Abstract
This book chapter shows how the early Heidegger’s philosophy around the period of Being and Time can address some central questions of contemporary social ontology. After sketching “non-summative constructionism”, which is arguably the generic framework that underlies all forms of contemporary analytic social ontology, I lay out early Heidegger’s conception of human social reality in terms of an extended argument. The Heidegger that shows up in light of this treatment is an acute phenomenologist of human social existence who emphasizes our engagement in norm-governed practices as the basis of social reality. I then defuse a common and understandable set of objections against invoking the early Heidegger as someone who can make any positive contribution to our understanding of social reality. Lastly, I explore the extent to which the early Heidegger’s philosophy provides insights regarding phenomena of collective intentionality by showing how the intelligibility of such phenomena traces back to individual agents’ common understanding of possible ways of understanding things and acting with one another. With the early Heidegger, I argue that this common understanding is the fundamental source and basis of collective intentionality, not the non-summativist constructionism on which contemporary analytic social ontology has sought to focus with much effort. The lesson about social ontology that we should learn from the early Heidegger is that there is a tight connection between the social constitution of the human individual and his or her capacity to perform actions or activities that instantiate collective intentionality.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the major innovations of Pettit’s social ontology is his discernment of the crucial distinction between the issue that animates the disagreement between individualism and collectivism, and that about which atomism and holism are in opposition. He notes rightly that social theory and social ontology will continue to encounter intellectual impasses if they fail to distinguish the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ issues in social ontology. For an instructive discussion of these matters, see Pettit 1996: 111–16.
- 2.
According to Gilbert, who may be the first in analytic social ontology to coin this term, ‘singularism is the thesis that [collectivity] concepts are explicable solely in terms of the conceptual scheme of singular agency’ (ibid., emphasis in the original).
- 3.
The main philosophers who inaugurated, and whose ongoing work continue to sustain, the burgeoning interest in analytic social ontology are Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000, 2003), Searle (1990, 1995), Tuomela ([with Miller] 1988; 1995, 2002, 2003, 2007), Pettit (1996, 2002, 2003, 2014), and Bratman (1999: Part II). I note here in this footnote only their most influential earlier contributions to this particular literature.
- 4.
For a rare and notable exception, see the work of Schmid (2005: Ch. iv, 2009: Ch. 9). To some extent, this paper engages in an indirect dialogue with Schmid’s interpretation and appropriation of the early Heidegger’s philosophy for purposes of social ontology. Despite our apparent disagreements about a number of interpretive and philosophical issues, I am grateful to Schmid for stimulating discussions about them, as well as for pointing out to me in particular the significance of Heidegger’s 1928/29 lecture course, Einleitung in die Philosophie (Heidegger 1996), as an important resource for understanding Heidegger on social ontology.
- 5.
I argue for this elsewhere in ‘Problems of Circularity in Theories of Collective Intentionality’ (Koo 2011b).
- 6.
I will explain the sense in which analytic social ontologists provide constructionist accounts of social or collective entities in the next section.
- 7.
All page references in this book chapter will henceforth be to this work as ‘SZ (Heidegger 1993)’. The English translation by Macquarrie and Robinson of this text (Heidegger 1962) provides the German pagination on its margins. Note, however, that all translations of Sein und Zeit into English in this book chapter will be my own, not those of Macquarrie and Robinson. In this paper Heidegger’s concept of das Man will be rendered in English as the ‘anyone’, which works fairly well as a translation but fails unfortunately to capture the undertone of prescription expressed by many (though not all) uses of ‘man’ in German (e.g., ‘Das macht man nicht in der Öffentlichkeit’ [‘One doesn’t (shouldn’t) do that in public’]). But ‘anyone’ is slightly preferable for linguistically disambiguating reasons since there will be places in the book chapter where I use ‘one’ in its ordinary sense in English, not in the distinctive, loaded sense that Heidegger expresses in his uses of ‘das Man’ in Sein und Zeit. I also prefer not to capitalize ‘anyone’ in order to avoid any suggestion that it is some sort of reified, self-contained entity that exists over and above or apart from individual human beings.
- 8.
Tuomela 2002: Ch. 4.
- 9.
Interestingly, Tuomela notes that we-attitudes can be shared in turn in the I-mode or the we-mode (ibid.: Ch. 2).
- 10.
