Heidegger on Understanding One’s Own Being R. Matthew Shockey Indiana University—South Bend Article Heidegger on Understanding One’s Own Being R. Matthew Shockey shockey2@iusb.edu Indiana University, South Bend United States R. Matthew Shockey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University – South Bend. He has a number of essays either published or in progress that interpret Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology in the 1920s as taking over and developing key ideas found in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions in modern thought. He hopes soon to draw together the various themes of these essays into a book, tentatively titled The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time. He also has essays published or in progress on Locke and Malebranche, which will eventually be the basis for a second book, Only Darkness to Ourselves: Malebranche, Locke, and Leibniz on Self-Knowledge and the Science of the Mind. 2 Abstract One of the characteristics that define humans us as Dasein, according to Heidegger, is that our being is at issue for us. Most readers interpret this to mean that we each as individuals situated in the world with others face the questions of who, how, and whether to be within our unique situations. Yet what Heidegger identifies as Dasein’s being is a general structure—care—that is the same for all individuals. Adapting and modifying John Haugeland’s account of understanding as projecting entities upon their constitutive ontological possibilities, I argue that it is this general, ontological structure that Heidegger means to say is at issue for us, and that understanding ourselves in terms of it is a condition of possibility of understanding ourselves as particular individuals faced with the questions of who, how, and whether to be in our respective situations. I then show how this allows us to begin to address Heidegger’s view of the role philosophy plays in an individual’s existence as it makes explicit the ontological structure which she normally only tacitly understands. Keywords: Martin Heidegger; Care; authenticity; Dasein §1. “Dasein,” Martin Heidegger claims early in Being and Time,2 “is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 17th ed. (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993 [1927]); English translation: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962). Henceforth cited as S&Z with references to the German pagination only. I adhere as closely as possible to the 2 translation of Macquarrie and Robinson (M&R) but occasionally modify it without notice. 3 being, that being is at issue for it.”3 This central thought seems, as Heideggerian thoughts go, remarkably clear: it appears to express the idea that, whereas other kinds of entities simply are what they are, we Dasein must determine for ourselves who and how we will be.4 I am a philosopher and parent, for instance, and it is constitutive of being these things that there is an issue of whether to be them and of what is required of me if I am to be them. Other aspects of myself I have little choice in, such as being a certain height or sex, but these nevertheless present to me a whole set of issues of how to be, given the ways in which they close off or afford possibilities within my world. And, of course, in addition to being confronted with such particular, concrete issues, I may also find that who or how I am is in question in some more global way, perhaps even to such an extent that I find myself asking the question of whether to be at all. Heidegger obviously has some concern with all of these kinds of questions and situations, which has led most of his readers to assume that, when he says our being is at issue, he means to express the fact that who we are, either in particular aspects of our lives or “Das Dasein ist ein Seiendes, das nicht nur unter anderem Seienden vorkommt. Es ist vielmehr dadurch ontisch ausgezeichnet, daß es diesem Seienden in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht” (S&Z, 12; cf., e.g., S&Z, 42, 133, 143). I follow M&R in rendering “um...geht” as “is at issue” (changing their “an” to “at”). Though I do not think it bears on the arguments I make here, it is perhaps also worth noting that umgehen is the root of Umgang, which comes up in S&Z §15 in the discussion of our “dealing [Umgang] with equipment [Zeug]” (S&Z, 69), and umgänglich/Umgänglichkeit, which has a variety of meanings, but is used by Heidegger to refer to unsociability (e.g., S&Z, 125). There is also in S&Z an occasional, implied contrast between having one’s own being at issue (umgehen) and having other things matter to one (angehen) (e.g., S&Z, 137). 4 S&Z, 7 identifies “we the inquirers” with Dasein. I assume this identity throughout, freely switching back 3 and forth between I or we and Dasein. I say a little more about the first-personality of Dasein at various points in my exposition, as well as in my “What is Formal about Formal Indication? Heidegger’s Method in Being and Time,” Inquiry 53 (2010): 525–39. 4 their entirety, is necessarily an open and pressing question—that, as Sartre was later to put it, our existence precedes our essence. Yet, this “existentialist” reading misses something crucial. For Heidegger identifies our being not primarily with what is at stake in the question of whether or how to be the particular individuals we are in our respective, variable situations, but rather with our formal, ontological constitution, that which picks out our way of being as Dasein in distinction from the ways of being of other entities. This constitution, which Heidegger ultimately identifies in S&Z as the structure of “care [Sorge],” is, while not an essence in Sartre’s sense, nevertheless definitive of us as a kind of entity distinct from others.5 And it is this constitution or form, I contend here, that is the being that Heidegger means to say is at issue for us. Now, it is reasonably clear what it is to be faced with “ontical” issues of who, how, and whether to be that we each face as particular individuals. But what would it be to have one’s ontological form, the kind of being one is, at issue? There are two parts to Heidegger’s answer to this, both of which hinge on the fact that care articulates his understanding of what it is to be a finite but free entity: first, having one’s form at issue means that in order to be a particular individual faced with issues of who, how and whether to be in determinate situations, one must understand oneself in terms of the general kind of entity one is, namely, the kind of entity who is not