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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Why We Should (Still) Read Beauvoir
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 5, 2017 by Rebecca Goldner as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Goldner is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. Her talk is about the importance and relevance of the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In particular, her talk focuses on de Beauvoir's seminal work <em>The Second Sex</em> and the perennial questions it asks. From what it means to be a woman, to how this question impacts debates over subject and objectivity, and the way in which we practice the liberal arts, Ms. Goldner's talk places these questions in the context of de Beauvoir's work and shows their relevance for the past and future of liberal education.
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Goldner, Rebecca
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-07-05
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Permission has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2617">Typescript</a>
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English
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Goldner_Rebecca_2017-07-05
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Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986. Deuxième sexe. English
Feminism
Existentialism
Women
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Why We Should (Still) Read Beauvoir
A Lecture for the Graduate Institute Summer Series
Wednesday July 5, 2017
Rebecca Steiner Goldner
I want to thank you all for coming tonight and the Graduate Institute for
hosting this lecture, and to say a little bit about why I wanted to give this lecture.
Long, long ago, I was a GI student here over the course of four summers, and I recall
with great fondness the Wednesday night lectures, talks, and roundtable discussions
we had then, though they were perhaps less formally instituted than they have been
of late. My paper is aligned with the spirit of those exploratory and informal events
and the discussions that followed them.
I also want to say something about why I am lecturing on Beauvoir. I was
lucky enough to offer a preceptorial on Beauvoir this past academic year and so I
was given the gift of reading this incredible book with 10 of the most thoughtful,
invested, and interesting students one could wish for as interlocutors. It was
actually reading their preceptorial papers that inspired me to write on Beauvoir and
so I owe them a great amount of gratitude.
I wrote this talk expecting that one need not have read Beauvoir to
understand what I am saying: this is a paper on a non-program book and a book that
is not necessarily a part of our common discourse (yet). One of the aims of this talk,
then, is to introduce you to the book and perhaps to persuade you that The Second
Sex is worth reading, is still relevant, and that it raises important questions we
might not otherwise ask.
1
�My claim, however, is more specific than a general sense of the relevance of
The Second Sex. I also have found this book to be paradigmatic of a way of thinking—
perhaps of learning—that we aim for at this college. That is, The Second Sex could be
read as exemplifying characteristics that we take to be essential to an education in
the liberal arts. To this end, I suggest the following:
1.
Beauvoir’s book is motivated by a question— ‘What is
woman?’. One might call this her opening question. We like opening
questions, here. We particularly like opening questions that require us to
consider something we might take as a given, something we think we
understand or know, questions which help demonstrate – in particular
through prolonged discussion—that we don’t actually know what we
thought we knew. When Beauvoir offers her famous premise that “one is not
born, but rather becomes, woman” (283, which is almost precisely half way
through the book, at the beginning of the second volume) we might read this
as an elaboration of the question rather than any kind of answer-- the kind of
elaboration we might offer in the second half of a seminar to show that there
is more complexity and depth yet to be uncovered. I wonder how often we
ask exactly who is included or meant to be included when an author or text
refers to ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’. The Second Sex helps us to investigate this
question, and it seems worth our exploring together, even if we don’t agree
on the answers. If agreement or assent/consensus were the aim of seminar
discussions, seminars would truly never end.
2
�2.
Beauvoir’s aim is freedom, and that freedom can only be
extended to women by uncovering and revealing the limiting and
determining features of women’s lived experiences. When the New Program
began in 1937, the motto of SJC was selected as a play on the Latin word for
“book” (liber) — “Facio Liberos Ex Liberis Libris Libraque”, “I Make Free
Adults from Children by Means of Books and a Balance.”1 We, like Beauvoir,
seem committed to the premise that learning can lead to freedom, and,
furthermore, that an understanding-- or at least a profound engagement
with-- history, literature, philosophy, theology, science, mathematics and art
can be liberating. That we question, probe and interrogate our previously
held assumptions and opinions about the world is a condition of free and
thoughtful action. If we hold assumptions and opinions about what ‘woman’
is, or what ‘feminine’ is, then the freedom of women depends upon exploring
our understanding of woman through questions, investigation, and dialogue.
