philosophical conversations

Heidegger & the everyday.

Trevor,
This dissertation about Heidegger's understanding of the everyday in Being and Time may be of interest. He displaces the concern with epistemology in the analytic philosophy we were schooled in to explore our comportment within the everyday life we find ourselves living. The everyday was my pathway into Heidegger.

The category of the everyday is important. It means that we no longer have the schzoid split of analytic philosophy, where its practitioners live in the everyday common life, and then go up to the university to write about themselves as machines in terms of a systematic, abstract theory. Their being is one of an isolated subject somehow detached from, yet extrinsically related to, the world,

With Heideger we work on understanding the concrete everyday life we live. That makes philosophy relevant. The implied ontological point is that we are involved in, rather than detached from, our own world.

Rudi has the starting point of phenomenology spot on. He says that for Heidegger:

"We must start with the everyday because this is where we are. As Heidegger develops his phenomenology of the "where we are" called Da-sein (Being-there), it becomes apparent that our being-there-in-the-world has a complex structure....Heidegger's preliminary description of the everyday highlights the contextual nature of our world. By showing how this characterizes our normal experience it becomes apparent that theory, as abstractive, presupposes this experience from which it de-contextualizes."

So being or Dasein is a distinctive and definitive characteristic of the way we conduct our activities. An understanding of Dasein is implicit in everything we do, everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything towards which we comport ourselves in any way. What we are is being; and how we are is being. Hence we have a metaphysics of everyday life that is embodied in us living our daily lives.

Rudi goes to make another crucial point, one that has caused you come concern--the subject/object issue. he says:

"By starting with the everyday Heidegger is determined to do justice to the unity of the interwoven multiplicity of human experience. It is this unity that Heidegger seeks to capture by describing Dasein as Being-in-the-world, and which is missed in the long honoured distinction between subject and object. .....As Dreyfus has made clear, to claim that Heidegger has broken with an overemphasis on the theoretical by emphasising the practical is to miss Heidegger's more fundamental break with the philosophical tradition by questioning the primacy of the subject-object distinction."

This is a rupture with Descartes's dualism in which the "I think" stands in opposition to a world of physical objects. Our being-in the-world is more akin to dwelling in a place (eg your living at Rostrevor all your life).Your existential mode of being-in there is dwelling in relation to the world in an intrinsic sense (not extrinsic--it's Hegel again). By intrinsic it is meant that your relationships to the world of Rostrevor are part of what it means to be. They constitute your being or worldhood.

In Heidegger's language Dasein is always already in the world, always already involved. This involvement is one of practices as it involves a handling, using, a taking care of things, a concern about These practices have their own kind of knowledge: a tacit, embodied knowledge. It is knowledge that is both practical---like playing an instrument or building a garden--- and concernful towards about others (people) and things (the garden) we have relationships with.Our human world is a meaningful, significant and intelligible whole.

That sketches what attracted me to Heidegger: it is a radical rupture with analytic philosophy's concerns with science, epistemology and machines. By explaining things in terms of the natural sciences, analytic philosophers (scientifc materialists) abstract from the richness of everyday experience. True, theory is rightly abstractiveand it decontextualises what it takes as its object for the purpose of analysis. However, these analytic philosophers illegitimately take their abstract, naturalscientific view as revealing the truth of things. So they interpret the richness of human experience in a reductive manner. and trreat it a mere colour and ornamentation.

Seeondly, Heidegger's rupture enables philosophy to have its own voice--not that of science--- and to reconnect with our common life.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 2, 2004 05:11 PM | TrackBack