Universal Mutual Responsibility: Heidegger, Selfhood, and the Possibility of an Ethics of Community

Abstract

Martin Heidegger's treatise Being and Time, in seeking to answer the question of the meaning of Being, addresses the subject of the self and various problems relating to selfhood as component parts of his larger project. While addressing the subject of the self, however, Heidegger has overlooked many important considerations, specifically with regards to the way the self interacts with and depends upon its others. The end result of this is that Heidegger's understanding of the self throughout Being and Time carries with it both demonstrable inconsistencies and a number of propositions that require further investigation. This study, thus, has sought to exegetically explicate Heidegger's understanding of the self as it is made manifest throughout Being and Time, to critically pose problems to Heidegger's concept of the self that highlight those places where the self has been left inconsistent or incomplete, and to draw upon both alternate sources and original research so as to augment Heidegger's concept of the self and return a more robust and complete understanding of the self.

This study demonstrates that, while Heidegger's concept of the self in Being and Time is fundamentally incomplete and inconsistent at various points in and of itself, it provides an adequate foundation upon which a more complete and consistent understanding of the self and its interactions with its others can be developed. One possible conceptual solution to this problem, a solution that takes its inspiration from various sections of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, has been proposed below under the name of “universal mutual responsibility.” This solution offers a means by which to preserve Heidegger's existing ontological investigations into the self while supplementing these ontological investigations with those existential considerations Heidegger himself left unexplored. These considerations and their various implications have been read back and reinserted into the text, thus solidifying the concept of universal mutual responsibility as a viable advancement upon Heidegger's existing concept of the self within Being and Time.