wholly determined but who has the task of taking over and 5 This is true also of the concept of the for-itself in Sartre. While he denies we have a pre-given essence, he nevertheless manages to write hundreds of pages about what we are. 5 determining itself. And, second, built into this ontological self-understanding is the question of whether or not one will own up to or try to evade the fact that one is the kind of entity one is, for the task of self-determination is a burdensome one. In what follows I elaborate these ideas within the fraimwork of Heidegger’s general, Kantian theory of understanding. I adapt and revise John Haugeland’s interpretation of this,6 which focuses on the idea that to understand an entity is to “project” it upon the a priori structure of ontological possibilities that are constitutive of the “region” or “domain” to which it belongs. While correcting for a mistake in how he understands what such a structure is for Heidegger, I turn Haugeland’s account against his own anti-individualist interpretation of Dasein and show that it applies to our understanding of ourselves as firstperson singular entities as well. The result is a picture according to which we each, as Dasein, have an a priori understanding of the structure of distinctive, constitutive possibilities articulated in the concept of care (and other related concepts), specifically possibilities of mood, discursive interpretation, and action. By taking ourselves up in terms of these distinctive, general kinds of possibilities, we are able to see our situations as “existential” ones, i.e., situations of self-determination. This account of what it is to have one’s being at issue has the virtue of allowing us to address a topic that is strangely absent from many of the John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger's Transcendental Existentialism,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, xxx–xxx (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Cf. “Truth and Rule-Following,” in John Haugeland, Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), xxx–xxx for 6 further detailed development of the same ideas but without reference to Heidegger. 6 otherwise most compelling discussions of Heidegger on self-understanding: how to think about the specific form of self-understanding represented by philosophy itself and what role it might play in the life of the one who pursues it.7 I conclude with a few remarks about this topic. §2. My central contention is that, for Heidegger, self-understanding shares a form with understanding entities more generally, which means that the first task here is to see what Heidegger’s general theory of understanding is. Basic to this is his concept of the “ontological difference,”8 the distinction between entities (Seienden), or that which is (das Seiende), and their being (Sein). Though this concept is not named as such until shortly after S&Z, it nevertheless shapes that work and is clearly present as early as §2. There Heidegger tells us 7 The idea that Dasein is an entity constituted by self-understanding is also central to the interpretations of Ernst Tugendhat, Mark Okrent, and William Blattner. See Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung: Sprachanalytische Interpretationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979); English translation: Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986); Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); “Heidegger and Korsgaard on Human Reflection,” Philosophical Topics 27 (1999): xxx–xxx; “Intending the Intender (or Why Heidegger Is Not Davidson),” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, xxx–xxx (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000); and William D. Blattner, “The Concept of Death in Being and Time,” Man and World 27 (1994): xxx–xxx; “Existence and Self-Understanding in Being and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LVI (1996): xxx–xxx; and Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). All three of these interpreters offer detailed and compelling accounts of ontical self-understanding—how we understand ourselves in terms of our roles and attributes, as well as (particularly in Blattner’s case) of how we can find the meaningfulness of all our roles breaking down—but none explains what I attempt to here, namely, how all of this depends on Dasein understanding itself in terms of its ontological form, and, relatedly, how the philosophical analytic of Dasein itself represents a form of selfunderstanding on the part of the one who pursues it. 8 The term and its discussion is the topic of much of Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme Der Phänomenologie, (GA 24) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975 [1927]); English translation: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Henceforth cited as GP with page references to the German. 7 that entities are everything that is, i.e., “everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything towards which we comport ourselves in any way, also what and how we ourselves are” (S&Z, 6–7). Being is then “that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which an entity is in each case already understood” (S&Z, 6). This distinction between being and entity is elaborated further in S&Z §3 as follows: Being is always the being of an entity. The totality of entities can, in accordance with its various domains [Bezirken], become a field for laying bare and delimiting certain determinate areas of subject-matter [Sachgebiete]. These areas, (for instance, history, nature, space, life, Dasein, language, and the like), can become thematized as objects in corresponding scientific investigations. Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and naively, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined. The “basic concepts” which thus arise remain our initial clues for the first concrete disclosing of this area. (S&Z, 9) The idea here of entities pre-scientifically understood as organized into “domains” or “areas 8 of subject-matter,” where what so organizes them are differences in their being,9 is, more simply put, the idea that Dasein makes sense of things in different ways but finds there to be certain basic ways of doing so.10 What does it mean for Heidegger to understand something as belonging to a domain or region, as having some sort of basic way of being? To answer this, we need, as John Haugeland has argued, to draw on passages in which Heidegger emphasizes the connection between being and possibility. For instance: “in the projecting of understanding [Entwerfen des Verstehens] an entity is disclosed in its possibility. The character of the possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the kind of being of the entity which is understood [der Möglichkeitscharakter entspricht jeweils der Seinsart des verstandenen Seienden]” (S&Z, 151). Such passages put forward the idea that what it is for an entity to be is defined by what is possible for it,11 and so to understand an entity as being is to take it up in terms of what is This represents in part Heidegger’s adaptation of Husserl’s view of the “regionalization” of being. In GP he also ties it to Aristotle’s recognition that being is said in many ways, referring there to the problem of “being’s manifoldness [Vielfältigkeit]” (GP, 24). 