The Authenticity of the Ordinary (original) (raw)
Related papers
European Journal of Philosophy, 2020
David Egan's book is not the first work to bring together the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. Many philosophers, most notably Hubert Dreyfus and Stanley Cavell, have long felt there to be an affinity between the two philosophers, despite the many differences in tone, style, and tradition. Such a sensed affinity tends to focus on two central strands of their work: a deep dissatisfaction with philosophy as traditionally conceived and practiced, and an appeal to the everyday or the ordinary as crucial to articulating that dissatisfaction and providing for an alternative way of doing philosophy (what Heidegger refers to as ontology, whose method is phenomenology, and what Wittgenstein refers to as, if anything, simply grammatical investigations). There has in recent years been a spate of work that endeavors to tease out these affinities in detail, including book-length studies and collections of papers. Egan himself is one of a triumvirate who edited such a collection a few years back (in the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to that volume), so he is hardly a newcomer to the Heidegger-and-Wittgenstein corner of philosophy. Despite this being something of a crowded field, Egan's book stands out as a sensitive, lucid, and nuanced treatment of the interplay between the two philosophers. Because I am so sympathetic to so much of what Egan has to say (again, in the spirit of full disclosure, some of my own work is cited here and there, mostly approvingly), mustering a more critical perspective has been quite a challenge. Nonetheless, after sketching out Egan's project, I will try to bring out some worries that arose in working through his book. Rather than cite minor quibbles and squabblessuch as Egan's treatment of Heidegger's notion of distantiality at the end of third chapter or (far worse) his overlooking a paper of mine in note 9 on page 45-I will concentrate on more central issues. The book is divided into three parts. Parts One and Two concern the notion of everydayness, viewed first from the perspective of averageness and then from the perspective of authenticity. The third part steps back to reflect on the way both philosophers' transformed conceptions of the everydayyoked as they are to criticism of philosophy as traditionally conceiveddemand a transformed conception of philosophical practice. Although Egan shuttles between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, he does so within chapters so that both philosophers remain present in the discussion, with key ideas from each deftly woven together without being crudely assimilated or identified (there is even at one point the introduction of a Kripkendegger figure to parallel the Kripkenstein that haunts a swath of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein). While Egan throughout the book emphasizes the affinities between the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, the part of the book devoted to method calls greater attention to their differences. Egan carefully documents how both philosophers are sensitive to the ways in which their rejection of traditional philosophy demands a reconception of philosophical method: Heidegger, for example, notes early on in Being and Time that the shift from entities to being (from the ontical to the ontological) initiates a project where "we lack not only most of the words but above all the 'grammar'." (BT 63/39); and Wittgenstein struggled throughout the later decades of his life to find a suitable way to arrange and present his thoughts (after all, Philosophical Investigations was only published posthumously). Despite the self-consciousness Heidegger displays about the demands his project places on language, Egan finds his departures from traditional philosophical methods, at least at the time of Being
Living in a Wittgensteinian world: beyond theory to a poetics of practices
As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk - talk that can originate new language-games - we can offer to make our own 'inner lives' public. In this paper, I want claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background 'landscape' of our lives visible. These methods are explored below.
The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday by David Egan
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2020
David Egan's book is not the first work to bring together the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. Many philosophers, most notably Hubert Dreyfus and Stanley Cavell, have long felt there to be an affinity between the two philosophers, despite the many differences in tone, style, and tradition. Such a sensed affinity tends to focus on two central strands of their work: a deep dissatisfaction with philosophy as traditionally conceived and practiced, and an appeal to the everyday or the ordinary as crucial to articulating that dissatisfaction and providing for an alternative way of doing philosophy (what Heidegger refers to as ontology, whose method is phenomenology, and what Wittgenstein refers to as, if anything, simply grammatical investigations). There has in recent years been a spate of work that endeavors to tease out these affinities in detail, including book-length studies and collections of papers. Egan himself is one of a triumvirate who edited such a collection a few years back (in the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to that volume), so he is hardly a newcomer to the Heidegger-and-Wittgenstein corner of philosophy. Despite this being something of a crowded field, Egan's book stands out as a sensitive, lucid, and nuanced treatment of the interplay between the two philosophers. Because I am so sympathetic to so much of what Egan has to say (again, in the spirit of full disclosure, some of my own work is cited here and there, mostly approvingly), mustering a more critical perspective has been quite a challenge. Nonetheless, after sketching out Egan's project, I will try to bring out some worries that arose in working through his book. Rather than cite minor quibbles and squabblessuch as Egan's treatment of Heidegger's notion of distantiality at the end of third chapter or (far worse) his overlooking a paper of mine in note 9 on page 45-I will concentrate on more central issues. The book is divided into three parts. Parts One and Two concern the notion of everydayness, viewed first from the perspective of averageness and then from the perspective of authenticity. The third part steps back to reflect on the way both philosophers' transformed conceptions of the everydayyoked as they are to criticism of philosophy as traditionally conceiveddemand a transformed conception of philosophical practice. Although Egan shuttles