In other words, shared we-attitudes satisfy the condition of ‘common knowledge’. The concept of common knowledge is a technical term and refers to the epistemic situation of individuals in relation to each other’s intentional attitudes. Its generic definition is as follows: For any two agents A and B, there exists common knowledge that p among A and B if and only if A knows that p, B knows that p, A knows that B knows that p, B knows that A knows that p, and so on. It is easy enough to see how this definition can be iteratively applied to more than two individuals; see Gilbert 1996: 36n4.
- 11.
It seems that Tuomela’s view has become more anti-reductionist with age. One of his earliest papers on the nature of collective intentionality (Tuomela and Miller 1988) is clearly reductive in spirit; and he does not hesitate to use ‘building block’ talk by asserting in 2002 that, ‘We-attitudes of these kinds [i.e., we-intentions and we-beliefs] are the underlying building blocks of social practices, and they are also causally relevant to the initiation and maintenance of both social practices and social institutions.’ (2002: 3) By 2007, however, he writes that ‘the elements in my analysis [of collective intentionality] are not independently existing “building blocks” of joint intentions but are only analytically isolated parts that presuppose the whole of which they are parts’ (2007: 97).
- 12.
Tuomela 2002: 165.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid.: 127, emphasis in the original.
- 15.
Cf. the quotation cited above from Tuomela’s more recent work (2007: 97) that disavows the need for reduction in adequately explaining collective intentionality phenomena.
- 16.
Cf. Wittgenstein 2009: §132.
- 17.
Although Heidegger does not speak explicitly of roles in Sein und Zeit, it is fairly clear that he thinks other people typically show up and make sense in terms of what they do (‘[die Anderen] sind das, was sie betreiben [SZ 126]), insofar as they occupy and enact public roles of which others can also make sense in accordance with the normalized intelligibility that the ‘anyone’ supplies and maintains (SZ 127). For example, others show up at work (SZ 120) as craftsmen, the producers or deliverers of products or services, bookshop keepers, sailors (SZ 117f.), commuters of public transportation, or newspaper readers (SZ 126). In the 1925 lecture course that is published as History of the Concept of Time, which served as the penultimate draft of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger writes: ‘One [Man] is what one [man] does. The everyday interpretation of Dasein takes its horizon of interpretation and naming from what is of concern in each particular instance. One [Man] is a shoemaker, tailor, teacher, banker.’ (Heidegger 1992: 244, emphases in the German original). These are just a few examples of the average everyday way in which Dasein unthematically falls into or else assigns itself an unexceptional range of ‘for-the-sake-of-whichs’ (Worum-willen [SZ 84]). It ought to be generally speaking uncontroversial to understand and accept, as a simple matter of observation and brief reflection on how we encounter others in everyday life, that they and we ourselves primarily and mostly (zunächst und zumeist) show up and make sense in terms of the roles or positions that they and we each occupy and enact. I will elaborate this more below.
- 18.
Dreyfus 1991: 189–91. Understanding ‘projects the being of Dasein on the basis of its for-the-sake-of-which [i.e., its self-interpretations] just as primordially as on the basis of significance qua the worldliness of its current world. … Projection is the existential ontological makeup of the room for maneuver [Spielraum] of [Dasein’s] factical ability-to-be.’ (SZ 145)
- 19.
In what follows, whenever I italicize ‘anyone’, I am using it in Heidegger’s loaded use of this word that also expresses prescriptive undertones. When I do not italicize it, I am using it as this is standardly done in English. My interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of das Man has learned much from and builds upon (among others) the interpretations of Dreyfus 1991: Ch. 8 and 13; Boedeker 2001; Schatzki 1992, 2005; Carman 2003: Ch. 3.
- 20.
‘The expression “everydayness” means … a definite how of existence that predominates Dasein…. We have often used in the present analysis the expression “initially and mostly” [“zunächst und zumeist”]. “Initially” means: the way in which Dasein is “manifest” [i.e., shows up as making sense] in the with-one-another of publicness … “Mostly” means: the way in which Dasein, not always but “as a rule”, shows him- or herself for anyone [Jedermann].’ (SZ 370)
- 21.
