From the Primacy of Praxis to the Primacy of Practices
Drawing upon
Being and Time, and more specifically, paragraph 13 of
Being and Time, W. Blattner (
2007) offers his often-quoted definition of the primacy of praxis thesis (henceforth
TPP): “the intelligence and intelligibility of human life,” says Blattner, “resides primarily in precognitive practice, and that cognition is derivative of such practice” (Blattner,
2007: 10). This formulation captures the point that is integral to the most pragmatic projects: pragmatically-oriented authors tend to start with the investigation of human comportment as the
condition of our access to the world and only then investigate the accessed ‘objects’ as the subject of ‘theoretical’ interest, an approach that Blattner sees as a descendent of Kant’s transcendentalism (Blattner,
2007: 13). Be that as it may, this formulation opens up more questions than it resolves. First of all, by subordinating the theoretical attitude to the praxis, we bind ourselves with the task of clarifying what we mean by “praxis” in the first place.
One way of explaining the notion of “praxis,” which has become more and more significant in the past two decades, is based on the resources provided by what is broadly conceived as existential phenomenology and, more specifically, based on the phenomenological conception of intentionality. Following Švec and Čapek (
2017), for example, we can describe the primacy of practice thesis as based on the idea that “[i]ntentionality is, in the first and fundamental sense, a practical coping with our surrounding world” (p. 1).To flesh out the primacy of praxis in terms of intentionality in such a way means, first and foremost, to stress that
intending or
accessing an object (the domain of ‘knowing-that’) rests upon a
corresponding act (the domain of ‘knowing-how’) that is performed by a being
whose being consists of relating to beings that it is not, i.e., of finding itself in the world. Accessing an object, in this sense, implies its existential significance for a being who accesses it: the object
matters to me being presented in a certain ‘
how’ that discloses its relevance to
me. Okrent (
1991) has described this basic pragmatic idea by saying that “beliefs and desires must be ascribed together” (p. 64). While this formulation is, in a sense, confusing (as it relies upon a non-phenomenological vocabulary of beliefs and desires, whereas phenomenological analysis finds it preferable to talk about “solicitations” and “non-thetic” awareness), it grasps the basic motive of phenomenological thinking, stressing the integral link between the accessibility of objects (i.e., ‘beliefs’ we can have about them) and our ability to
be in the world (i.e., ‘desires’ in the context of which we can have ‘beliefs’). Recognition of the fundamental
interest that accompanies intentionality (which Okrent even describes as the fundamental “narcissism,” a description we will critically assess later) constitutes one of the basic pillars of
TPP.
Then, of course, there is a question of what those ‘desires’ are, how they are adopted and formed. Okrent has offered, more recently, another useful tool distinguishing two ‘camps,’ two general ways of explanation (Okrent,
2013: 134). The first refers to American pragmatism represented most notably by Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Noe and Okrent himself (Okrent,
2013: 134) (Rouse can also be added to this list). According to this approach, the general ability to disclose entities as relevant to us is ultimately based on evolutionary selection, which explains how and why the “organic instrumental practical interests of the agent” are formed. The second approach, which he ascribes to Heidegger, is based on the assumption that accessing objects in a meaningful way is dependent upon socialization that would teach us some “socially articulated ends, means and properties” (Okrent,
2013: 134) in light of which the meaningful treatment of something
as something becomes possible. This distinction is convenient and, apparently, grasps some part of the truth. But ultimately, it must be neglected for several reasons.
First, this is because Merleau-Ponty cannot be situated in the naturalistic camp having much more in common with Heidegger and other phenomenologists than with Dewey (see Koloskov,
2021). The issue of whether or not (and, if yes, to what extent) the phenomenological approach is compatible with naturalistic principles is still unresolved and lies outside the scope of this paper; what we should emphasize, however, is that existential-phenomenological program points towards one shared presupposition common to a number of authors, as different as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Patočka, Todes. All of them share a similar intention to stress a certain
cleavage between human existence and any kind of explanation by objective factors. All of them (although to a different degree) are trying to outline the constitutive role that negativity plays in human existence that escapes or negates worldly deterministic influences.