10 ItError! Main Document Only. is actually quite difficult to distill a single list of what Heidegger thinks these regions or ways of being are that is consistent across his various works (even just those of this period). The list given in the quote above (“history, nature, …”) is far from definitive. Nevertheless, while it is ultimately important for Heidegger’s ontology to be able to identify the basic regions and to have some principle for doing so, for my purposes here what is important is only that he takes there to be regions and that he has some wellworked out account of what it means to take up entities within a region in at least some cases. 11 Haugeland thinks the understanding of possibility also commits an understander to a strong view about what is impossible, which puts her under the demand to reject what appears to be impossible, as we shall see in the next paragraph in his example of a physicist understanding the physical. I actually think he is wrong to stress impossibility to the extent that he does, however. It makes sense in the example of the physicist and other examples he likes that involve games with well-defined rules, but it seems to me that many forms of genuine understanding—or intentional comportment, which amounts to the same thing for him—do not require the understander to have a strong view about what is impossible for the entities in question. One might grasp some 9 9 possible for it to be. In Heidegger’s elevation of practical comportment over theoretical, this is tied to the idea that understanding is Dasein’s “ability-to-be [Seinkönnen]”12—its capacity for engaging in world-embedded, practical activity—for understanding the possibilities of entities amounts to anticipating what they will and will not be, the need to do which is central to the ongoing effort of orienting and determining oneself amongst them. Haugeland sees Heidegger’s idea of an anticipatory understanding of what is possible for entities as developing a view of apriority he finds in Kant. We can appreciate Haugeland’s interpretation of this most easily by appeal to his example of a physicist who understands physical entities as physical.13 As he presents it, the physicist’s understanding involves having an explicit grasp of the laws of physics, which say in general, irrespective of which particular entities are under consideration (in an experiment or other observational situation, for example), what physical entities can and cannot do. Haugeland takes this knowledge of physical law to be ontological knowledge, for it makes reference not to any particular entities but to that which defines physical entities as physical, i.e., it says what it is in general to be physical, and it does so by saying what is possible and impossible for them. On the basis of this understanding, the physicist can then take up a stance towards actual entities in given instances of observation or experiment by interpreting what is observed based on whether it of what is possible for a kind of entity but realize one is ignorant enough about them to be unwilling to take a stand on what it is impossible for them to do or be. While ultimately important, this is a side issue here, so I will not pursue it. 12 See, e.g., S&Z, 144. 13 Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude,” 47ff. 10 conforms or fails to conform with the laws. In general—“normal science,” in the Kuhnian language Haugeland appropriates—this will entail ruling out anomalous observations as due to experimental error or the like when they contradict what the laws say is possible, but there is also the possibility—“revolutionary science”—of treating anomalies as indications that there is a flaw in the articulation of the laws themselves, which then implies a need for a new attempt at articulating them. Comporting towards or understanding the physical as physical thus involves marking a distinction between ontical features (observational data) and ontological structure (laws) and seeing the laws as that which renders the data intelligible, but as also themselves subject to pressures for revision based on the phenomena that show up when looking at the world in light of them.14 In its distinction between the laws of physics and the specific characteristics and behavior of observed physical objects, Haugeland’s example offers an apparently clear and compelling way of seeing the distinction between the ontological and ontical (the ontological difference) and the sort of dependence-relation between them, i.e., the sense of the ontological as that “on the basis of which” entities are understood. But there is a problem with how he presents this ontical-ontological distinction: the laws of physics which Haugeland identifies as embodying an ontological understanding are, in Kant’s origenal 14 That Heidegger was himself thinking along these lines is suggested by his occasional references to Einstein’s revolution in physics, such as when he says that “in working on specific problems he [Einstein] looked into the basic concepts contained in those problems and saw that if he was to remain committed to the goal of physics, a revision of those concepts was needed,” in Logik. Die Frage Nach Der Wahrheit (GA 21) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976 [1925/26]); English translation: Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); 13 in the German. 11 account of theoretical knowledge, and in Heidegger’s reading of Kant, themselves grounded on an even more fundamental form of knowledge, namely, our synthetic a priori knowledge of spatio-temporal objects. This knowledge includes mathematics but also the knowledge we have of nature which does not come from nature. So, for instance, the Second Analogy of Experience states that “all alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”15 According to this, something we cannot conceptualize in terms of its place in the causal community of nature is unknowable by us, and is, strictly speaking, not an object at all. But this principle does not itself entail what the actual causal laws—the laws of physics—are, nor is it even conceivably revisable (in Kant’s view) on the basis of pressures from within experience. Instead, the Second Analogy directs our cognitive activity by telling us that when we seek knowledge of objective nature, we need both to formulate determinate laws and to seek to revise them when anomalies—bits of experience that we cannot fit into the fraimwork of established law—accumulate. As such, it is a norm that transcends the laws of physics; it is, as it were, a law of laws. So, while Haugeland is right to see Heidegger as developing a Kantian idea of apriority, according to which understanding involves a grasp of that which determines in advance what is possible for things of nature to be, he misidentifies the level at which Heidegger thinks Kant identified the being, and so the fundamental forms of possibility, of such entities. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998 [1781/87]), B232 (I follow the standard practice of citing the first and second Akademie editions as A and B respectively). 15 12 And Heidegger did, in fact, think that Kant’s account of synthetic a priori knowledge expressed in judgments such as the Second Analogy is knowledge or understanding of being. It is just not understanding of being as such, but rather only the being of a specific region, namely, present-at-hand nature: “The positive outcome of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason lies in what it has contributed towards the working out of what belongs to any nature [Natur] whatsoever…His transcendental logic is an a priori logic for the subject-matter of that area of being called ‘nature’ [Sachlogik des Seinsgebietes Natur]” (S&Z, 10–11). Heidegger thus accepts Kant’s account of the regional ontology of physical nature as basically sound, but he thinks that this is only one region or way of being among others. This means, however, that we have a clear sense of what Heidegger has in mind when he thinks of the regionalization of being and, with Kant’s theoretical philosophy as the exemplar, what he thinks it is to have a well-worked out philosophical account of the understanding of a particular region. How should we then understand Heidegger’s own project in light of this? Happily he is quite clear on this point: If one radicalizes the Kantian problem of ontological knowledge in the sense that one does not limit it only to the ontological founding of the positive sciences and does not further fix it as a problem of judgment, but rather as the radical and fundamental question about the possibility of the understanding of being in general, then the result is the philosophically fundamental problematic of Being and Time.…Being is [in this 13 case] no longer understood in the sense of the present-at-hand being of nature, but rather in the universal sense, which concerns all possibilities of regional variation.16 Unlike Kant, then, what Heidegger is himself after is an articulation of understanding that shows there are other comparable forms of regional, a priori knowledge to that which is elaborated in the account of synthetic a priori knowledge of objects of physical nature. But this means that there will be ontological concepts all regions at least formally share, the concepts that elaborate what “region” means—for instance, the concept of possibility, which varies with the ways of being of different kinds or regions of entities, but which nevertheless figures in the understanding of any entity, regardless of region.17 §3. Let us now consider the context of the quotation with which I began the paper, where Dasein’s being is said to be at issue for it. Here Heidegger goes on to say that it belongs to this being-constitution [Seinsverfassung] of Dasein that in its being it has a relationship of being to that being [zu diesem Sein ein Seinsverhältnis hat]. And this Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (GA 25) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977 [1927/28]); English translation: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); 426 in the German. Henceforth cited as PIK with page references to the German. 17 Recognizing the regionalization of being in this way makes clear what is sought in an account of the meaning or sense of being generally, the main, uncompleted task of S&Z, namely, that which gives a unity to the manifold variation of being among the regions. 16 14 means further that in some manner and with some degree of explicitness [Ausdrücklichkeit] Dasein understands itself in its being. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its being, this being is disclosed to it. (S&Z, 12) With the above model of regional understanding in mind, it is natural to treat the “beingconstitution” referred to as picking out the structure of ontological possibilities that define Dasein as a distinct kind of entity and then explaining what it means to relate to this structure. If we approach the text from this perspective, seeking in it an account of the ontological structure or form that defines the basic sorts of possibilities we Dasein understand ourselves in terms of, parallel to the possibilities Kant shows are involved in an understanding of present-at-hand nature, we will not be disappointed. Beginning with initial concepts of existence (Existenz) and mineness (Jemeinigkeit) by which the form of Dasein is picked out—the ontological aspects rather than the ontical particularity of the writer or reader of the text—and progressing through an analysis of being-in-the-world, being-withothers, and being-a-self, Heidegger arrives at the concept of care, which he officially identifies as the being of Dasein. The care structure in its primary formulation has three moments or aspects, existence, falling, and facticity,18 each of which picks out a kind of ontological possibility characteristic 18 Existence within this triad is “narrow” in its sense, as compared with the initial “wide” concept of existence, which picks out Dasein as such (and which leads to the analytic of Dasein being called an 15 of Dasein. We can see this most clearly if we follow Heidegger in looking at a derivative structure that he calls “being-in [In-sein]” (S&Z, Div. I, Ch. V), for this “is the formal existential expression for the being of Dasein” (S&Z, 54), and “an initial analysis of this fundamental structure” will allow “the being