I have said that one of Haugeland’s indispensable contributions is his clear grasp of the methodological connection between Division I and Division II of Being and Time, the fact that “the grounding of ontical truth … can be transcendental only as existential” (DD, 220). Using a vocabulary that strays a bit from Haugeland’s own, I should like to phrase the “existential” part of this equation as the idea that the “I-myself” is a necessary condition for any understanding of being, thus including the kind of understanding of the being of entities on which truth claims rest. Phrased in this way, Haugeland’s analyses of existential concepts such as anxiety, death, and guilt represent a recovery, within Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism, of the transcendental role of the first-person stance, the “I think,” free of the Cartesian mentalism that identifies the first-person with consciousness.11 Haugeland is able to find philosophical
purchase here thanks to Heidegger’s idea that the “being of the ‘sum’”
(Heidegger 1962, 46; GA, 2:33)—the “I am”—is care (Sorge), that the modus existendi of the I-myself is to be an issue for myself, to be in question, to give a damn. “This,” as Haugeland notes, “is the most basic definition of Dasein;
all the others follow from it” (DD, 216).
Being an issue for myself is evident in everything I do and think, but it becomes explicit—hence also evident as a theme for those of us who engage in the project of elucidating our Dasein phenomenologically—in the experience of breakdown (existential “death”). If in its everydayness Dasein discovers itself in what it does—i.e., in its possibilities in the sense of abilities, skills, and practices—in breakdown it discovers itself as “primarily being-possible”
(Heidegger 1962, 183; GA, 2:191). Such being-possible, I-myself, is not a competence over this or that but what Heidegger terms “competence over … being as existing” (ibid.). As Haugeland shows, such competence is a form of
“originary self-responsibility—one that cannot be public but can only be taken over by an individual” (DD, 209). Thus, for Haugeland, a being capable of saying “I” is not one who is able to perform some distinctive cognitive act of self-identification but one who is able to commit to its own existing, to be responsible for it. “Existential commitment … is no sort of obligation”; it is
“not a communal status at all but a resilient and resolute first-person stance”
(HT, 341).
Haugeland offers penetrating analyses of what is involved in existential death, but he is more interested in what can result from it, namely, commitment as a form of owned (or authentic) existence. If we are to grasp the broader philosophical significance of Heidegger’s ontology, however, we need to tease out a fundamental feature of existence as it is manifest in breakdown itself.
Once we have gotten clear on this point, we will be able, in section 3, to appreciate Haugeland’s insight that existential commitment is no voluntaristic leap of faith but the essence of mind.
The most economical approach is to begin where Haugeland himself begins:
with the phenomenon of intentionality. For Haugeland, Heidegger’s break with Husserl lies in rejecting his claim that consciousness is originary intentionality.12 The semantic quality (or aboutness) of our experience cannot be understood as a function of synthetic relations among conscious acts, or Erlebnisse; the modalizations that belong to meaningful experience involve normative distinctions that reach into the temporal stream of consciousness from elsewhere. Laboring in the Sellarsian groves of Pittsburgh, Haugeland
leveraged the idea that intentionality involves a normative moment—the idea that mental content is not information but meaning—into what might seem to be a very non-Sellarsian position: it is not our rationality that is responsible for the normative ground of meaning; it is our responsibility for normativity that is the meaning of our rationality. Because being responsible is not an act of consciousness but competence over being as existing, a phenomenologically adequate account of intentionality requires clarifying the link between responsibility (commitment) and the first-person stance, the I-myself.
