How to Go Beyond an Ontotheology of the Human Subject? Anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger

Abstract

By examining Martin Heidegger's critique of Søren Kierkegaard, this essay reconsiders the limits that an ontotheology of the subject may or may not impose on investigations of the relations between being and time. I begin by summarizing briefly both Heidegger's rejection of subject-centered thought and his critique of Kierkegaard as an example of such thought. I then delineate the sense in which, and gauge the extent to which, in The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard unsettles both the modal-ontological categories on which such subject-centered thought is based and the "vulgar" notion of time that, according to Heidegger, traditionally attends the invocation of these categories. Finally, I indicate briefly some ways in which Heidegger's thought remains partially beholden to an ontotheology of the subject. The more general implication is certainly not, however, that Kierkegaard outdoes Heidegger in some sort of competition in the deconstruction of metaphysics. Rather, this approach to the question of the metaphysics of the subject by way of the anxiety-analyses of Heidegger and Kierkegaard suggests that the exact character of such a metaphysics and the specific meaning of "subject" and "subjectivity" remain open and pressing questions, especially given that Heidegger's fundamental ontology (and his Seinsdenken), as well as Kierkegaard's critique of Hegelian systematicity, remain marked by traditional notions of sovereign self-determination, and its ontology