© 2015. Philosophy Today, Volume 59, Issue 1 (Winter 2015). ISSN 0031-8256 73–90 DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201411547 Hegel, Heidegger, and the ‘I’: Preliminary Reflections for a New Paradigm of the Self PAOLO DIEGO BUBBIO Abstract: In this paper, I contend that both Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophies can be regarded as attempts to overcome Cartesian subjectivism and to by-pass traditional oppositions between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the ‘I.’ I explore Hegel’s notion of the ‘I,’ stressing how Hegel takes up Kant’s ‘I-think,’ freeing Kant’s philosophy from its subjectivism. Then, I submit that Heidegger, in the twentieth century, was similarly concerned with the overcoming of subjectivism, and that an analysis of his notion of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) and its development in the context of Heidegger’s thought can support this argument. Finally, I suggest that Hegel’s and Heidegger’s analyses can be used to elaborate an alternative and more flexible model of the ‘I,’ which avoids individualism, allows thinking of the formation of the self as a collective enterprise, and thus provides the conceptual resources to transform our identity without losing it. Key words: Hegel, Heidegger, the ‘I,’ subjectivism, mineness I n the scholarly community, there is general agreement that the notion of the self has become indispensable to contemporary social and political discourse and that specific models of the self have specific implications for politics and society. In a superficial sense, everyone knows what it means to be an ‘I,’ in the sense that everyone has a basic practical knowledge underlying the use of this indexical utterance, as everyone must learn the rules governing the use of the pronoun ‘I’ in order to become a speaker. 1 However, the immediate or common-sense understanding of this idea may imply an account of the self that is not fully exhaustive and, more importantly, has practical consequences (for example, regarding one’s relationships with others and one’s integration into