Abstract
The critical analysis of habit is regularly complemented by scenarios of how to defy it. Heidegger’s conceptual pairing for taking on this twofold task is “everydayness” and “authenticity.” In this paper, his account is put to test. By choosing an unusual line-up of authors – Heidegger, Hegel, and Diderot –, it identifies three different strategies for overcoming the danger of being ridden by a type. They appeal to authenticity, universality, or individuality. After discussing Hegel’s and Diderot’s accounts, the paper turns to Heidegger’s confrontation between everydayness and authenticity and shows that it remains inconclusive. In order to create a bulwark against habit Heidegger establishes a link between authenticity and the anticipation of death which makes Dasein turn away from the “multiplicity of possibilities” and secures the “simplicity” of resoluteness. This total demolition of particularities and differences paves the way to a totalitarian conception of overcoming customs: The individual is prone to affirm a destiny marked by total homogeneity and equalization. The paper comes to the conclusion that, among the different readings of habit and its discontents, Diderot’s account is the most plausible.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Rousseau (1997: 50), the individual experiences “total alienation” when joining the social contract. This apparent loss is to be regarded as a gain of a kind or as a form of self-enhancement: the self-loss is compensated by the fact that the individual becomes a fully acknowledged member of the so-called “common self.” It is noteworthy that Hegel, in his early writings, renders Rousseauian “aliénation” as “Entäußerung” in German. The use of “Entfremdung” only gains momentum from the Phenomenology onwards and seems to be inspired by Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s “aliénation” as “Entfremdung” (cf. Dupré 1983: 19–21; see below).
- 2.
Hegel’s ambivalence comes to the fore in the following remark: “Now the thing is to breach this order of things, to change the world, to improve it […]. But in the modern world these fights are nothing more than ‘apprenticeship’, the education of the individual into the realities of the present, and thereby they acquire their true significance. For the end of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the subject sows his wild oats, builds himself with his wishes and opinions into harmony with subsisting relationships and their rationality, enters the concatenation of the world, and acquires for himself an appropriate attitude to it.” (Hegel 1988, vol. I: 593)
- 3.
“Aliénation de l’esprit” is rendered as “Entfremdung des Geistes” by Goethe and as “mental alienation” in the most recent English translation (Diderot 2004: 642; 2014: 69).
- 4.
I quote the Macquarrie&Robinson translation of Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) and refer to the page numbers of the original German edition that are also noted in the margin of the English version.
- 5.
McNeill translates “seines einzigen Vorbei” as “singular past,” but Heidegger clearly refers to the moment when life is over. I have adapted the citation accordingly.
- 6.
Cf. Wittgenstein 1969: 15e (§§ 96–7): “It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened and fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift.”
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Thomä, D. (2017). The Danger of Being Ridden by a Type: Everydayness and Authenticity in Context – Reading Heidegger with Hegel and Diderot. In: Schmid, H., Thonhauser, G. (eds) From Conventionalism to Social Authenticity. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56865-2_7
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