To better understand the role of the I-myself in the constitution of intentional content, we may contrast Haugeland’s account with one to which it is greatly indebted but with which it parts company on just this point. Hubert Dreyfus (1991) argues that the intentionality of experience—the intelligibility of things
—cannot be grounded in consciousness; meaning just ain’t in the head. Instead, following Heidegger, Dreyfus argues that the way things show up depends on Dasein’s practical coping—the skills, practices, and roles in which everyday Dasein finds itself engaged. It is my ability to make a birdhouse, for example, that allows entities to show up for me as hammers, nails, and lumber; and it is my facility in the practices of the academic world that allows things to show up as papers to be written or as colleagues to be flattered. The intentionality of practical coping cannot be understood in terms of mental representation, however; its meaning does not derive from a complex of propositional attitudes. Heidegger groups such skills and abilities under the collective term
“understanding,” where understanding is not “one kind of cognizing among others” but a kind of competence, “being a match” for something, being up to it (Heidegger 1962, 182–183; GA, 2:190–191). As a category of Dasein’s being, understanding is not something that Dasein exercises now and then; it is, rather, definitive of its to-be (modus existendi).
Thus, for instance, to understand oneself as a carpenter, philosopher, father, or friend is not to represent oneself under a certain description but to be able to be those things; that is, to act in greater or lesser conformity with the norms or rules that constitute them as the practices or roles they are. It is perhaps misleading to speak of rules here, since the norms in question need not be formulated or anywhere articulated.13 We might better speak of the “measures”
that are embedded in the practices themselves as the way “one” does such things. In Wittgensteinian fashion, Dreyfus holds that conformity to a way of doing things just is the ground of the normative appropriateness, suitability, or serviceability in light of which we can be intentionally directed toward things
as this or that. The “ultimate ‘ground’ of intelligibility is simply shared practices” (Dreyfus 1991, 157).
Haugeland starts from this picture and does not so much reject it as refine it in an absolutely crucial way, without which it is not a Heideggerian picture at all. Heidegger himself alerts us to this. Commenting on the novelty of his idea that intentionality is based on “transcendence”—that is, on what Being and Time calls “ability-to-be” (Seinkönnen) or understanding—Heidegger notes that such transcendence cannot be conceived as a kind of “intuition” in Husserl’s sense. It is not some sort of cognitive achievement. However, he continues, “Even less can it be packed into practical comportment, be it in an instrumental-utilitarian sense or in any other” (Heidegger 1984, 183; GA, 26:235). Haugeland helps us to see why this is so.14 An understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) cannot be explained in terms of the sort of competence exhibited in skills and practices alone, because such behavior can be characterized as skilled practices or abilities-to-be, in the relevant sense, only if it is carried out by an agent capable of what Haugeland calls “first-person involvement.” I will call such involvement “trying.” For instance, for something to be “playing chess,” it must be “trying to win” (HT, 340); it is not enough to move pieces around in a legal way. Further, “If you are to keep playing—you who are involved in this game as a player—then you must insist that both your own and your opponent’s moves be legal. This insistence on legality is a kind of first-person involvement that is even more fundamental to game playing than is trying to win” (HT, 340).
This last point is key: trying to be a carpenter, philosopher, or father presupposes the possibility of acting in light of norms rather than acting merely in conformity with norms, even though it need not involve explicitly representing such norms to oneself. As I read it, Haugeland’s concept of existential commitment captures just this point. But it entails a further point about the modus existendi of the entity so endowed: “trying” in the sense of first-person involvement—that is, practical coping, or trying to be something
—is possible only for a being who is also able not to be anything, one who can cease to act without thereby ceasing to exist, one whose trying extends to competence over existing itself. If practical coping is a way of establishing what I am (carpenter, philosopher, physicist), then the distinctively first-personal involvement that makes commitment what it is concerns not “what”
(kein Was) but what it is to be as such (sondern Sein als Existieren) (Heidegger 1962, 183; GA, 2:191). Here we find the post-Cartesian meaning
of I-myself.
Division I of Being and Time begins with an analysis of how things show up in my everyday being-in-the-world—namely, as embedded in holistic equipmental contexts governed by in-order-to relations. Zuhandenheit (availability), then, is the modus existendi of entities whose possible ways to fail depend on what they are good for, in the sense of what they are used for.
The norms that measure such success or failure are thus not intrinsic to what is available but derive from what Heidegger calls the “work” (1962, 99; GA, 2:94). In my current situation, for instance, things are showing up as available in relation to the work to be done, that is, suitable for writing a philosophy paper. The computer keyboard, the paper, pen, eyeglasses, books, desktop, and so on, are meaningful because they more or less successfully enable this work.
