Ethics Without Flaws (Heidegger Reexamined: Part 2)
Continuation of the post on the limitation of Heidegger's early philosophy.
This post is a continuation of a previous post, please refer to it for completion of argument.
Much has been written about ethics, or its absence, in Heidegger. About the absence of ethics in his work - this was written mainly by people who jumped too quickly to conclusions without waiting for his lectures to be published. In fact, as I mentioned in the previous post, Heidegger wrote extensively about Aristotle's ethics, and one could say he tried to base much of his fundamental ontology on it - but with a twist. What is this twist?
Well, Aristotelian ethics is famously teleological. It assumes a conception of nature as having embedded purposes for different living beings, and humans are no different in this respect. Various modern philosophies have typically tried to find a substitute for this teleological character in will. Will, of first or second order, is supposed to function as the anchoring point that allows us to establish ethics completely. However, ethics of will in its various forms has encountered different objections: primarily, it seems that ethics of will fails to explain why we want what we want, or better yet, why we should want what we want. Nevertheless, Heidegger took another option. Instead of assuming that humans have a purpose or a fundamental will, for Heidegger, the purposive horizon of humans is determined by temporality. Temporality bounds humans against the death of the self, which constitutes their most intimate possibility. As we have seen, this kind of position presents peculiar problems that we have already addressed.
For instance, with the girl who attempted suicide in adolescence and was suddenly prevented from doing so. Like ethics of will, Heidegger's ethics seems unable to anchor a theory of error in the perception of the purposes humans aspire to. If a person has reached their decision authentically, there is no ontic factor that might change the person's ontological self-understanding in a way that would turn the decision into a mistake. As we've seen, this stems from his perception that the decision should frame life as a zero-sum game, win or lose. The implicit claim here is that a person is capable of reaching such a decision, something we might want to doubt, but more than that: if the person has reached such a decision, it cannot be wrong. The only option Heidegger considers as an alternative is to look at life as a kind of art (techne): in art, to achieve optimal results, we make mistakes and experiment repeatedly to reach a higher ability. Heidegger's intuition is that life is not a game of this sort. We don't have lives "to experiment with" but only to live them, which means that art is the wrong mode through which to examine human lives.
However, Heidegger does seem to offer us a kind of theory of error. Gadamer articulated this concisely in his addition to Truth and Method under the title "Hermeneutics and Historicism" (1965), but in fact this is the same argument that Heidegger makes in several places regarding the temporalization of temporality, the reflexive nature of the ontological structure of humans. I'll quote a bit. The context in which Gadamer speaks is related to Bultmann's theology, but as we'll see, it goes beyond it. Please excuse the long quote, but as we'll see, Gadamer tries to directly address the problem we've posed, and in Heidegger I couldn't find an explicit discussion of the role of temporalization of temporality as part of correcting self-understanding.
Self-understanding refers to a historical decision and not to something one possesses and controls. Bultmann has constantly emphasized this. Hence it is quite wrong to understand Bultmann’s concept of fore-understanding—being caught up in prejudices—as a kind of preknowledge. This is a purely hermeneutical concept, developed by Bultmann on the basis of Heidegger’s analysis of the hermeneutical circle and the general fore-structure of human Dasein. It refers to the openness of the horizon of inquiry within which alone understanding is possible, but it does not mean that one’s own fore-understanding should not be corrected by the encounter with the word of God (or, indeed, with any other word). On the contrary, the purpose of this concept is to display the movement of understanding as precisely this process of correction. It must be noted that this “corrective” process is, in the case of the call of faith, a specific one that is of hermeneutic universality only in its formal structure.
This is where the theological concept of self-understanding comes in. This idea also has obviously been derived from Heidegger’s transcendental analysis of existence. The being that is concerned with its being presents itself, through its understanding of being, as a means of access to the question of being. The movement of the understanding of being is itself seen to be historical, as the basic nature of historicity. This is of decisive importance for Bultmann’s concept of self-understanding. [...]
What is extra nos [=consciousness, thought], other than us and not at our disposal, is part of the inevitable essence of this self-understanding. The self-understanding that we acquire in constantly new experiences of the other and of others remains, from a Christian point of view, non-understanding in an essential sense. All human self-understanding has its absolute boundary in death. This really cannot be used as a serious argument against Bultmann (Ott, p. 163) in an attempt to find a sense of “conclusion” in Bultmann’s idea of self-understanding. As if the self-understanding of faith were not precisely the experience of the eventual failure of human self-understanding. This experience of failure need not necessarily be understood in Christian terms. Human self-understanding is deepened by every such experience. In every case it is an “event” and the concept of self-understanding a historical concept. [1]
What Gadamer describes here is a kind of inevitable theory of error that the model of fundamental ontology might provide. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that all our understanding of ourselves as the future horizon of our activity (the for-the-sake-of-something) eventually becomes part of our given past (Geworfenheit) - until we reach the final expression of the failure to hold our own future in our personal death. Until then, we can certainly "correct" ourselves, and each new decision of ours will proceed from the assumption that our previous decision becomes a historical event for us.
