- Original
- Huneeus & Orrego
Original
At this point someone is sure to object that in spite of his interest in our shared, everyday practices, Heidegger, unlike Wittgenstein, uses very unordinary language. Why does Heidegger need a special, technical language to talk about common sense? The answer is illuminating.
To begin with, Heidegger and Wittgenstein have a very different understanding of the background of everyday activity. Wittgenstein is convinced that the practices that make up the human form of life are a hopeless tangle.
How could human behavior be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions. 1
Wittgenstein warns against any attempt to systematize this hurlyburly. “Not to explain, but to accept the psychological phenomenon — that is what is difficult.” 2
Heidegger, on the contrary, thinks that the commonsense background has an elaborate structure that it is the job of an existential analytic to lay out. This background, however, is not what we usually deal with and have words for, so to talk of it requires a special vocabulary. Searle faces the same problem when he tries to talk about the background.
There is a real difficulty in finding ordinary language terms to describe the Background: one speaks vaguely of “practices,” “capacities,” and “stances” or one speaks suggestively but misleadingly of “assumptions” and “presuppositions.” These latter terms must be literally wrong, because they imply the apparatus of representation . . . . The fact that we have no natural vocabulary for discussing the phenomena in question and the fact that we tend to lapse into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought to arouse our interest. . . . There simply is no first-order vocabulary for the Background, because the Background is as invisible to Intentionality as the eye which sees is invisible to itself. 3
When, for example, Heidegger substitutes such technical terms as “worldliness,” the “toward-which,” and the “for-the-sake-of-which” for such everyday terms as “context,” “goal,” and “purpose,” he is wrestling with this very problem.
Heidegger struggles to free himself from traditional assumptions and our everyday vocabulary in his attempt to return to the phenomena. Among traditional philosophers he most admired Aristotle, who was, he says, “the last of the great philosophers who had eyes to see and, what is still more decisive, the energy and tenacity to continue to force inquiry back to the phenomena . . . and to mistrust from the ground up all wild and windy speculations, no matter how close to the heart of common sense” (BP, 232).4 But even Aristotle was under the influence of Plato and so was not radical enough. Heidegger therefore proposes to start again with the understanding in the shared everyday activities in which we dwell, an understanding that he says is closest to us yet farthest away. Being and Time is supposed to make manifest what we are already familiar with (although not to make it so explicit that a Martian or computer could come to know it) and in so doing to modify our understanding of ourselves and so transform our very way of being.
This would be reason enough to study Being and Time, but Heidegger does not simply want to clear the ground of traditional distortions and pseudoproblems. He has a positive account of authentic human being and a positive methodological proposal for how human being should be systematically studied. Both his understanding of human existence and his interpretive method for studying human being-in-the-world have had an enormous influence on contemporary life and thought. Wherever people understand themselves and their work in an atomistic, formal, subjective, or objective way, Heidegger’s thought has enabled them to recognize appropriate alternative practices and ways of understanding and acting available but neglected in our culture. At an international conference in Berkeley commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Heidegger’s birth, not only philosophers but also doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, theologians, management consultants, educators, lawyers, and computer scientists took part in a discussion of the way Heidegger’s thought had affected their work.5
Most of the leading thinkers in the humanities and social sciences also acknowledge a debt to Heidegger. Michel Foucault has said, “For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. . . . My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.”6 Early in his career, Jacques Derrida doubted that he could write anything that had not already been thought by Heidegger. Pierre Bourdieu says that in philosophy Heidegger was his “first love.” His own important concept of the social field is indirectly indebted to Heidegger byway of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who acknowledged the influence of Being and Time on his Phenomenology of Perception. Even Habermas, who started out under Heidegger’s influence but has distanced himself from Heidegger and developed a more traditional philosophical line, judges Being and Time to be “probably the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel.” 7
Huneeus & Orrego
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 108, #629.[
] - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 97, #509.[]
- Searle, Intentionality, 156-157.[]
- Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, henceforth cited as BP. This book is based on the lecture course Heidegger gave in 1927, the same year he published Being and Time. In all quotations I have changed the original translation to fit the conventions noted in the preface.[]
- H. Dreyfus and M. Zimmerman, eds., Applied Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.[]
- Michel Foucault, “Final Interview,” Raritan, Summer 1985, 8. “Le Retour de la Morale,” interview conducted by Gilles Barbadette, Les Nouvelles, 28 June 1984.[]
- Jürgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.[]