Abstract
One unresolved dispute within Heidegger scholarship concerns the question of whether Dasein should be conceived in terms of narrative self-constitution. A survey of the current literature suggests two standard responses. The first correlates Heidegger’s talk of authentic historicality with that of self-authorship. To the alternative perspective, however, Heidegger’s talk of Dasein’s existentiality, with its emphasis on nullity and unattainability, is taken as evidence that Dasein is structurally and ontologically incapable of being completed via any life-project. Narrativity imports into Being and Time commitments concerning temporality, selfhood, and ethics, which Heidegger rejects. Although both positions find good exegetic support for their conclusions, they can’t both be right. In this article, I navigate a path between these two irreconcilable positions by applying insights derived from recent debates within Anglo-American literature on personal identity. I develop an alternative thesis to Narrativism, without rejecting it outright, by arguing that Dasein can be analysed in terms of what I call “narratability conditions.” These allow us to make sense of the prima facie paradoxical notion of “historicality without narrativity.” Indeed, rather than reconciling the two standard positions, I hold that the tension between them says something important about Dasein’s kind of existence. Thus I conclude that while the narrativist question “Who ought I to be?” is perfectly legitimate within limits, what the existential analysis of the limits on narratability reveals is that no answer to this question can ever be definitive.
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Notes
Taylor (1976, p. 282).
Ibid., p. 299.
Guignon (1993, p. 232).
Carman (2003, p. 266).
She cites Lewis, Perry, Parfit, and Shoemaker as providing different theories of reidentification.
Atkins (2004, p. 360).
Ibid, p. 361.
Schechtman (1996, p. 2).
Schechtman (2005, p. 244).
Atkins (2004, p. 363).
Ibid., p. 363.
Schechtman (1996, p. 159).
Schechtman (1996, p. 105).
Taylor (2002, p. 47).
Ibid., p. 50, my emphasis.
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., p. 48.
Guignon (1983, p. 92).
Ibid., p. 93.
Heidegger (1962, p. 427).
Guignon (1992, p. 135).
Guignon (1993 , p. 225).
Carman (2003, p. 266).
Heidegger (1962, p. 286).
Heidegger (1962, p. 279).
Dreyfus (2001, pp. 321–323).
Carman (2003, p. 300, my italic).
Ibid., p. 312.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 311.
In recent years considerable light has been shed on Heidegger’s existential-existentiell couplet through research into the method of Formale Anzeige in Being and Time. Formal Indication specifies the matter of phenomenological enquiry and points out the direction for a hermeneutic Interpretation of Dasein. Heidegger insists we must start with concrete existence, which is in “in each case mine” if we are to lay bare the basic structure of existence (Da-sein). That the analytic of existence has a formal character, however, owes everything to Dasein’s distinct mode of being, which is the core insight of the unattainability thesis as Ryan Streeter lucidly explains: Dasein is “essentially incomplete”; it “seeks possibilities for itself” but never has “its possibilities… fulfilled” (Streeter 1997, p. 416). The explication of Dasein’s “whole” can therefore only be a matter of formal indication—as Streeter explains, “Dasein qua projection is radically unattainable.”
Carman (2003, p. 276).
Ibid., p. 307.
Sartre describes the choice confronted by a student during the war who had to decide “between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his [ailing] mother and helping her to live” (Sartre 2008, p. 39).
Heidegger (1962, p. 318, my italic).
Ibid, p. 313.
Ibid., p. 331. See the chapter in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or II “Balance between Esthetic and Ethical,” specifically the discussion of absolute choice and guilt: “I do not create myself—I choose myself” (Kierkegaard 1990, p. 215).
Ibid., p. 186/see also p. 344.
Carman (2003, pp. 268–9, my italic).
Heidegger (1962, p. 185).
Guignon (1983, p. 96, my emphasis).
Heidegger (1962, p. 185).
See Heidegger (1995, p. 177).
See Strawson (2005a, p. 64).
Recalling here that the high end Narrativity Thesis is not simply a descriptive but a normative thesis—and to the latter “making one’s narrative explicit” is indeed a requirement.
Velleman (2006, pp. 222–223).
Velleman (2006, pp. 219).
Note however they do contra Strawson make a coherent picture of average intelligibility.
As John Lippett has recently argued: “There is an important difference between asking whether particular aspects of a life hang together, and of whether a ‘whole life’ does, and the former experience is far more common that the latter” (Lippett 2007, pp. 47, 48).
Velleman observes: “Narrative coherence cannot ultimately depend on rational justification if rational justification ultimately depends on narrative coherence” (Velleman 2006, p. 219).
Schechtman (1996, p. 134).
Velleman (2006, p. 221).
Ibid., p. 220.
Here I agree with John Christman’s assessment: “narrativity collapses into a capacity for self-interpretation” (Christman 2004, p. 709)—my aim however is different from Christman’s who does not really use this insight to get any leverage on the notion of the self. In that sense, Christman’s analysis remains in principle “negative.”
Strawson (2005b, p. 359).
As Hume famously argued: “from what impression cou’d this idea be deriv’d?” Hume (1739, p. 164).
Strawson (1999, p. 493).
Prima facie, the Pearl View can be found in James’s Principles. However, James likens “selves” to cattle on a prairie, insofar as, bearing a brand, both form a herd: “there is found a self-brand, just as there is found a herd-brand” (James 1981, p. 320). He also says this brand “runs through them all like a thread through a chaplet and makes them into a whole” (ibid, p. 317). It is precisely here that Strawson and James part company, for Strawson rejects the idea of a string: “many mental selves exist, one at a time and one after the other, like a (stringless) string of pearls… each is a distinct existence” (Strawson 2005b, p. 359).
“[The] basic form of our consciousness is that of a gappy series of eruptions of consciousness from a substrate of apparent non-consciousness” Strawson (1999, pp. 20, 21).
See Heidegger (1962, p. 116).
Smith may very well describe himself as a family man in, say, the context of a job interview, if asked; narratability does not deny that narrative self-conceptions are possible. It says they are not fundamental. Smith’s ability to form a narrative self-conception does mean that being a family man signifies anything like a state characteristic that can define the essence of his “who.” Smith’s being a family man does not derive from his self-ascribing such a property to himself; it derives from the way he understands himself, and that understanding is largely rooted in his comportmental behaviour—it is primarily pragmatic; that is, it is not a “telling” but a “doing.”
Heidegger (1962, p. 434).
For a lucid account of pragmatic temporality, see Blattner 1999.
Heidegger (1992, p. 189).
Note, the Narrativist insists that getting clear about myself requires getting clear about my narrative.
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Fisher, T. Heidegger and the narrativity debate. Cont Philos Rev 43, 241–265 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9141-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9141-x