Abstract
The Hegelian concept of recognition ties the ethics of self-interpretation to an ethic of self-realisation. However, it rests on essentialist claims about the nature and possibility of self-knowledge that are unlikely to be sympathetically viewed in the generally liberal and anti-essentialist atmosphere of contemporary applied and professional ethics. This chapter aims to show how a non-essentialistic alternative might be developed, which preserves some key features of Hegel’s model, on the basis of Heidegger’s account of authenticity. Heidegger can be said to take a sceptical essentialist view of human nature. Just as knowledge remains an issue for the epistemological sceptic, even while he rejects it, so Heidegger’s approach to the question of what it is to be human acknowledges that our own being never ceases to be an issue for us, while recognising that to embrace any of the (ultimately instrumentally derived) self-conceptions that are available to us would be inauthentic.
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Notes
- 1.
Cooper 1990, pp. 34–6.
- 2.
- 3.
Kripke 1980, pp. 111–5.
- 4.
The Socratic appeal to forms to explain claims about e.g. piety is a familiar example of this kind of appeal. See for example Plato 1954.
- 5.
See for example Popper 1945, pp. 9–21.
- 6.
Putnam 1993, p. 155.
- 7.
This is not to say that all such disputes are always scientifically resolvable, or that they never have an impact outside of academic circles. Kuhn (1962) discusses a number of historical cases in which a dispute about definitions turned out to be irresolvable, and was ended only by a ‘paradigm shift’ in the relevant science, which was at least as much a social and psychological shift as a scientific one. A more recent illustration is provided by the disagreements among astronomers during the summer of 2006 concerning the definition of a planet. These had the effect of pushing the number of recognised planets in the solar system from the traditional 9, to 12, and then down to 8, all within the space of a couple of weeks.
- 8.
This is a core theme of Husserl 1970a. It is picked up and developed by the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School, in particular by Marcuse and Habermas .
- 9.
Husserl 1970a, part I, section 2, and passim.
- 10.
Ibid., part I, section 5.
- 11.
Ibid., part II, sections 16–21; part III A, sections 28–32. See also Husserl 1995, Introduction and First Meditation.
- 12.
- 13.
Husserl 1995, p. 24.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 15.
Ibid., Second Meditation.
- 16.
Ibid., section 8. See also Husserl 1982, pp. 57–62.
- 17.
Husserl 1995, p. 33.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 74.
- 19.
Husserl 1964, p. 6. Husserl’s methodological innovations were, I should emphasise, far more elaborate than the above sketch can hope to convey – though a sketch is sufficient for present purposes.
- 20.
Husserl 1995, section 20. See also p. 65: ‘Each object that the ego ever means, thinks of, values, deals with, likewise each that he ever phantasies or can phantasy, indicates its correlative system, and exists only as the correlate of its system’.
- 21.
Ibid., sections 25–8, 58–62.
- 22.
Husserl 1970b, pp. 632–3.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 780–2.
- 24.
Ibid., Investigation 6.
- 25.
Not the least of these is that being seems (as noted by both Aristotle and Brentano ), to have a number of different senses, which are not related to each other in any obvious way.
- 26.
Husserl 1970b, p. 780.
- 27.
- 28.
Heidegger 1988, section 9c.
- 29.
Heidegger 1992, sections 11a, 11b.
- 30.
Heidegger 1962, section 43a.
- 31.
Heidegger 1988, p. 70.
- 32.
Husserl 1995, section 20.
- 33.
Heidegger 1988, p. 267.
- 34.
Correspondingly, the traditional metaphysical distinction between essence and existence is undermined, at least insofar as it rests on the claim that essence and existence are fundamentally distinct.
- 35.
Heidegger 1962, part 1.
- 36.
Ibid., section 9.
- 37.
Ibid., pp. 194–5.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 33–4.
- 40.
Ibid., section 12.
- 41.
See above Section 7.1, and Cooper 1990, pp. 34–6.
- 42.
- 43.
Heidegger 1962, section 40.
- 44.
Ibid., sections 39–41.
- 45.
Ibid., section 15. The immediacy of the kind of understanding we have of a tool in actual use is vividly captured in the Odyssey book 19 ‘Iron itself can draw men’s hands’ (Homer 1965).
- 46.
- 47.
Heidegger 1962, section 16.
- 48.
Ibid., section 17.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 154.
- 51.
Heidegger 1962, pp. 153, 163: ‘[W]ith the equipment to be found when one is at work, those Others for whom the work is destined are “encountered too”. If this is ready-to-hand, then there lies in the kind of Being which belongs to it (that is, in its involvement) an essential reference to possible wearers, for instance, for whom it should be “cut to the figure”’; ‘In that with which we concern ourselves environmentally, the Others are encountered as what they are; they are what they do’. See also Heidegger 1988, pp. 289–90.
- 52.
See Heidegger 1977b. The pervasive modern interpretation of nature as nothing but a resource is a key theme of this later essay.
- 53.
Heidegger 1962, section 15.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 55.
See Heidegger 1977b.
- 56.
Heidegger 1962, section 15. The arrangement of the workshop, or a constellation of resources, comes to imply a form of life.
- 57.
See Heidegger ’s discussion of ‘Inauthentic self-understanding by way of things’ in Heidegger 1988, pp. 289–90.
- 58.
Ibid. See also Heidegger 1962, section 27.
- 59.
- 60.
Heidegger 1962, sections 54–60.
- 61.
Such at least is what an existentialist reading of Heidegger would tend to make of, for example, traditional Aristotelian conceptions of human flourishing , and Hegel ’s conception of self-actualisation in the ethical state.
- 62.
Heidegger 1962, p. 90.
- 63.
To be clear: the claim here is that objectification , as previously discussed, is a form of inauthenticity . I do not mean to suggest that all forms of inauthenticity can be analysed as forms of objectification.
- 64.
Heidegger 1962, p. 107, and passim.
- 65.
Ibid., sections 26, 27.
- 66.
Ibid., section 27.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 68.
Though not necessarily in all cases, for example prostitution .
- 69.
None of which should be taken to imply that there do not exist even more powerful ethical reasons for avoiding the total instrumentalisation of human beings than those associated with the avoidance of objectification . To point out that objectification may be in evidence even in cases in which the victim can be shown not to have been treated as a mere means is not to deny that treating someone as a mere means may be the more serious ethical failing. My concern is that the significance of objectification tends to be overlooked. I have no intention of suggesting that it is the only, or even the most serious, moral wrong connected with the instrumentalisation of persons.
- 70.
As it would not for, for example, a pragmatist, who has a neat reductive story to tell about what knowledge really is, which supposedly settles the issue. See e.g. Rorty 1989.
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Lucas, P. (2011). Heidegger and Authenticity. In: Ethics and Self-Knowledge. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1560-8_8
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