reasons, between a quasi-mechanical conformism and a commitment responsive to the normativity of norms.
The liminal condition of breakdown is a modification of the care structure and thus involves the three elements of affectedness, understanding, and discourse. As the sort of discourse that belongs to this modification, conscience will articulate the intelligibility of the self as disclosed through the other two elements: the affectedness of Angst and its corresponding mode of understanding, death. For our purposes what matters most about these controversial analyses is the way “everyday familiarity collapses” so that Dasein is “brought face to face with itself as being-in-the-world” (GA 2, pp. 250–51/188–89/233).
Anxiety is a distinctive affectedness because it neutralizes the claims things normally exert on me and so also the reasons they provide for what I do. Anxiety “tells us that entities are not ‘relevant’ at all” (GA 2, p. 247/186/231). This does not mean that significance and reasons disappear; I still register their demands, but they no longer grip me. As Heidegger puts it in “What is Metaphysics?,” anxiety reveals the “strangeness” of the fact “that they are beings – and not nothing” (GA 9, p. 114/90); beings are simply there, inert. This in turn is because anxiety does not “concern a definite kind of being for Dasein or a definite possibility for it” but rather “discloses Dasein as being-possible as such” (GA 2, p. 249/187–88/232). Things become insignificant, reasons lose their grip, just because I am no longer drawn into the world in terms of some definite possibility, some specific practical identity. “We ourselves … slip away from ourselves” (GA 9, p. 112/88–89), and with that go the constitutive rules which, belonging to our roles and practices, provide the terms in which I understand how to go on. Without these, I am able neither to act nor to deliberate. Conceived as a mode of understanding (ability-to-be), this being individuated down to my sheer “being-possible” is, as William Blattner (1994) has shown, an “ in-ability-to-be” – that is, “death” as the “possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there” (GA 2, p. 333/250/294). Death is not a matter of bodily demise but an existential condition in which I am no longer able to gear into the world in terms of roles and practices, with the result that things have properties but no affordances, and the motives and reasons the latter once supplied now take on the character of something closer to simple facts, items in the world of which I can take note but which do not move me. The question that arises here is not how they could ever have been valid for me (as the one-self I am defined by such validity), but how they could be valid for me now – that is, for the one who genuinely says “I.” How can any reason be my reason?