8/12/2019 J o h n Haugeland-dasein Disclosed!

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PHILOSOPHY

A living wayIn addition to making important contribu-tionsto philosophical debates aboutinten-tionalityand artificial intelligence, the late

John Haugeland was well known among phi-losophersasaningeniousinterpreterofMartinHeideggers Being and Time. Central to his

reading of that difficult text was his denial ofwhat had seemed obvious to most other read-ers: that Heideggers word Dasein(which inordinary German just means existence) refersto the individual human being.

Haugeland regarded that as a disastrousmisconception, and one that obscured thewhole pointof thebook. When hediedin 2010he had been working for years on what was tobe the definitive statement of his alternativeinterpretation. The envisioned opus was to becalled Dasein Disclosed, and the unfinishedmanuscriptformsthe central hundred pagesorsoof thepresentvolume,which nowbears thattitle. It has been edited with great intelligenceand care by Joseph Rouse, who has includedten additional essays (two previously unpub-lished).

Haugeland rightly insists that, in spite of itsreputationasanessayinexistentialismorphil-osophical anthropology, the declared, offi-cial aim ofBeing and Timeis to reawaken thequestion of the sense of being: that is, thequestion what itmeans, notjustfor humanbe-ings,but foranything atall, tobe. Heideggers

real theme is not human beings as such, butrather what human life and the world must belike such that concepts like truth, knowledge,and objectivity can be so much as intelligible.

The deep philosophical error Heidegger

was combating, deriving from Descartes andthe Cartesian tradition, was to suppose thatsuch basic concepts are simply intermediatecontact points between two distinct, perhapseven independently existing things: self andworld, or subject and object. Self and world,however, as Haugeland says, are not likeweights on either end of a bar bell, but likesides ofa coin. And justas the coinis what al-lows the sides to be sides, soBeing and Timepurports to explain what it is that makes aworld a world, and a self a self.

Haugelands innovation is to insist that anindividualhumanbeingsexistenceis justpartofa larger phenomenon,whathe callsalivingwayoflife,andthatthis(notperson or human

being) is what Heidegger meant by Dasein.Haugelands favourite examples are sciencesandlanguages. So,for example, Italian isa liv-ing language and chemistry a still vital re-search programme,whereasEtruscan isa dead

language and alchemy a failed science.Haugeland drew much of his inspiration

from Thomas Kuhns Structure of ScientificRevolutions, which describesscienceas a het-erogeneous series of innovations embeddedin what Kuhn famously called paradigms:frameworks of inquiry constituted by back-ground beliefs,values,established proceduresof observation and experiment, and ingrainedhabitsof imagination.For Kuhn, ordinary ob-

jectivity is possible only on the basis of a para-digm that defines at the outset what is and isnot worth caring about, what is significant orinsignificant, possible or impossible. In Hei-deggerian terms, we must already be throwninto a worldof care,projectingintofuture pos-sibilities, in order for things to show up for usinany definiteway atall.Moreover, forKuhn,we acquire scientific knowledge not just byhavinga paradigm,but by being prejudiced infavourof theparadigm wefindourselvesin.AHeideggerian way of putting this would be tosaythatonlyby beingresolutelycommitted tosomealreadyprojectedcontextofmeaningarewe able to face up authentically to the worldand our situation in it.

The analogy with Kuhn does indeed shed

light on much of what Heidegger says aboutDasein in Being and Time. For Haugeland,though, the analogy is no mere analogy. Da-sein is not people, he writes with an almostaudiblesigh. Inmy experience,thiscannotbe

said too often. In his view,Dasein is like chemistryas debut that chemistryisDasein

It is not a view that has wamong Heidegger scholars. says the who of everyday

myself,but theanyone(dmeans by that, however, is nnot you or me, but that you agard ourselves as just one amanyoneelse. Heideggeralsoseindesignates the same thithe word Mensch(man). In sein is what we refer to winouns, in particular you hardly applicableto quantumdarin Chinese. Haugeland Heideggerspassingremarkinsofar as it is, just as Daseinexists, it is historical.But thsentence is a comparison oanother, not an identification

Although Haugelands randTime is philosophicallydin its own right, it is also Procrustean bed into whichstrain tofit hissubject.But tits most genuinely HeidegFor like Heideggers own treatments of other thinkeclosedisbestreadnotasexeg

tary, but as a kind of creatiinterpretation, after all, slightona textnotby coincidstraying from it and illumibetween them.

TAYLOR CARMAN

J o h n H a u g e l a n d

D A S E I N D I S C L O S E D

John Haugelands Heidegger

Edited by Joseph Rouse

336pp. Harvard University Press.

36.95 (US $49.95).

978 0 674 07211 4