4.5. The primacy of care over use can be inscribed without difficulty in the
peculiar dialectic that defines the analytic of Dasein: that between the improper
( Uneigentlich) and the proper ( Eigentlich). What appears as primary, the dimen-
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sion in which Dasein is “already and for the most part,” can only “fall” always
already into impropriety and inauthenticity; but precisely for this reason, the
proper does not have another place and substance with respect to the improper:
it is “existentially only a modified way in which the latter is seized upon” ( nur
ein modifiziertes Ergreifen dieser; Heidegger 1, p. 179/224). This means that the
primacy of the proper over the improper (like that of care over handiness, of
temporality over spatiality) rests on a singular structure of being, in which some-
thing exists and is given reality solely by grasping a being that precedes and,
nevertheless, disperses and removes itself. That something like a dialectical pro-
cess is in question here is suggested by the analogy with the dialectic that opens
the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which sense certainty, which “is primary and our
immediate object,” is later revealed to be the experience that is most abstract and
lacking in truth, which may become true only through a process of mediation
and negation, which nevertheless has need of it as the beginning that must be re-
moved in order, only at the end, to be understood. Just as, for Hegel, perception
( Wahrnehmung, taking as true) is possible only by grasping the untruth of sense
certainty, so also in Being and Time, the proper is only a modified grasp of the
improper, and care a grasping of the impropriety of use. But why, in our phil-
osophical tradition, does not only consciousness but the very Dasein, the very
being-there of the human being, need to presuppose a false beginning, which
must be abandoned and removed to give place to the true and the most proper?
Why can the human being find itself only by presupposing the not-truly-human;
why can it only find free political action and the work of the human being by
excluding—and at the same time including—the use of the body and the inoper-
ativity of the slave? And what does it mean that the most proper possibility can be
seized upon only by recovering itself from lostness and the fall into the improper?
א Heidegger cautions many times against the temptation to interpret the “falling”
( das Verfallen) of Dasein into the improper in theological terms, as if it referred to the doctrine of the status corruptionis of human nature (“Ontically, we have not decided whether man is ‘drunk with sin’ and in the status corruptionis, whether he walks in the status integritatis, or whether he finds himself in an intermediate stage, the status gratiae”; ibid., p. 180/224). It is difficult to believe, however, that he was not aware (as Hegel, on the other hand, had been in his own way with respect to the doctrine of redemption) of
having secularized in the analytic of Dasein the theological doctrine of the fall and original sin. But once again, it would probably have been a matter—for him as for Hegel—of
“properly” grasping on the ontological plane what had been “improperly” theorized on
the ontic level. The shift in level worked out by secularization often coincides not with a weakening but with an absolutization of the secularized paradigm.
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4.6. In his 1946 essay Der Spruch des Anaximander, Heidegger seems to want
to restore to use the centrality that, in Being and Time, he had taken away from
it in the name of care. The occasion is provided by the translation of a Greek
term closely related to chre and chresthai: to chreon, often translated as “necessity,” but which Heidegger unreservedly renders with der Brauch, “use.” First of
all, by adopting the etymology proposed by Bréal and rejected by the majority
of linguists, Heidegger inscribes this term into the semantic context of the hand
and of handling (and, in this way, puts it implicitly into relation with the di-
mension of Zuhandenheit in Being and Time):
Chreon is derived from chrao, chraomai. This suggests he cheir, the hand. Chrao means: ich be-handle etwas, I handle something, reach for it, extend my hand to
it [ gehe es an und gehe ihm an die Hand ]. Thus, at the same time, chrao means: to place in someone’s hands, to hand over and deliver [ in die Hand geben, einhändigen], to let something belong to someone. Such a giving into the hand
[ Aushändigen, “delivery”] is, however, of a kind which keeps the transfer in hand
[ in der Hand behält], and with it what is transferred. (Heidegger 3, p. 337/276)
What is decisive here, however, is that a fundamental ontological function be-
longs to use, thus carried into the sphere of the hand, because it names the very
difference between being and beings, between presence ( Answesen) and the pres-
ent ( Anwesendes) of which Heidegger never stops reminding us:
The term [ to chreon] can only name the essentification in the presence of the present [ das Wesende im Anwesen des Anweseden], together with the relation which
is announced—obscurely enough—in the genitive. To chreon is thus the handing
over [ das Einhändigen] of presencing, a handing over which hands out [ aushän-
digt] presencing to what is present, and therefore keeps in hand, in other words,
preserves in presencing, what is present as such. (Ibid.)
