In this chapter we sketch out the elements that constitute the act of resolve—appropriating one’s whole self (“whole” because it includes one’s mortality)—and the grounding of that in thrown-openedness, the existential structure that Heidegger provisionally called “temporality.”
The early Heidegger carried out this program by asking: What happens when meaning fails? As the form of life that is defined by λόγος, we are made for meaning, but we are also able to experience its collapse. That can occur on various levels. There is the failure of practical-ontic meaning when, for example, a chosen tool no longer fits its appointed task because the tool either breaks down or is found unsuitable (too light, too heavy). There is also the failure of logical and epistemological meaning when, for instance, a declarative sentence, which purports to show something apophantically (i.e., as it is in itself), proves not to do so: the pen is not in the drawer, as I had claimed it was. More globally, a specific paradigm of meaning can fail to adequately explain and predict its range of phenomena, not just provisionally but definitively: medieval cosmology gives way to modern views. Finally—but really finally—there is the moment when one’s life, suffused as it is with meaning, fails to go on. I die, and with me disappears my relation to meaning at all.
But short of death I can experience another, crucial failure of meaning, one that issues in what Heidegger calls “dread” (Angst). Here a complete collapse of meaning in the very midst of my life lets me see the absurdity, the utter groundlessness, of my engagement with meaning.9 (I use the word “absurdity” in a Heideggerian-phenomenological sense based on the word’s Latin etymology, surdus: that which is “deaf ” to any efforts to make sense of it.) In that moment I come face-to-face, however briefly, with the fact that I am ever at the edge of death (Sein zum Tode) and not just “towards” it as an inevitable but still future event. “Death is a way of being, that you take over as soon as you exist. ‘As soon as you are born, you are old enough to die.’”10 In this condition, says Heidegger, one may sense an invitation or summons (“the call of conscience”) to understand and accept the groundlessness of oneself and thus to assume authorship of one’s own life. To take that decision is to “double” one’s ex-sistence: already structurally thrown open (erschlossen), I take it over and become resolutely thrown-open (entschlossen). How does that happen and what does it entail?
9. At GA 66: 229.11–12 = 203.13–14 Heidegger says that dread as Ent-setzten (horror) “die Abgründigkeit des Seyns um ihn [Dasein] wirft.” On the Lichtung as Abgrund, ibid., 87.8 = 72.33. On Seyn as Abgrund, ibid., 312.23–24 = 278.13–14. GA 88: 35.16–17: “Warum Ab-grund? Weil Da-sein Endlichkeit!”