1 As Patočka (
1989) sums up, human existence “has the negative character of a distance, of a remove, of an overcoming of every objectivity, every content, every re-presentation and every substrate” (Patočka,
1989: 196). So, the explanation of being of the subject must reserve some space for spontaneity or freedom: the ecstatic process of finding oneself in the world must sooner or later appeal to the indeterminability or spontaneity of human existence. Of course, different phenomenological projects have different ways of accounting for how such freedom for one’s own possibilities is realized, ranging from Merleau-Ponty’s late theory of institution to Sartre’s analysis of fundamental self-choice. Here we can agree with Okrent concerning the fact that Heidegger’s answer to such a question contains a distinct and original contribution for
TPP.
To demonstrate this specificity of Heidegger’s project, let me first sum up very briefly Heidegger’s account of inauthentic and authentic existence before proceeding to Dreyfus’s pragmatic reconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy. First of all, we should recall why Heidegger introduces these categories.
Being and Time’s basic goal is to clarify the question of being based on an investigating of
a way of being (
Sein; an
ontological level of analysis) of a being (
Seiende; correspondingly, an
ontic level of analysis) for whom its own very being is at issue. Heidegger designates this entity as
Dasein and defines its way of being as
existence –
Dasein exists “as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the being of those beings which it encounters within its own world” (Heidegger,
1927: 56). Starting from these assumptions, Heidegger’s early analysis is mostly restricted to ‘existential analytic’ and is located on the ontological level. He wants to emphasize “existentials,” that is, structural aspects of
Dasein’s relation to the world without which there can be no relation at all. This analysis is opposed to the ontic level, which takes into account something that
Dasein happens to be related to and which is not structurally necessary for the relation. As Heidegger puts it, the “essential determinations” of
Dasein, which is conceived as a relation, “cannot be accomplished by ascribing to it a "what" that specifies its
material content” (Heidegger,
1927: 12). But he is also convinced that the existential analytics is “ontically rooted” (Heidegger,
1927: 13): something like a structural aspect of the relation to the world can only be found in the concrete and
ontic fact (“
der Tatsache”) (Heidegger,
1927: 56) of
Dasein.
2 And by addressing this
fact, Heidegger realizes that it can either obstruct the task of existential analytics by not being itself and concealing its existential structures or, on the contrary, facilitate the analysis by being itself and manifesting its existential structures explicitly.
So, what does it mean
not to be myself? Heidegger uses the term
Das Man, sometimes translated with the idiomatic
what one does, to describe the all-encompassing corpus of norms that inconspicuously but relentlessly
guide most individuals in the course of their lives. Heidegger shows that
Dasein, for the most part, remains attentive and submissive to this tacit normativity of what things are to be done and how they are to be done, as it
stylizes itself for the way one behaves. This normative dimension, whilst not being devoid of certain ‘creative’ resources as Heidegger’s notion of distantiality (
Abstandigkeit) indicates (Egan,
2012), strives for anonymity by creating the impression that accepted norms follow from the ‘objective’ state of affairs. They are what
needs to be done rather than
something I do. In everydayness, says Heidegger, it remains unclear who authentically made the decision (Heidegger,
1927: 268). In order to avoid the need to make one,
Dasein tries to flee from itself pretending to be what it is not—an occurrent entity whose determination would be ‘thingly’ determinations:
Dasein wants to be as little responsible for its being-a-teacher/mother/citizen as a table is responsible for its being-round. Pretending that there are self-obvious ways of doing and saying things helps to alleviate the sense of responsibility for ourselves and mimics the way of being of occurrent entities.
The fundamental motive that stays behind such an unownedness or inauthenticity is
Dasein’s attempt to escape the recognition of its own essential mortality. Facing the imminent certainty of its own death,
Dasein realizes that
one does not die and that
no one will die for it, which throws
Dasein into what Heidegger describes as uncanniness (Heidegger,
1927: 170) of the world: it realizes the norms of
Das Man do not exhaust
Dasein’s being. This brings the recognition of its essential nullity or negativity: the only reason why it can relate to things and events is that it is
not those things and events; this
not is a structural determination of
Dasein (Heidegger,
1927: 283). As Heidegger further describes it, the “nullity belongs to the being-free of Da-sein for its existentiell possibilities” (Heidegger,
1927: 285). In this sense dying as a possibility of no longer relating to the world appears as a more ‘inherent,’ “ownmost” possibility than any kind of relation to something in the world. Trying to avoid this terrifying recognition,
Dasein seeks to obscure its way of being by mimicking the way of being of the objects.
