The Human Being as a Verb

Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Fosse on Becoming

Philosophy has a tendency to turn the world into nouns.

The human being. The self. Being. Time. Faith. Language.

We give names to what exists, and the words can create the impression that we have thereby grasped something stable. A noun can be defined, delimited and placed within a system.

But life rarely behaves like that. It moves, changes and returns. It happens.

In Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jon Fosse, we find, in very different ways, a resistance to the idea that the human being can be understood as something finished. All three draw language away from what is static and toward movement.

For Kierkegaard, the human being must become oneself. For Heidegger, the human being exists by being thrown into a world, understanding, choosing and relating to possibilities. In Fosse, words, people and experiences return in ever new displacements.

Perhaps all three are trying to turn the human being into a verb.

Becoming oneself

For Kierkegaard, the self is not a finished entity.

It is a task.

This is one of the most difficult and at the same time most fruitful ideas in his work. One might think that being oneself would be the easiest thing in the world. Who else could one be?

But for Kierkegaard, this is precisely the problem. A person may live an entire life without truly becoming oneself.

In The Sickness unto Death, the self is described as a relation that relates itself to itself. The formulation is famous, but also difficult. It points toward something essential: the self is not an object.

It is a relation.

And a relation exists only insofar as it takes place.

To be a self is therefore something a human being does. It is a movement between what one is, what one has been, what one might have become and what one is trying to become.

Kierkegaard’s human being is therefore always underway. The self cannot be possessed. It must be lived.

And this task does not end when youth is over. The question of who one is can return throughout life, even when one believed it had long since been answered.

Repetition

This becomes even clearer in Repetition.

Kierkegaard distinguishes between recollection and repetition. Recollection turns backward and seeks what has been.

Repetition also returns to what is old, but in another way.

It turns forward.

At first, this appears contradictory. How can one move forward by returning?

Yet human life is full of such movements. We encounter the same questions again. We return to the same places. We reread a book. We meet a person after many years.

Then we may discover that the words are the same, but the meaning has changed.

Not necessarily because the words have changed.

But because we have.

Repetition is therefore not a copy. It is becoming.

A human being does not repeat life by living the same thing once more. Life is repeated by continually taking it up again.

To become oneself therefore also means becoming oneself anew.

And anew.

Heidegger and the verb

When Heidegger appears a few decades later, something similar happens to the language of philosophy.

He inherits a tradition full of nouns: being, consciousness, subject, object, time, world.

But Heidegger distrusts these words when they are allowed to stand still. They can make us think that being is a thing, that the human being is an object, or that the world is something standing outside us.

So he begins to set language in motion.

He does not first ask what the human being is, but how the human being is.

The human being is not merely present in the world in the way a chair is present in a room.

The human being is in the world.

Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein — being-in-the-world — is precisely an attempt to break with the idea of the human being as an isolated subject observing an external reality.

We are not first enclosed within ourselves and then move outward into the world. We are already involved. We understand, act, worry, expect, remember, use things and encounter others.

Existence is already an activity.

To exist

The word existence therefore acquires a special meaning in Heidegger.

It does not merely mean that a human being is there. A stone is there as well.

But the human being exists in the sense that it constantly relates to its own being. It has possibilities. It can be otherwise. It can choose, fail and try again.

The human being is therefore never completely identical with what it already is.

It also stands in relation to what it is not yet.

In this way, the future becomes part of the present. I am not only what I have become. I am also what I am moving toward.

This is why Heidegger’s human being can never be fully described by a noun.

It is more precise to describe it through verbs:

to be, to understand, to choose, to wait, to remember, to die.

When truth “essences”

Heidegger does this not only with the human being. He also does it with philosophy’s most fundamental concepts.

A particularly clear example is the word Wesen.

In German, Wesen usually means “essence.” It sounds like a classical noun: What is the true essence of a thing?

But Heidegger returns to the word’s verbal character. He uses the form west — one might almost say that something “essences,” although English has no natural verb for it.

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger writes that truth west. The point is not merely that truth has a particular essence, as though it could be defined once and for all. Truth happens as a movement between unconcealment and concealment. Something comes into view, while something else withdraws.

It is a small linguistic gesture, but it says a great deal about Heidegger’s philosophy.

Truth does not merely exist.

It happens.

It is as though he does not trust a language that stands still, because what is to be thought does not stand still either.

