The bounds of self: An essay on Heidegger's 'Being and Time'

Heidegger's Being and Time offers a theory of the self as a finite, temporal entity, charged with the task of determining its own existence. I offer an explication, clarification and partial defense of this theory, in which I argue that it is best understood as a reworking of Kant's account of the finite agent. Heidegger's advance comes in offering a much richer account of the contexts of everyday action and ways in which we are fundamentally shaped by others. He also frees the concept of self-determination from Kant's overly rationalistic interpretation of it. Some have claimed that this results in nihilism about value, but I argue that, in fact, it provides a broad framework for understanding the concept of value and the sort of clash among values that we modern, post-Enlightenment selves face. I also show that Heidegger stands, if only implicitly, within the Stoic-influenced, perfectionist tradition in modern philosophy, which trades on the fact that ontology of the self, by virtue of its intrinsic reflexivity, provides a form of self-understanding for the one who works it out. I explore how this shapes his thought and underlies his view that doing philosophy is itself a means of achieving authenticity. Though I focus on issues of normativity and agency, I also show how the account of agency is meant to provide practical foundations for an account of intentionality, and I address how the metaphysics of self relates to the question of the meaning of being with which Heidegger opens the book. In the course of addressing the above, I also exhibit the very fine, subtly developed, and largely missed architectonic underlying Being and Time's two extant Divisions.