That the term or idea ‘man’ can stand in for or represent humanity as a
universal (humankind, mankind) --even in our college motto-- risks enfolding
women into an absolute model of human freedom that does not adequately
recognize differences in the experiences of women. As Beauvoir puts it, “just
as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical that defined the oblique,
there is an absolute human type that is masculine” (5).
1 I will note that this translation of the motto is the one circulated in a 2014 letter to the community
written by Barbara Goyette and Victoria Mora, one or both of whom I assume offered the translation.
The college’s Wikipedia page translates the motto retaining the masculine universal—I make free
men…. (following the lecture, I changed the college Wikipedia page to the Goyette/Mora translation).
3
�3.
Beauvoir is concerned with how we live together. Beauvoir
envisions a subject who thinks freely and authentically and who actively
engages in human projects and relations. Such a subject ought to be a
consciousness engaged in a reciprocal movement with other subjects,
positing itself as Subject yet recognizing its possibility to be objectified when
confronted by Others. Only such a subject can fully take its part, she says, in
the human ‘mitsein’ (being-with). The plurality of conditions determines and
differentiates the experiences by which one becomes-- or fails to become--
such a subject, and, insofar as one fails to engage in such a reciprocal
movement, insofar as one is relegated to the position of Other, one will fail
both to live and to act freely. This failure is not only problem for women, it is
a human problem--one that spreads itself through all communities, from the
familial to the global.
These claims—that the text is motivated by a question, that it aims at human
freedom, and that such freedom is necessary for human communities—serve as the
background for the talk, though I am going to focus more specifically on a passage
from the introduction. Originally, I had intended to explicate five themes and terms
offered in this passage, but that would be far too long a lecture, as it turns out, and
so I have chosen two words that I hope will provide you with some sense of what I
find interesting and important in The Second Sex. (Here is the passage:)
4
�“What singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all
humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world
where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as
an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever
transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies
in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits
itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as
inessential.” (Introduction, 17)
I am going to focus on Situation and Freedom, and while I will discuss each of them
in turn, it will quickly become clear how they implicate one another.
Situation
Beauvoir’s first use of the word situation appears in the opening paragraph
of the introduction, where we find the term italicized in the following claim: “But
conceptualism has lost ground: biological and social sciences no longer believe there
are immutably determined entities that define given characteristics...science
considers characteristics as secondary reactions to a situation (une situation)”. A
few paragraphs later she draws the following contrast: it would never, Beauvoir
writes, occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity
(5). This is not to say that there is no situation for men, but that the situation for
men is a given; it is granted as the universal situation, and to ask “what is a man?” is
tantamount to asking “what is a human being?” We might here apply one of
5
�Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s two rules of feminism and ask whether this kind of
generalizing is reversible. That is, could we reverse the claim and put women in as
the universal? Could the question “what is a woman?” be taken to mean “what is a
human being?” My intuition is that we would not make this reversal so easily. If we
juxtapose claims about humanity in general-- that is, the situation for human beings
or the human condition-- with claims about woman or woman’s condition, we might
find enough disparity to recognize that to be human in this general sense and to be a
woman do not amount to the same thing. When Beauvoir writes of the situation of
woman she means one that places her in a secondary position within the human
situation, within the mitsein. If we can better understand what she means by
situation, we might better comprehend what Beauvoir means when she writes that
characteristics-- the characteristics of a woman -- might be defined by a situation,
that is, by a situation rather than nature, biology, or some mysterious feminine
essence.
First, I think it helpful to look to the structure of the book as a whole. The
book is divided into two volumes (1: Facts and Myths and 2: Lived Experience) and
each volume is sub-divided into parts and then chapters within the parts. Volume II,
Part II is entitled “Situation” but it also contains a chapter (10) entitled “Woman’s
Situation and Character”. We should not be misled by the way Beauvoir appears to
narrow her use of ‘situation’ to one part of the book. On my reading, the entirety of
The Second Sex reveals the situation as a whole, and the construction of the book
demonstrates the reciprocal nature of the relations between the facts and myths and
6
�the lived experiences, all of which together constitute the situation for
women. What we find in Volume II, Part II as in particular identified as ‘Situation’
are the concrete and typical situations that both result from and contribute to the
destiny, history and myths of Volume I.