Being happens. The world opens. The human being exists. Language speaks.

Philosophy becomes grammatically restless because reality itself cannot be held fast as a collection of finished things.

And then comes Fosse

In Jon Fosse, this movement becomes literature.

He does not write philosophical treatises on being or repetition. He lets language do the work.

Anyone who reads Septology notices how sentences, words, images, names, movements and prayers return.

But no repetition is entirely identical with the one before it.

A sentence returns several pages later and suddenly means something else. A memory shifts. One human being is mirrored in another.

Asle meets the other Asle.

One could have been the other. The other could have been the one.

Identity becomes mobile.

Who am I?

Who might I have been?

Who is the other?

Where do I end and where does he begin?

Fosse does not necessarily provide answers. He allows the questions to move through language.

Repetition and variation

Fosse has himself compared writing to music.

Music lives through repetition and variation. A theme returns, but never in quite the same way.

The same is true of his prose.

Repetition does not create stagnation. It creates rhythm.

A sentence returns, but since the last time, the reader has experienced something. The sentence has therefore changed as well.

This is a strange phenomenon. The words may be identical, while the meaning is not.

Time has entered language.

Here Fosse stands very close to Kierkegaard.

For Kierkegaard, repetition is an existential category. In Fosse, it becomes a literary experience.

Kierkegaard asks what repetition means.

Fosse makes us undergo it.

The human being who is never finished

Here the three meet.

Kierkegaard’s human being must become oneself.

Heidegger’s human being exists as possibility.

Fosse’s human being is repeated and displaced through language, memory and time.

None of them describes the human being as finished.

There may be a profound philosophical consequence in this. If the human being is not a finished noun, then a human life cannot be understood as an object of which we eventually gain a complete overview.

We are never entirely finished with our own past.

We interpret it anew.

We are never finished with our relationships.

We encounter them again.

We are never finished with grief.

It returns.

We are never finished with love.

It must be lived again.

Perhaps we are never finished with faith either.

It must be repeated.

Old age, too, is a becoming

If this is right, it applies not only to the choices of youth or the projects of adulthood. It applies to the whole of life.

Old age, too, must then be understood as becoming.

It can be tempting to think of old age as a condition one eventually arrives at: first childhood, then youth, adulthood and finally old age. As though life consisted of rooms one passed through before entering the last.

But this is not necessarily how it is experienced from within.

One grows old.

Day by day.

And at the same time, one continues to become something.

Perhaps it is precisely then that one becomes aware of the strange power of repetition. One returns to books read in youth and discovers that they have changed.

Of course they have not.

The reader has changed.

One encounters again questions one thought had been answered. They are still there, but they present themselves differently.

Kierkegaard becomes a different Kierkegaard.

Heidegger becomes a different Heidegger.

Fosse becomes a different Fosse.

Not because the texts change.

But because the reader does.

Reading itself therefore repeats.

And at this point the idea of the human being as a verb becomes more than a philosophical formulation. It becomes an experience.

As long as life continues, the human being continues to become.

The same road

We can walk the same road many times.

The map is the same. The distance is the same. The road lies there.

But the walk is never identical.

The weather is different. The light is different. The body is different. The thoughts are different.

The one who walks has become another.

Perhaps this is precisely what Kierkegaard called repetition.

And perhaps this is what Heidegger was trying to show when he made existence into something we continually enact.

In Fosse, it becomes rhythm.

We return.

Again.

And again.

Not because we are standing still.

But because human life may not move like a straight line.

It moves more like a spiral.

We return to the same thing.

But from another place.

Philosophy as a verb

Perhaps philosophy, in the end, is not a noun either.

Philosophy is not only something that exists in books.

It is something we do.

We ask.

We doubt.

We interpret.

We return.

We try to understand.

Then we discover that understanding was not complete.

And begin again.

Kierkegaard made the self into a task.

Heidegger made existence into a movement.

Fosse made repetition into language.

All three remind us of something simple that nouns can easily conceal:

The human being is not finished.

It is not something we first are and then go on to live.

It becomes in the very act of living.

Perhaps, then, we should sometimes stop asking:

What is a human being?

And ask instead:

What does it mean to be human as something we do?

Then philosophy becomes a verb.

And perhaps life does too.

Kierkegaard made the self into a task.

Heidegger made existence into a movement.

Fosse made repetition into language.

This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT