A rchive Date
[ 21-12-2003 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Phenomenology ]
|
[Could anything be more Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility?
Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the light of Division II
This paper was presented at the Inaugural Meeting of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies, Asilomar, California, July 19-23,1999. I would like to thank the participants for their helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Wallace Matson for his help in sorting out the New Testament Greek. Hubert L. Dreyfus
Introduction
It has always seemed to me that the text of a thinker is only worth studying if reading it makes a significant difference in how we see the world and ourselves. Our job as commentators is to clarify the text and bring out its relevance. But how does one go about clarifying and applying a thinker like Heidegger? Since Heidegger, unlike contemporary analytic philosophers who attempt to give a logical analysis of concepts, always attempts to anchor his discussion in the phenomena, I try to use Heidegger’s text to draw attention to pervasive phenomena that are often overlooked, and then use an elaboration of these phenomena to cast exegetical light on the text. Finally, I test the significance of the result by seeking to show the relevance of Heidegger’s insights to issues of current concern. The following remarks are meant to demonstrate this approach.
I. Average versus Primordial Understanding
Heidegger says that Division I of Being and Time provides a phenomenology of average everydayness and so will have to be revised in the light of the authentic way of being he describes in Division II. My attempt to write a commentary exclusively on Division I Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, MIT Press, l991. was, therefore, criticized on the ground that I presented as Heidegger’s view theses that were taken back in Division II. None of the critical reviewers, however, said what my exclusive concentration of Division I led me to get wrong. And, as far as I could tell, none of the claims made in Division I were taken back in Division II.
I now see, however, that focusing exclusively on Division I did, indeed, lead me to make at least one serious mistake. I overlooked warnings, scattered about in Division I, that the average intelligibility described there would later be shown to be an inferior form of understanding, in contrast to a richer more primordial kind of understanding described in Division II.
In my Commentary, I spelled out Heidegger’s basic theses that (1) people have skills for coping with equipment, other people, and themselves; (2) their shared everyday coping practices conform to norms; (3) the interrelated totality of equipment, norms and social roles form a whole which Heidegger calls “significance.” (4.) Significance is the basis of average intelligibility, and (5) this average intelligibility can be further articulated in language. As Heidegger puts it “We have the same thing in view, because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said” (212).
In spite of the obvious irony, in Heidegger’s conclusion that “publicness primarily controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right” (165), I concluded that, for both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the source of the intelligibility of the world and of Dasein is the average public practices articulated in ordinary language.
This interpretation still seems right to me, but I went on, mistakenly, to conclude from the basis of intelligibility in average understanding and ordinary language that for Heidegger, as for Wittgenstein, there was no other kind of intelligibility. I noted Heidegger’s claim that “by publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone” (165), but I went on, nonetheless, to argue that there could be no higher intelligibility than the public, average, intelligibility provided by the social norms Heidegger calls the one. Any higher intelligibility, like Plato's ideas, Descartes’ mathematical relations among bits of extension, or Hegel's self-transparent Geist, I claimed, would necessarily be metaphysical, so Heidegger would surely have rejected any such idea. Likewise any sort of private intelligibility that was not, at least in principle, shareable would seem to be, for those left out, a sort of unintelligibility. The whole point of intelligibility is that it be shared or at least sharable, if not by all rational creatures, at least by those brought up in a given culture or form of life. So, I simply denied that for Heidegger there could be any higher intelligibly than that in the public practices and the language that articulates them.
I’ve since come to see that I was wrong. Heidegger clearly holds that there is a form of understanding, of situations, on the one hand, and of Dasein itself, on the other, that is superior to everyday understanding. He calls this superior understanding “primordial understanding” (212). I still hold, however, that this primordial understanding cannot be some radically different way of making sense of things, since, for Heidegger, this higher intelligibility must somehow be based on and grow out of the average intelligibility into which everyone is socialized. So, although such higher intelligibility may in fact be accessible only to the few, as a form of shared intelligibility it must in principle be available to everyone. What could such a more primordial form of understanding be?
To get a clue, it helps to recall what we learn from Ted Kisiel’s researches into the sources of Being and Time. According to Kisiel, the book grows out of Heidegger’s work on Aristotle: Division I elaborates on techne, everyday skill, and Division II on phronesis, practical wisdom. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Kisiel says: “The project of BT thus takes shape in l92l - 24 against the backdrop of the unrelenting exegesis of Aristotle’s texts … from which the pretheoretical models for the two Divisions of BT, the techne of poesis, for the First, and the phronesis of praxis for the Second, are derived.” 9. So we would expect Heidegger to present his own version of the mastery of the cultural practices that, according to Aristotle, enables the phronemos to “straightway” “do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way.” But just what phenomena do Aristotle and Heidegger have in mind with techne and phronesis? The way to find out is to let these phenomena show themselves as they are in themselves, so I will take a moment to describe, in a very abbreviated way, four stages one goes through in acquiring a new skill in any domain, as well as what one has when one has become an expert, especially the expert in social situations, Aristotle’s man of practical wisdom.
II. A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition
For a more detailed account see, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine, Free Press, 1988.
Stage 1: Novice
Normally, the instruction process begins with the instructor decomposing the task environment into context-free features that the beginner can recognize without the desired skill. The beginner is then given rules for determining actions on the basis of these features.
The student automobile driver learns to recognize such domain-independent features as speed (indicated by his speedometer), and is given the rule, “Shift when the speedometer-needle points to 10.
The child who is supposed to learn to act ethically in his or her culture might be given the rule. “Never tell a lie.”
Stage 2: Advanced beginner
As the novice gains experience actually coping with real situations, he begins to note, or an instructor points out, perspicuous examples of meaningful additional components of the situation. After seeing a sufficient number of examples, the student learns to recognize them. Instructional maxims can then refer to these new situational aspects.
Of course, if the beginner follows the rule, “Shift at 10 miles an hour,” the car will stall on a hill or when heavily loaded. So the advanced beginner learns to use (situational) engine sounds as well as (non-situational) speed in deciding when to shift. He learns the maxim: “Shift up when the motor sounds like it is racing and down when its sounds like it is straining.”
Likewise, the policy of not lying will get a child into fights and excluded from important events so, with the coaching of the parents, children learn to tell their friends when leaving their homes that they had a good time regardless of the truth. Thus the child learns to replace the rule “Never lie” with the maxim “Never lie except in situations when making everyone feel good is what matters.”
Stage 3: Competence
With more experience, the number of potentially relevant elements that the learner is able to recognize becomes overwhelming. At this point, since a sense of what is important in any particular situation is missing, performance becomes nerve-wracking and exhausting, and the student may well wonder how anyone ever masters the skill.
To cope with this overload and to achieve competence, people learn through instruction or experience, to devise a plan or choose a perspective. The perspective then determines which elements of the situation are treated as important and which ones are ignored. By restricting attention to only a few of the vast number of possibly relevant features and aspects, such a choice of a perspective makes decision making easier.
A competent driver leaving the freeway on an off-ramp curve, learns to pay attention to speed of the car, not whether to shift gears. After taking into account speed, surface condition, angle of bank, etc., the driver may decide he is going too fast. He then has to decide whether to let up on the gas pedal, take his foot off the pedal altogether, or step on the brake, and precisely when to perform any of these actions. He is relieved if he gets through the curve without being honked at, and shaken if he begins to go into a skid.
A young person learns that there are situations in which one must tell the truth and others in which one lies. Although this is daunting, the adolescent learns to decide whether the current situation is one of building trust, giving support, manipulating the other person for his or her own good, harming a brutal antagonist, and so forth. If, for instance, trust is the issue, he then has to decide when and how to tell the truth.
The competent performer, then, seeks rules and reasoning procedures to decide upon a plan or perspective. But such rules are not as easy to come by as are the rules and maxims given beginners. There are just too many situations differing from each other in too many subtle ways. More situations, in fact, than are named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each situation. Competent performers, therefore, must decide for themselves in each situation which sort of situation they are in as well as what to do, without being sure that their understanding of the situation will be appropriate. Such a decision as to what matters in the current situation, i.e. what sort of situation it is, requires that one share the sensibility of the culture and have the ability to respond to the similarities recognized by one’s fellows.
Such decisions are risky, however, so one is tempted to seek the security of standards and rules. When a risk-averse person makes an inappropriate decision and consequently finds himself in trouble, he tries to characterize his mistake by describing a certain class of dangerous situations and then makes a rule to avoid them in the future. To take an extreme example, if a driver pulling out of a parking space is side-swiped by an oncoming car he mistakenly took to be approaching too slowly to be a danger, he may make the rule, never pull out if there is a car approaching. Such a rigid response will make for safe driving in a certain class of cases, but it will block further skill refinement. In this case it will prevent acquiring the skill of flexibly pulling out of parking places. In general, if one seeks to follow general rules one will not get beyond competence.
But without guidelines, coping becomes frightening rather than merely exhausting. Prior to this stage, if the rules do not work, the performer can rationalize that he has not been given adequate rules rather than feel remorse for his mistakes. Now, however, the learner feels responsible for disasters. Of course, sometimes things work out well, and the competent performer experiences a kind of elation unknown to the beginner. Thus, learners at this stage find themselves on an emotional roller coaster.
As the competent performer becomes more and more emotionally involved in his task, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw back and to adopt the detached rule-following stance of the beginner. While it might seem that this involvement would interfere with rule-testing and so would lead to irrational decisions and inhibit further skill development, in fact just the opposite seems to be the case. If the detached rule-following stance of the novice and advanced beginner is replaced by involvement, one is set for further advancement, while resistance to the acceptance of involvement and risk normally leads to stagnation and ultimately to boredom and regression. Patricia Benner has described this phenomenon in From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice, Addison-Wesley, l984, 164.
Stage 4: Expertise
With enough experience with a variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions, the competent performer seems gradually to decompose this class of situations into subclasses, each of which share the same decision, single action, or tactic. This allows an immediate intuitive response to each situation.
The expert driver, generally without paying attention, not only feels in the seat of his pants when speed is the issue; he knows how to perform the appropriate action without calculating and comparing alternatives. On the off-ramp his foot just lifts off the accelerator or steps on the brake. What must be done, simply is done.
Also, with enough experience and willingness to take risks, some people grow up to be ethical experts who have learned to tell the truth or lie spontaneously, depending upon the situation, without appeal to rules and maxims. Aristotle would say that such a person has acquired the virtue of truthfulness. Some people grow up to be experts capable of responding appropriately to a wide range of interpersonal situations in their culture. Such social experts could be called virtuosi in living. This description poses a problem. How come many people gown up to be expert drivers but only a few become social virtuosi? The answer seems to be that there are at least two kinds of skills: Simple skills, like crossing the street and driving, and subtle skills like music, sports and subtle social interaction. It makes little sense to speak of a virtuoso everyday driver, whereas one can be a virtuoso musician or a champion in some sport.
Acquiring simple skills requires only that one face risks and uncertainty without falling back on rules or fleeing into detachment, whereas acquiring hard skills requires, in addition, a motivation continually to improve --then, one needs both the willingness to take risks and a commitment to excellence that manifests itself in persistence and in high standards for what counts as having done something right. One also must be sensitive to the distinctions in the relevant domain. (Such sensitivity in an extreme form in music is perfect pitch.) Such sensitivity is a component of what we call talent. Talent in this sense is a necessary condition for becoming a virtuoso in any field.
As a result of accepting risks and a commitment to being better than average, the virtuoso in living, develops the capacity to respond appropriately even in situations in which there are conflicting concerns and in which there seems to those looking on to be no appropriate way to act. Pierre Bourdieu describes such a virtuoso:
Only a virtuoso with a perfect command of his “art of living” can play on all the resources inherent in the ambiguities and uncertainties of behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriate to each case, to do that of which people will say “There was nothing else to be done,” and do it the right way. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1977, 8.
This is obviously Aristotle's phronemos. Of course, there may be several wise responses. Indeed, on my account, the idea of a single correct response makes no sense since other virtuosi with different funds of experiences would see the matter differently, and even the same phronemos would presumably respond differently once he had had more experience and therefore could discriminate a richer repertoire of situations.
III. The Phronemos as a Socially Recognized Virtuoso versus the History Maker as World Transforming Master
We can now generalize this account of skill acquisition and return to Being and Time to see whether the virtuoso’s increasingly refined sense of the social situation is, indeed, the more primordial understanding Heidegger has in mind. We can do this by seeing how Aristotle’s phronemos is related to Heidegger’s resolute Dasein. Heidegger is clear that the average way of acting is to obey standards and rules. He describes “Dasein’s lostness in the one”, as following “the tasks, rules, and standards … of concernful and solicitous being-in-the-world” (312). In contrast, Heidegger’s resolute individual deviates from the banal, average, public standards to respond spontaneously to the particular situation. In Heidegger’s terms, irresolute Dasein responds to the general situation (Lage), whereas resolute Dasein responds to the concrete Situation (Situation). As Heidegger puts it: “for the one ...the Situation is essentially something that has been closed off. The one knows only the ‘general situation’” (346), while “resolute Dasein” is in touch with the “concrete Situation of taking action” (349). The distinction between these two kinds of situation seem to come out of nowhere in Being and Time but they clearly have their origin in Heidegger’s detailed discussion of phronesis in his l925 Sophist Lectures. There he says:
Dasein, as acting in each case now, is determined by its situation in the largest sense. This situation is in every case different. The circumstances, the givens, the times and the people vary. The meaning of the action itself, i.e. precisely what I want to do, varies as well….It is precisely the achievement of phronesis to disclose the respective Dasein as acting now in the full situation within which it acts and in which it is in each case different. Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, Indiana University Press, l997, 101.
In Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger has not yet made a clear distinction between Lage and Situation. In this lecture course, he uses both terms interchangeably to refer to the concrete situation. See, for example, page 102: "out of the constant regard toward that which I have resolved, the situation [Situation] should become transparent. From the point of view of the proaireton, the concrete situation [konkrete Lage] . . . is covered over.
Given the phenomenology of skill acquisition, it should be clear that the concrete Situation does not have some special metaphysical or private kind of intelligibility cut off from the everyday. Rather, intelligibility for the phronemos is the result of the gradual refinement of responses that grows out of long experience acting within the shared cultural practices. Thus, in discussing phronesis Heidegger quotes Aristotle’s remark that “Only through much time…is life experience possible.” Ibid. 97. And in Being and Time he is explicit that the intelligibility of the Situation disclosed by resolute action is a refinement of the everyday:
Authentic disclosedness modifies with equal primordiality both the way the ‘world’ is discovered and the way in which the Dasein-with others is disclosed. The ‘world’ which is available does not become another ‘in its content’ nor does the circle of others get exchanged for a new one; but both being toward the available understandingly and concernfully, and solicitous being with others, are now given a definite character….(344).
Thus, “Even resolutions remain dependent upon the one and its world” (345).
Moreover, as Aristotle already saw, expert response is immediate, and Heidegger agrees that “resoluteness does not first take cognizance of the Situation …; it has put itself into the Situation already. As resolute, Dasein is already taking action” (347). Or, as Heidegger already put it in his l924 lectures: “in phronesis …in a momentary glance [Augenblick] I survey the concrete situation of action, out of which and in favor of which I resolve [Entschliesse] myself.” Ibid., 114 Also, according to Aristotle, since there are no rules that dictate that what the phronemos does is the correct thing to do in that type of situation, the phronemos, like any expert, cannot explain why he did what he did. Heidegger, of course, agrees:
The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something occurrent which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It only gets disclosed in free resolving which has not been determined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such determination. (355)
So when Heidegger asks rhetorically, “But on what basis does Dasein disclose itself in resoluteness?” he answers:
Only the resolution itself can give the answer. One would completely misunderstand the phenomenon of resoluteness if one should suppose that this consists simply in taking up possibilities that have been proposed and recommended (345).
All the virtuoso can do is stay open and involved and draw on his or her past experience. I’m following Heidegger in reading Ent-schlossenheit as openness not determination. See, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, l971. “The resoluteness (Ent-schlossenheit) intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject, but the opening up of human being … to the openness of being.” 67 The resulting resolute response defines the Situation. As Heidegger puts it, “The Situation is only through resoluteness and in it” (346).
Like the phronemos, the resolute individual presumably does what is retroactively recognized by others as appropriate, but what he does is not the taken-for-granted, average right thing – not what one does – but what his past experience leads him to do in that particular Situation. Moreover, as we have seen, since the Situation is specific and the phronemos’ past experience unique, what he does cannot be the appropriate thing. It can only be an appropriate thing. Still, unlike Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith suspending the ethical, who can only be understood by himself and others as a madman or a murderer, “Resolution does not withdraw from ‘actuality’, but discovers first what is factically possible; and it does so by seizing upon it in whatever way is possible for it as its ownmost ability-to-be in the ‘one’ “ (346). Thus, in responding to the concrete Situation the resolute individual is recognized as a model; not of what general thing to do, but of how to respond in an especially appropriate way. In this way, “when Dasein is resolute, it can become the ‘conscience’ of others” (344).
It should now be clear that Kisiel’s claim that Heidegger, in his account of resolute Dasein in Division II, is working out Aristotle’s phenomenology of practical wisdom helps make sense of Heidegger’s cryptic remarks about the resolute Dasein’s response to the concrete Situation. But Kisiel’s plausible way of understanding the passages in question is complicated by another group of interpreters who point out that Heidegger’s account of authenticity is also deeply influenced by his early interest in the account of radical transformation in St. Paul, Luther and Kierkegaard. These interpreters focus on Heidegger’s use of the term Augenblick.
We have already seen that, indeed, in the 1924 Heidegger uses the term Augenblick to describe the phronemos’s instant of insight. This reading is confirmed by Basic Problems where the Augenblick is equated with Aristotle’s kairos, the moment of appropriate skillful intervention. “Aristotle saw the phenomenon of the Augenblick, the Kairos,” Heidegger says. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Indiana University Press, 1982, 288. But Augenblick is also Luther’s translation of St. Paul’s moment in which we shall be changed in a “twinkling of an eye.” So John Van Buren claims that “Heidegger took the movement that concentrates itself at the extreme point (eschaton) of the kairos to be the kairological time that he had already discovered in the Pauline eschatology.” John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, Indiana University Press, l994, 231.
The whole discussion of Kairos and Augenblick is hard to follow since, as I understand it, the term Kairos is never used in New Testament Greek to mean the time of transformation that later came to be called Kairological time. The term translated Augenblick occurs in Corinthians I, 15:52 to describe what will happen when we are raised from the dead: “We shall all be changed in a moment (atomos), in the twinkling of an eye.(ripei en ophthalmou).” But the term gets extended by Kierkegaard to cover all the ways that one’s identity and world are suddenly and radically transformed. Kierkegaard goes even further. The Greek for what is normally translated by “the fullness of time” when Jesus returns to transform the world is pltroma, while the term for the transformation in which the Christian is reborn as a “new creation” is metanoia, but both crucial moments are subsumed by Kierkegaard under the notion of an Augenblick as the moment of a decisive transformation.
Thus, not too surprisingly, all the terms that refer to a total transformation of identity and/or world get lumped together and identified with the Greek moment of decisive action or Kairos. What is surprising is that those concerned with the use of these terms in Heidegger do not bother to sort out the various phenomena to which they refer. For example, Van Buren blurs all distinctions when he tells us that, “Following St. Paul, as well as Aristotle, Heidegger stresses that particular kairoi, situations, are always ‘new creations’ that come ‘like a thief in the night.’” 283.
Unfortunately, the evidence Van Buren cites for this claim does not seem to establish it or even suggest it, but rather suggests the contrary, viz. that Heidegger here uses “Kairos” to refer, not to religious time, but to secular action in a concrete situation.
In WS 1924-25, Heidegger connected kairos in Aristotle with the Pauline theme of kairos as ‘the twinkling of an eye’: Phronesis is the glancing at the this-time, at the this-time-ness of the momentary situation. As aisthesis, it is the glance of the eye, the Augen-blick, toward the concrete at the particular time…. Ibid., 229. (Note again the concrete Situation.)
Van Buren seeks further support in a passage from Heidegger’s lectures, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, but this passage too supports the Aristotelian reading.
Phronesis is the illumination of dealings that temporalizes life in its being. The concrete interpretation shows how this being, kairos, is constituted…. It goes toward the eschaton, the extreme, in which the determinately seen concrete situation intensifies itself at the particular time. Ibid., 231 My italics. Unfortunately, Van Buren does not give a page reference to the source of this quotation.
Although the translation leaves things rather murky, clearly Heidegger is here describing the cultural virtuoso’s resolute dealing with the concrete Situation, not the moment of rebirth of the Christian in which he gets a new identity, nor the moment of the coming of the Messiah when the world will be transformed and the dead raised in the twinkling of an eye.
But, in spite of these blatant misreadings of the texts, the interpreters who want to give Heidegger’s use of Augenblick a Christian interpretation are onto something important. There is a surprising moment where Heidegger introduces the Augenblick in a way that seems clearly to refer to the phronemos’ daily dealings with things and equipment. He says:
To the anticipation which goes with resoluteness, there belong a Present in accordance with which a resolution discloses the Situation….That Present…we call the Augenblick…The Augenblick permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. (387, 388)
So far, this is no surprise, but then Heidegger appends a footnote saying, “S. Kierkegaard is probably the one who has seen the existentiell phenomenon of the Augenblick with the most penetration…”(479). What can this mean?
Heidegger seems to want to describe the phenomenon of the response to the concrete Situation at a level of formality that covers any decisive moment in which Dasein, as an individual, breaks out of the banality of the one and takes over its situation, whether that be the Greek act of seizing the occasion or the Christian experience of being reborn. Which Kierkegaard calls becoming a new creation, see Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Penguin, l985, 70. .
For Heidegger, either type of decisive moment is an Augenblick. In a course given shortly after the publication of Being and Time, the Greek and Christian views, their radical difference, and their formal similarity are spelled out together. Heidegger first speaks in general terms of “Dasein’s self-resolution (Sich entschliessen) to itself …to what is given to him to be, this self-resolution is the Augenblick”. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 29/30, Vittorio Klostermann, l983, 224. He then fills this out in Aristotelian terms, explaining, “The Augenblick is nothing else than the glance of resoluteness, in which the full Situation of an action opens up and is held open.” Ibid. But he also suggests that this Aristotelian moment of decisive action falls short of the kind of radical transformative Augenblick Kierkegaard had in mind. “What we here indicate with ‘Augenblick’ is what Kierkegaard was the first to really grasp in philosophy – a grasping, which begins the possibility of a completely new epoch in philosophy since Antiquity.” Ibid. (My italics.)
Although Heidegger’s view is difficult to sort out, if we hold onto the phenomena in question, we can be sure that, Heidegger did not simply identify the Greek understanding of kairos with the Christian understanding of Augenblick, although he did see each as manifesting a resolute, i.e. open, way of being which was a precondition of a special moment of decisive action. One thing is sure, one can’t even begin to make sense of Heidegger if, like Kisiel, one simply cites lecture-texts to argue that Heidegger’s account of resolute Dasein in Being and Time is an adaptation of Aristotle’s phronemos, or, like Van Buren, one cites other lecture-texts to argue that Augenblick in Being and Time must be understood in the light of Christian kairological time. Without first seeing that Aristotle and St. Paul are describing two genuine, but seemingly irreconcilable, phenomena, the challenging exegetical questions do not even arise.
Once we focus on the phenomena, however, we can see that each interpretation has something right but each mistakenly claims to have the whole story. A satisfactory interpretation requires clearly distinguishing two experiences of the source, nature, and intelligibility of decisive action -- the Greek experience, arising from a primordial understanding of the current Situation, that makes possible virtuoso coping in the current world and the Christian experience, arising from a primordial understanding of Dasein itself that makes possible a transformation of self and world. Heidegger seems to be distinguishing Dasein’s primordial understanding of the current Situation from Dasein’s experience of its most primordial way of being, and yet trying to subsume them both under the Augenblick when he says, “Dasein gets brought back from its lostness by a resolution so that both the current Situation and therewith the primordial ‘limit-Situation’ of being-towards-death, will be disclosed as an Augenblick that has been held on to.”(400)
At other places in the text, moreover, it seems clear that the two different forms of understanding are disclosed by two different forms of resoluteness. The first is discussed in Chapter 2 of Division II. There Heidegger defines resoluteness as “self projection upon one’s ownmost being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety….” (343) This kind of resoluteness arises from facing one’s thrownness and the consequent anxiety that comes with the realization that one’s average understanding with its rules and standards has no intrinsic authority. Holding onto this anxiety makes possible the openness, involvement and willingness to take risks that, in turn, make possible the acquisition of expertise. Resoluteness thus makes possible the virtuosity of the Heideggerian phronemos who, because he has held onto anxiety and so no longer takes for granted the banal public interpretation of events, can see new possibilities in the most ambiguous and conflicted situations and so can do something that all who share his world will retroactively recognize as what was factically possible at the time Such a person’s understanding of his society is richer and deeper than the average understanding and so he is generally more effective. But he is not yet fully authentic.
Besides the effective coping of the phronemos, made possible by an expert grasp of the concrete Situation, there is a fully authentic way of acting made possible by Dasein’s understanding of its own way of being. This authentic way of acting is a more complete form of resoluteness in which Dasein not only faces the anxiety of guilt, viz. the sense that its identity and social norms are thrown rather than grounded and so have no final authority, but, furthermore, faces the anxiety of death, viz. that Dasein has to be ready at all times to die, i.e. give up its identity and its world altogether. In such an understanding, Dasein manifests “its authenticity and its totality” (348).
Heidegger seems to be distinguishing and ranking the two ways of holding onto anxiety and the kind of resoluteness each makes possible by holding that only the second is authentic and whole. In Chapter V, when he turns to the “authentic historizing of Dasein” (434), he says:
We have defined “resoluteness” as a projecting of oneself on one’s ownmost being-guilty ….Resoluteness gains its authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. In this, Dasein understands itself with regard to its ability-to-be, and it does so in such a manner that its will go right under the eyes of Death in order thus to take over in its thrownness that entity which it is itself, and to take it over wholly. (434) It is hard to reconcile this claim that only anticipatory resoluteness reveals Dasein authentically and fully with the claim in the earlier discussion of the resoluteness of facing guilt that “we have now arrived at that truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic. (343) I think Heidegger was simply confused as to how he wanted to relate the two kinds of resoluteness. Generally, he sticks to the view that authentic resoluteness is the most complete kind of resoluteness because it involves facing death.
Anticipatory resoluteness makes possible an even more primordial form of intelligibility than the pragmatic understanding evinced by the phronemos or social virtuoso. Heidegger sensed that such a authentic Dasein’s reinterpretation of what his generation stands for – how the shared social practices hang together and have a point -- allows him to transform his culture, but in Being and Time Heidegger could not yet see how radically a culture could be transformed. Only when he had understood that the style of a culture –its whole understanding of being -- could change, could he fully grasp what it would be like for a cultural master to disclose a new world. Heidegger presumably would include such cultural masters among the statesmen, gods, and philosophers who disclose new worlds. They are all instances of “truth establishing itself.” See “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 61, 62.
To be innovative in this strong sense requires anticipatory resoluteness – anxiously facing both death and guilt. The resolute phronemos merely experiences his thrownness and so has the sense that the social norms are not rules to be rigidly followed. He therefore gives up a banal, general understanding of social norms and responds to the concrete Situation, but he can still be understood by his peers to have effectively solved a shared problem. In anticipatory resoluteness, however, anxiety in the face of death has freed Dasein even from taking for granted the agreed-upon current cultural issues.
Repetition makes a reciprocal rejoinder to the possibility of existence that has-been-there….But when such a rejoinder is made to this possibility in a resolution, it is made in a Augenblick; and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the today, is working itself out as the ‘past’. (438)
Here the Augenblick does name the inception of a new creation. In the moment of decisive action, then, authentic Dasein can take up marginal practice from the cultural heritage.
[Fate] is how we designate Dasein’s primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen. (435)
Dasein can then act in such as way as to take over or repeat the marginal practices in a new way and thus show a form of life in which that marginal practices has become central and the central practices have become marginal. Such an innovator is so radical that he transforms his generation’s understanding of the issue facing the culture and produces a new authentic “we.” He thus goes beyond not only the banal general understanding of his peers, but even beyond the Situational understanding of the phronemos. The phenomenon of world disclosing is described and illustrated in, Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds, The MIT Press, l997. We could call such a fully authentic history-making Dasein a cultural master.
The most extreme form of the transformation such a history-making Dasein brings about is a cultural version of the Augenblick of Christian conversion. This, for Kierkegaard, is the Augenblick as the fullness of time. The whole culture is reborn into a new world. Since the new world has new standards of intelligibility, the cultural master, like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, cannot explain himself and so cannot, like the phronemos, be recognized by his peers as having done something appropriate. But, unlike Abraham suspending the ethical, who is totally repulsive to his contemporaries and even himself, the history-maker, because he draws on a shared heritage, is not totally unintelligible. He is a charismatic figure who can show a new style and so be followed, like Jesus was followed by his disciples, even though they did not understand the meaning of what they were doing. He will not be fully intelligible to the other members of the culture, however, until his new way of coordinating the practices is articulated in a new language and preserved in new institutions.
These accounts of the special way the social virtuoso can seize the moment and the way the historical innovator can transform the culture seem to be correlated with Heidegger’s two different accounts of the present dimension of non-successive temporality. Primordial temporality makes possible world-time and thus the phronemos’ experience of being solicited, on the basis of past successes, to respond to the current Situation so as to open up new possibilities for dealing with available and occurrent entities. (Heidegger’s account of how primordial temporality makes possible pragmatic temporality has been analyzed by William D. Blattner in his excellent book, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Cambridge University Press, l999
Authentic temporality, by contrast, is a secularization of the Kierkegaardian account of Christian temporality in The Concept of Anxiety in which the temporal structure makes possible the decisive instant of individual conversion and world transformation. Heidegger seems to have wanted to recover both the Greek and the Christian understanding of temporal transformation, but did not have time to work out how the two kinds of non-successive temporality (primordial temporality and authentic temporality) were related to each other and to his ontological project.
IV. Ethical and Political Implications
The phenomena of the social virtuoso and the cultural master have ethical and political implications. For example, Heidegger’s account of the resolute response to the factical situation offers a way out of the antinomy presented by Dworkin’s and Derrida’s account of legal decision making. Dworkin holds that “judges must, …so far as possible, regard the existing legal practice as expressing … a coherent conception of justice and fairness, and so are charged to uncover this conception and to make decisions in specific cases on the basis of it.” See Gerald J. Postema, “Protestant’ Interpretation and Social Practices,” Law and Philosophy 6 (1987) 283-319. Postema presents a critique of Dworkin based on Bourdieu and Wittgenstein which is similar to the one I am suggesting here. Thus, according to Dworkin, an explicit sense of the principles involved should actually guide a judge when she applies the law as well as when she justifies her decision.
Derrida is enough of a Heideggerian to sense that there is no theory behind a judge’s practice and no single right decision, so he rightly sees that the judge’s justification could not be the basis of her decision and must, therefore be, at best a rationalization. Thus he rejects Dworkin’s rationalism. However, without an understanding of the phenomenon of skillful coping behind Heidegger’s claim that a resolute way of being makes possible a richer more primordial kind of understanding, Derrida wrongly concludes that in making a decision the judge must be making “a leap in the dark.” Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ‘, Cardozo Law Review, 11, 5-6 (1990), 920-1045. I suspect that, three different sorts of cases are lumped together by Derrida.
(1) There is the case of extrapolating the law to new situations that are similar but never identical to previous cases and for which there is no set of features in terms of which one can justify one’s judgments of similarity.
Here Derrida is right, there can be no theory of how to proceed, but Heidegger would presumably analyze an expert judge’s decisions on the basis of the phenomenon of expert coping and so hold that the judge, like any resolute phronemos, neither acts on principle nor makes a leap in the dark, but rather straightway engages in “the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time” (345). With an eye to the phenomenon, we can see that the judge would be acting as a social virtuoso led by her past experience to respond to the subtle similarities between the current situation and situations in which she had already made what were recognized as appropriate responses. Even when such a phronemos reflects she does not reflect on abstract principles but stays involved and reflects on her expert sense of the concrete situation.
As Derrida sees in such cases there cannot be one right decision as Dworkin assumes. Two different judges with different past experience and different ways of having entered the current situation may well see the situation differently. Remember, Heidegger says:
The Situation cannot be … presented like something occurrent which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It only gets disclosed in free resolving….(355)
But even then, one if the several possible wise decisions need not be chosen arbitrarily. The virtuoso judges can talk to each other about the way they entered the current situation and relate the situation to other situations in the hope of getting their colleagues to see things the way they do. This may work to produce agreement, but even if it does not, the choice between the remaining candidates is not the arbitrary imposition of power; it is a choice between possible wise decisions.
Still, Derrida is right that, since similarity cannot be reduced to certain shared features, any justification that tried to explain the judge’s decision in terms of classes of situations would have to be a rationalization that drew either on principles like those the expert followed when she was only competent or, at best, more refined principles the expert had abstracted from many cases. But Heidegger would want to add, I hope, that, although such principles could not capture the judge’s expertise, they need not be arbitrary. That is, they could serve as convincing justifications for a competent decision even though they could not be used to determine what counted as the relevant similarities in the next case and so could not serve as the basis for a genuinely wise decision. (2)
There is the decision of a legal innovator who brings to bear a whole new way of looking at the role of the law in some domain. Such a decision would be even further from being rationalizable, but, if Heidegger is right, it would not be a leap in the dark but a masterful response to marginal practices. The marginal practices, as Nietzsche says, make “a leap from the wings to center stage” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, counter-memory, practice. Donald F. Bouchard, ed. Cornell U. Press.150. but the innovative master does not make a blind leap in responding to them; rather, thanks to his openness, he has a subtle sense of the marginal practices that are moving into the center.
(3) The nearest thing to a Derridian leap in the dark occurs where there are two or more conflicting sets of values. These are the kinds of cases that reach the Supreme Court. For example, pornography cases in which the court must decide between the well being of the community and the right to free speech. In such cases there does not seem to be any nonarbitrary way of deciding which way to understand the situation. Each judge will decide on the basis of his or her own set of values and past experience but the decision will be imposed by the majority. This does seem to be a case, if not of a leap in the dark, at least of an arbitrary imposition of power.
Only this third type of case fits Derrida’s analysis, but Derrida’s mistakenly holds that all decisions that extrapolate to a new situation have the arbitrariness found only in type-three cases. He claims that either a decision is guided by cognitive rails and so is mechanical but uninteresting, or else it is arbitrary, thus missing the relevance of the two types of primordial understanding that Heidegger describes. By in effect denying the way a resolute person’s past experience can feed into a sense of what is factically possible and thus make possible a wise or even an innovative decision that is not dictated by principle but is not arbitrary either, Derrida gives support to the nihilism of the legal realists.
Conclusion
In summary, according to Division II of Being and Time, public, average, everyday understanding is necessarily general and banal. Nonetheless, this leveled average understanding is necessary both as the background for all intelligibility and in the early stages of acquiring expertise, and so it is both ontologically and genetically prior to any more primordial understanding. Once, however, an expert has broken out of the banal thanks to the anxious realization of his thrownness and , by repeated risky experience in the everyday world, has mastered the discriminations that constitute his skill, he can respond to the situation in a more subtle way than a non-expert can.
This primordial understanding of the concrete Situation has no special content -- no source of intelligibility other than everyday intelligibility – but it, nonetheless, makes possible the social virus’s successful responses to the most difficult social situations. Furthermore, by facing the anxiety of death and so seeing that the issues of his culture and even his own identity could be radically changed, a fully authentic Dasein can manifest an even higher kind of primordial understanding. As a cultural master he can take up marginal possibilities in his culture’s past in way that enables him to change the style of a whole generation and thereby disclose a new world.
|