What Gives? Heidegger and Dreyfus on the Event of Community

Abstract

“Custom is king of all,” Herodotus tells us in The History (3.38). While Hubert Dreyfus, as far as I know, makes no mention of this famous passage, the sense of nomos as “settled custom” (nenomistai) corresponds very closely with Dreyfus’ focus on the background practices of a specific historical community as the key to understanding Being in the world in Division I of Heidegger’s Being and Time. For Dreyfus, what has been the matter of thought, in both his interpretations of Heidegger and his own phenomenology in over five decades of work, has been the question of how the meaning of our world is given by a nexus of practices and awareness that flows beneath, or behind, our self-conscious, rational awareness. As Martin Woessner says in Heidegger in America, “Perhaps more than any other figure in American academic philosophy, Hubert L. Dreyfus has helped to carve out a secure place for Heidegger’s work in the United States” (Woessner 203).¹ Dreyfus has done this by applying Heideggerian insights to subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, expertise in fields such as nursing and piloting, and the application of ethical insight. The thread linking this work is the idea that coping, as manifested in our everyday practices, is what orients us to a shared world of meaning, in both things and actions, a coping that is always prior to rational analysis and the Cartesian faith that the self may be immediately transparent to itself.