References
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, San Francisco: Harper Collins 1962, p. 284. Hereafter referred to as BT. All references are to the pagination of the German edition, given in the margins.
- For a more detailed discussion of primordial ‘Being-guilty,’ see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 306: “Existential guilt reveals not inauthentic Dasein's moral lapses, or its essential failure to choose; it reveals an essentially unsatisfactory structure definitive of even authentic Dasein. Even if Dasein has done nothing wrong there is something wrong with Dasein—its being is not under its own power.” The pejorative language (“essentially unsatisfactory,” “something wrong”) is rather misleading, since primordial guilt, as an ontological condition, should be strictly separated from the moral sense of ‘guilt.’
- I will refer to “das Man’ as ‘the they,’ in keeping with the Macquarrie and Robinson translation. For a thoughtful argument on behalf of translating this term as “the one,” see Dreyfus, p. 151.
- See BT pp. 126–30, 176–80, and 268–72.
- In Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, Frederick A. Olafson uses a similar point to argue the priority of virtue over vice in a Heideggerian-based ethics. See p. 75: “the very possibility of wrongdoing is dependent on there being in place something like a common norm of expectation in relation to which certain actions have to count as violations.”
- For a more detailed analysis of Heidegger's discussion of ‘the they,’ see Dreyfus pp. 154–58, especially p. 157: “What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate ‘ground’ of intelligibility is simply shared practices. There is no right interpretation. Average intelligibility is not inferior intelligibility; it simply obscures its own groundlessness.” See also p. 235: “the one offers its norms as guidelines that seem to follow from human nature, and its for-the-sake-of-whichs seem to offer an identity to the self.”
- Many commentators on Heidegger's discussion of conscience emphasize the role of authentic choice in the present moment. I wish to emphasize, on the contrary, the response to the call of conscience as an anticipation of, and commitment to, future choice through recognition of the continued need for a conscience, not simply a past need for one. Cf., for example, Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999, p. 90: “The authentic style of existence involves ‘choosing to choose’ […] Conscience asks us to own up to our guilt. It asks us to make our actions our own (eigen, in German) and thus to exist authentically (eigentlich)”. Cf. also Dreyfus, p. 308: “The existential meaning of conscience is the call, not to do this or that, but to stop fleeing into the everyday world of moral righteousness or of moral relativism and to face up to Dasein's basic guilt” and Olafson, p. 47: “we do constitutionally owe something […] and what is due from each of us is a choice […] This is a fact that we chronically try to hide from ourselves; but it is also possible to accept it or, as Heidegger puts it, to choose choice as the governing modality of one's active life. When we do that, we may be said to ‘want to have a conscience’ in the sense of being prepared to supply, out of one's own resources, what is not in any case forthcoming from any other source. It is this willingness that constitutes authentic responsibility.”
- BT p. 273.
- Cf.Olafson, p. 7: “a ground of ethics, as I conceive it, is a distinctive relation between human beings rather than a supreme moral truth from which rules of conduct could be deduced.” Although I think Olafson is right to treat the ground of ethics as a relation rather than a moral truth, I have emphasized Dasein as care and its relation to the Other as Being-ahead-of-itself—that is, in its uncommon-ness to itself and to the Other. Olafson, on the contrary, emphasizes Mitsein, or Dasein as intersubjectivity and Being-together-in-the-world, thus the relation to Dasein in its commonness to the Other.
- See Polt, p. 79: “we cannot help caring about our own Being and the Being of other entities, because we are such that beings matter to us, they make a difference to us […] Although Heidegger does not directly say so, his language of ‘care’ is an implicit criticism of all philosophies of detachment.”
- Commentators who overlook Heidegger's identification of the Being of Dasein with care are forced to find necessary but indirect connections between Dasein's self-interest and the well-being of others. But this is unecessary since the Heideggerian Self already has an interest in the well-being of the Other. Cf. Olafson, p. 82: “What is now required is that Mitsein be shown to be deeply implicated in the conditions of our own and everyone's well-being or happiness. What this amounts to is the claim that the happiness of each one of us stands in a relation of interdependence to that of others, so that the well-being of Alter cannot in principle be indifferent to that of Ego, even if there is no sign of reciprocating interest on Alter's part.”
- As Olafson points out in his discussion of Heidegger's general notion of solicitude [Fürsorge], “it remains a good deal clearer what this kind of Fürsorge is not than what it is” (Olafson, p. 46).
- Olafson's attempt to base “an ontologically based ethic of the ‘We’” (Olafson, p. 5) upon the concept of Mitsein is in danger of overlooking this priority of non-identity in Heidegger's understanding of Dasein. His approach emphasizes Dasein's identification with the Other in respect of shared concerns and a shared world, while my approach emphasizes Dasein's identification with the Other in its potentiality for difference from itself and from the subject (or, generally, from ‘das Man’). Cf. Olafson, p. 56: “for all the great differences that set one human being apart from others, any human being as an entity that has a world is the same as any other because that world is the same for every human being. We may have wildly different ‘beliefs’ about the world and it may be impossible in practice to resolve those differences; and yet this is not enough to make us give up the idea of a single world that is, in principle, the same for all.”
- Cf., for a contrary view, Olafson, p. 58: “[a moral community] can be formed only if both sides can reach a single version of the truth about who they are and can also in that sense accept the equivalence of the one and the other in their understanding of that truth.”
- Olafson seems to believe that moral behaviour requires altering the subject's self-understanding and corresponding actions if they are incompatible with the shared world of Mitsein—which is, I would argue, precisely that of the ‘they.’ I argue, on the contrary, that it is the responsibility of the ‘they’ to alter its self-understanding in order to receive the Other in its incompatibility. Cf., Olafson, p. 56: “just as, in the case of things in the world, what I disclose must be compatible with what other people disclose and is ideally complementary to it, so in the domain of action I can be responsible only if I can show that the action I propose to take stands in some compatible/complementary relation to the actions of others who may be affected by it, provided their actions satisfy the same criterion.”
- This includes the accommodation of the Self in its otherness to itself: one's own potential for authenticity. We have seen that the Other can provoke the call to conscience by revealing, in her individual existence, unrecognized existentiell possibilities of my own Dasein. Thus the reception of the Other through the modification of the ‘they’ is not a self-sacrificing mode of ethical obligation to others. By receiving the Other in its otherness, I become open to the call of conscience concerning possibilities of my own Being.
- This is an important point of contrast to those who interpret Heidegger's use of ‘letting be’ as passivity. Such a view, for example, leads Olafson to conclude that “if ‘letting entities be’ is the only way to avoid subjectivism, we would have to give up the active life altogether and adopt a wholly passive stance as satellites of being.” (Olafson, p. 4, note 5). This overlooks the fact that ‘letting be’ requires letting-be-seen, since being is always Being-in-the-World.
- Consequently, the ethics I am arguing for would ensure ‘compatibility’ of actions, but as a consquence of affirming the otherness of Dasein to itself and to the Other rather than as a negation of that otherness. For the opposite approach to moral compatibility, cf. Olafson, p. 54: “we will be concerned to produce an understanding of what is the case that both of us (and anyone else who may happen along) can share. In this sense, Mitsein and we ourselves must be familiar with the business of arriving at a disclosure that is as close as possible to being genuinely common and neutral as between the persons concerned.”