#  What is Dasein’s Ownmost Potentiality-for-Being? 

 



    ![Hegel](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/mahindra/files/dialectical.jpg?h=e9e65712&itok=uuD2mLrz) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 5, 2026** 

 06:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 018**  



 

 



 

## [DIALECTICAL THINKING IN THE HUMANITIES](/dialectical-thinking-humanities)

## SPEAKER: Amy Levine, Harvard University Society of Fellows

At the end of Division I of *Being and Time*, Heidegger introduces anxiety (Angst) to solve a methodological problem. Dasein (Heidegger’s word for human being) is the being for whom its own "Being is an issue for it,” so that an investigation of Dasein’s being is an investigation of its understanding of its own being. But Dasein usually understands itself in terms of culturally available possibilities for living and acting, which are constituted by our shared conceptions of what it means to be, e.g., a teacher, or a parent. Insofar as it does so, in its understanding of its own being, “Dasein is not itself,” or rather, is “inauthentic.” How can Dasein ever be disclosed as itself in its Being-in-the-world?

Anxiety solves this problem by being a phenomenon in which Dasein, a being that essentially projects itself onto possibilities, comes into view as itself, apart from any of these possibilities. What thereby comes into view?

My proposed reading offers a new interpretation of the analogy, noted by some interpreters, between anxiety (and related concepts like death and conscience), and Kantian self-consciousness. Recent readers of Heidegger in the analytic tradition, notably, Crowell (2013), see anxiety, like self-consciousness, as an condition which allows Dasein to rationally appropriate normative claims, taking responsibility for these claims as reasons. I argue, though, that this approach does not register how radical Heidegger’s departure from Kant is when he locates the source of Dasein’s intelligibility outside, rather than inside the self. While on a Kantian picture, our rational faculties are dependent on sensible faculties for their characteristic exercise, for Heidegger, Dasein is dependent on external sources of intelligibility, language and cultural practice, for its characteristic activity of Being-in-the-world. Dasein comes into view as itself in anxiety in confronting its dependence on external sources of intelligibility as a predicament; the breakdown experienced as anxiety is Dasein’s self-awareness of this condition. It is both an ontological fact and an existential vulnerability that we are dependent on meaningful practices that we did not choose or create to understand ourselves and the things around us: that we are teleologically oriented creatures without a determinate teleology.

This talk will sketch the argument of my contribution to the Cambridge Elements series on the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Heidegger on Anxiety.

### About the speaker

Amy Levine is a philosopher with three main areas of research interest. First, in metaethics and moral psychology, she focuses on questions about the nature of agency, practical reason, and normativity. Second, she works on the history of 19th and 20th century European philosophy, especially Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Third, she has a serious interest in psychoanalysis, which informs her approach to questions in ethics and the philosophy of agency. Levine holds a PhD in Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought from the University of Chicago, a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Philosophy and English from Williams College.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities ](/seminars/dialectical-thinking-humanities)
 
 

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