It should
already be becoming clear that Heidegger conceives of the human way of being as
essentially conditioned. The Western philosophical tradition has often
presupposed that the human subject can in some way transcend the material realm
upon which it fixes its gaze, and so that human beings are only contingently
possessed of a world; but, for Heidegger, no sense attaches to the idea of a
human being existing apart from or outside a world. This does not, however, mean
that human beings are somehow imprisoned in the world, forcibly subjected to
the essentially alien limits of embodiment and practical interaction with
nature; for those limits are not essentially alien. If no recognizably human
existence is conceivable in the absence of a world, then the fact that human
existence is worldly cannot be a limitation or constraint upon it; just as
someone can only be imprisoned if there is a world outside her prison from
which she is excluded, so a set of limits can only be thought of as limitations
if there exists a possible mode of existence to which those limits do not
apply. Since that is not the case here, the inherent worldliness of human
existence must be thought of as an aspect of the human condition. It is a
condition of human life, not a constraint upon it.
But, on
Heidegger’s account, human existence is not only conditioned by worldliness –
or, rather, worldliness conditions human existence in ways that we have not yet
examined. This chapter will examine two of them: the way in which the world is
inherently social or communal, and the ways in which it conditions human affective
and cognitive powers.
INDIVIDUALITY AND COMMUNITY (§§25–7)
So far, it
may have seemed that Dasein’s world is populated solely by physical objects or
entities, what J. L. Austin called ‘medium-sized dry goods’. But Heidegger emphasizes
that there is at least one other class of beings that must be accommodated by
any adequate analysis of that world, those with the kind of Being belonging to
Dasein – in short, other people. And if we cannot understand Dasein in the
terms appropriate to objects, then neither can we understand other human beings
and Dasein’s relations with them in that way.
But, of
course, many philosophers have tried to do just that. The very title under
which this set of issues is commonly known in the discipline confirms this: ‘The
Problem of Other Minds’. It implies that, while we can be certain of the
existence of other creatures with bodies similar to our own, justifying the
hypothesis that these bodies have minds attached to them is deeply problematic.
Here, a dualistic understanding of human beings as mind–body couples combines with
a materialist impulse to suggest that our relations with other putatively human
beings are, in effect, relations with physical objects of a particular sort to
which we are inclined to attribute various distinctive additional
characteristics – which inevitably raises the question of our warrant for such
extremely unusual attributions. And any attempts to solve this ‘problem’
inevitably share those presuppositions, since they will be couched in the terms
in which the problem itself is posed.
The
argument from analogy, for example, tells us that our justification lies in the
similarities of form and behaviour between our bodies and those of other
humanoid creatures. Given that we know from our own case that such behaviour is
associated with mental activities of various sorts, we can reliably infer that
the same is true in the case of these other entities. This is a species of
inductive inference, drawing a conclusion about what is correlated with the behaviour
of other bodies on the basis of our acquaintance with what is correlated with
the behaviour of our own. But, of necessity, our observations relate solely to
correlations between mental phenomena and our own behaviour, and so provide no
basis whatever for conclusions about what (if anything) might be correlated with
the behaviour of others – a correlation that it is in principle impossible for
us to observe directly. It may seem that such an extrapolation is justified by
observable similarities between our own bodies and behaviour and the bodies and
behaviour of others, but the key issue is: which similarities? That the
bodies and the behaviour are similar in bodily and behavioural respects is not
in question. But the similarity that matters is that a mind be similarly
attached to those other bodies and their behaviour; and no amount of similarity
between our bodily form and behavioural repertoire and theirs can
establish that. To think otherwise – to think that a correlation established
between body and mind in my own case can simply be extrapolated to the case of
others – is to assume that comprehending the essential nature of others is
simply a matter of projecting our understanding of our own nature onto them. But
it is precisely the legitimacy of such empathic projection – of regarding (one’s
relation to) another humanoid creature as if it were just like (one’s relation
to) oneself, or, in more Heideggerian language, viewing Being-towards-Others in
terms of Being-towards-oneself – that is at issue.
This, I
take it, is Heidegger’s point in the following passage:
The entity
which is ‘other’ has itself the same kind of Being as Dasein. In Being with and
towards Others, there is thus a relationship of Being from Dasein to Dasein. But
it might be said that this relationship is already constitutive for one’s own
Dasein, which, in its own right, has an understanding of Being, and thus
relates itself towards Dasein. The relationship-of-Being which one has towards
Others. . . then become[s] a Projection of one’s own Being-towards-oneself ‘into
something else’. The other would be a duplicate of the Self. But while these
deliberations seem obvious enough, it is easy to see that they have little
ground to stand on. The presupposition which this argument demands – that
Dasein’s Being towards an Other is its Being towards itself – fails to hold. As
long as the legitimacy of this presupposition has not turned out to be evident,
one may still be puzzled as to how Dasein’s relationship to itself is thus to
be disclosed to the Other as Other.
