Anonymity, Mineness, and Agent Specificity: Pragmatic Normativity and the Authentic Situation in Heidegger’s Being and Time
Anonymity, Mineness, and Agent Specificity: Pragmatic Normativity and the Authentic Situation in Heidegger’s Being and Time
“California Heideggerianism,” as developed in the 1980‘s by Dreyfus, Haugeland, and Guignon, interprets Heidegger’s notion of the Anyone in Being and Time as a pattern of social normativity that establishes the contours of Dasein’s self-understanding and world. Specifically, the Anyone maintains a reservoir of “anonymous” or “generic” social roles, and individual cases of Dasein understand themselves by throwing themselves into one or several such social roles. Thus, the content of Dasein’s self-understanding is circumscribed by those possibilities of living on offer from Anyone. I argue that this reconstruction of the role of the Anyone is neither phenomenologically plausible nor exegetically required. To develop an alternative approach, I analyze the pragmatic normativity of those situations in which Dasein is called upon to deviate from everyday social norms. I draw upon Haugeland’s reconstruction of the phenomenon of conscience in Being and Time, which I argue can lead us to a conception of authentic self-understanding in which the content of self-understanding is neither some utterly novel and unprecedented form of originality nor provided by anonymous social norms. Rather, this owned content is the product of specifying impersonal possibilities of self-understanding that reside in the background culture in which one lives.
Keywords: Heidegger, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, John Haugeland, Normativity, Authenticity, Das Man
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