Hi John,

I have taken the time to read your Heidegger/Das Man piece all the way through, and I have a few overall reactions and concerns I’d like to share. First, thanks for sharing your engagement with Sein und Zeit, specifically your thoughts on the preparatory existential analytic of Da-sein, Division One, I-V. Unfortunately, since I haven’t the time to do a refresher close reading of the Heidegger just now, and I haven’t read the work by Dreyfus that you are interrogating in your piece, my comments are given here in a summary form.

My basic concern is that your reading of Sein und Zeit, while critical of the work by Hubert Dreyfus, yet remains too much its captive for my tastes. Heidegger is at great pains to make clear that he is not attempting to write just another philosophical anthropology (Letter on Humanism, etc.).

The primary intention of the overall analytic of Da-sein as Care is to find the right approach to asking the question of Being, the Seinsfrage, in order to found the project of a fundamental ontology. As a result, one has to always keep in mind how the existential analytic of Da-sein is first and foremost about exposing what Da-sein, understood through the existentialia of Care, tells us about Da-sein as a primordial mode of disclosure. We need to keep in mind why Heidegger is interested in the “who” of Da-sein specifically in order to grasp existentiality as (thrown) facticity.

So my contention is that without due consideration of Da-sein as Care (VI) and the discussions of Da-sein’s possibility for being a whole and being toward death and resoluteness (Division Two, I, II) and then the multi-part analysis of Temporality, it is very difficult if not impossible to understand what is meant in and through the characterization of inauthentic (average everyday) Da-sein and authentic Da-sein (resolute, being toward death).

Put in less schematic terms, my point is that speculations about “inauthenticity as a normative mood” or “Das Man as bad” or again, wanting to “preserve a happy ending for Da-sein” or contrasting Das Man with authentic Being-in-the-world with others (mit-sein) so that there is an efficacious interplay between average everyday Da-sein and other modes of being in the world, and especially discussions of morally normative considerations, all smack of philosophical anthropology.

Perhaps you will say that this is all Dreyfus, and that it is from this that you are trying to separate yourself. If so, I am willing to grant that this is what you intend. Where you seem to be staking out your own position, however, you write, “If Heidegger has achieved his aims in Being & Time of providing a comprehensive analytic of the Being of the beings that we ourselves are, the ontology should be varied and robust enough to cover all possible extremities of ‘human’ experience.” Several issues with this. First, Being and Time as published was only the first half of the intended scope — Heidegger intended to write a full account of Time and Being, but abandoned it in what is called “the turning” as too transcendental, in favor of a the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics. Second, as mentioned earlier, to say that Heidegger intended to “cover all possible extremities of human experience” is once again, to descend into philosophical anthropology.

Also, I don’t think your accounts of resoluteness and the call of conscience, and de-cision (by which you appear to attempt to distance yourself from Dreyfus) go very far either. Here we arrive at the other major problem, which derives from the same root (using the preparatory analytic as a standalone jumping off point).

These things all have a profoundly political valence. You just can’t talk about them, either internally to the work, or in a broader context, without situating them within a discussion of the political in Heidegger. Once again, the key sections are in Division Two, especially in section V, 72–77 on Temporality and Historicality. What Heidegger has in mind really has nothing to do with how individual Da-seins can living properly authentic lives. As one of my former teachers Johannes Fritsche has written, “…Being and Time makes a direct case for…the National Socialists and their Gemeinschaft, namely the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people.”

I really recommend you have a look at Fritsche’s book, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time. His concluding chapter is about American interpretations of Being and Time (especially Wolin and Dreyfus) and how he thinks it is extremely difficult for Americans to understand Heidegger’s notion of historicality and authentic Da-sein. In a long footnote to his final chapter, he takes specific aim at Dreyfus’s treatment of distancing. He writes, “It is only a mild exaggeration to say that from Dreyfus’s analysis one gets the impression that Heidegger was analyzing the strategies of an ironic Romantic or of a dandy who distances himself not only from the They but from the content of his own choice as well…for Dreyfus, under the gaze of authentic Da-sein all traditional practices bleach out and lose their intrinsic meaning…Heidegger himself would surely have subsumed such behavior under Abständigkeit (distantiality) as a mode of ordinary and inauthentic Dasein.”