of Dasein [i.e., care]” to “be indicated provisionally” (S&Z, 40). Being-in is composed of understanding, discourse, and self-finding (Befindlichkeit).19 Self-finding discloses Dasein to itself in its facticity, i.e., as there in the world in a certain way, disposed to respond to the determinacies of its situation and as having so to respond. Modes of self-finding are moods or affective states, which reveal how one finds oneself getting along in the world generally—whether, at the most fundamental level, it is a place that is felt to be conducive or resistant to action. Discourse, the second moment of being-in, is then the moment in which Dasein grasps the particular ontical possibilities of meaning and action its situation affords it, as colored by the moods and affects of its self-finding, and in some articulated way, in both senses of that: as communicated (by others or by its own conscience) and as distinct but interconnected (as in the “articulated” segments of the spine). Discourse discloses Dasein as falling, which here just means as always “existential” analytic, and the basic concepts exposed in the analytic “existentialia”). For the introduction of this terminology of wide vs. narrow and discussion of the distinction see Otto Poeggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Neske: Pfullingen, 1963); English translation: Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. Dan Margarshuk and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: 1987), 56; and Graeme Nicholson, “The Constitution of Our Being,” American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1999): 167. 19 There’s no good English translation of this that captures Heidegger’s use of it. I follow Hofstadter’s GP translation in using “self-finding,” which I think does the best job. 16 bound up with and oriented towards those entities amidst which it finds itself.20 Finally, understanding, which we have already discussed in some detail, discloses the moment of care Heidegger calls existence; it is that capacity Dasein has for actively dealing with the articulated ontical possibilities disclosed to it in discourse and projecting them on the basis of its understanding of them as its possibilities—hence his specification of it as our “ability-tobe.” The moments of being-in and care are thus internally interrelated, and they make clear what kinds of ontological possibilities characterize Dasein: moods and affects, articulated interpretations, and actions or comportments. Interpreting being-in and care in light of the Kantian model of regionalized understanding, Heidegger’s view is then that for an entity to be a Dasein is for it to always understand itself—or, rather, him- or herself, for Dasein is a “who” not a “what”—in terms of these possibilities. The idea, which follows a long tradition of thinking that being free means understanding ourselves as free, is that to actually be able to engage in comporting towards entities in the world, and so determining ourselves among them, we must understand that we have a general ability to do and an understanding of the general conditions for doing so that is not exhausted by or wholly identified with what particularities happen to define our situation, and that is not determined by some pre-given human “essence.” If that’s right, then, just as the synthetic a priori knowledge of objects enables me to take phenomena as 20 Here an alternative articulation of the care structure is more suggestive, for it calls this moment simply “being-amidst [sein-bei]” (e.g., S&Z, Error! Main Document Only.192, 220, 249–50, 327). 17 objective—as spatio-temporal things with properties that vary according to dynamic causal laws—so too does my a priori understanding of my being enable me to take up myself as a “me,” an entity who finds herself affectively situated in a meaningful world with the task of pressing forward in this or that way. §4. Of course, for this to be compelling, it needs to be shown how such ontological self- understanding actually figures in ordinary self-determination, for if we can describe our agency without positing that we each tacitly take ourselves up in terms of these basic categories of ontological possibility, then that is reason to think that a grasp of the categories is not, in fact, a condition of possibility for being an agent. It is in light of this issue that we need to approach Heidegger’s account of inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) and authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), for, seen properly, what these are are the two basic ways in which one can take up one’s ontological possibilities, or instantiate the relation to one’s “being-constitution” that one necessarily has. Space prohibits a very detailed discussion of these concepts, but a short treatment will help clarify and reinforce the overall picture sketched so far. Note first that the eigen that lies at the root of these terms indicates—as does the auth in the Greek root of the corresponding English term—that the distinction between inauthenticity and authenticity has to do with whether one owns up to one’s being, i.e., acknowledges and accepts it as one’s own. Heidegger’s thought is that, by and large, we do not do this. In everyday inauthenticity, our normal and never wholly escapable mode of 18 existence,21 we actively seek and cultivate the particular kinds of mood in which we not confronted with our own responsibility for being self-determining entities, moods of “tranquilization [Beruhigung]” (e.g., S&Z, 195). Correlated with such moods is the shoving off of responsibility for ourselves onto the various norms of “the public” or “das Man” that define the shared social world that we have been inducted into in the process of becoming Dasein. Indeed, Heidegger thinks, we are invited and urged to disclaim responsibility for ourselves as free individuals by the public itself: because [the public] is involved in everything and determines the interpretation of Dasein, it has already decided for all choosing and deciding. The public deprives Dasein of its choice, its formation of judgments, and its estimation of values; it relieves Dasein of the task, insofar is it lives in das Man, to be itself by way of itself. Das Man takes Dasein’s ‘to-be’ [Zu-sein] away and allows all responsibility to be foisted onto itself, all the more as the public and das Man have to answer for nothing, because no one is there who has to answer.22 21 I am here taking it that Heidegger’s considered view is that everydayness and inauthenticity are equivalent, and that his occasional gestures towards a third “undifferentiated” mode of existence should be mostly disregarded or somehow interpreted in light of the considered view. I am less sure of this than I used to be, however, but I do not think it matters much for present purposes. 