On Time, Being, and Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life

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48 Six The surreptitious understanding of being as life unwittingly made possible, guided, and limited Martin Heidegger’s tremendous and unprecedented efforts to spell out the sense of being. His entire work could be considered from our point of view as having contributed decisively to identify the traditional sense of life as well as to render explicit to what extent this sense has thoroughly determined our understanding of being. Is there any possibility of freeing the thinking of being from the “closure” of life? But what would be the aim of such an enterprise? To close the horizon of life compels us to close the horizon of being. And beyond being, what? Nothing. Or the pure and naked thing. The thing unconcerned with being. For several years before Being and Time—which established a strong, an inviolable distinction between being and life—Heidegger took no precautions against characterizing life as being in the world.1 For example, in an explicit passage that would no longer be possible after Being and Time, Heidegger wrote: Chapter Six 49 It is also incorrect to speak of a “world of animals” and a “world of human beings.” The issue is not modes of apprehending actuality according to definite points of view; rather the issue is being-in-the-world. Thus, since the world is encountered through a definite disposition of living things, animals and human beings are in their world. The relatedness of animals to the world is precisely that which brings animals in their being genuinely into being-there (Dasein).2 During the years I am referring to (basically between 1919 and 1926), all the terms that in Being and Time will become the “existentials” of being— that is, the fundamental structures in which existence displays itself, such as “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein), “care” (Sorge), “being-with” (Mitsein) or “coexistence” (Mitdasein), and so on—were predicated of life. Life is the way in which Heidegger grasped the sense, the process or movement (Bewegheit, kinesis) of being.3 No wonder Heidegger considered On the Soul the ontology of life and of Dasein.4 The psychē of Aristotle’s treatise is an ontological concept, irreducible to the psychological and phenomenological realm of lived experience (Erlebnis)—hence the title of the treatise, Peri Psychēs (“On the Soul”), must be translated, according to Heidegger, as “Of being in the world.”5 Aristotle laid out the first fundamental traits of an ontology of life in his treatise Peri Psychēs. It is completely misleading to see therein a psychology or to use such a title for it.6 Life is the very mode of Being that which is living. Zen is a basic ontological concept. The soul is also to be understood in this sense.7 For Aristotle, perception, thinking, wanting are not experiences (Erlebnisse). Peri Psychēs is not psychology in the modern sense, but instead deals with the being of human being (or of living beings in general) in the world.8 Aristotle’s De anima. If one translates it “On the soul,” then it is misunderstood today in a psychological sense. If we adhere, not to words, but to what is said in Aristotle’s investigation, then we translate it: “About being in the world.” What are crudely designated in an easily misunderstood manner as “faculties of the soul,” “perception,” willing,” are for Aristotle not experiences , but ways of existing of a living being in its world.9 In other words, to nourish, to grow, to reproduce, to age, to die, to perceive, to imagine, to desire, to deliberate, to think, to speak, to contemplate, and so on, ought to be considered as originary possibilities of being. 50 On Time, Being, and Hunger One also ought to bring up the structure being-toward-death (Sein-zumTode ), which could only be a possibility of life: Only a living being can die— only for a living being does the fact of being-toward-death mean finitude, singularization, temporalization, task (that it “has” to be, that it “has” to exist). From the existential analytics of Being and Time on, however, there is a radical difference to make between life as process of being that is not exclusive to human beings, and the human mode of being concerned with the human being’s own process of being, that is, existence. In Being and Time, dealing with the latter a priori...