Dreyfus’ Aims — The Possibility of Authenticity

Dreyfus has two problems he is trying to solve, the second deriving from the first. The first is how to give an account of a truly shared world, not merely an inter-subjective one. Olafson argues that Heidegger’s account, in lacking a substantive argument for how multiple Daseins share a single world, is in risk of charges of solipsism. Dreyfus offers Das Man as the argument for a truly shared world.

Das Man has two features that make it desirable for this role. Firstly, Das Man is what articulates the significance of the network of assignments in the field of equipment, it establishes the everyday ‘in-order-tos’ that Heidegger has defined the ‘world’ as. Secondly, Das Man gives to Dasein its self, the “Man-Selbst” which is the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein. In short, Das Man has two jobs advantageous to Dreyfus; articulating the world, and allocating selves. Insofar as the everyday ‘self’ of Dasein depends upon a shared, articulated, public world, Heidegger has provided an account of the ‘glue’ that holds all of the Daseins together in a single, shared, world.

However, the first problem solved in this way, a second problem now emerges: what to make of the other less than desirable roles that Das Man plays in Heidegger’s overall account? The ‘Dictatorship’ of Das Man, and the concealing and covering over? Dreyfus pushes these back and diagnoses a confusion on Heidegger’s part between conformity and conformism, which ultimately stems for Heidegger’s confusion over falling and fleeing. These are significant alterations. Why can’t we just admit Dreyfus’ change of emphasis (the centralizing of Das Man for an account of a shared world) and leave those other roles of Das Man, as well as the relations between falling and fleeing, where they lay? The issue is:

“-if Heidegger derives falling as absorption from falling as fleeing, he makes authenticity impossible. Dasein is structurally absorbed in the world. If Dasein’s absorption is a result of fleeing its unsettledness, Dasein’s structural tendency to fall away is identified with giving in to the temptation to cover up. Falling as an existential structure would then entail that Dasein cannot own up to being the kind of entity it is. That would make Dasein essentially inauthentic.” (Dreyfus, 1995, p.229, my italics)

We end up with a kind of choice matrix. If Olafson is right that we should see the influence of Das Man as a perverted form of Mit-sein then the threat of solipsism looms. If we accept Dreyfus’ centralizing of Das Man as a solution to solipsism, then we must correct Heidegger in his assertion that ‘falling’ is initiated by Dasein’s fleeing. If we fail to make that amendment, then authenticity for Dasein becomes impossible, because fleeing into the arms of Das Man is ‘cooked into’ Dasein at the ontological level (because Dasein has ostensibly already ‘fallen’). Dreyfus’ expansion of Das Man allows him to argue that Dasein begins as fallen, it does not need to flee to lose itself because it is already lost. This means that ‘fleeing’ is a non-act on the ontological level: it just means ‘not leaving the default position’. However, on the ontic, psychological level it can present itself as a positive phenomenon of choice (when faced with anxiety), one can feel as though the choice is to flee or persist in anxiety. However, ontologically, ‘having fled’ (Falling) is the zero level state of everyday Dasein, so Dasein does not choose it per se. Dasein’s choice, at this level, is always a choice for authenticity. If ‘having fled’ is the ontological cause of being ‘fallen’, then Dasein has already ontologically chosen inauthenticity in order to be at all. That is, if “Dasein bars its own way” with Das Man as part of its ontological constitution (as Heidegger says at BT, Div I, §27, p.129), then there is no hope of ‘unbarring’ this way.

The dilemma, then, as Dreyfus presents it is between solipsism or the impossibility of authenticity.

Heidegger’s Answer to the Dilemma

We should take a look at how Heidegger frames Dasein’s possibility for authenticity. It is instructive that the chance for authenticity does not come from a deep study of cultures and epochs that would allow one to assume an inner distance towards their own cultural norms, and uncover how they cover over their arbitrariness (as would be an implied possibility of Dreyfus’ reading). Instead, Dasein’s possibility for authenticity in the face of Das Man is the call of conscience.

Dasein fails to hear itself, and listens away to the “they”; and this listening-away gets broken by the call if that call, in accordance with its character as such, arouses another kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that is lost, has a character in every way opposite. If in this lost hearing, one has been fascinated with the ‘hubbub’ of the manifold ambiguity which idle talk possesses in its everyday ‘newness’, then the call must do its calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience. (BT, Div. II, §55, H.271).

This call that pulls Dasein away from its fascination with Das Man, and the Man-Selbst it offers, needs to be diametrically opposed to the way ‘One calls and talks’. Being a ‘call’ it is discursive, but in being in opposition to Das Man as the repository of everyday intelligibility it cannot ‘say’ anything. Heidegger admits that in any given Man-Selbst, the call may be represented onticly in such and such a way: a voice of God telling one to not steal the wallet, for example. But these particular manifestations can be confused with the injunctions of the One and its normativity. The true call of conscience is identifiable only through its direction of pull:

Yet what the call discloses is unequivocal, even though it may undergo a diﬀerent interpretation in the individual Dasein in accordance with its own possibilities of understanding. While the content of the call is seemingly indefinite, the direction it takes is a sure one and is not to be overlooked. (BT, Div. II, §56, H.274)

So, in the ‘stealing a wallet’ example. The individual may envisage some dialoguing interlocutors trading maxims “One respects the property of others”, “One does not scoff at the gifts of fate”, etc etc. All of this is the chatter of the One, and the individual Dasein who uses these maxims to make a choice has in effect not made a true choice at all. However, why are they hesitating? Why this proliferation of maxims for this action? The smooth acting-to-the-norm has been disturbed by the call of conscience, and the individual Dasein is being pulled away from Das Man, that is, they are authentically grappling with a choice. In choosing to turn the decision over to the dialectic of proverbial maxims, Dasein has chosen to flee in the face of this choice, and fall back into Das Man.