In contrast, the plug on the far wall, the chairs in the corner, my wife’s desk, and other such things in the environment (Umwelt) are not “available” in this sense. Just as it would be absurd to hold that the meaning of the computer keyboard, pen, paper, and other things with which I work is constituted by specific acts of consciousness aimed at them, so it would be absurd to say that everything that can be located in my vicinity right now is available—if, with Heidegger, we understand availability as a modus existendi whose intelligibility is governed by the work to be done. But what determines what the work to be done is?
For Heidegger, the work does not suffice to determine the normative in-order-to relations constitutive of availability because it is itself merely one more thing on hand, itself meaningfully there by the grace of some more encompassing in-order-to, some more encompassing work (1962, 99; GA, 2:94). Nothing about my wielding the pen, typing on the keyboard, looking up a citation in a book, printing out pages, and so on, makes it the case that I am writing a philosophy paper—exercising that particular skill, aiming toward that particular result or work—and not, say, making a work of art or just playing around. Rather, as Heidegger notes, meaning derives from the fact that the equipmental totality (including the work to be done) itself belongs to a Bewandtnisganzheit, or “relevance totality,” whose character as a determinate totality derives from that “for-the-sake-of-which” (Worumwillen) everything is being done. And that for the sake of which something is being done—what is at stake in what I am doing—is not of the same modus existendi (availability) as what is being done; it “always pertains to the being of Dasein”; it is “for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s being” (1962, 116; GA,
2:112–130). Methodologically, this means that the normative order on which practical comportment (doing) depends involves a possibility of Dasein’s being that is not, in turn, a kind of doing. This makes up what Heidegger calls Dasein’s understanding of its own to-be, competence over being as existing.
When this particular competence is isolated phenomenologically, as it is in breakdown, we learn why it is that “transcendence”—the ground of intentionality—cannot be “packed into practical comportment” (Heidegger 1984, 183; GA, 26:235).
For instance, what I am doing with my pen, keyboard, and books is writing a philosophy paper rather than making an artwork not because any of the skills I am exercising necessarily belong to one rather than the other, but because I am trying to be a philosopher (what it means to be a philosopher is at stake in what I am doing), and I am not trying to be an artist. Trying must not be understood as a kind of mental intention, which would reintroduce the cognitivism Heidegger wanted to escape.15 No amount of intending to be a philosopher can make it the case that I am trying to be one if I am unable to exercise the relevant abilities and skills, though I can play at being one.16 But what is essential to trying—to exercising competence over being a philosopher, lover, father, or any other such particular Seinkönnen—cannot be reduced to the exercise of any set of practical skills or abilities. Merely acting in accord with such norms cannot constitute me as trying to be a philosopher, any more than the mere intention could. I can act in accord with them quite accidentally, as when I am playing, or when the behavior they call for just happens to be identical to that called for by being an artist of a certain sort.
But if this is so, then the intelligibility that beings exhibit in the analyses presented in Division I of Being and Time rests on a condition that is not analyzed in Division I, a condition without which it is not possible to understand how behavior that happens to be in accord with norms can yield a world, a determinate totality of significance (Bedeutungsganzes) in which things do not merely appear but show themselves as the things they are. What, then, is competence over being as existing, if not a kind of mental intention or practical comportment?
Here the importance of Haugeland’s methodological understanding of the existential elements of Division II comes into view. The problem that Division I leaves us with is not the problem of accounting for the norms that govern the practices in which the meaning (being) of entities can show itself. Division I suffices to show that such norms belong to those very practices, to the
“public,” to the historically variable forms of das Man. Rather, the problem lies in accounting for the normative force of such norms, how they can get a grip at all such that anything—including Dasein itself as philosopher, father, or physicist—can be measured by them and itself be said to live up to those norms or fail to do so. If Dasein is the being through whom behavior takes on the normative shape of a practice, this must be because beholdenness to norms is intrinsic to its being, because Dasein cannot be Dasein without being concerned with success or failure at being, without being an issue for itself.