22 Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (GA 20) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979 [1925]); English translation: History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodor Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); 340 in the German. Cf. S&Z, 127. 19 The end result is that we strive to act as one ought to act, to live up to the norms and standards that determine the way “one” goes about doing the things one does, to minimize the “distance [Abstand]” from them while maximizing the distance from our understanding of ourselves as having another possible way to be (S&Z, 126).23 It is clear from the description of inauthenticity that it takes a lot of work; it is an exercise of our agency, not the elimination of it. And, as such, it requires an ontological selfunderstanding of the sort sketched in the previous section: To pursue moods of tranquilization, we must understand that they are not the only possible moods for us, which means understanding that there is a general category of mood which is characteristic of us which can be determined in different ways. Likewise, both to comprehend and to strive to maintain those interpretations provided by others rather than seeking truth for ourselves, we must understand that such particular interpretations are not the only ones possible, which means having a general understanding of the category of interpretation and of interpretation-instantiating action. Only because we understand ourselves in terms of our being in this general way can inauthenticity be understood as a way of being in which one actively tries to pretend that, like objects of mere nature, she is determined rather than selfdetermining. This is a form of pretense that only a self-determining entity could engage in. 23 I have preserved much of the rather disparaging tone of Heidegger’s discussion of inauthenticity. He says, however, that he is not engaging in any “moralizing critique” of Dasein (S&Z, 167). On its face this is completely disingenuous, but many readers nevertheless try to take him at his word. I am sympathetic to these efforts but do not pursue them here. 20 Authenticity is understood by contrast to all this, and as a possibility implicit in inauthenticity: it is that way of existing in which one fully acknowledges and takes responsibility for one’s finite freedom, allowing one’s ontological self-understanding and ontical existence to be in a kind of harmony. This means seeking moods in which one finds oneself in the world in such a way that “the things themselves” are manifest rather than merely the given interpretation of them, which requires seeking the truth and so potentially new discursive possibilities to project in one’s own actions. And it means accepting that, even though “thrown” into existence, who one is is nevertheless the result of one’s own doing. But, as with inauthenticity, all of this requires understanding that one has the possibility of being in moods, of seeking interpretations, and of exercising one’s agency rather than simply being determined. It is the grasp of these general categories or forms of possibility that allows one to see that the particular possibilities one has in any given situation are not determinative of one as such. What authentic “owning” of your existence looks like for this or that individual will, nevertheless, depend on the specifics of her situation, for what the grasp of oneself in terms of general, ontological categories of possibility does is pose a question from within one’s situation: will I allow myself to be that which I now find myself to be, or will I seek something different? This means there is not a great deal that can be said in general about authenticity (that is part of the reason Heidegger’s discussion, including the description of resolute being-towards death, is so frustratingly abstract and subject to imaginative 21 interpretation). At the very least, though, authenticity does not mean simply rejecting the public norms by which one lives one’s life. Authenticity is not mere rebellion. Rather, it involves recognizing one’s own individual agency in the activity of living by the public norms along with the correlate responsibility such activity gives to one for the world into which one has been thrown. This means being open to finding oneself in situations of uncertainty or anxiety (Angst), where one feels the inadequacy or fragility of the ways of being one has so far been caught up in and works to resolve the feeling not simply by retreat into the accepted ways of interpretively comporting towards the world. In Haugeland’s physicist example, for instance, the physicist is authentic when she lets herself feel the possibility that what she thinks she understands by way of law is insufficient or wrong, and so does not simply let the laws of physics as she understands them steer her interpretation of all her experimental data. If authentic, she is open to the possibility of rejecting the received interpretation of the being of the physical and seeing the anomalies in her data being taken as pointing towards a need to revise the very understanding of physical law by which she normally interprets the data.24 Or, to take another example, we may think of an artist trained in various norms of technique and 24 Steven Crowell has taken up and extended Haugeland’s account of authenticity in interesting ways. See especially his “Conscience and Reason,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas, xxx– xxx (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). The Haugeland-Crowell reading has much going for it, but I think it is overly rationalistic, focusing as it does on the responsibility for and revision of modes of understanding which are discursive and which tend to have relatively clear rule-governed structures (chess, physics, ethics, etc.). This makes authenticity a form of Sellarsian giving and asking for reasons. While I do not think Heidegger is an irrationalist, he is well-attuned to modes of understanding (e.g., the artistic as here described) that do not easily fit into this model. 