In this sense, the fundamental openness that characterizes Being-there (Dasein/human) certainly allows for a reappropriation of ourselves that can be described in terms of correction. But it seems to me that this is misleading. The new experiences that undermine our grasp of our own future are perhaps a fact that fundamental analysis can account for through the temporalization of the self as long as it is still in a position that allows some reappropriation, but to the extent that authenticity has indeed been achieved - the openness to new insights that might undermine it inevitably becomes a kind of inauthentic understanding, a form of falling (Verfallen). At least within the framework of fundamental analysis (and we're leaving the discussion of the later Heidegger aside, as mentioned), this is not really a change of our self-understanding for a more successful one.
Among other things, we can and should understand the limitation of the very process of temporalization of the self in light of our example of the adolescent girl. The absolute limit that Gadamer also recognizes here is death. In an event where death is accidentally prevented, as we described, the reappropriation of the self is in a decisive sense not of the "selfhood" that was authentic before. Because again, that selfhood as authentic embraced personal death. Reappropriation cannot appropriate it as such. It must understand it as a grasp of the then-future personal death that failed. But if it is a grasp of personal death that failed, then it is not authentic. The reason it is not authentic is not found in the self-understanding the adolescent girl had when she tried to commit suicide, but in an external event. Hence, the inauthenticity of the girl when she tried to commit suicide cannot be explained only in terms of self-understanding, and consequently, self-understanding as presented by fundamental analysis cannot really support temporalization of the self if it involves an authentic understanding of the self appropriating an authentic understanding of the self. It must turn at least one side of the equation into inauthentic for this process to function.
This is in fact the account that fundamental analysis must give in first-person terms to the change of self-understanding. It necessarily has to "fall" into a certain form of first-person reunderstanding of our previous selfhood to which it will relate in terms of an alien third-person. The reference is in fact to our past self as an "other" no less than a representative of the establishment, to use the intuition of the sixties, might be between us a representative of "the They." The girl will need to perceive her past self as something foreign to her, as part of her falling. This means that in practice, an account of an authentic change of self-understanding to another authentic self-understanding is not possible here. To understand this limitation, we can use MacIntyre's critique of Williams.
In his book Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016), MacIntyre presents an interesting argument against Williams, which, due to the complexity of Williams' own thought, I will use despite having doubts about how faithfully it represents Williams himself - for reasons we have already seen.[2] In MacIntyre's discussion, Williams is presented precisely as one who believes that our right reasons for ethical action always begin and return in their justification to a first-person reference to what truly matters to us.
What MacIntyre seeks to show is that there is a problem of a different kind in this form of thinking, which we saw in the example of the adolescent girl. There is always the possibility that we, even when we have put ourselves through all the checks that our practical decision is truly mine in a radical and authentic way, are deceiving ourselves. From a prism that takes into account only first-person thinking, we will never be able to fix this problem. MacIntyre suggests that the only way we can escape this conflict is through the resources that an author whom Williams values, D.H. Lawrence, provides. In D.H. Lawrence's novels, we are actually exposed, according to MacIntyre, to a whole catalog of characters who act from deep internal conviction. But the third-person narrative of these characters allows us, the readers, to see exactly how these characters deceive themselves. As if we get a perspective superior to theirs through which we are able to see their limitations, even though ethically they are seemingly acting exactly as they should act. But what is the practical, or ethical, expression of this insight?
The problem, in terms that MacIntyre describes, is presented through an example of a woman who needs to look back at her life at a decision she made to be involved in a high-risk life, like being a musician, political activist, or circus performer, instead of something with a more secure future like a local government clerk, teacher, or cleaning worker. MacIntyre points out the range of possibilities available to her, which is of course not exhaustive: (1) to be satisfied with her past decision, to identify that despite having good reasons to choose otherwise, from her knowledge of herself she would have regretted it if she had chosen differently. (2) to be frustrated with herself, to regret and live reluctantly with what she chose then. (3) she will look back and understand that she made the right choice - and her choice was indeed right - but identify that she still has longings for the life she didn't live. (4) she will look back and understand that she made the right choice, but in fact she didn't make the right choice, and her longings for the life she didn't live are a symptom of this.
MacIntyre's argument about how to identify which of these retrospective possibilities, or from the outset, are the right ones to choose between for the understanding of the self is complex. The question is how to obtain a third-person perspective on the self that will allow me to avoid the possibility that I am deceiving myself. MacIntyre's answer is basically that I should be able, under ideal conditions, to consult with a diverse set of others who have sufficient familiarity with me to help me understand myself. On the face of it, this is an answer that there is no reason Williams would not accept according to MacIntyre. But the part that Williams would reject is this: this consultation process assumes that we are trying to reach an understanding not only of what is right for me personally and radically, but what is right for "anyone" who would be positioned as I am positioned, living the life I have lived and feeling as I feel. We need, in other words, to assume here objectivity precisely of the kind that Heidegger emphatically rejects as a formation of modern subjectivity:
[...] But what his [William’s] account of deliberation does preclude is this: that in the end I have to arrive at the right decision not just for me, here, now, but for anyone so situated. The objectivity that dependence on others can achieve is indeed objectivity, a rescuing of the agent from imprisonment within her or his subjectivity. I am not of course maintaining that we are all equally dependent on others for the kind of self-knowledge that we so often need in making crucial decisions. I am asserting that for all of us in much of our practical deliberation, we need to have a justified confidence in the judgments of others on whom we stand in close relationships, if we are to have a justified confidence in our own first person judgments. Nor is it the case that it is only our understanding of ourselves that may be and often needs to be transformed through our interactions with such others. What we learn from them may include how to think about the objects of our desires in new and more adequate ways, so that on the one hand our desires are changed and on the other we envisage the alternatives between which we have to choose somewhat differently.
[...]
So our imagined agent, confronted by her choice between alternative careers, needs to consider what her social relationships are and have been, something that would not have been suggested to her by Williams’ misleading claim that “Practical thought is radically first personal.” Indeed, she will now have to think in terms that will put her even further at odds with Williams. For if the strong thesis that I have proposed is true, then an agent whose motivational set – to use Williams’ term – does not allow that agent to learn in appropriate ways from others will be defective as an agent. For she will be apt to be motivated by desires for objects that she has only bad reasons or insufficiently good reasons to desire. [3]
The kind of objectivity that MacIntyre talks about here is certainly not only avoided by Williams as he presents him, but also by Heidegger of fundamental ontology. What MacIntyre describes here is that in certain cases we should trust others about ourselves more than our own understanding of ourselves. If we return to the discussion of Heidegger, such a thing is certainly an expression of a fallen understanding of ourselves of the kind we have already mentioned. This means that in order to function as successful practical agents, we always need to some extent to maintain not only a decision about what the good life is for us, but an active and real discussion of what the good life is. For Heidegger, in practice, the first, if we take it seriously, pushes out the possibility of the second. Moreover: discussion must assume, at least operatively, that a better understanding of my self than that which I have achieved so far is possible. This possibility, if taken seriously, suggests to us that Heidegger's concept of proper practical deliberation that we have seen is flawed. Our alternatives are not between taking our lives as an object for technical manipulation or taking them seriously as ones in which we can only fail or succeed in light of a decision we have made. Practical deliberation must include within it a theoretical component that might look at our lives as if from the outside - and in this sense, Heidegger's discussion of Plato's Sophist that we have already seen is incomplete. Aristotle's hierarchy between types of wisdom that he tries to appropriate there to his own philosophy does not work.
In an anachronistic conceptualization, we would want to say that Aristotle's ethics works with something like human interest. We have some fundamental interest that our lives be happy. Therefore in the Eudemian Ethics, which we noted Heidegger shamefully ignores, Aristotle actually raises the discussion of whether a person needs a calculated purpose for their life or not. Of course, Aristotle believes that living life without such a purpose is very great foolishness. But what Aristotle does not think is that this purpose is infallible: it needs to be attentive to the dialectic of the discussion of the good life and be able to change according to this discussion. In fact, as he says in the Nicomachean Ethics, the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be capable of this discussion. In contemporary terms, we would want to say that the ideal of the happy life plays for Aristotle as the regulative idea of this kind of discussion. Does this turn life into a game?
This seems too hasty a conclusion. While changing the purpose we aim for is certainly possible without our natural interest changing, it does not yet reflect that what we have done in our lives until now was simply "experimenting" with something in which we have no real interest. On the contrary. One can certainly think that if we are not willing to submit the purpose we set for ourselves to examination, then we do not think that purpose would survive examination. If we are willing to submit it to examination only "as if," chances are we are afraid to do so in reality. This kind of cowardice certainly treats life as a game, but as a game that we are simply afraid to think we haven't yet understood how to play.
[1] 1998, 544-555.
[2] 157-163.
[3] 162-163.