But nowhere in Division I has this been demonstrated, since Dasein shows up there only as the “one-self” (das Man-selbst), a self who is always engaged in some specific ability-to-be, some publicly recognizable role, always doing something. And though in doing something it is always an issue for itself, Dasein can easily “be” without being an issue for itself in just that way, since it can choose not to be a father, philosopher, or physicist. Such roles are ultimately as extrinsic to Dasein as the property of being suitable is to the pen I am writing with. And for all that Division I tells us, beholdenness to norms (commitment to holding oneself and others to the constitutive standards of the practices in which one is engaged; concern for successfully negotiating what is at stake in the practice) may not be intrinsic to Dasein considered as I-myself.
What must be shown is that I-myself cannot be without being beholden to norms; that there are stakes merely in being at all; that, in addition to possessing competence over existing as a father or a philosopher (competence that I might equally not possess), I always exercise a certain competence over existing as such.
Haugeland understands how this possibility is attested in the phenomenon of existential breakdown, but to fully appreciate the deepest methodological point, we need to move a step beyond Haugeland’s text. In existential death—
with its attendant mood of anxiety, and as articulated in conscience—my practical comportment collapses.17 Because I no longer gear into the world—
that is, have become affectively “disengaged” from my involvements—the norms to which I have been beholden hitherto, which have thereby defined who I am, become inert, lose their normative force; in Angst, I am no longer moved by them. Nevertheless, I am “given to understand” something about myself in such a condition, thanks to the way my being is “articulated” in the call of conscience—namely, as “guilty” (schuldig) (1962, 326; GA, 2:373).
Heidegger glosses this idea with the claim that, in conscience, I am called to
“take over being-a-ground” (1962, 330; GA, 2:377), which, as I understand it,
means that I am called to responsibility or answerability (Verantwortlichkeit).
As Haugeland puts it, this sort of “being responsible … must be something over and above that invariable responsibility that always characterizes Dasein
—something that is a possibility for it but not necessary” (DD, 209). Taking over being-a-ground is itself a project, an ability-to-be, which can succeed or fail right along with the other projects in which I am engaged (father, teacher, physicist): the project of being I-myself. This is what I discover about myself in breakdown or existential death as the “possibility of no longer being able-to-be-there” (1962, 294; GA, 2:333). That such an “absolute impossibility of Dasein” is possible18—that it is a way for me to be—means that even when I am no longer something, I still am, and in such a way that a normative distinction between success and failure can still get a grip. How so?
Haugeland’s analysis of existential death entails that even when I am not engaged in doing anything, I am still an issue for myself, still responsible for being. In existential death, I am for-the-sake-of my ownmost self. But what is at stake in such selfhood is no particular “what”; rather, it is my ability to take over my factical situation in light of the normative, that is, in light of the idea of measures of better and worse. This is what makes responsibility for the norms and stakes of my roles and practices—commitment as a “resilient and resolute first-person stance” (HT, 341)—itself possible. It is not that my ownmost self is normatively prescribed in terms of some particular role or roles; rather, it is answerable for what presents itself to me as normative in such particular roles. In being-a-ground I commit myself to the norms of some practice (say, physics or fatherhood), making them my reasons; and because I do so, what is at issue in that practice can show itself as assessable in normative terms. But
Haugeland’s analysis of existential death entails that even when I am not engaged in doing anything, I am still an issue for myself, still responsible for being. In existential death, I am for-the-sake-of my ownmost self. But what is at stake in such selfhood is no particular “what”; rather, it is my ability to take over my factical situation in light of the normative, that is, in light of the idea of measures of better and worse. This is what makes responsibility for the norms and stakes of my roles and practices—commitment as a “resilient and resolute first-person stance” (HT, 341)—itself possible. It is not that my ownmost self is normatively prescribed in terms of some particular role or roles; rather, it is answerable for what presents itself to me as normative in such particular roles. In being-a-ground I commit myself to the norms of some practice (say, physics or fatherhood), making them my reasons; and because I do so, what is at issue in that practice can show itself as assessable in normative terms. But