Becoming a person: Hermeneutic phenomenology's contribution

Abstract

Hermeneutic phenomenology sets out to describe human beings as they show up in “average everydayness,” prior to high-level theorizing and reflection. From this standpoint, human existence is found to be meaning- and value-laden, and so in need of interpretation in order to be properly understood. The description of everydayness leads to a critique of the “substance ontology” presupposed by many natural sciences, and instead characterizes a human being as an “event” or “life story” unfolding between birth and death. Working within this approach to understanding humans as events, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) gives an account of what he calls an “authentic” (literally, “proper” or “owned”) individual. This account gives us a distinctive way of understanding what it is to be a “person” in the fullest sense of this word. A person, on this account, is an individual who can assess her primary desires in the light of “higher” or “second-order” motivations concerning what sort of person she wants to be. As a participant in a social context, she is indebted to the historical tradition of a community for her possibilities of self-interpretation and self-evaluation. In a social context, she can be a “respondent,” answerable for what she does. And she is equipped to be an effective moral agent in facing situations demanding decisions. An authentic individual or “person” has a kind of freedom that makes meaningful choice possible.