The face-to-face encounter, by contrast, is a mutual mirroring of who each other is in which individual singularity shows itself — ‘I am I’ in a radical sense of self-presentation of myself as myself —, and this mirroring takes place through the way in which the individuals comport themselves as singular individuals toward each other, no matter how fleetingly and en passant. Such mutually reflecting comportment in which singularity shines through shows (ἀποφαίνειν) ineffably how the two individuals estimate and esteem each other as who they are in their singularity. Each individual has a status as somewho in the world, and the way the other individual comports itself toward the first individual makes it apparent whether this status as self is affirmed or whether its stand as self is depreciated through behaviour that shines back as slighting the individual in its whoness. Every encounter is therefore to a greater or lesser degree a test of self-standing in the world, and because this is so, minute attention must be paid to the kindness and attentiveness of comportment if the other is not to be offended by having its who-self slighted, no matter how slightly. If the other behaves coarsely and impolitely in the encounter, this can be brushed off by, in turn, estimating this person at a lower self-status. The mirror-play with such persons then has little weight in defining or affirming, through reflection, one’s own self and its standing, and the encounter between individuals becomes instead a mere exchange between particular persons. ‘Rude behaviour’ as the negation of politeness does not touch the singular individual but offends only the conventional, general rules of interplay between persons for which singularity remains withdrawn into the background.

On the other hand, the individual also has truly face-to-face encounters with other, significant individuals, so that the shining-back from these others carries more weight in one’s own self-definition. To be close to another individual in the existential-ontological dimension sui generis ‘in-between’ you-and-me means to mutually disclose (mostly mutely, atmospherically) in the mirror-play more of one’s singular self in the sense of how one understands the world in more detail (since world-understanding is self-understanding) and to give weight to how this singular other reflects this self-definition of the self: appreciatingly or depreciatingly within an attuned atmosphere of encounter that enables mutual self-disclosure. This is the encounter in the moment or Augenblick in which gazes are exchanged. Such a close, face-to-face encounter has the intimacy of eye-to-eye, “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares” (John Donne The good-morrow). The gaze of the other that shines back can be either an affirmative, understanding, empathic look or a depreciating, destructive look to kill. Such close encounters with an intimate other, a confidant, are a mediation with the world that embed the individual more deeply in the world than the reflections of its self through average everyday dealings with others.

With those individuals to whom it is close in the sense of mutual self-disclosure, mutually supportive self-affirmation and also conflicts that touch each other’s understanding of self, a singular individual shares its world by confiding its ownmost masks of identity (there is no maskless identity since identity is always and essentially identity with other). The conflicts between you and me are how we break and refract on each other, reflecting back to each other selves with which it is painful to identify. The dimension in-between of you-and-me can be the crucible in which we mutually cast and form each other’s selves through conflicts over differences in which our respective singularities are refracted, moulded and remoulded in adopting hitherto unfamiliar universals radiated back through the respective other, sometimes with the burning sharpness of a laser beam. You and I may break apart through our mutual refractions on each other, or we may emerge from the crucible, each recast as selves and welded together in a mutual understanding and harmonious attunement borne by Eros.

The shared world of you-and-me provides the more or less fleeting existential shelter of homeliness. Such being-at-home in the world is possible only because in a close relationship of you-and-me an affirmative mutual mirroring of self in its singularity takes place, above all atmospherically in mood, thus providing both individuals with a firmer stance as selves borne in the world. Because the other individual, ‘you’, mediates me with the world in which I have to find myself in self-refraction and self-reflection, there is also the ontic possibility that you-and-me cut off from the world of the others, cocooning ourselves in a symbiotic relationship of mutually mirroring affirmation. The mediation with the world through the interstice of you-and-me thus fails. You as my significant other therefore have to maintain your self in your otherness from me as a mediating link with the world if I as this individual self am to be truly ‘closed together’ with the world and my primal split with the world alleviated through an impossible mediation.

As has been shown repeatedly, mediation is ultimately impossible because self-identity is an identity of identity and difference, i.e. a living, moving, phenomenal contradiction between singularity and universality in which there is friction and fracture to a greater or lesser degree. We have gained this insight into the contradictory nature of selfhood and therefore human existence as a whole ontological structure by asking what the Platonic, and then the Hegelian dialectic could have to do with the constitution of the self in a reflective, refractive interplay with the other in three guises: the thingly world, the others and the singular other of ‘you’. It is not to be had solely from Heidegger’s thinking, which only dimly illuminates the phenomenon of you-and-me and also eschews dialectical figures of thought, for which contradiction is the nub.