By translating chreon with Brauch, Heidegger situates use in an ontological dimension. The relation of use now runs between being and beings, between pres-
ence and what comes to presence. This implies, naturally, that “use” and “to use,”
Brauch and brauchen, are abstracted from the sphere of meaning of utilization and, as we have seen for chresis and chresthai, restored to their originary semantic complexity:
Generally, we understand “to use” to mean to utilize and need within the area of
that to the use of which we enjoy rights. That of which one has need in the act of
a utilization then becomes the usual [ üblich]. The used is in use [ das Gebrauchte ist im Brauch]. As the translation of to chreon, “use” is not to be understood in these customary but secondary meanings. Rather, we attend to the root meaning:
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brauchen, to use, is bruchen, to brook, in Latin frui, in German fruchten, Frucht
[to bear fruit, fruit]. We translate this freely as “to enjoy [ geniessen],” which in its original form [ niessen] means to take joy in something and so to have it in
use. Only in its secondary meaning does “to enjoy” come to mean to consume
and gobble up. We encounter what we have called the root meaning of “to use”
as frui when Augustine says, “Quid enim est aliud quod dicimus frui, nisi praesto habere, quod diligis?” (“For what else do we mean when we say frui if not to have at hand something especially prized?”). Frui contains: praesto habere. Praesto, praesitum means in Greek hypokeimenon, that which already lies before us in unconcealment, the ousia, that which presences awhile. Accordingly, “to use”
says: to let something that is present come to presence as such. Frui, bruchen [to brook], brauchen [to use], Brauch [use], means: to hand something over to its own essence and, as so present, to keep it in the protecting hand. In the translation of to chreon, use is thought of as the essentification in being itself. Bruchen
[to brook], frui, is now no longer predicated of enjoyment as human behavior;
nor is it said in relation to any entity whatever, even the highest ( fruitio dei as beatitudo hominis). Rather, “use” now designates the way in which being itself
presences as the relationship to what is present which is concerned and handles
it as what is present: to chreon. (Ibid., pp. 338–339/277)
4.7. What relation is there between this “use” understood as a fundamental
ontological dimension in which being maintains beings in presence and the
“familiarity that uses and handles” that in Being and Time named the mode of
being of the beings that Dasein first encounters in the world?
There is certainly more than an analogy between the affirmation “to use
means: to let something present be present as such” and the one in paragraph
18 of Being and Time, according to which “‘letting something be relevant’ signi-
fies ontically: letting something handy be so-and-so as it is already and in order that it be such” (and the text immediately specifies that “the way we take this
ontical sense of ‘letting be’ is in a fundamentally ontological way”; Heidegger 1,
pp. 84–85/117). However, with respect to the “familiarity that uses and handles,”
the shift of use from the level of the analytic of Dasein to that of the ontological
difference seems to deprive it of any concreteness and distinctness. What does it
in fact mean that being uses beings, that the originary ontological relation has
the form of a use?
At a certain point, Heidegger assimilates use to energeia. The present being,
he writes, is brought into presence and into unlatency “insofar as, surging into
presence, it is brought into being by itself,” and, at the same time, “it is brought
into being, insofar as it is pro-duced by the human being.” From this perspec-
tive, what comes into presence has the character of an ergon, that is, “thought
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in a Greek way, of a pro-duct, something brought forth” ( Hervor-gebrachtes);
for this reason, the presence of what is present, the being of beings is called in
Greek: energeia (Heidegger 3, p. 342/279). In accordance with the proximity
between chresis and energeia that we have already encountered in Aristotle, use ( chreon) and being-at-work ( energeia) “name the same thing” (ibid., p. 342/280).
The specificity of the term chreon, understood as “use” ( Brauch) here seems to fade away. But what if use instead implied, with respect to potential, a relationship other than energeia? What if we had to think a use of potential that did
not simply mean its being put-into-work, its passage to the act? What if use in
fact implied an ontology irreducible to the Aristotelian duality of potential and act
that, through its historical translations, still governs Western culture?
5
Use-of-Oneself
5.1. In Stoic thought, the terms “use” and “to use” develop a function
so central that it has been affirmed that in the last analysis Stoicism
comes down to a doctrine of the use of life. In his study dedicated to this ar-
gument, Thomas Bénatouïl (pp. 21–22) has shown that the theme of use—in
particular of the use of its own body parts by the animal—intersects with that
of oikeiosis, of the appropriation or familiarization of the self to the self, whose fundamental importance in Stoic ethics has long been known to scholars (it is
“the beginning and the foundation of Stoic ethics”; Pohlenz, p. 11).
The hypothesis that we intend to suggest is that, well beyond a simple inter-
section, the doctrine of oikeiosis becomes intelligible only if one understands it as a doctrine of use-of-oneself.