(BT, 26: 162)
Thus, the
argument from analogy appears to work only if the question it is designed to
answer is begged – only if it is assumed from the outset that all the other
humanoid bodies I encounter are similar to mine not only physically and
behaviourally but also psychophysically, i.e. that they are similarly
correlated with minds. The similarity that legitimates the inductive inference
thus turns out to be the similarity that it is supposed to demonstrate; the
argument from analogy assumes what it sets out to prove. In this respect, a Cartesian
understanding of other minds faces the same difficulty as a Cartesian
understanding of the external world: in both cases, no satisfactory answer is
available to the sceptical challenge that the terms of such understandings
invite. Heidegger concludes that we should therefore jettison an essentially
compositional understanding of other persons: the sceptic’s ability to demolish
our best attempts to treat that concept as a construction from more basic
constituents (e.g. as resulting from the projection of the concept of a
humanoid mind on to that of a humanoid body) reveals that such treatments
either
presuppose or eliminate what they set out to analyse. We must, rather,
recognize that the concept of the Other (of other persons) is irreducible, an
absolutely basic component of our understanding of the world we inhabit, and so
something from which our ontological investigations must begin. To adapt
Strawsonian terminology, it is the concept of other persons (and not that of
other minds plus other bodies) that is logically primitive.1 And in so far as
others are primordially persons, creatures with a perspective upon the world
and whose essence is existence, then their Being must be of the same kind as
Dasein.
But
Heidegger’s point is anti-solipsistic as well as anti-dualist. It is not just
that the concept of another person must be understood non-compositionally (i.e.
as Dasein rather than as the juxtaposition of two present-at-hand substances). That
concept is also essential to any adequate ontological analysis of Dasein (i.e.
the Being of Dasein is essentially Being-with-Others). After all, the Being of
Dasein is Being-in-the-world, so the concepts of Dasein and world are
internally related. But the structure of the world makes essential reference to
other beings whose Being is like Dasein’s own. So Dasein cannot be understood
except as inhabiting a world it necessarily shares with beings like itself.
And just
what are these essential references to Others?
In our
description of the . . . work-world of the craftsman . . . the outcome was that
along with the equipment to be found when one is at work, those Others for whom
the work is destined are ‘encountered too’. If this is ready-to-hand, then
there lies in the kind of Being which belongs to it (that is, in its
involvement) an essential assignment or reference to possible wearers, for
instance, for whom it should be cut to the figure. Similarly, when material is
put to use, we encounter its producer or supplier as one who ‘serves’ well or badly.
. . . The Others who are thus ‘encountered’ in a ready-to-hand, environmental
context of equipment are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is
proximally just present-at-hand; such ‘Things’ are encountered from out of the
world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others – a world which is always mine
too in advance.
(BT, 26: 153–4)
This
suggests three different senses in which other people are constituents of
Dasein’s world. First, they form one more class of being that Dasein encounters
within its world. Second, what Dasein works upon is typically provided by
others and what it produces is typically destined for others; in other words,
the ‘whereof’ and the ‘towards-which’ of equipmental totalities relate the
work-world to other people. Third, the readiness-to-hand of objects for a
particular Dasein is not (and could not conceivably be) understood as their readiness-to-hand
for that Dasein alone; if any object is handy for a given task, it must be
handy for every Dasein capable of performing it. In this sense,
readiness-to-hand is inherently intersubjective; and since a parallel argument
applies to the recontextualized world of present-at-hand objects, it entails
that Dasein’s inherently worldly Being is essentially social.
Note that
Heidegger is not claiming that Dasein cannot be alone, isolated from all human
company; whether or not that is the case is a purely ontic question, to do with
a particular individual in a particular time and place. The claim that the
Being of Dasein is Being-with is an ontological claim; it identifies an
existential characteristic of Dasein which holds regardless of whether an Other
is present, and for two reasons. First, because, if it did not, the possibility
of Dasein’s encountering another creature of its own kind would be
incomprehensible. For, if, ontologically, Dasein’s Being was not Being-with, it
would lack the capacity to be in another’s company – just as a table can touch
a wall but can never encounter it as a wall, so Dasein could never conceivably
encounter another human being as such. Second, it is only because Dasein’s
Being is Being-with that it can be isolated or alone; for, just as it
only makes sense to talk of Dasein encountering an object as unready-to-hand if
it can also encounter it as handy, so it only makes sense to talk of Dasein as
being alone if it is capable of being with Others when they are
present. In other words, aloneness is a deficient mode of Dasein’s Being; ‘The
Other can be missing only in and for a Being-with’ (BT 26: 157).
Heidegger
sees no conflict between his claim that Dasein’s Being is Being-with and his
earlier characterization of Dasein’s Being as in each case mine; rather, the former
constitutes a further specification of the latter. That notion of ‘mineness’
encapsulates two main points: first, that the Being of Dasein is an issue for
it (that every choice it makes about which existentiell possibilities to
realize is a choice about the form that its own life will take), and,
second, that each Dasein is an individual, a being to whom personal pronouns can
be applied and to whom at least the possibility of genuine or authentic
individuality belongs. To go on to claim that the Being of such a being is
Being-with does not negate that prior attribution of mineness; for to say that
the world is a social world is simply to say that it is a world Dasein
encounters as ‘our’ world, and such a world is no less mine because it is also
yours. Our world is both mine and yours; intersubjectivity is not the denial of
subjectivity but its further specification. And this further specification
deepens our understanding of the condition under which each Dasein must develop
(or fail to develop) its mineness or individuality. For, if Dasein’s Being is
Being-with, an essential facet of that which is an issue for Dasein is its
relations to Others; the idea is that, at least in part, Dasein establishes and
maintains its relation to itself in and through its relations with Others, and
vice versa. The two issues are ontologically inseparable; to determine the one
is to determine the other.
This
understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity
determines Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein’s average everyday mode of
existence. For it entails that Dasein’s capacity to lose or find itself as an
individual always determines, and is determined by, the way in which Dasein
understands and conducts its relations with Others. And the average everyday
form of that understanding focuses upon one’s differences (in appearance, behaviour,
lifestyle and opinion) from those with whom one shares the world, regarding
them as the main determinant of one’s own sense of self. Our usual sense of who
we are, Heidegger claims, is purely a function of our sense of how we differ
from others. We understand those differences either as something to be
eliminated at all costs, thus taking conformity as our aim; or (perhaps less
commonly) as something that must at all costs be emphasized and developed – a
strategy which only appears to avoid conformity, since our goal is then to
distinguish ourselves from others rather than to distinguish ourselves in some
particular, independently valuable way, and so
amounts to allowing others to determine (by negation) the way we live. The
dictatorship of the Others and the consequent loss of authentic individuality
in what Heidegger calls ‘average everyday distantiality’ is therefore visible
not just in those who aim to read, see and judge literature and art as everyone
reads, sees and judges, but also in those whose aim is to adopt the very
opposite of the common view. Cultivating uncommon pleasures, thoughts and reactions
is no guarantee of existential individuality.
Dasein, as
everyday Being-with-one-another, stands in subjection to Others. It itself is
not; its Being has been taken away by the Others. Dasein’s everyday possibilities
of Being are for the Others to dispose of as they please. These Others,
moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can
represent them. . . . One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their
power. The Others whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one’s
belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most
part ‘are there’ in everyday Being-with-one-another. The ‘who’ is not
this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them
all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the ‘they’.
(BT, 27: 164)
In other
words, this absence of individuality is not restricted to some definable
segment of the human community; on the contrary, since it defines how human
beings typically relate to their fellows, it must apply to most if not all of
those Others to whom any given Dasein subjects itself. They cannot be any less
vulnerable to the temptations of distantiality, and so cannot be regarded as
having somehow avoided subjection to those who stand as Others to them. ‘The
Others’ thus cannot be thought of as a group of genuinely individual human
beings whose shared tastes dictate the tastes of everyone else; and neither do
they constitute an intersubjective or supra-individual being, a sort of
communal self. The ‘they’ is neither a collection of definite Others nor a
single definite Other; it is not a being or set of beings to whom genuine
mineness belongs, but a free-floating, impersonal construct, a sort of
consensual hallucination to which each of us gives up the capacity for genuine self-relation
and the leading of an authentically individual life. Consequently, if a given
Dasein’s thoughts and deeds are (determined by) what they think and do,
its answerability for its life has been not so much displaced (on to others) as
misplaced. It has vanished, projected on to an everyone that is no one by
someone who is, without it, also no one, and leaving in its wake a comprehensively
neutered world. As Heidegger puts it, ‘everyone is the other and no one is
himself. The “they”, which supplies the answer to the question of the “who”
of everyday Dasein, is the “nobody” to whom every Dasein has already
surrendered itself in Being-among-one-another’ (BT, 27: 165–6).
In short,
the average everyday mode of Dasein is inauthentic. Its mineness takes the form
of the ‘they’, its Self is a they-self – a mode of relating to itself and to
Others in which it and they fail to find themselves and so fail to achieve
genuine individuality. And this cultural critique also accounts for the
prevalence of ontological misunderstandings in the philosophical tradition. For
Heidegger needs to explain how a creature to whom (according to his own analysis)
an understanding of Being essentially belongs can have misunderstood its own
Being so systematically. But, of course, if Dasein typically loses itself in
the ‘they’, it will understand both its world and itself in the terms that ‘they’
make available to it, and so will interpret its own nature in terms of the
categories that lie closest to hand in popular culture and everyday life; and
they will be as inauthentic as their creators. They will embody the same impulses
towards levelling down, the avoidance of the unusual or the difficult, the
acceptance of prevailing opinion, and so on. And since philosophical enquiry
will typically be the work of those same inauthentic individuals, the
philosophical tradition will contain similarly inauthentic ontological
categories that are unhesitatingly accepted by its present representatives. Any
attempt to retrieve an authentic ontological understanding will accordingly
appear to subvert obvious and self-evident truths, to overturn common sense and
violate ordinary language.
Two words
of warning are in order about this notion of inauthenticity. First, such an
inauthentic state is not somehow ontologically awry, as if Dasein were less real
as an entity, less itself, when its Self is the they-self. On the contrary, any
Being capable of finding itself must also be capable of losing itself. Second,
authenticity does not require severing all ties with Others, as if genuine individuality
presupposed isolation or even solipsism. Heidegger’s view is rather that Dasein’s
Being is Being-with; in other words, just as with Dasein’s worldliness, its
inherently social forms of existence are not a limitation upon it but a limit –
a further condition of the human way of being. So authentic Being-oneself could
not involve detachment from Others; it must rather require a different form of
relationship with them – a distinctive form of Being-with.
Unfortunately,
Heidegger’s way of stating this last point raises more questions than it
answers. For he says that ‘authentic Being-one-self is . . . an existentiell
modification of the “they” – of the “they” as an essential existentiale’
(BT, 27: 168). If the they-self is an essential existentiale of Dasein, it is
not just a particular existentiell possibility that Dasein commonly tends to
actualize, but rather a ‘primordial phenomenon [which] belongs to Dasein’s
positive constitution’ (BT, 27: 167), part of its ontological structure. But since
submission to the they-self is an inherently inauthentic mode of Dasein’s
Being, Heidegger seems to be claiming that Dasein’s Being is somehow inherently
inauthentic. In other words, whereas previously he has claimed that Dasein is
ontologically capable of living either authentically or inauthentically, and
that which it achieves depends upon where, when and how it makes its
existentiell choices, now he wants to claim that Dasein’s very nature mires it in
an inauthenticity of which such authenticity as it may sometimes achieve is
merely an existentiell modification.
It is hard
to see what sense might be attached to the idea that authenticity is an
existentiell mode of an ontologically inauthentic being; how can Dasein be both
authentic and inauthentic at once –authentically inauthentic? More generally,
Heidegger’s claim looks like a simple confusion of his own categories, a
blurring of the very distinction between ontic and ontological levels of
analysis to which he constantly makes reference; and his analysis in this
chapter provides no support for the conclusion he wants to draw. For its focus
is Dasein’s average everydayness, which is an existentiell state, and so can
reveal only that the Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self. If this
licenses any ontological conclusion – a conclusion concerning structures of
Dasein’s Being regardless of its particular ontic state – it is that Dasein’s
Being is always Being-with. It certainly does not license the conclusion that
that Being-with must take the inauthentic form of submission to the ‘they’.
Can
Heidegger’s seeming waywardness here be justified, or at least accounted for?
Two passages provide a clue, the first from the beginning of section 27:
We have
shown earlier how in the environment which lies closest to us, the ‘public’
environment already is ready-to-hand and is also a matter of concern. In
utilizing means of transport and in making use of information services such as
the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another
dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’,
in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish
more and more.
(BT, 27:
164)
In one
sense, this passage gets us no further forward, since the phenomena it picks
out (prevailing arrangements for transport and newspapers) are features of
Dasein’s world that one can easily imagine being altered more or less
radically; there seem to be no ontological implications here. On the other
hand, it plainly links the idea of one Dasein being just like the next with
that of the environment that lies closest to it, which is of course the
work-world – as if for
Heidegger there is something inherently public or impersonal about that world,
something that no more acknowledges the individuality of those who inhabit it
than a public transportation system acknowledges the individuality of each of
its ‘customers’ or a newspaper that of each of its readers. What might this
something be?
