Care and selfhood in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Simon Lumsden (University of New South Wales)

For Heidegger the philosophical tradition, culminating in Hegel, had interpreted all that was meaningful, or based its metaphysical interpretation of being, through an expanded notion of the self. Heidegger tries to displace this notion from its privileged position by undermining the representation of the subject as a unified and transparent self-relation. It is argued here that Heidegger’s examination of conscience is the central site of his challenge to self-determining subjectivity. In conscience he corrects the metaphysical subject by presenting a model of selfhood that is irreconcilably divided.

Simon Lumsden is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. His research is primarily concerned with German Idealism, Poststructuralism and the relation between these traditions. He has published widely in these areas. He is currently completing a manuscript concerned with the development of self-consciousness in German Idealism and the critique of the subject in Heidegger and Poststructuralism.