Wrathall covers 5/3/01 1:26 PM Page 1 Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity Authenticity, Heidegger, Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 1 Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity edited by Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas For more than a quarter of a century, Hubert L. Dreyfus has been the Essays in Honor of leading voice in American philosophy for the continuing relevance of phe- Hubert L. Dreyfus nomenology, particularly as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus has influenced a genera- Volume 1 tion of students and a wide range of colleagues, and these volumes are an excellent representation of the extent and depth of that influence. In keeping with Dreyfus’s openness to others’ ideas, many of the essays in this volume take the form of arguments with various of his positions. The essays focus on the dialogue with the continental philosophical tradition, in particular the work of Heidegger, that has played a foundational role in Dreyfus’s thinking. The sections are Philosophy and Authenticity; Modernity, Self, and the World; and Heideggerian Encounters. The book concludes with Dreyfus’s responses to the essays. Mark Wrathall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Brigham Young University. Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy and Head of School at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Books by Hubert L. Dreyfus of related interest Being-in-the-World A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I Wrathall and Malpas, editors Available in paperback What Computers Still Can’t Do Available in paperback The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 edited by http://mitpress.mit.edu Mark Wrathall WRAAP1 ,!7IA2G2-hdbcha!:t;K;k;K;k 0-262-73127-4 and Jeff Malpas Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 1 edited by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ©2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in New Baskerville by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong, and printed and bound in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heidegger, authenticity, and modernity : essays in honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus / edited by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-23207-3 (v. 1 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-73127-4 (v. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 0-262-23208-1 (v. 2 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-73128-2 (v. 2 : pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976—Influence. 3. Philosophy, European. 4. Philosophy, American—20th century. 5. Computers. 6. Cognitive science. 7. Dreyfus, Hubert L.—Influence. I. Dreyfus, Hubert L. II. Wrathall, Mark A. III. Malpas, J. E. B945.D764 H45 2000 193—dc21 99-056942 Contents Foreword ix Richard Rorty Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas I Philosophy and Authenticity 11 1 Must We Be Inauthentic? 13 Taylor Carman 2 The Significance of Authenticity 29 Randall Havas 3 Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism 43 John Haugeland 4 Philosophy and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Search for a Ground for Philosophizing 79 Charles Guignon II Modernity, Self, and World 103 5 Kierkegaard’s Present Age and Ours 105 Alastair Hannay vi Contents 6 The End of Authentic Selfhood in the Postmodern Age? 123 Michael E. Zimmerman 7 “The End of Metaphysics” and “A New Beginning” 149 Michel Haar 8 Nietzsche and the “Masters of Truth”: The Pre-Socratics and Christ 165 Béatrice Han 9 What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World 187 Julian Young 10 Uncovering the Space of Disclosedness: Heidegger, Technology, and the Problem of Spatiality in Being and Time 205 Jeff Malpas III Heideggerian Encounters 229 11 The Primacy of Practice and Assertoric Truth: Dewey and Heidegger 231 William D. Blattner 12 Absorbed Coping, Husserl and Heidegger 251 Dagfinn Føllesdal 13 Proofs and Presuppositions: Heidegger, Searle, and the “Reality” of the “External” World 259 David R. Cerbone 14 Intending the Intender (Or, Why Heidegger Isn’t Davidson) 279 Mark Okrent IV Responses 303 15 Responses 305 Hubert L. Dreyfus vii Contents Notes 343 References 385 Contributors 397 Index 399 Foreword Richard Rorty No one in our day has done more than Hubert L. Dreyfus to make American philosophy less parochial. For some forty years, he has helped the rest of us understand what our European colleagues are up to, introduced us to them, and encouraged the study of their works. By commenting on them, by organizing conferences about them, and most of all by weaving their works together with work being done by anglophone analytic philosophers, Dreyfus has ren- dered invaluable service to the international philosophical commu- nity. It is no exaggeration to say that without Dreyfus the gap between European and anglophone philosophy would be, at the end of the twentieth century, far greater than it in fact is. By behaving as if the analytic-Continental split were of no great importance, he has done a great deal to narrow it. My own acquaintance with European philosophy owes almost everything to Dreyfus. Back in the late 1950s, when I was at Welles- ley and Dreyfus was at Harvard, he encouraged me to read Merleau- Ponty and tried to convince me that Husserl was not nearly as pointless as I thought. Had I not been intrigued by his account of Husserl’s break with Descartes, I should never have taught Cartesian Meditations.1 By helping John Wild and others translate the early por- tions of Sein und Zeit 2 and letting me reproduce copies of the result, Dreyfus made it possible for me to assign bits of that book to my Wellesley classes. (This underground, unauthorized, mimeographed translation was the basis for most teaching of Heidegger in the x Richard Rorty United States prior to the publication, in 1962, of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation. People whose German was weak but who knew Dreyfus had a big head start.) Toward the end of the 1960s, when I started reading Derrida, Dreyfus was one of the few friends with whom I could hash over La Voix et le Phénomène 3 and who could explain to me what was going on in Paris. Later on, in the 1970s, Dreyfus helped me to get acquainted with Jürgen Habermas and with Michel Foucault. Many other Amer- ican philosophers owe their personal acquaintance with these two men to Dreyfus’s mediation. He made it his business to ensure that not only Berkeley, but the U.S. academic community as a whole, realized that exciting and original philosophical work was being done in non-anglophone countries. He encouraged students to work on these figures, and he became one of the very few senior figures in American philosophy on whom young philosophers who were interested in Heidegger or Foucault could rely for support. Students whom Dreyfus trained at Berkeley have become influential and important commentators on European philosophy and, in their turn, have encouraged and supported the efforts of a third generation of scholars. When intellectual historians track the gradual flow of postwar French and German philosophical thought into the United States, Dreyfus’s archive will be one of their principal sources. Dreyfus would not have been able to do all this without amazing reserves of energy and great personal charm. But his achievements are due above all to his inexhaustible intellectual curiosity—his will- ingness to read anything that comes along with the hope of finding something new and important in it. The sheer joyous optimism of his approach to philosophy, his assumption that there is probably something useful and interesting in any new philosophical publica- tion, is primarily responsible for his contribution to our country’s intellectual life. In a period in which it has sometimes seemed that American philosophers read less and less in every generation, and in which specialization in philosophy has reached hitherto unheard- of extremes, Dreyfus has remained a colleague with whom one can profitably converse all along an amazingly wide spectrum of philo- sophical topics and authors. xi Foreword Starting in 1980, Dreyfus (with help from his wife Geneviève and his friends Jocelyn and David Hoy) staged a series of summer insti- tutes, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. These brought Husserlians together with Searleans, Heideggerians together with Davidsonians, Foucauldians together with bourgeois liberals. Some of the most fruitful teaching I have ever done, and some of the most instructive intellectual encounters I have ever had, were at these institutes. Hundreds of American philosophers who spent their summers in Berkeley or Santa Cruz, talking with the others whom Dreyfus had assembled beneath the redwoods, had similar experiences. Nothing else that the Endowment has done so far for American philosophy compares with its sponsorship of those institutes. So far I have concentrated on Dreyfus’s role as mediator, commen- tator, and impresario. But of course he has another persona: he is an original, heretical, systematic philosopher. I have often resisted his views, and still resist many of them, but over the years I have often had to concede that he was right all along. In an era when flow charts captivated the imagination of most analytic philosophers, Dreyfus’s 1972 book What Computers Can’t Do4 was shrugged off by many people, including myself.