Abstract

I focus on the relationship between anxiety and truth in Heidegger's Being and Time to explain the relation of humans to Being that challenges the distinction upheld in the current scholarship on Heidegger between his early and later thinking. I conclude that rather than overcoming metaphysics, as Heidegger claims to do throughout his writings beginning with Being and Time, Heidegger's thinking of the relation between the human and Being places him within what I call the Western tradition of the metaphysics of feeling. As early as in Being and Time and throughout much of his life Heidegger struggled over his inability to explain the relationship between Da-sein and Being. The division between the early and later Heidegger, or Heidegger I and II, revolves around the understanding of this relationship. The early Heidegger of Being and Time is generally interpreted as putting forward a philosophy of existence wherein Da-sein is understood as an isolated egoistic, individual that has become authentic in the taking up of its life as its own and as finite. Heidegger I places the emphasis on the individual. In the later Heidegger Being plays the central role. Being gives to Da-sein its existence and Da-sein as a recipient of what Being gives gets relegated to role of shepherd, or caretaker of Being. Finitude belongs to Being. I argue that in Being and Time the relationship established between anxiety and truth works to clear Da-sein of any sense of individuality and places Da-sein in a direct relation to Being, or truth. On the basis of this relation the individuality of Da-sein is born in and as a process that defines its finitude. By focusing on anxiety and truth I not only put forward an explanation of the relation between Da-sein and Being, but I show how the certainty of this relation is grounded on the pre-rational level of anxiety. Grounding certainty in anxiety by "yoking" anxiety to truth is why I place Heidegger within the metaphysics of feeling. It is on the level of anxiety that humans must be in accord to live in the same world