between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, he does so within chapters so that both philosophers remain present in the discussion, with key ideas from each deftly woven together without being crudely assimilated or identified (there is even at one point the introduction of a Kripkendegger figure to parallel the Kripkenstein that haunts a swath of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein). While Egan throughout the book emphasizes the affinities between the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, the part of the book devoted to method calls greater attention to their differences. Egan carefully documents how both philosophers are sensitive to the ways in which their rejection of traditional philosophy demands a reconception of philosophical method: Heidegger, for example, notes early on in Being and Time that the shift from entities to being (from the ontical to the ontological) initiates a project where "we lack not only most of the words but above all the 'grammar'." (BT 63/39); and Wittgenstein struggled throughout the later decades of his life to find a suitable way to arrange and present his thoughts (after all, Philosophical Investigations was only published posthumously). Despite the self-consciousness Heidegger displays about the demands his project places on language, Egan finds his departures from traditional philosophical methods, at least at the time of Being
Beyond the Tools of the Trade: Heidegger and the Intelligibility of Everyday Things
In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without stopping to inquire into the sources of their intelligibility. In Division I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. A common reading of Heidegger’s analysis is that the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self-understandings (such as being a gardener, shoemaker, teacher, mother, musician, or philosopher). In this paper, I argue that while such practical self-understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment specific to many practices, these ‘tools of the trade’ make up only a very small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self-understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things – like toothbrushes and sidewalks – used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self-understanding as ‘one,’ ‘anyone,’ ‘no one in particular,’ or das Man, might play this intelligibility constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self-understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that it is the cultural identities into which we are ‘thrown,’ rather than practical identities or das Man, that ultimately constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity.
Obligation and Impersonality: Wittgenstein and the Nature of the Social
Although sociologists conceive obligation as an objective force (the social) that compels individuals to act and think according to pre-defined norms of conduct and ways of reasoning, philosophers view it as an imperative that is met through the agent's deliberation. The aim of this article is to undermine the standard dichotomy between the deterministically sociological and the moral–philosophical views of obligation by way of contending that Wittgenstein's view on blind obedience (as analyzed by Meredith Williams) bears a conception of the social. I will then argue that Wittgenstein's notion of forms of life and the sociological notion of situation refer to the same encompassing phenomenon: obligation. I will finally claim that this phenomenon should be re-specified in terms of impersonality to devise a shared dynamic conception of obligation admitting that a plurality of contextual normative orders monitor collective and individual action in ordinary life.
Philosophical Investigations 17 pp. 552-565., 1994
A recently published Wittgenstein manuscript from the early 1940s, which contains some unusually explicit notes for a public lecture on private language, helps to clarify the nature of Wittgenstein's argument that a private definition is impossible because ostension always depends on a "technique of use." It also strongly supports the view that Wittgenstein was not arguing for a positive theory of mind and helps us to see how the treatment of training and practice in the opening sections of the "Investigations" is the basis for the subsequent discussion of both rule-following and privacy.
The threat of privacy in Wittgenstein's Investigations: Kripke vs. Cavell
Wittgenstein Studien, 2020
Most readers of the Investigations take skepticism as a target of Wittgenstein's remarks, something to be refuted by means of a clear grasp of our criteria. Stanley Cavell was the first to challenge that consensual view by reminding us that our criteria are constantly open to skeptical repudiation, hence that privacy is a standing human possibility. In an apparently similar vein, Saul Kripke has argued that a skeptical paradox concerning rules and meaning is the central problem of the Investigations-and one that receives a skeptical solution. Following the orthodoxy, however, Kripke does not take privacy as a real threat but instead reads Wittgenstein as offering an argument against its very possibility. This paper offers a critical assessment of Kripke's and Cavell's readings, and concludes by delineating an understanding of our linguistic practices that acknowledges the seriousness of skepticism while avoiding the kind of evasion shared by Kripke and the orthodoxy, enabling us to see agreement and meaning as continual tasks whose failure is imbued with high existential costs. [Forthcoming in Wittgenstein-Studien , Vol. 11 2020; please refer to published version for quotation]
The Confluence of Authenticity and Inauthenticity in Heidegger's Being and Time
Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, 2020
I argue that there is a confluence of authenticity and inauthenticity inherent to the structure of average everydayness in Being and Time. I support this reading by recasting Heidegger's notion of fallenness in Being and Time in terms of its precursor, ruinance, which he introduces in his 1921-22 lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research (GA 61). In this lecture course, Heidegger explains that ruinance is constituted by a dual movement of relucence and prestruction: the former, an intentional openness to the world; the latter, a securing that conceals that openness. While this dual movement is not expressed explicitly in these terms in Being and Time, I show that it is nevertheless tacitly operative in the structure of falling and that it grounds the duality of average everydayness. I frame this study around the debate on how Dasein can be authentic despite its fallenness, given that fallenness paradoxically renders Dasein essentially inauthentic.