Now, an important thing is that there is this tension between ‘everyday’ and ‘authentic’ intelligibility. Authentic disclosure introduces an element that has been covered up by everyday disclosure (Heidegger,
1927: 130). While inauthenticity is constituted by the “neglect” (Heidegger,
1927: 268) of a kind of being that
Dasein is, authentic disclosure saves
Dasein from its “lostness” in the world. Explicitly recognizing its own way of being,
Dasein also realizes that its being-free for existenti
el possibilities means that none of those possibilities is
inscribed into its essence as necessary; nothing particular that it can do and say is ‘proper’ to
Dasein because
Dasein itself exists as a relation. And this, in turn, gives
Dasein the ontic possibility to ‘own' the norms: accentuating the distance between its negative way of being and norms,
Dasein realizes that doing and saying things always rely on
Dasein’s own decision that no one can make instead of it. It obtains the possibility of an ‘explicit choice’ of its possibilities instead of being merely “grow[ing] up in them”.
By introducing this new element, however, authentic
Dasein does not depart from everydayness completely. It still remains dependent upon the possibilities it has grown into.
Dasein merely reveals their incompleteness. Everyday disclosure is characterized by the “loss of a ground” (
Bodenlosigkeit); authenticity, on the contrary, discloses the ground of everydayness. It shows that norms of everydayness can only mean anything for the sake of
Dasein’s ability-to-be. In this sense, authentic disclosure manifests being-whole of
Dasein as opposed to the dispersion of
Dasein in ways of doing and saying things. The typical example of such complementation is Heidegger’s analysis of silence: authentic
Dasein does not depart from everyday language but realizes that it doesn’t have to talk and that silence that accentuates a
decision to say something is a condition of possibility of speech. So, authentic
Dasein might have the same existenti
el content (Heidegger,
1927: 297) as an inauthentic one. The difference lies in the way authentic
Dasein picks up this content; one way or another, authentic
Dasein does so based on an “explicit choice,” in “choosing to make [one’s own] choice”.
It is important to stress, however, that this
tension between authentic and inauthentic disclosure takes place on the existenitiel level. Only here can Heidegger describe the authentic disclosure as a sort of liberation from
Das Man, as something that “frees [
Dasein] from the lostness” (Heidegger,
1927: 264). On existential level, however, there can be no tensions: both authentic and inauthentic
Dasein have the same existential structure that makes it possible for them to relate to anything at all. In a crucial passage, Heidegger writes, for example, that “authentic being-one’s-self does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating “I”. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than being-in-the-world” (Heidegger,
1927: 298). Only holding this in mind we can understand why Heidegger claims at the same time that authenticity is an existenti
el modification of everydayness and that everydayness is an existenti
el modification of authenticity (Heidegger,
1927: 317): both those modalities presuppose the same existenti
al structure. The difference between them is
inessential: while authentic
Dasein recognizes its own way of being and builds its existenti
el orientation in accordance with its own existenti
al structure, inauthentic
Dasein conceals it (while presupposing it) and thus, is unfit to phenomenologically demonstrate
Dasein’s way of being. Again, existentially speaking, the structure of being-in-the-world presupposes both possibilities ‘that we have grown into’ (something that we can ‘authentically’ choose or just overtake implicitly) and the choice (even if this choice is not to choose).