‘The anyone is an existential and belongs as originary phenomenon to the positive makeup of Dasein…. Self-ownership [Das eigentliche Selbstsein] does not rest on an exceptional condition of the subject that is detached from the anyone, but is an existentiell modification of the anyone as one of its essential existentials.’ (SZ 129f., emphases in the German original) The ‘its’ at the end of the last sentence refers to human existence in general (Dasein or being-in-the-world), not to the anyone. As Heidegger also writes in his discussion of the existential of ‘falling’ (Verfallen): ‘What matters in falling concerns nothing else than the ability-to-be-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein-können], even when in the mode of undistinguishedness/unownedness [Indifferenz/Uneigentlichkeit]. Dasein can only fall, because what is at issue for it is its understanding-affective [verstehend-befindliche] being-in-the-world. Conversely, owned [eigentliche] existence is not anything that hovers above falling everydayness, but existentially only a modified seizure [Ergreifen] of the latter. … Falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself …’ (SZ 179, all emphases in the original; cf. SZ 383) I will explain the subtle distinction between ‘undistinguishedness’ (Indifferenz) and ‘unownedness’ (Uneigentlichkeit), both at the levels of textual interpretation and philosophical significance, in the next section.
- 22.
Dreyfus 1991: Ch. 8 and 13.
- 23.
I note in passing here that normativity and normalization are related but distinct phenomena. I examine their relationship at length in Koo 2011a: Ch. 5.
- 24.
Cf. Wittgenstein 2009: §§241–2.
- 25.
Heidegger 1992: 246, emphasis in the original. It is noteworthy that Heidegger’s elaboration of the phenomenon of publicness (Öffentlichkeit) in this lecture course, as well as in a later one (Heidegger 1996), both of which serve, as it were, as the historical ‘bookends’ of Sein und Zeit, are significantly more positive, evaluatively speaking, than his elaboration of the same in Sein und Zeit.
- 26.
It is in this precise sense that ‘the anyone-self, for the sake for which Dasein is in everyday life, articulates the referential nexus of significance’ (SZ 129).
- 27.
On my reading and reconstruction of his argument, he can only adequately support this strong claim by the end of his discussion in SZ §27 about the ambivalent significance of our everyday existence in the mode of the anyone in our lives.
- 28.
I have chosen in this paper, for both practical and philosophical reasons, to omit any discussion of the connection between Heidegger’s conception of human social existence and historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) in Ch. 5 of Division Two of Sein und Zeit. The practical reason is simply that doing so would have added to the already considerable length of this paper. The more important philosophical reason is my sense that Heidegger’s very brief discussion of that connection especially in §74 is rather underdeveloped or else needs to be carefully interpreted in light of his conception of ownedness (‘authenticity’) as forerunning resoluteness, owned (‘authentic’) temporality, and owned (‘authentic’) historicality. We should thus be wary of thinking that we can easily understand what he means by ‘destiny’ (Geschick), which according to him is ‘the happening of the community, of the people’ (das Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes) (SZ 384), or more generally any hint (for that is all there is) about what the nature of ‘authentic community’ can be (SZ 384f.). For instructive remarks about this issue, see especially Schatzki 1992: 90 and 2005: 242–44; and Richardson 2012: 191–97. Despite Heidegger’s use of notorious and politically loaded language in §74, much more would need to be said in my view if the account on offer there is meant to be informative for social ontology. I leave it to the informed reader to determine whether my omission here is a mistake.
- 29.
- 30.
Many critics of Heidegger also locate this negative view of the social as the root cause of Heidegger’s official support of Nazism in the early to mid-1930s and, even worse, his reprehensible failure to take moral responsibility for this support after World War II; see Habermas 1992. This is a charged and complicated issue that I cannot go into here.
- 31.
Rentsch 2000: 37, my translation.
- 32.
From this perspective, one can care for an individual by either ‘leaping in’ for her and thereby obscuring her possibility of coming to ‘own’ herself (the einspringend-beherrschende Fürsorge), or by ‘leaping ahead of’ that individual and thereby putting her in the position to achieve possible self-ownership (the vorspringend-befreiende Fürsorge).
- 33.
According to Habermas 1992, this is the major critique of Heidegger that critical theorists like Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas himself make of Heidegger.
- 34.
Here I have benefited from Carman’s lucid and instructive discussion of this issue; see Carman 2003: Ch. 6.
- 35.
This is often misleadingly translated into English (and French) as ‘authenticity’. Boedeker gives a convincing argument for why ‘self-ownership’ is the better translation; see his 2001: 96n35.
- 36.