To give an example, one of the concrete situations in the part Beauvoir calls
“Situation” is “The Mother”. Beauvoir’s account of “The Mother” (which is a chapter)
relies on the biological data, the psycho-analytic account, the historical record, the
myths, the economic reality, the childhood, the girlhood, the sexual initiation, the
marriage (and likely much more) to demonstrate how these facts and myths as well
as one’s own personal history are concretized into a presently lived experience, the
experience of being a mother. For a woman to explicitly and simply think that she
wants to be a mother because she likes children or because she assumes this role
will bring her happiness, is to ignore the plurality of forces at play on and through
her. There may a biological impetus to perpetuate the species that has demands on
the woman, but, as Beauvoir writes, “the woman’s body is one of the essential
elements of the situation she occupies in this world, but her body is not enough to
define her; biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns
us” (48). Following Beauvoir, from the biology we should next look to the psychoanalytic, economic, historical and political contributions to the situation. For the
specific situation of “The Mother,” these issues might take the form of some of the
following: the availability of birth control and/or abortion, which directly influence
a woman’s choice to become a mother; these concerns about women’s healthcare
will overlap-- sometimes in conflicting ways-- with questions of economics. How one
7
�was raised might play a role--does being handed dolls to play with encourage
maternality? The question of what other choices and activities are open to a woman,
and whether those options seem or are made to seem better or worse, is of course
relevant here. Could ‘mothering’ be an active human project-- a praxis-- that allows
someone to eschew other kinds of work? Can being a mother justify and provide
meaning to an existence that risks looking passive and aimed at repetition rather
than progress? Beauvoir thinks not, or, minimally, thinks that such justification or
meaning-giving is largely inauthentic, that is, it does not arise from a recognition of
one’s freedom. The decision or situation in which one becomes or doesn’t become a
mother is part of the intricate web that constitutes women’s lives. If we feel
ourselves inclined to think that motherhood is in and of itself fulfilling, respected,
and freely chosen, we should ask ourselves how many women have chosen
motherhood outside of a lasting partnership-- likely or historically a marriage. The
connection of the mother to marriage is more explicit than to other factors, but they
all play a role in more or less explicit ways.
At the same time, the lived experiences of women as mothers become the
grist for the mills of the myths and facts, that is, scientific fact, historical record,
theology and literature as it pertains to women. So long as women feel it is their
biological, essential and social destiny to be mothers, being a mother will continue
to be the biological, essential and social goal to be attained.
What I mean to suggest with the abbreviated example of The Mother is that
the particular situations in which women live-- as married women, as mothers, as
independent women are not free choices, but largely determined choices, choices
8
�affected and influenced not merely by the options available to any specific woman,
but by the way a woman takes on and lives, or assumes, the biology, history,
psychology and mythology that capture her. Rather than our choices (to marry, to
become a mother, to be an independent woman) representing an entirely rational
deliberation leading to free selection, Beauvoir maintains that such decisions are (in
the best circumstances) only “chosen in situation”, that is “both motivated and
freely chosen”. Of any choice a woman makes concerning how to live as a woman,
nothing in the mythology and facts is “determining, although all contribute to
explaining it” (436). The options for women are situated choices, choices weighted
with a politics, literature, economy, biology and psychology that have historically
tended towards the oppression rather than the liberation of women.
The situation, then, is this plurality of contributing circumstances constituted
both by external and internalized forces on an originally free consciousness. The
situation is both the present as lived by women and the entire history that weighs
upon that present. It is biological facts that claim as conclusions premises that went
unrecognized in its descriptive method; it is a body of literature that varies wildly in
its portrayals of women is still largely written from the male perspective. At the
individual level it is being raised as a girl, but it is also attempting to raise a girl as if
she were a boy. It is an experience of one’s own body as alienation, mystery, and
interiority. It is, as our opening citation tells us, to be constantly put into the
position of other-- or, as my students started saying, to be othered -- by men, by
women, by ourselves-- to be othered and yet to intuit one’s subjectivity. The
situation is not singular but is rather a convergence of lived, discursive and implicit
9
�conditions that crystallize in each particular woman. Whether she accepts or rejects
the conditions, she is always responsive to them. Even rejecting the notion of
woman is to be in some way captured by it, haunted by it even as one enacts its
negation.