Further developing and creatively appropriating Heidegger’s texts, Dreyfus managed to explicate why exactly the notion of
Das Man should be not only be analysed on existentiel level in a sense of a criticism of the public world. We should also analyse its existenti
al function taking it as an indication of the fact that the “source of intentionality” (Dreyfus,
1991: 87) or the “source of intelligibility” (Dreyfus,
1991: 95) is no longer located within a private logical domain, but refers us to
the shared practices of being-in-the-world (existenti
al level). What one does, i.e., the
normal way of doing and saying
normal things, not only conceals the truth about our being but also functions as a condition of the meaningful access to entities: the only reason why I can deal with such entities as cars, tables and bank accounts is that I undertake a range of conventional cultural goals and corresponding conventional ways of reaching them. Even though the tendency to conform might be caused by the desire to
conceal the truth about one’s own way of being, it eventually results in abandoning the pre-normative immediacy of one’s own experience and
discloses for the very first time the normative dimension that makes it possible for us to approach entities meaningfully. Here, Dreyfus sees Heidegger as being committed to one of the most basic pragmatic maxims: our normative access to entities (i.e., ‘following a rule’) is not something we can do privately but rather a form of intersubjective praxis; this is a behaviour that we learn to perform rather than information that we learn to know.
The crucial point here is that those ways of doing and saying things, the basic “agreement in ways of acting and judging” that Dreyfus also describes as the “average background practices,” cannot be seen as any sort of intentional result of subjective activity but itself is “presupposed by the intentionalistic sort of agreement arrived at between subjects” (Dreyfus,
1991: 95). The background practices, in other words, are not
belief systems that we can explicate and justify because any kind of meaningful belief becomes possible in the context that has been established not by
beliefs but by
skills, by something we do. Those skills themselves are nothing but
contingently established forms of life, the “habits and customs, embodied in the sort of subtle skills which we exhibit in our everyday interaction with things and people” (Dreyfus,
1980: 8) which have
no further foundation. There is nothing ‘behind’ our ways of acting other than “our average comportment” (Dreyfus,
1991: 95) forged by the need to conform to
something. Here, Dreyfus speaks of the last stage of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” Dreyfus,
1991: 96) that realizes the only deep-hidden truth about human existence is that there are no such truths; the ground of intelligibility itself remains groundless and contingent. So, when explaining our ways of doing things, we have to eventually resort to ‘this is
just how it's done/said’ kind of argumentation, admitting that there is nothing behind our ways of doing things other than conformism. As Wittgenstein (
1998) states, "[g]iving grounds [must] come to an end sometime" (Wittgenstein
1998: 110). And by showing the dependence of our ability of making sense of things on our
ungrounded conformist behaviour, Heidegger puts “the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian tradition” (Dreyfus,
1991: 88), which locates the source of such an ability in a private, subjective domain.
To illustrate this line of thinking, Dreyfus refers to our linguistic behaviour: “If I pronounce a word or name incorrectly others will pronounce the word correctly with a subtle stress on what I have mispronounced, and often I shape up without even noticing” (Dreyfus,
1991: 93). Why do we get corrected? Those grammatical, pronunciational, syntactical and syntaxial structures are not justified in a strict sense within the world (there might well be other accents or grammatical structures), yet we feel that others are entitled to correct us and that we should take up those corrections. This is because for a language to be functional, there, quite simply, must be certain agreement over the normal usage of grammatical and phonetic structure, idiomatic baggage etc. And the notion of
Das Man demonstrates that something like an agreement in regards to our linguistic skills becomes possible because, for us,
it is more important to conform rather than to conform about something particular. As every
one tends to ‘look over one’s own shoulder’ searching for the normal ways of saying things, a community might arrive at an agreement in a form of life, thus disclosing the normative access to entities. So, by saying that “we are norm-following creatures,” Dreyfus is stressing that the intelligible, meaningful behaviour would be impossible unless there is this common sense of gravity that gathers us around the same what-it-is-there-to-be-done norms of behaviour.
We can therefore see that the TPP takes a special form here. The ‘goals’ and ‘desires,’ in light of which entities are accessed, point back to contingent ways of action that we have assimilated in the course of our socialization. Those ways of action do not refer to any other foundation and have no explanation other than our need to find something that is to be done or said in our lives. We can describe the variation of TPP that locates the source of intelligibility in contingent ways of acting as the Primacy of Practices thesis (henceforth, TPP(s)).
Patočka’s Criticisms of Heidegger and Heideggerian Pragmatism
In this section, I will demonstrate that this development of Heidegger’s thought remains stalled because it overtakes Heidegger’s distinction between the inauthentic fall into the world and an authentic “purification” from such a fall. I will start by outlining Patočka’s criticism of Heidegger with the sole goal of demonstrating how those criticisms are valid if we endorse the TPP(s) thesis. After this, we will proceed to Patočka’s own version of TPP(s) in section three.