Heidegger notes in passing that his phenomenological analysis of being-in-the-world in Division One examines Dasein’s understanding of the world insofar as this understanding is unowned (uneigentlich) and, indeed (zwar), genuine (echt) (SZ 146, 148; cf. already 12). This remark should receive more attention than it has gotten in most interpretations of Sein und Zeit because it reveals how we need to have a more nuanced understanding of ownedness and unownedness. (Dreyfus’s reading is one of the few exceptions here [1991: 192–4].) It is further textual evidence that we should keep separate for analytical purposes Dasein’s undistinguished understanding of the world from its unowned understanding of it.
- 37.
In fact, he notes (unfortunately only) in passing that besides the two extreme forms of caring for others that concern him, there exist many other mixed forms of sociality that go beyond the scope of his investigation (SZ 122).
- 38.
Consider, e.g., the self-understanding of the café waiter that Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness or the ‘selfless’ housewife that Betty Friedan describes in The Feminine Mystique.
- 39.
Rentsch’s work (1999) is interesting by working out what these positive forms of being-with-others are (among other consequences) from within a broadly Heideggerian framework. It is an exemplary case of how to ‘think with Heidegger against Heidegger’.
- 40.
Limitation of space here prevents me from saying more about the philosophical consequences of this important issue; see Koo 2011a: 40–8.
- 41.
It is crucial to keep in mind how these positions are exactly defined by Pettit; see my brief explication of them above at the beginning of Sect. 5.1.
- 42.
‘Dasein owns itself in the originary individualization of the resoluteness that is reticent and expects/demands anxiety for itself. [Das Dasein ist eigentlich selbst in der ursprünglichen Vereinzelung der verschwiegenen, sich Angst zumutenden Entschlossenheit.]’ (SZ 322, emphasis in the original German)
- 43.
In Heidegger’s own life, these idiosyncratic commitments had ethically and politically disturbing consequences, to say the least.
- 44.
Heidegger 1996: 106; cf. 101–10. All translations of this text into English are mine. In this text Heidegger, unlike in SZ, does not carefully distinguish between present-at-hand (vorhandene) and ready-to-hand (zuhandene) entities. In 1996 he tends to talk much more about our sharing in the unconcealment (truth) of the present-at-hand. But I think that since all his examples in this stretch of the text are of equipment (e.g., a piece of chalk, a sponge, a blackboard, chairs and tables, the lectern, the lecture hall, etc.), he has in view, generally speaking, our sharing in the unconcealment of entities (Seiendes) in general and of the ready-to-hand in particular (see 1996: 74–7). In any case, as far as I can tell, nothing philosophical turns on this loose use of his terminology in this stretch of the text.
- 45.
Ibid.: 101f., 104, 108.
- 46.
Ibid.: 129f., 133.
- 47.
Ibid.: 130–35.
- 48.
Ibid.: 134; cf. 137.
- 49.
Ibid.: 106.
- 50.
Ibid.: 101.
- 51.
Ibid.: 130; cf. 129, 133.
- 52.
The example he uses of two individuals engaged in shared cooperative activity of doing various things at their shared cottage that nevertheless aim at accomplishing the same goal is suggestive (ibid.: 92), if the thought expressed there is explicitly connected with the issues treated in this section.
- 53.
Ibid.: 141; cf. Heidegger 1992: 241.
- 54.
Schmid 2009: 171, all emphases in the original. Except for the description of Being and Time as being individualistic, I agree wholeheartedly with this important point.
- 55.
- 56.
Consider the title of Gilbert 2003.
- 57.
I thank Thomas Szanto, Alessandro Salice, and Hans Bernhard Schmid, the organizers of the workshop on ‘Social Reality: The Phenomenological Approach’ (at the University of Vienna, March 2013), for inviting me to be a presenter at it. This workshop certainly lived up to its billing by providing me with an opportunity both to think initially about my topic and subsequently getting numerous critical and constructive comments from the audience about many of its ideas as they were presented then. The final version of this paper has altered in a number of significant ways from its initial presentation at this workshop in light of those comments, for which I thank the audience. I thank especially Bernhard Schmid for his critical questions at my session and also in a number of periodic informal conversations on other occasions. Lastly, I also thank two anonymous reviewers of the penultimate draft of this paper for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
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Koo, JJ. (2016). Early Heidegger on Social Reality. In: Salice, A., Schmid, B. (eds) The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27692-2_5
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