We might recognize that many of the fields which comprise the facts and
myths (science, politics, literature, philosophy, theology—Beauvoir even references
Ptolemy in one place in the book) bear great resemblance to the arts we study as
part of a liberal education, but the way they converge in the situation is not
automatically liberating.2 Its multifacetedness does not immediately nor easily yield
escape-- in fact, we might better see it as an attack on all fronts. The situation is
synthetic insofar as it brings together what might appear as discrete considerations,
but that it synthesizes them into the lived experiences of women means that women
always locate themselves within a vast field of influences, many or most of which
serve to objectify and oppress her, to fix her in immanence. Beauvoir shows how
systemically the situation operates by pointing out that, historically, when one area
shows improvement, another area becomes more constraining. After she evaluates
the situation of women in the ancient world, Beauvoir points out that in Rome, when
women had great freedom in their personal lives they were afforded only limited
legal rights but just as women were offered some legal emancipation, their personal
lives came under far greater scrutiny. This is when we find that the satirists “went
2 Addressing why women have not produced the depth and scope of work that men in these fields
that men have, Beauvoir notes “Women do not challenge the human condition because they have
barely begun to assume it entirely…Art, literature and philosophy are attempts to found the world
anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim one must first unequivocally
posit oneself as freedom” (748).
10
�wild against them” for behaving like men in their personal and political lives. Thus,
an abstract equality, especially equality before the law, was wholly insufficient to
change the situation.3 The danger particular to an oppressive situation is that it is
systematic, self correcting and self perpetuating.4
Though Beauvoir occasionally suggests a sort of hopefulness about
changing the situation, because the situation is so convoluted in its causality, it both
results from and in the alienation of women within the human species.5
Complicating matters is the fact that while other oppressed groups have united in
some way against their oppressors, “women lack the concrete means to organize
themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition…[women] do not use
‘we’…but remain tied to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to
other women” (8). Sexual liberation, autonomy over her reproductive capacities, a
body of literature that better reflects women’s interests and realities, love that looks
more like friendship than marriage, are a few of the steps Beauvoir suggests
towards changing the situation. Perhaps too reliant on the promise of socialism,
Beauvoir emphasizes throughout, however, that economic liberation and work is
the sine qua non of a new and free situation for woman.6 Most importantly, however,
no single aspect of the situation could constitute sufficient liberation.
3 “In their exchanges, woman counts on the abstract equality she was guaranteed, man on the
concrete inequality he observes” (758).
4 Beauvoir denies that history is cyclical, if only because she is committed to the idea that “freedom
can break the circle” (763).
5 A species which is, Beauvoir reminds us in the conclusion, not so much a species as “an historical
becoming, defined by the way it assumes natural facticity” (753).
6 I say the promise of socialism because Beauvoir notes that this is what the Soviet revolution
promised but failed to deliver: “women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the
same conditions and for the same salaries…women would be obliged to provide another livelihood
for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when
11
�Freedom
This brings us to the next word from our opening passage: freedom. Beauvoir
contrasts freedom in numerous places (notably the introduction) with happiness,
and it is worth our time to think about why. Beauvoir rejects happiness as a goal or
an aim – happiness is an ambiguous notion and authenticity-- that is, recognition of
ourselves as free subjects-- would certainly be required before one could tackle the
question of happiness. “Is not a housewife happier that a woman worker” she asks
rhetorically? Her answer is neither yes nor no, but that, “we cannot really know
what the word happiness means and still less what authentic values it covers; there
is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation
that one would like to impose on others happy: in particular, we declare happy
those condemned to stagnation under the pretext that happiness is immobility”
(16).
Happiness seems like such a clear aim-- even a telos-- for humans-- we think
so often that we are striving towards happiness. But given the wide range of human
activities, emotions and relations that we associate with happiness, could we
possibly know what it means to call something ‘human happiness’? More
importantly, how can I know that I have authentically chosen my variety of
happiness? Happiness is not a definitive term; perhaps in a seminar you have
considered the question ‘What is happiness?’. For Beauvoir, the happiness of the
they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be
allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity
leave would be paid for by a society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not
mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them”
(760). See also p. 761.