In the afterword to the
Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, Patočka notes that
Being and Time’s tendency to treat everydayness as inauthentic leads to overlooking the essential part of everydayness; namely, in
Being and Time “we do not see the source of the opposition between “at home” and “at the workplace” (Patočka,
2016: 183). Indeed, Heidegger’s phenomenology of everydayness has absurd implications if applied to the caring setting of a family home. How can we analyse the child-parent relation in terms of interchangeability and anonymity of
Das Man? There is no doubt that the anonymous normativity,
ways of being a mother/father/daughter, play a crucial role here as well; but there is also little doubt that this situation is different from the public world where actors are treated as a kind of dispensable resource. One’s own child is not interchangeable with
any other child in the same way as one’s employee is. At home, says Patočka, we are not so much concerned with common activities but rather with being-together; what we do here (games, walks, travels) is a way of bringing us closer to each other, which is why the anonymous interchangeability here does not exhaust the content of human relations. This warmth, the desire to
share the world with our close ones “transform[s] the dread and anxiety of the uninhabitable into a possibility of acceptance” (Patočka,
2016: 187). Heidegger’s system does not have the conceptual resource to reflect upon this important distinction; he remains inattentive to what Patočka describes as “
eros” of our being-in-the-world, the simple immediacy of the bliss of acceptance and the pain of rejection that can be influenced by the anonymous normativity but not exhausted by it completely.
Second, analysing
Dasein in terms of the authenticity/inauthenticity opposition leaves the possibility of reconsideration of “limits” of “human situation” (Patočka,
2016: 186) unclarified. Activities of an artist and a thinker deal with the everyday intelligibility neither in a sense of inauthentic fall into it nor its authentic ‘enowning’. Unlike owning one’s own situation or unowned absorption in it, these activities take a step back in order to “change” the situation by disclosing a “non-everyday human possibility” (Patočka,
2016: 186). Heidegger of
Being and Time is indeed little interested in the dynamics of everyday intelligibility; an investigation of the development of existentiel intelligibility belongs to the task of anthropology, sociology and other sciences. He, on the contrary, is only interested in existentiel dimension and its dynamics as long as it gives an insight into existential structures of
Dasein. Patočka, however, suspects that this lack of interest hides a problem. For him, it is unclear where exactly should we situate reconsideration of human limits: just like it seems wrong to describe it as inauthentic; at the same time, it seems equally wrong to distance it from everydayness.
Of course, those are very general objections. There are plenty of recent interpretations of Heidegger, which seek to demonstrate how exactly can Heideggerian authenticity leads to the possibility of reconsidering the human situation (one could think of Crowell (
2014) or McManus (
2019) to mention but a few examples). Although I do believe that Patočka would eventually have a point here as well, it would go far beyond the scope of the paper to demonstrate the validity of Patočka’s concern in all possible cases. For the goals of this paper, I would like to argue that subscribing to
TPP(s) would make the aforementioned problem much more explicit: a consistent analysis of the
disclosive role of everyday practices renders any kind of
supplementation by authenticity excessive.(In “
Patočka’s Version of TPP(s)” section, we will argue that TPP(s) presupposes instead the
continuity between everydayness and authenticity.)
Surprisingly enough, early Dreyfus’s account almost explicitly confirms Patočka’s objection. Claiming the average practice function as a source of intelligibility, Dreyfus remains convinced that there is nothing like non-everyday intelligibility. Recognizing one’s own way of being brings awareness of one’s own contingency and the ability to manipulate the everyday normativity in a fre
er fashion switching identities and goals under certain circumstances (e.g., when one is no longer able to continue a career in sports after an injury, he can easily switch to something else). But Dreyfus also stresses that, one way or another,
Dasein remains dependent upon overtaking this or that particular cultural for-the-sake-of-which, i.e., set of goals and identities that are pursued for their own sake and that have been generated by the everyday intelligibility. Structurally binding the origin of meaningfulness with inauthenticity, Dreyfus leaves the question of reconsidering the limits of human action untackled. More recently Dreyfus (
2004) and like-minded philosophers (in the first place, people like Blattner (
2013), Taylor (
1992), Carman (
2003), Wrathall (
2017) and others) attempted to demonstrate how authentic disclosure can help us to revise and reconsider practices. However, I am convinced that such attempts are inconsistent.
