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May 17, 2006
This quotes is from the Ereignis interview with Richard Polt. Ereignis says:
I appears to me that Heidegger's analysis of everydayness in Being and Time was the initial impetus for his popularity. For example, Hubert Dreyfus' book on Division I is the most popular English book in the vast secondary literature on Heidegger. This analysis of everydayness is the basis for a new way to do philosophy. Instead of doing philosophy by reflecting on an ideal world as Plato suggested, or imagining oneself as a detached subject in the mind dealing with or experiencing objects out there, Heidegger philsophizes about man already thrown into a world of meaningful things. In your collection on Being and Time Charles Guignon says that man in Heidegger's examination of the everyday deals with things without having to first reflect on their "substance", and that Heidegger aims to "deflate" the Cartesian or substance dualism that had dominated western philosophy up until that time.
Well, that's how I came to Heidegger--through the return to everydayness. This philosophical focus on the everyday was hugely influencial in French philosophy: Sartre's examinations of interpersonal relation, Merleau-Ponty's critique of perception, Lefebvre and the Situationists' critique of Marxism for ignoring everyday life etc.
What was less influential was the way Heidegger criticizes man in his habitual everyday mode. In Division II of Being and Time Heidegger says that at times man is aware of his finitude, and this forces man to chose between living life in light of that finitude or to remain in an "inauthentic" everydayness. As Polt observes:
This section of Being and Time too has been influential, oftentimes with the same philosophers, and in some cases with others, and can also be interpreted as one in a philosophical and literary tradition of existential choices found in the 19th century works of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, both of whom Heidegger read.
Dreyfus, for instance, initially viewed Division II as a separate, "existentialist" side of Heidegger. He latter revised this position.
Though I thought that Adorno's Minima Moralia had more philosophical bite by way of a critique of everydayness, I thought that Heidegger conception of "the 'not-at-home'" that we feel in anxiety is "more primordial" than comfortable familiarity in that in such experiences as anxiety, we confront the sheer givenness of things and of ourselves. Those experiences can then transform the ordinary world.
What is not mentioned in this interview is the ecological turn of the latter Heidegger in his exploration of the technological mode of being.
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