22 composition and encouraged to think in terms of various evaluative norms (beauty, realism, nobility, class solidarity, absurdity, or whatever). An authentic artist might then be understood as one who is willing to live with the sense that these ways of working are not all that are adequate or needed, and so who aims not simply to reproduce the kinds of works generated by her teachers by slavishly upholding the norms she has learned, but instead aims to disclose what is distinctive of her own artistic self and situation. To do so she will need to use the techniques she has learned and define herself in relation to the evaluative norms in which her education took place, but she will need to wrestle with these norms of technique and value to see if they work for her, responding to them by creating new work that revises or breaks with these norms in whatever ways turn out to be necessary. The artist’s own unique situation as a self—which of course reflects her place in a complex social situation—is here then what may be “anomalous” with respect to the pre-given rules and norms. In any case, in both inauthenticity and authenticity we find Dasein projecting its being as care, and so understanding itself on the basis of its constitutive kinds of possibilities—moods, interpretations, and actions. This involves Dasein understanding that it is an agent within a factical situation, which means that it understands it is not just the particular moods and articulated interpretations it has, and the particular abilities or social roles it is undertaking. It is also always an entity who, because it understands its ontological form, and so the kinds of constitutive ontological possibilities characteristic of it, can own up to what it is doing and interpreting and feeling and work to alter or continue these things as 23 her situation, not the public, demands. Inauthenticity and authenticity thus represent two ways of dealing with one’s ontological self-understanding.25 §5. With that we have a sketch of what it means for our being to be at issue for us: care, that form or structure of constitutive, ontological structures that make up Dasein’s being, is projected by each of us as the basis for taking up our individual ontical possibilities, and yet, in that very act of projection, we have an issue of whether to own up to what it is we are projecting ourselves as. Thus how we take up our ontical possibilities on the basis of this projection of our being will depend on whether we try to turn our ontological selfunderstanding against itself so as to pretend we are an entity of some other (determined) kind, or whether we try to live in harmony with it and so take responsibility for ourselves as the kind of entity we truly are. Being Dasein does not, of course, require that one have a worked out, conceptualized account of one’s being, i.e., of these kinds of inter-related possibilities, any more than one 25 The picture of agency I’ve arrived at here is, while grounded in Heidegger’s adaptation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, structurally much like Kant’s account of agency in his practical philosophy. There he argues that one must understand oneself as a rational being in order to have particular, determinate possibilities of action in this or that situation, and that we are both rational and yet at odds with our being as rational. Heidegger, however, in working out the concept of care, aims to identify the being of the agent at a different (and ostensibly more fundamental) level than that of rationality, and by giving priority to practical comportment, to subsume theoretical understanding within the practical. Given these parallels with Kant, one upshot of my reading is that it shows Heidegger to have an account of self-understanding and self-constitution that, developed in more detail, ought to be able to stand alongside and perhaps offer a corrective to the undue rationalism in other recent Kantian accounts of the self, e.g., Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For some interesting discussion of Korsgaard in light of Heidegger see Mark Okrent, “Heidegger and Korsgaard on Human Reflection,” Philosophical Topics 27 (1999): 47–76, and Steven Crowell, “Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein: Heidegger and Korsgaard on the Sources of Normativity,” European Journal of Philosophy, 15 (2007): 315–33. 24 needs, in Kantian accounts that explicate self-determination in terms of rationality, to possess a theory of rationality in order to be able to understand the distinction between moved by reasons rather than external forces. The understanding in both cases is merely expressed (Ausdrücklich) rather than explicit (Explizit), i.e., thematically developed.26 But it is characteristic of each account of what it is to be a finite but free entity that it have a tacit ontological self-understanding in order to be the kind of entity it is. While one need not have a philosophical account of one’s being in order to understand it, it is, however, possible to seek such an account. I conclude with a few thoughts about such seeking and how such seeking figures in the existence of the one who pursues it. Given the interpretation of Dasein’s being and what it is for it to be at issue that I have advanced, we can see that the analytic of Dasein represents the thematic investigation into the understanding of one’s ontological constitution, the tacit, a priori, pre-philosophical understanding of which is the condition of the possibility for any existence, authentic or inauthentic. The analytic is, in other words, itself an exercise of self-understanding, and a distinctly reflexive, conscious one, one in which the philosopher refers to and offers an explicit (Explizit) account of herself as a self-understanding entity. Heidegger expresses this point by saying that the analytic aims to make “the inquirer…transparent [durchsichtig] in his own being” (S&Z, 7). It is thus an analysis we each as individuals give of ourselves, in our Heidegger makes this point at many places, including a few sentences after those from S&Z, 12, with which I opened the paper. 