Let’s take, as an example, the most recent article by M. Wrathall that in many ways sums up preceding efforts to improve the
TPP(s). In the article “Making Sense of Human Existence,” he offers us two possible ways of how the Heideggerian approach can lead to a change in one’s own situation. The first is described as existential irony. Consider first Wrathall’s description of what constitutes the inauthentic existence based on an example of a college professor:
She goes to all the right conferences and publishes papers in the right journals. She works hard on her classes (even reading and implementing the suggestions of various books on pedagogical technique) and is rewarded with glowing student evaluations. She is a good departmental citizen, faithfully attending graduate student conferences even on a Saturday afternoon and actively participating in faculty meetings and faculty senate committees. (Wrathall,
2017: 228)
What can an ironic attitude change about such a situation? First, Wrathall stresses that the ironic distance does not change the situation completely. Even after attaining the ironic attitude toward the intelligibility of the corresponding social role, the professor still considers herself a college professor. It’s just that she now realizes that this intelligibility along with its particular shape is not necessary; understanding that no existenti
el possibility is inscribed into her essence in an occurrent-like fashion, she understands also that it is
her decision to accept such intelligibility or to neglect it. And this realization ‘loosens’ her commitment to being a professor, giving her the necessary flexibility for reconsidering the practice. Because this particular segment of intelligibility no longer appears fixed and necessary as it is, she can first clarify for herself the motivational structures that led her to accepting such a goal (a certain “erotic ideal,” i.e., the affectively immediate goal of the “life of the mind” that she pursues for its own sake) and can rely more resolutely on them. Namely, she can appropriate the everyday norms so they would correspond to what she thinks is essential about being a college professor. But of course, changing the practice is an achievement that happens at the cost of becoming less intelligible in terms of everyday intelligibility, so the department chair and dean “grow concerned” (Wrathall,
2017: 228).
A more radical way of reconsidering one’s own situation is described as “existential revolution”. A revolutionary not only attains an ironic distance with regard to a practice and appropriates it; she recognizes that the accepted corpus of practices as such no longer corresponds to one’s own goals at all and decides to leap towards marginal practices, or triers, to develop a set of “workable practices” (Wrathall,
2017: 239) on her own, which is a project that remains completely unintelligible according to the current standards of intelligibility. Wrathall uses the example of T. Leary who dropped his job in Harvard’s Department and became a major figure in the “movement of psychedelic communities” (Wrathall,
2017: 229).
What is common to both those examples, says Wrathall, is that they are not only subordinated to the currently existent standards of intelligibility but also realize that the intelligibility is itself only intelligible on the background of “a sense that motivates our commitment to the practice in the first place” (Wrathall,
2017: 229). Wrathall explains this ‘sense’ of human existence that ‘nourishes’ and ‘feeds’ the everyday intelligibility (Wrathall,
2017: 237) in the following way. Only because human existence
as this integral ecstatic movement is trying to find itself in the world by
attaining certain goals and
settling in certain practices (i.e., searching for sense), particular frames of ‘intelligibility’ become intelligible as such. For the same reason, this existential attempt to find oneself cannot be exhausted by any such particular frame: the “sense” of being-in-the-world cannot be deployable within the context of stale, ‘happened’ intelligibility, but also includes the possibility of attaining, alternating, and creating new goals and practices. The two examples above are meant to demonstrate that although our search for sense might occasionally appear unintelligible, it is, in fact, the (everyday) intelligibility that is not intelligible without the sense.
If viewed from a closer perspective, both of those examples remain deeply problematic. Wrathall’s discussion of irony, for example, seems to rely on the intentionally obscured description of what constitutes the everyday praxis of a college professor. First, there is hardly a professor that decides to publish in the ‘right kind’ of journals, attend meetings just out of conformity. There are always good reasons why it is desirable to publish papers where one normally publishes them (such as being read, quoted, obtaining prestige, bonuses, developing one’s own career etc.); that Das Man eventually points out to ungrounded ways of acting does not mean that every comportment has nothing but general and empty conformity to appeal to. Consequently, the ironic attitude is not normally expected to resolve the real practical complexities and contradictions (even a hardened ironist is likely to understand that it might not be a good idea to make a department chair concerned, and publish a paper in a ‘good journal’ every once in a while). Irony gives us a momentary relief from such complexity, but only to embrace it in the end, which is a kind of situation where the irony seems to obtain its very content. Furthermore, both recognition of practical complexities, i.e., the distance between the ‘romantic’ ideal and ‘bitter’ reality, and the corresponding ironic attitude seem to be integral parts of everyday intelligibility, something that actors are normally expected to understand and master. Other parts of Wrathall’s description just seem to be plainly wrong, or at least speculative: for example, one can reasonably doubt whether philosophy professors are normally afraid of being corrected by their students (on the contrary, one normally wants to be corrected as it would mean that students are engaged). And the reason why Wrathall has to rigidify and caricaturize everyday intelligibility is simple: without taking away its habitual aspects, he won’t be able to ascribe any tangible content to the authenticity conceived as a liberation from the dominance of the everyday intelligibility.
The problematic nature of pragmatic use of the Heideggerian notion of authenticity is further accentuated by the second example of the existential revolutionary who, as Wrathall points out, “goes into unknown,” searching not only for a freer manipulation with available ends and practices but for “a new ideal and a new set of practices” (Wrathall,
2017: 239). Consequently, his behaviour becomes completely immeasurable by the current standards of intelligibility and is proclaimed “insane” (it only becomes averagely intelligible retrospectively when the new set of practices is accepted). The problem here is that most existential revolutionaries (if defined this way) would, as a matter of fact, be insane. The dominant number of deviations that seek to reconceptualize intelligibility in new terms are justly characterized as inadequate: schizophrenic delusions, sectarian and ideological thinking, conspiracy theories or just plainly absurd beginnings do not normally hide a richness of alternative ways of existence. As the saying goes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and deviant behaviour is nothing but a deviation, a failure of socialization. We need a more substantive criterion than an
indirect reference to potential success in developing something like “workable practices” (since we can easily remember successful practices that remain insane nonetheless and unsuccessful practices that are much saner than many successful ones (e.g., practices of mass extermination)) or a general appeal to the
eros, goals that are pursued for the sake of themselves (since, again, we would need a criterion that distinguishes sane
eros from the insane one (e.g., the goal of inflicting suffering upon other people)). Developing such a criterion would have to start with acknowledging that revolutionaries
break away from current standards of intelligibility
only because they take up a challenge from those standards. A revolutionary differs from an average individual by the scope of his vision and the depth of his understanding that makes it possible for him to start doing things differently, not by his ability to break free from everyday intelligibility as such. The escape itself is only a by-product, a collateral effect, which doesn’t do any kind of explanatory work: it is because the revolutionary takes up
real practical challenges, sourced from
real practical complexities, that he becomes capable of reconsidering his own situation. Acknowledging this would mean that authenticity remains essentially bound to the everyday intelligibility. In this sense, authenticity becomes a
function of everydayness; practices offer us the possibilities of being authentic that we must
learn to reveal by immersing into the practical life (which is a claim that Heidegger despite his emphasis on the existenti
al character of
Das Man would never endorse).
This means that Heidegger’s contempt with regard to the publicity along with the desire to shake off its mastery is an odd partner for something like TPP(s), which identifies the contingently established ways of acting and judging as the source of intelligibility. The partnership that is proposed by Heideggerian pragmatism results in cutting off the authentic disclosure from any kind of productive impact over practices, which renders the practical authentic self empty of any tangible content. By locating the source of meaningfulness in inauthenticity and claiming that that authentic self somehow operates as a ground of meaningfulness, pragmatic readers implicitly take away the ground from authenticity from which it normally pushes off. In the next section, we will see that by abandoning the vocabulary of fall into the world and liberation from it, Patočka arrives at a position that can be seen as a more acceptable version of the TPP(s).