Dreyfus’ Objection

Why is this overall account unacceptable to Dreyfus (i.e., why does he think that conscience is not enough to make authenticity possible)? In his extension of Das Man to the condition of intelligibility as such, the call of conscience, as Heidegger agrees, must be ‘silent’ (not intelligibly determinate). But the call of conscience asks of me to make a choice. However, there is no choice I can intelligibly make outside of the condition of intelligibility (Das Man), thus making the ‘authentic’ choice impossible.

Think in the above example of how I would choose to take or not take the wallet now that the silent call of conscience has made me vacillate. Obviously falling back on some public maxim is a kind of ‘fleeing’ in the face of the choice, but so is twenty five minutes of ethical deliberation, weighing up the pros and cons, examining the situation through utilitarian and deontological lenses, and so on. Basically, if I act on the basis of intelligible reasons then I have also chosen inauthenticity. In order to choose the authentic solution, I would need to disengage from the situation, as an intelligible ‘moment’, entirely. The ‘call of conscience’ that landed me in this vacillating situation emerged alongside the wallet itself, my taking it or not is now no longer an everyday manipulating of equipment. It calls me back to anxiety away from everyday intelligibility. Its demand is that I recognize the groundlessness of any decision for or against, but that the decision is ultimately mine, without any appeal to any reason, compulsion, pro, or con. The authentic decision is to choose to approach the decision itself from this way, but approaching the decision from this way, I cannot decide. I am in an authentic yet unintelligible space.

So, in order to save authenticity as a possibility worth having, Dreyfus argues we need to dismiss Heidegger’s claims about the ontological order of events. Dasein doesn’t flee into fallenness, Dasein starts from fallenness. It can achieve a modest authenticity when it makes its choices deliberately (thus un-falls itself), albeit still in light of social norms (referencing Das Man), just not being pulled along unconsciously by these norms. In the above example, since I am now vacillating, any choice I make regarding the wallet is more or less authentic, even if I choose to steal it. The inauthentic choice would be to leave the wallet where it is just because ‘One doesn’t touch what doesn’t belong to one’, or to spontaneously take it because ‘One has to do what they must to get by’. That is, not to make a choice at all, but blindly follow a rule.

Another, Pessimistic, Solution?

However, there is another solution, that does not require us to make substantial interpretive revisions in Heidegger’s presentation.

Authenticity might just not be a possibility worth having for ontic persons. That is, us. Dasein has its possibility of being authentic, conscience calls it to this possibility, but for persons, Man-Selbst fully interpolated into the regime of public intelligibility, authenticity might just represent an unintelligible self-destruction. Some moment of Zen ego-annihilation. Of course any analysis of the beings that we are might, once it penetrates down to the most fundamental ontological layers, discover a primordial world of authentic and inauthentic choices, following the traces of ontic disturbances and inconsistencies, but that gives us no assurance that the beings that we refer to as “I”, “You”, “Her”, “Him”, and so on, are capable of ‘acting’ intelligibly vis-à-vis their fundamental ontological constitution. This is to say that Being & Time may just be an incredibly pessimistic account of the human condition. Note that this alone is not a refutation. There were no assurances that the phenomenological investigation into the question of Being would have a happy, or redemptive, conclusion.

I do not have the space to fully develop this interpretation. I will only provide one additional argument for it: If Heidegger has achieved his aims in Being & Time of providing a comprehensive analytic of the Being of the beings that we ourselves are, the ontology should be varied and robust enough to cover all possible extremities of ‘human’ experience. At the fundamental level of Being, Dasein intimates its own possibility for authenticity. However, if this possibility could be realistically exhausted by the kinds of beings that ‘we’ are (modern, urbanized, computer using, Heidegger readers), then, in a sense the ontology is exhausted by a narrow ‘form of life’. It is not a refutation of Heidegger’s analytic if a certain prevalent, yet narrow, ‘form of life’ appears in an inextricably inauthentic situation, pushing and pulling against a tyrannical Das Man of its own design. In fact, this is a desirable discovery. There is such a multitude of radically other ways to be (including our own when asleep and dreaming) it would be strange if ours, and Heidegger’s, were just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the ontological possibility of authenticity.

That is, if the analysis of Dasein, and its possibilities for authenticity, articulate and apply to such radically different ways of being and forms of life as Wall Street stock brokers in the 1980’s, rice farmers in the Tokugawa Shogunate, Roman Legionnaires stationed in Londinium in 47AD, Egyptian priests of Osiris, nomadic Babylonian goat herders, Martian colonists in the 23rd century, and early Homo Sapiens crossing the Bering strait into the Americas, it would just be an astounding coincidence that beggars belief that we had, with our current form of life and ‘cultural package’, and the Man-Selbst we take on as we surf the internet and watch Saturday Night Live, some how achieved a privileged position to seize Dasein’s possibility of authentic being.

It might just not be a possibility worth having.