12
�bourgeois woman, for example, is, if not wholly illusory, greatly conditioned by her
situation. “How could the Cinderella myth not retain its validity?” Beauvoir asks, and
then elucidates, “Everything still encourages the girl to expect fortune and
happiness from a “Prince Charming” instead of attempting the difficult and
uncertain conquest alone” (155). She thus opposes the difficulties of authentic
freedom with the ease of accepting a constrained happiness. Choosing the happiness
of the bourgeois housewife allows a woman to ‘‘elude the metaphysical risk of a
freedom that must invent its goals without help” (10). The myth of domestic,
immanent, repetitive happiness makes it easier for the woman to give in to what she
calls the ‘temptation to flee freedom’ and, she concludes, ‘it is an easy path.” Women
are not simply condemned to this happiness but complicit in selecting it, “seduced
by the ease of their condition, they will accept the role of housewife and mother to
which they are being confined… It is easier,” Beauvoir writes, quoting George
Bernard Shaw, “to put people in chains than to remove them when the chains bring
prestige” (130).
Indeed, why remove the chains at all? Perhaps there are some women who
are content to go through life enchanted or enchained but happy (a common idiom
puts this more succinctly). We need not look much further than our program texts
to think about where this alleged domestic happiness leaves us: when Dorothea
achieves just the marriage she wanted, we next find her sobbing in a hotel room on
her honeymoon. Eve is tempted by the fruit in spite of ideal companionship in
Paradise; Penelope, on her own for the better part of her married life, labors in vain
13
�in her room only to undo what she produces each day, Clytemnestra, Antigone. How
great is their happiness? Lady Macbeth?
One problem with inauthentic happiness, happiness selected in a determined
and limited field, is that it will always be tenuous at best, always at risk of fracturing,
of falling apart, of recognizing the restrictions as such. In her novel, My Brilliant
Friend, Elena Ferrante describes such a realization through Lila, who calls it a
dissolving of margins. “But suddenly-she told me- in spite of the cold she had begun
to sweat. It seemed to her that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too
quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had the impression
that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around
everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the
outlines of persons and things and revealing itself” (89-90). Lila’s horror, her
repulsion and her disassociation in this scene sound much like an impotent version
of what Sarah Ahmed refers to as ‘snapping’, an experience that forms the
foundation for what she calls Snap Feminism. She writes:
It is only when you seem to lose it, when you shout, swear, spill, that you
have their attention. And then you become a spectacle. And what you brought
out means you have to get out. When we think of such moments of snap,
those moments when you can’t take it anymore, when you just can’t take it
anymore, we are thinking about worlds; how worlds are organised to enable
some to breathe, how they leave less room for others.
Eve, Dorothea, Penelope, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth, Donna Anna. Don’t
we see them experience their moments of snap, the instant when the happiness they
were promised proves highly illusory, when the margins begin to dissolve?
14
�Even if it could be authentic, happiness is a complex matter to elucidate and
risks so much relativism. Beauvoir does not deny that happiness may have a part in
the future she envisions for women, and for human community, but the happiness
that results from genuine freedom is secondary to it and largely unknowable at the
present time.7 For Beauvoir, happiness is not merely a difficult, but a dangerous, end
to work for, insofar as the ideal of happiness has been used as a tool of oppression.
Thus she elects not happiness, but freedom as the goal. Here at the college we talk
about human flourishing. If freedom and happiness are not the same thing, it seems
to me that Beauvoir would put flourishing on the side of freedom.
So what does Beauvoir mean by freedom, and why ought we aspire to it?
Beauvoir says, in contrast to happiness, that the position she holds is that of
‘existentialist morality’. We might better turn towards her work in the Ethics of
Ambiguity, written two years before The Second Sex, to recognize that Beauvoir does
not here intend a general or borrowed notion of existentialist morality, but one that
she herself has defined and described. Beauvoir’s existentialism is at once
committed to the possibility of human transcendence while fully aware of the limits
of facticity, or, as we described it above, the situation. Her ethics, then, is
accomplished through struggle and some reconciliation of a radical ideal of freedom
with a real possibility for it. In a general sense, existentialism conceives of human
subjectivity as wholly or almost entirely transcendent, able to overcome the
immanence of being through an ability to project itself into the future, and to alter
7 “…this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry and dreams will be banished from [the world of
tomorrow]. Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future; the future is only an
abstraction for us…” (765)
15
�and affect the world through productivity and praxis. “Every subject,” Beauvoir
explains, “posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it
accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms”
(16). That transcendence is accomplished through a surpassing of what is given
(that is, given by the materiality in the world, given by relations with others, with
society, given by one’s own past and even one’s present)-- this notion surpassing is
typical of existentialist theory; what Beauvoir adds to this (and perhaps what makes
it a morality or an ethics) is the surpassing not only towards the future but towards
other freedoms, that is, other subjects.
