Kierkegaard’s aesthete, named only as A, continually laments the lack of meaning in his life. He suffers through passions that flare up and quickly die away, leaving him in a melancholic state. His mode of being is on display in the Diapsalmata, the fragmentary writings at the start of Either/Or. In this chapter, we examine why he avoids becoming consistently engaged in the world and remains trapped within his alienated melancholia. We offer a general account of melancholy, arguing that melancholia is an existential condition that must be understood in terms of the metaphysics of possibility. We also provide a sympathetic interpretation of A’s melancholy, rather than placing blame upon him, because melancholia attunes us to certain aspects of the world and of human existence. The aesthetic life has epistemic, moral, and aesthetic worth on its own terms, so a person may legitimately decide to remain melancholic. This avoids compromising our possibilities, makes us receptive to the suffering of others, and may inspire creative activity such as writing poetical fragments.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

The Introduction provides a basic account of Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant, and the major philosophical themes that feature in his interpretation. These themes include fundamental ontology, human finitude, receptivity, and time. The Introduction also introduces the main sources under consideration: Heidegger’s 1927–1928 lecture series on Kant, and his 1929 Kant book. Finally, an overview of the chapters in the book is provided.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant with that of the German Idealists. The German Idealists attempt to unify Kant’s faculty psychology by uncovering a “common root” that is the source of sensibility and understanding, where the common root is a homogenous capacity that nevertheless can generate the other faculties. Insofar as these interpretations rely on telling a causal story, where one faculty causes others to arise, they return to a pre-critical position that Kant would reject; on Kant’s critical philosophy, we are precluded from extending categories like causality to our faculties for cognition, since such faculties do not appear sensibly in our experience. The chapter argues that, while Heidegger also seeks a common root, he avoids this problem by insisting that the common root is heterogenous. His common root – the imagination – is a unification of three basic capacities, rather than a single, deeper capacity that causes the others. Thus, Heidegger does not seek a foundation for metaphysics that is beyond the bounds of what Kant thinks we can know; he works with the cognitive capacities that Kant already identifies, but seeks to explain more fully the structural interrelationships between those capacities.

In this chapter, I begin by considering Poet A – Kierkegaard’s compelling pseudonym who embodies how we usually understand and respond to this mood state. Poet A’s account reveals three key facets of boredom: the incessant striving of our voracious ego, the onset of existential fatigue, and our ever-resilient attempts to fend off boredom, seeking both to maximize freedom and maintain control. I then turn to Kierkegaard’s analysis in Sickness unto Death, penned by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Rather than understanding boredom as a neutral mood state that comes and goes, Anti-Climacus diagnoses it as laced with forms of despair that easily overtake us. When we maneuver to escape this kind of boredom, we only become further mired in it. Anti-Climacus’ framework illuminates and brings conceptual depth and insight to the two dominant boredom responses I noted in the introduction, avoidance and resignation.

An in-depth analysis of ageing can assist us in developing a deeper understanding of human temporality and its relevance for the good life. The experience of growing old makes clear that life is essentially a process in time with a particular temporal extension and structure that has important eudaemonic implications. Taking ageing as the starting point and frame of reference, I distinguish three ethically relevant levels of human temporality that become manifest in the process of ageing: the fundamental co-ordinates and parameters of human existence in time; the culturally variable models of the life course and life stages; and the unique individual trajectory through life and its narrative interpretation. These considerations underline the need for a more appropriate appreciation of the temporal dimension and structure of human existence in ethical discussions about the good life.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

Tackles the two main issues of contention between Cassirer's and Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant. I first examine why Heidegger opposes his own ‘ontological reading’ of the first Critique to the ‘epistemological reading’ that he attributes to the Neo-Kantians. I clarify what this opposition entails and consider in what way it indeed applies to Cassirer (4.1). Next, I turn to Cassirer and Heidegger's more specific disagreement regarding the relevance of Kant's account of transcendental imagination. Remarkably, both thinkers not only value how this account attempts to undercut the artificial opposition between receptivity and spontaneity (4.2), but their agreement extends to the shared thesis that Kant ultimately did not succeed because he lacked a truly phenomenological method (4.3). Yet, Cassirer and Heidegger still radically part ways as soon as they evaluate why this (failed) attempt is so important: while Heidegger takes transcendental imagination as the ground of human reason’s finite nature, Cassirer concludes from the primacy of this faculty to the fundamentally spontaneous character of reason (4.4).

Compares Cassirer and Heidegger's take on the human being's capacity to orient itself in the world in a meaningful way. Cassirer's theory of the functions of consciousness, the only meat to his functional conception of human subjectivity, is used to describe the diverse, cultural compasses by means of which the 'symbolic animal' navigates the human world (7.1). Heidegger's accounts of 'the they' and of owned ('authentic') existence in turn provide a theory of Dasein's capacity to orient itself within and towards its world (7.2). In view of their shared interest in orientation, I discern an important distinction for both Cassirer and Heidegger between an orienting and an oriented self. With regard to both, they ultimately disagree about the infinite (cultural) or finite (temporal) nature of the human being (7.3).

To say that human beings are creatures is to say that they are finite, fallible, and defined by their need of others to nurture and support them. It is to understand that people must learn to receive and then share again the life that they have been given. This places people in positions of vulnerability that are often hard to bear. This chapter explores the contours of creatureliness, and examines the character of our interdependence while also describing the communal conditions that are necessary if the vulnerability of people is to be honored rather than violated. Put another way, to live into our creaturely condition it is important for people to exercise forms of power that are modelled on the love of God made incarnate in Jesus. Characterized this way, creatureliness is humanity’s way of participating in the divine love that creates and sustains all of life.

The chapter discusses Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s metaphilosophical investigations. They result in two different versions of a postmetaphysical philosophy of finitude. For Nietzsche, metaphysics puts forward ideas of the absolute and of absolute value, such as goodness or freedom per se. The qualities and qualifications that specify human beings, however, are provisional and relational, in short: finite. They are, in fact, instances of one unique force that feeds them all, viz the will to power. Even our thoughts and values seem to supervene on actual power relations. Metaphysics completely misses this point, Nietzsche argues; hence, we should abandon it. Heidegger, too, wants to dismiss metaphysics because it fails to accommodate human finitude. For him, metaphysics initially dealt with the question of the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) but, unfortunately, has forgotten about Being altogether. Focusing on the understanding of beings as beings instead, metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, has been occupied with fleeing from Being. Yet,for us humans, our very Being (as well as the meaning of Being in general) is always an issue about which we most deeply care, even though it entails nothing but time, transience, and, ultimately, death.