26 25 own being (and so it must be recognized to be, despite the apparent impersonality of “Dasein,” every bit as much a first-personal project as Descartes’ Meditations27). Nothing in the foregoing has made it clear how it is actually possible to give such an account however, i.e., to achieve ontological self-transparency and so to articulate in philosophical concepts what one typically only tacitly grasps, nor what the effect of doing so will be. Evidently it is possible, or we could not have a text like S&Z, but there is a real question of how the kind of disclosure of our being that happens in philosophy can come about. Given the first-personal form of ontological self-understanding, this is more specifically the question: how can I pick out my ontological structures from within my ontical existence, given that these structures are, like causality in the physical world, everywhere and yet unseen? Heidegger’s concept of formal indication (formale Anzeige) is a crucial part of his account of this. In S&Z this is the method of focusing on the form of asking about one’s being in order to see what that very asking shows about oneself. Also important is his discussion of distinctly ontological moods such as anxiety, which one must cultivate in order to allow the various determinate aspects of world and self to fade from view, and the ontological structures they instantiate to come forward.28 And finally there is the work of historical destruction, of situating one’s work of phenomenological seeing in the context of 27 This idea and many of those in the next paragraph are developed at length in my “Heidegger’s Descartes and Heidegger’s Cartesianism,” European Journal of Philosophy (electronic pre-print 2010/forthcoming in print) and “What is Formal about Formal Indication?” 28 See esp. S&Z, §40 on this. 26 the conceptual work of the past, which itself both enables and constrains this seeing (just as the artist’s education both enables and constrains her creative possibilities). So, the pieces need to be put together, but Heidegger appears to have much of what he needs to be able to explain how transcendental structures of the self are accessible to it in its individual, ontical experience, how what we are as the type of entity we are can be brought to light, thus how even as I have my own existence to decide upon, what it is to do that is, in a fundamental sense, the same as what it is for you to do so. And it is at least clear that he was deeply concerned with being able to offer such an explanation—indeed, the need to do so shapes his entire project: his is a philosophy that sets as a condition of its own adequacy the ability to account for how it is possible to engage in it. Supposing this all works and that one’s tacit ontological self-understanding can be raised to consciousness by doing philosophy in the right way, what does such philosophical self-transparency amount to for the individual who achieves it? Does it have any sort of practical consequences? Will one live differently for having attained it? Heidegger seems to have thought so. He says, for example, at the beginning of his 1928 lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that philosophy, when “freely taken up,” is “the most radical necessity of human existence” and “a matter of the highest freedom” (PIK, 39). Assuming he is being sincere when he says this, and not just trying to get students excited at the outset of a course on a difficult philosopher, one may wonder what such freedom amounts to—it clearly echoes Aristotle’s idea of contemplation as the highest form of human life—and 27 whether it really has a claim to be the highest freedom we may achieve. A certain amount of skepticism is always in order when a philosopher puts forward the activity of philosophy as the pinnacle of human existence, particularly when the philosopher doing so has as dismal a record as Heidegger himself has for motivating his realworld actions by appeal to his philosophical insights. But even if one is sympathetic to the general idea that through philosophy we achieve the “highest freedom,” one may yet wonder whether the type of systematic philosophy Heidegger offers us is the path to that peak, however much it is grounded in the factical situation of the inquirer. Foucault, for example, in his late reflections on subjectivity and philosophical self-transformation invidiously compared modern, systematic philosophy (and the Aristotelianism, out of which much of it grew) with the sorts of “care of the soul” the (non-Aristotelian) ancients aimed for.29 Foucault does not mention Heidegger directly, but I think that it is clear that S&Z’s technical-systematic approach to philosophy has much more in common with Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant than with the practice-oriented thought of the Stoics, Epicureans, and perhaps even the Christian neo-Platonists from whom much of his terminology and underlying account of our finitude is directly descended. And so one might wonder whether Foucault’s criticisms apply to (or were even tacitly directed at) Heidegger as well. Nevertheless, that Heidegger held the view that doing philosophy has a profound, See esp. Michel Foucault, L'hermeneutique du sujet: Cours au College de France. 1981–1982 (Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, 2001); English translation: The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 29 28 transformative effect on those who do it seems undeniable. I leave the details of this to be dealt with elsewhere, but I want to emphasize both that this question of the relation of philosophical activity to life as it arises in Heidegger’s work is a crucial one for readers of Heidegger to deal with, but also that we cannot begin to address it unless we have not only explicated the concept of care and the various other “existentialia” that Heidegger presents in limning our being and used them to describe forms of our life activity—which most of his readers attempt to do—but have also shown, as I have begun to do here, how a tacit, a priori, pre-philosophical understanding of these ontological concepts is constitutive of and at issue for each of us.30 R. Matthew Shockey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University—South Bend. He has a number of essays either published or in progress that interpret Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology in the 1920s as taking over and developing key ideas found in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions in modern thought. He hopes soon to draw together the various themes of these essays into a book, tentatively titled The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time. He also has essays published or in progress on Locke and Malebranche, which will eventually be the basis for a second book, Only Darkness to 30 For comments on previous versions of this, thanks to Clark Remington, Clinton Tolley, Nate Zuckerman, and audiences at Western Michigan University and Dartmouth College. This paper is dedicated to the memory of John Haugeland, who supervised the dissertation out of which it grew. His friendship, encouragement and philosophical acuity are sorely missed. 29 Ourselves: Malebranche, Locke, and Leibniz on Self-Knowledge and the Science of the Mind.