But, someone will object, isn’t there a problem with the Hegelian dialectic’s claim to achieve absolute knowledge in which the totality of the world’s ontological structure is revealed in the blinding, infinite light of systematic dialectical reason? Isn’t Heidegger’s life-long struggle to open up an access to being prior to that of the λόγος conceived as proposition and reason pertinent above all with regard to the absolute claims of Hegel’s Logik as “the highest summit” (der höchste Gipfel; GA79:150) of the Western λόγος? Does this circumstance not justify Heidegger’s indictment of dialectical thinking? These objections are indeed worth making. First of all it must be noted that Hegel’s thinking is metaphysical and as such onto-theological, i.e. composed of an ontological orientation toward dialectical thinking-through of the being of beings in their totality, on the one hand, which renders his system speculative, i.e. ontological, and, on the other, an orientation toward a supreme being which, for Hegel, is the absolute, which renders his system theological. The dialectic of the phenomena practised by Hegel reveals the being of beings even when the theological orientation toward the absolute is bracketed off. This holds true, say, also for Plato’s dialectical thinking when his orientation to the supreme idea of the good is bracketed off. Metaphysics as onto-theology, whether it be Plato’s, Aristotle’s, Hegel’s or some other thinker’s in the Western philosophical tradition, is insightful also when interpreted solely as a phenomenological ontology. The baby does not have to be thrown out with the bath-water.

In the present specific context, moreover, it will be noticed that the dialectic of self and other presented above is a broken Hegelian dialectic that rests on the insight — pace Hegel — that existential singularity cannot be mediated, ‘closed together’ entirely smoothly with the universal via particularity, not even in absolute knowing that is supposed to attain an ultimate reconciliation of consciousness in its tornness (“Zerrissenheit” Hegel). There is a refraction through which the singular individual is broken on the world and raised to participate as a particular individual in the universal cast of a world. The contradiction between singularity and universality thus signifies here an existential pain of entry to the world. But what, more precisely, does this have to do with Heidegger’s thinking? It has to do with Heidegger’s more originary, more incipient (anfänglicher) conception of λόγος and λέγειν as a gathering laying-together that brings beings (Anwesendes) to present themselves in presence (Anwesen) as what they are (cf. GA79:143) in a ‘timely’ way. Hegel’s insight into the contradiction that the identity of a being is an identity of identity and difference (e.g. ‘This is a glass.’; cf. above) is aligned with Heidegger’s insight into the prelogical hermeneutic as that interposes itself so that a being shows itself as what it is, an insight that depends on an hermeneutic-phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s λέγειν τι κατά τινος (Anal. Priora I 24a14; cf. GA79:143) that does not amount simply to ‘saying something about something’, i.e. as not relating merely to statements but to the self-showing of beings in the open 3D-time-clearing of presence-and-absence. Insofar, Hegelian dialectic and Heideggerian phenomenology are not at loggerheads.

With respect to the first-person statement of identity, ‘I am I’, the phenomenological, existential interpretation yields something other than the self-positing of the modern ego-subject as fundamentum inconcussum, i.e. un-shakeable foundation, as it does with Fichte. Rather, it yields an insight into the fragility and groundlessness of the individual human being in its singularity. How so? Above it was said that first-person self-identity enunciates “the possibility of an individual presenting itself to itself and others as itself”. Such self-identity, however, viewed strictly, is impossible, or void if identity is understood as selfsame equality without difference, I = I. Why? Because the as inevitably introduces a difference in between I and I. ‘I am I’ demands a difference, for otherwise it remains an impotent, tautological, ‘autistic’ statement of singularity’s existential nothingness, i.e. its inchoate freedom. A singular existence must proceed to identification with an other that shines back from the world; it must assume a mask in which it appears as who it is of itself. The issue is whether the mask it adopts as its own is it ownmost, utmost potential for existing in the world.

Similarly, any being’s self-presentation of its identity with itself as itself, i.e. ‘A is A’ understood as A presenting itself as A, must proceed to difference in its identification with an appearance-as-... This hermeneutic as, however, is the scaffolding of an historical time that is always already interposed between beings and their self-presentation. The historical as that casts beings in their totality as resources whose movement and change are to be knowingly calculated and controlled is intermeshed with the historical as that casts beings in their totality as opportunities promising gain. These superposed ontological scaffoldings characterize our own times. The step back from the twofold constellation of being I call the “grasp”51 to letting beings present themselves of themselves as they are, however, does not leave them in their naked truth, but allows them to show themselves in an alternative historical scaffolding sent by propriation as an other, simpler historical mode of human being in its plurality and being itself belonging together. In this alternative hermeneutic cast, human beings become more receptive to and appreciative of beings’ and each other’s self-presentations as granted in the open time-clearing in which the world is embedded.