Is Dasein People? Heidegger According to Haugeland

Abstract

In an unfinished book manuscript and papers dating from 1982 to 2007, published and unpublished during his lifetime—collected here under the title he intended for the book, Dasein Disclosed—John Haugeland advances a highly original interpretation of Being and Time, centering on his unorthodox conception of what Heidegger meant by the term Dasein. On the standard reading, although the word is not synonymous with “person” or “human being,” it nevertheless refers to what those terms refer to, namely individual people like you and me. Haugeland maintains, instead, that it designates a historically concrete practice or “way of life” in which individuals—which he calls “cases of” Dasein—participate. I argue that the standard reading is correct—not obviously so, but for reasons of exegetical detail that have become clear only in light of this posthumously published volume. First, Haugeland’s interpretation leads him to equate two conceptions of ourselves that are and must be kept distinct in Heidegger’s ontology: the self as “I myself” and the self as “anyone” (das Man). Second, Haugeland’s claim that “others” is Heidegger’s generic terms for persons obscures the methodological orientation of Being and Time, namely, that it takes Dasein itself as both the agent and the witness—the source of phenomenological evidence or testimony—for the inquiry. Dasein, that is, being both the philosophical inquirer and the entity that calls itself “I,” whose being is being-with “others,” can be none other than the individual human being.