I concentrate on the
immanent sense in this essay, the transcendent sense deserves flagging. The transcendent sense of
the question of the good of Being and Time is the question of its aim and value. Is it intended to
serve a purpose analogous to that served by Augustine’s presentation of his self-analysis in the
form of confessions? Or is there some legitimate sense in which these various questions of the
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 263

matter analyzed and/or as the motivation for the analysis? To be sure, we can-
not overlook Heidegger’s insistence that his interpretation of das Man is onto-
logical, far removed from any “moralizing critique” (SZ 167), that the “bonum
and its privatio”—from which the idea of value has been abstracted—“have
the same ontological origin in the ontology of the present-at-hand” (SZ 286;
see GA 60: 293, 345), that the ontological criticism of everyday interpreta-
tions of conscience entails no judgment about “the existentiel ‘moral’ quality
of any Dasein which maintains itself in that manner of existence” (SZ 295).
Yet Heidegger also invites questions of the value of Being and Time in the
work itself with his truistic but nonetheless telling remark that underlying the
ontological interpretation of Dasein’s existence is “a definite ontical way of
taking authentic existence, a factical ideal of Dasein” (SZ 310).
In pursuing this line of questions, it deserves noting that the issue of desire
is not wholly missing from the existential analysis. Heidegger’s account of
Stimmung and Befindlichkeit does provide a structural analysis that, at least in
some respects, may seem as suitable for lust and love as it is for fear and
anguish. In lust and in fear, we find ourselves as being-in-the-world, already
disposed to something beyond ourselves, but in such a way that we lust and
fear basically for ourselves and, in the process, fail to disclose fully either our-
selves or others—if they happen to be the object of lust or fear—for what they
are. So, too, it might be argued that in love no less than in Angst, one is con-
fronted with one’s own being in its entirety, “one’s potential-to-be-in-the-
world authentically” (SZ 187), and, indeed, precisely in the face of the flight
from oneself that takes the form of mindless relations, determined by the
anonymous crowd (das Man), and the tasks of taking care of and procuring
things (Besorgen).
Yet precisely at this juncture we seem to run up against the self-imposed
limits of Heidegger’s analysis, the horizon of which, it bears recalling, is not
philosophical anthropology but fundamental ontology. For he contends that
not only the “world” but also “others’ being-here-with-us” can offer an anxious
Dasein nothing more, that Angst throws Dasein back onto itself, individual-
izing and disclosing Dasein as “solus ipse” (SZ 187f ). This Angst is ontologi-
cally significant since it signals that an adequate interpretation of Dasein’s
manner of being must take into account the finitude of its temporality and
thus the fact that Dasein’s absence is no less significant to its manner of being
than its presence is.

good (agathology) can be bracketed from existential analysis as the necessary locus of a funda-
mental ontology (SZ 13)?
264 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265

Yet, even given these primarily ontological concerns and the privileged
position of Angst in connection with them, much more needs be said here
before concluding that his analysis of Angst as a Grundbefindlichkeit rules out
a similar account of love or motivation generally. Particular attention would
have to be paid to possible ways in which the relation between Angst (insofar
as it individualizes Dasein) and being-authentically-with another might coin-
cide in love. Moreover, it is important to remember that Befindlichkeit and
Verstehen are equiprimordially united, on Heidegger’s account. With this co-
constitutiveness in mind, we might understand the good as the for-the-sake-
of-which (Worumwillen), the understanding of which provides the ultimate
significance for any set of involvements in its entirety (SZ 84–87, 143). Within
the framework of the existential analysis, the good, so construed, at one level
designates the possibilities that Dasein always already projects as part of the
thrownness of human existence, a thrownness that encompasses its given and
acquired desires and sense of the desirable, the good. But the good might also
and, indeed, pre-eminently include Dasein’s authentic possibilities and their
resolute projection.
Nevertheless, though Heidegger identifies Dasein itself as that for-the-sake-
of which any complex of involvements obtains, he neither identifies Dasein
itself as the good pursued nor explains the motivation for its fallenness or
its authentic resoluteness. The traditional notion of the good or goods as
something lovable or desirable and as the principle of choice figures explicitly
neither in his analysis of the basic existentials of being-here nor in his account
of authentic existence.28 Yet, despite this lack of any explicit talk of Dasein’s
good in Heidegger’s existential analysis in Being and Time, he is clearly appro-
priating into the analysis Augustinian themes that, on Heidegger’s own read-
ing, suppose a conception of the good. Hence, we are left to ask whether some
conception of the good implicitly informs the existential analysis, whether
something like the motivational structure at work in Confessions X is supposed
in Heidegger’s interpretation of existence, importantly filling in the gaps, as it
were, both for Being and Time’s author and its readers.29 Of course, the case

28)
At the end of his 1923/24 lectures oriented to knowing and ἀληθές, Heidegger himself
acknowledges the need to pursue the “much more important path of research” oriented toward
ἀγαθός and, indeed, to do so while sorting out Augustine’s influence on medieval and modern
senses of bonum; see Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, 276, 278f.
29)
There are further complications that deserve consideration in this respect. Whereas Augustine
locates human existence in fear and desire, which he analyzes in terms of a good, Heidegger’s
analysis of fear makes no mention of any good achieved in relation to the fear. Moreover, Augus-
tine distinguishes two sorts of fear, a servile fear that seems to correspond roughly to the fear
 D. O. Dahlstrom / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 248–265 265

has to be made that those gaps need to be filled in, that an account of Dasein’s
motivations makes an important difference to the existential analysis and its
ontological aims, and that, for the purposes of adequately interpreting Being
and Time, we have to interpret what its author left unsaid in this respect. But
if we come to the conclusion that we need to spell out the “ontical way of tak-
ing authentic existence,” the “factical ideal of Dasein’s ontic ideal” presup-
posed by Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of Dasein’s existence, need we
look any further than his reading of Confessions X?

analyzed in Being and Time and a chaste fear. Glossing the latter as “genuine fear” (echte Furcht),
“pure fear” (reine Furcht), and fear for oneself (selbstliche Furcht) motivated in genuine hope,
Heidegger also identifies it in terms of a particular goodness (“I hold precisely onto a bonum in
fear”) and love (timere separationem est amare veritatem) (GA 60: 259n2, 293–297). Exploiting
the word-family of ‘Furcht,’ Heidegger himself distinguishes different forms of Angst from “gen-
uine Angst: reverence” (die echte Angst: Ehrfurcht) (GA 60: 268). Chaste fear is the fear of betrayal,
not of being betrayed, but of betraying, of being unfaithful to the beloved. At the same time,
elaboration of this theme also makes evident the difference between the saint for whom the
Truth is a person and the thinker for whom the truth is personal (intimate, lived, historical) but
not a person.