This is the passage in which Diogenes Laertius (VII, 85 = SVF, III, 178) has
transmitted to us the essentials of what we know about the doctrine of oikeiosis:
A living thing’s first impulse [ hormè] is to self-preservation, because nature from the outset has rendered it familiar [ oikeios comes from oikos, the household or family] to itself [ oiekiouses autoi tes physeos ap’arches], as Chrysippus affirms in the first book of his work On Ends, affirming that for every living thing the first familiar thing [ proton oikeion] is its own constitution [ systasin] and the awareness [ syneidesin, but in the text of Chrysippus it should probably be read as
synaisthesin, “con-sensation” or “con-sentiment”; cf. Pohlenz, p. 7] of itself. For it was not likely that nature should estrange the living thing from itself [ allotriosai]
or that the nature which has generated it could render it extraneous and not
familiar to itself. We are forced then to conclude that nature in constituting the
living thing has rendered it familiar to itself [ oikeiosai pros heauto]; for so it comes to repel all that is injurious and to give free access to all that is familiar [ ta oikeia].
According to this passage, the proton oikeion, that which is from the very begin-
ning familiar to each living thing, is its own constitution and the sensation it
has of it. In the same sense, Hierocles expresses it in his Foundations of Ethics:
“From birth the living thing has sensation of itself and familiarity with itself
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and with its constitution” ( aisthanesthai te hautou kai oikeiousthai heautoi kai tei
heautou systasei; 7, 48; qtd. in Pohlenz, p. 1). Oikeiosis, familiarity with the self, is thinkable, in this sense, only on the basis of a synaisthesis, a con-sentiment of the self and of one’s own constitution. And it is on this last notion, therefore, that
the attention of the Stoics is concentrated, in order to seek to secure its reality
at any cost.
It is at this point that the concept of use appears with a decisive function.
The proof that animals possess sensation of their own body parts is, Hierocles
suggests, the fact that they are familiar with their function, know what their
function is, and make use of them: thus, “the winged animals perceived that
their wings are adapted in advance to flight and for each of the parts of their
bodies they perceive that they have them and, at the same time, what their use
is” ( chreia, proper functionality; Bénatouïl, p. 28). That we in some way perceive our eyes, our ears, and the other parts of our body is proven, Hierocles continues, by the fact that “if we want to look at something, we direct our eyes and
not our ears at it, and when we want to listen, we incline our ears and not our
eyes, and if we want to walk, we do not use [ chrometha] our hands for this but
our feet and legs” (ibid., p. 29). And in a subsequent passage, a further proof
of self-perception is the fact that animals that are endowed with hooves, teeth,
tusks, or venom do not hesitate “to make use of them to defend themselves in
combat with other animals” (p. 34).
A passage from Galen’s treatise traditionally entitled De usu partium insists
on the decisive character of use for understanding the function of each part of
the body: “When I first saw this,” he writes concerning the elephant’s proboscis,
I thought it superfluous and useless, but when I saw the animal using it like a
hand, it no longer seemed so. . . . If the animal did not make use of this part, it
would be superfluous and nature, who formed it, would not be perfectly skillful,
but now, since the animal performs most useful actions with it, the part itself
is shown to be useful and nature to be skillful. . . . When I also learned that in
crossing a
river or lake so deep that its entire body is submerged, the animal raises
its proboscis high and breathes through it, I perceived that nature is provident
not only because she constructed excellently all parts of the body but also because
she taught the animal to use them. (Galen 1, pp. 438–439/725)
In all these texts—whether it is a matter, as for the physician Galen, of affirming
the providential character of nature or, as for the philosopher Hierocles, of prov-
ing the familiarity of each animal with itself—the decisive element every time is
in fact use. Only because the animal makes use of its body parts can something
like a self-awareness and therefore a familiarity with itself be attributed to it.
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The familiarity, the oikeiosis of the living being with itself is dissolved without remainder into its self-perception, and this latter coincides in turn with the capacity of the living being to make use of its own body parts and its own consti-
tution. It is this constitutive connection between oikeiosis and use-of-oneself that it will therefore be necessary to clarify.
א It is in Lucretius, much more radically than in the Stoics, that use seems to be
completely emancipated from every relation to a predetermined end, in order to affirm
itself as the simple relation of the living thing with its own body, beyond every teleology.
Pushing to the extreme the Epicurean critique of every teleologism, Lucretius thus affirms that no organ was created in view of an end, neither the eyes for vision, nor the ears for hearing, nor the tongue for speech: “Whatever thing is born generates its own use [ quod natum est id procreat usum]. There was no seeing before eyes were born, no verbal pleading before the tongue was created. The origin of the tongue was far anterior to speech. The
ears were created long before a sound was heard. All the limbs, I am well assured, existed before their use” (IV, 835–841).
The reversal of the relation between organ and function amounts to liberating use
from every established teleology. The meaning of the verb chresthai here shows its pertinence: the living being does not make use of its body parts (Lucretius does not speak of
organs) for some one predetermined function, but by entering into relation with them,
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