Destiny Symposium Response

Elliot R. Wolfson

A common thread that runs through the various reflections on Heidegger’s idea of destiny is the emphasis on singularity. To be sure, destiny in Being and Time is demarcated as a critical feature of the human being’s ontological constitution – our way of being in the world – that entails the historicizing of the community. However, laying claim to one’s sense of communal destiny depends on being free in the anticipatory resoluteness of being-toward-death. Attunement to the truth of being must ensue from the deep-rooted aloneness – as opposed to loneliness – of Dasein’s subjectivity. The singularity of the end – the finitude that cannot be shared existentially with the other – precludes the authenticity of a collective Volk with a single standpoint. The alienation in this world that is an inescapable aspect of the human condition is described as being thrown into being. Curiously, this thrownness, Heidegger maintained, is expressed, above all, in language, wherein one finds “the uniqueness of the revealing-concealing isolation [die Einzigkeit der entbergend-verbergenden Vereinzelung] in the simplicity of the aloneness [das Einfache der Allein-heit] of Dasein” (GA 94: 71/54). Paradoxically, language is the home that is the place of isolation but also the place of unison (Ein-klang), the haven of solitude and the womb of relationality.

Contrary to what one might expect, Heidegger maintained that true community (Gemeinschaft) can only grow out of the sense of aloneness (Alleinheit) of the individual. As he put it in the Black Notebooks, “Only if and only as long as this originary aloneness of Dasein is experienced can true community grow indigenously; only thus is to be overcome all publicness of those who have come together and are driven together” (GA 94: 59/45). With regard to this matter, Heidegger demonstrates affinity with a number of thinkers in the early part of the twentieth century, including Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber, who argued that true individuality is expressive of community, that the latter can only proceed from an originary aloneness, that the solitude of the contemplative is precisely what engenders the possibility of genuine sociality. Destiny is a shared fate that circumscribes the possibility of being in a community, but that must always be seen from the perspective of an irreducible individuality.

Alles ist einzig, wrote Heidegger in the second poetic epigraph of Über den Anfang, everything is unique (GA 70: 5). If we are to speak of the universality of human destiny, the sense of allness must always be reckoned in conjunction with the absolute inimitability of the individual. Heidegger’s Einzigkeit corresponds to, and may have been influenced by, what Kierkegaard called den Enkelte, the “single,” the particular as that which is higher than and therefore incapable of being incorporated in the universal. On this score, destiny is the singular par excellence, the infinite negation that is the negation of the finite, a self-negating negation that underscores the futural dimension of time as the retroactive not yet, that is, the bringing forth that lets what is not yet present arrive into presencing, an act of autopoiēsis that is the bursting open and the arising of something from out of itself. The destinal future transpires in the interval of permanent impermanence wherein becoming dons and thereby discards the façade of being, the instant that is always the same because interminably different. To repeat, therefore, means “to let the same, the uniqueness of being, become a plight again and thereby out of a more original truth. ‘Again’ means here precisely ‘altogether otherwise’” (GA 65: 73/58).