The second
passage appears a little earlier:
[W]hen
material is put to use, we encounter its producer or ‘supplier’ as one who ‘serves’
well or badly. When for example, we walk along the edge of a field but ‘outside
it’, the field shows itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and
decently kept up by him. The book we have used was bought at so-and-so’s shop.
. . . The boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its being-in-itself to an
acquaintance that undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a ‘boat which
is strange
to us’, it
is still indicative of Others.
(BT, 26: 153–4)
At first,
this passage seems only to emphasize the multitude of ways in which Dasein’s
world reveals the presence of Others; but, reading it with our problem in mind,
what might strike us instead is just how those Others appear to Dasein. They
appear as producers, suppliers, field-owners and farmers, booksellers and
sailors – in short, as bearers of social roles; and they are judged in terms of
how well or badly they carry out their roles. Their identity is thus given
primarily by their occupation, by the tasks or functions they perform; who they
are to us is a matter of what they do and how they do it. But these are defined
purely impersonally, by reference to what the relevant task or office requires;
given the necessary competence, which individual occupies that office is as
irrelevant as are any idiosyncrasies of character and talent that have no
bearing on the task at hand. In so far, then, as Others appear in our shared
world primarily
as functionaries, they appear not as individuals but as essentially
interchangeable occupants of impersonally defined roles. Since our appearance
to them must take a precisely analogous form, we must understand ourselves to
be in exactly the same position.
We can see
why this is an ontological rather than an ontic matter if we recall Heidegger’s
earlier analysis of the worldhood of the world. It constitutes a widely
ramifying web of socially defined
concepts,
roles, functions and functional interrelations, within which alone it was
possible for human beings to encounter objects. Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s
Being as Being-with simply underlines the fact that human beings, no less than
objects, are part of that same web; after all, their Being is
Being-in-the-world. Since the environment closest to them is the work-world,
the identity closest to them is their identity as workers, as people performing
socially defined and culturally inherited tasks whose nature is given prior to
and independently of their own individuality, and which typically will not be
significantly marked by their temporary inhabitation of them. Just as the
objects with which we deal must be understood primarily in relation to purposes
and possibilitiesof- Being embedded in cultural practices, so we must
understand ourselves primarily as practitioners – as followers of the norms definitive
of proper practice in any given field of endeavour. And Heidegger’s point is
that such norms – and so such practices – are necessarily interpersonal, and so
in an important sense impersonal. It must be possible for others to occupy exactly
the same role, to engage in exactly the same practice; apart from anything
else, society and culture could not otherwise be reproduced across generations.
But, more importantly, a practice that only one person could engage in simply
could not count as a practice at all. Such a thing would be possible only if it
were possible for someone to follow a rule that no one else could follow – to
follow a rule privately – and as Wittgenstein has argued, that is a
contradiction in terms.
For
Heidegger, then, since Dasein’s Being is Being-in-the-world, it will always,
necessarily, begin from a position in which it must relate to itself as the
occupant of a role in a practice, and so must begin by understanding itself in
the essentially impersonal terms that such a role provides – terms which have
no essential connection with its identity as an individual, but rather define a
function or set of functions that anyone might perform. Such roles do not, as
it were, pick out a particular person, even if they do require particular skills
or aptitudes; they specify not what you or I must do in order to occupy them,
but rather what one must do – what must be done. The role-occupant thus
specified is an idealization or construct, an abstract or average human being
rather than anyone in particular: it is, in other words, a species of the
they-self. In this sense, and this sense alone, is the ‘they’ an essential existentiale
of Dasein.
But, of
course, just because such roles are defined in entirely impersonal terms, the
individual who occupies them need not always relate to them purely
impersonally. A social role can be a vital element in an individual’s
self-understanding (as a vocation, for example); but, although the role can be
appropriated authentically in such ways, its essential nature does not ensure
or even encourage such appropriations. Heidegger does not deny the possibility
of authentic existence to beings who must begin from such a selfunderstanding. He
simply claims that the position from which they must begin necessarily involves
a self-interpretation from which they must break away if they are to achieve
authentic existence, and that any such authentically individual existence,
since it must be lived in the world, must be a modification rather than a
transcendence of the role-centred nature of any such life. Authenticity is a
matter of the way in which one relates to one’s roles, not a rejection of any
and all roles. In short, Dasein is never necessarily lost to itself, but it
must always begin by finding itself; authenticity is always an achievement:
The Self of
everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic
Self – that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As
they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘they’, and
must first find itself. . . . If Dasein discovers the world in its own way and
brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this
discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished
as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the
disguises with which Dasein bars its own way.
(BT, 27: 167)
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