THE PHENOMENON OF LIFE

Abstract

Throughout his Marburg and Freiburg lecture courses of the 1920s, as in his magnum opus Being and Time (1927), Heidegger never ceased to emphasize the central importance of the phenomenon of world—a phenomenon that, he claimed, had never been adequately appreciated or understood in the history of philosophy, if indeed it had been seen at all.1 As Hannah Arendt astutely noted, Heidegger’s concept of world “in many respects stands at the center of his philosophy.”2 While Being and Time emphasized world as a referential totality of signification, enabling the disclosure of meanings that first “found the possible Being of word and language” (SZ, 87), and as a phenomenon to which Dasein was always already exposed in advance, that to which Dasein could only inevitably return in whatever degree of explicitness (76), it also highlighted the fundamental attunement of Angst as that which “first discloses world as world” (187). The “peculiar temporality” of Angst “holds” Dasein in the presence of its ownmost thrownness, yet in such a way as to hold the moment or Augenblick of possible decision “at the ready” (344). Such being held, the present study will argue, enables the distinctive phenomenon of human athos. For in disclosing Dasein in its “being toward” its ownmost possibility for Being, the temporality of Angst thereby first opens Dasein to the possibility of coming toward itself within and from out of its