Let me be more concrete: I used to terrify undergraduate students (not here)
when we studied existentialism by getting them to see that there was really nothing- no genuine constraint or limitation-- keeping them in the classroom, holding that
they remain students pursuing a college degree. I would likewise upset them when I
suggested that there was also nothing- no essential identity or nature-- that assured
that I would continue to be a teacher, a runner, a wife, or a mother. Nothing except
my own choices and the way that I that I assume decisions made in my past as an
identity or my essential character; only these things can serve as any kind of
guarantee for the future. I will continue to be a teacher, to do what is expected of the
teacher as long as I see value in it and regard my identity as bound to that role-- and
only for so long. Because I create my own essence or identity rather than being born
into it, I can also undo it. Because I create values, they are at constant risk of
revaluation. This kind of transcendence is a radical and terrifying view of freedom.
16
�But Beauvoir thinks that there are some limitations on this otherwise
unrestricted human freedom. The first is that if I genuinely recognize my own
freedom and other subjects as like-me, I will also aim for their freedom.
Furthermore, Beauvoir recognizes the implications of the situation on this freedom.
That is to say, sometimes our situation, particularly when the situation is comprised
of systematic oppression-- the situation of a slave, a proletariat, a woman, a person
born into poverty-- sometimes a situation such as these has closed too many paths,
has restricted the possibilities too greatly to allow for such freedom. This limiting is
likely a direct result of the failure of one subject or group of subjects, positing itself
as free, to fail to extend that freedom to others.
Beauvoir’s ideal of freedom attempts to include some commitment to others- though such commitments risks immanence-- while attempting to maintain the
possibility of transcendence. “But what is true of friendship,” she writes, “ is true of
physical love: for friendship to be authentic it must first be free. Freedom does not
mean whim (caprice): a feeling is a commitment that goes beyond the instant; but it
is up to the individual alone to compare her general will to her personal behavior so
as either to uphold her decision or, on the contrary, to break it; feeling is free when
it does not depend on any outside command, when it is lived in sincerity without
fear”(511). 8 Only a commitment which actively and reflectively holds within itself
the possibility of being broken can be a free commitment. Freedom, then, is not the
rational recognition and pursuit of the best possibility, but entails the existence of
8 I have taken the liberty of altering the possessive adjectives from the masculine to the feminine. In
French, the possessives take their gender from the word they modify and we cannot then know that
Beauvoir intended them to mean one sex rather than the other. Furthermore, I have changed the
word et to “and” rather than “to”.
17
�many-- perhaps endless- possibilities without regard to their moral value beyond
the free recognition of them precisely as possible, for oneself and others.
Here is the problem. This freedom may not, indeed likely will not, be easy.
The radical freedom posited by existentialism is terrifying insofar as it is antireductionist and anti-essentialist. It is common for subjects-- men and women alike- to flee this kind of freedom, to create and hide in essential identities that define us
and limit our choices. We find solace and the respite that become characterized as
happiness in these identities. But for Beauvoir, being fully human-- and free in her
sense of the word-- may not result in happiness, and it is certainly incompatible
with the inauthentic happiness that comes with the roles or identities we
essentialize ourselves into. Perhaps paradoxically, in spite of her overt commitment
to freedom, Beauvoir thinks that some avenues need to be closed, some inauthentic
choices revealed as such: Thus, for example, “The situation has to be changed in
their common interest by prohibiting marriage as a ‘career’ for the woman” (523).
Given her devotion to freedom, has Beauvoir then contradicted herself by
eliminating some of the choices as valid possibilities? Why can one not choose to be
a housewife9 (home-maker, our new term which makes this task seem more active)
if one recognizes it as a free choice and, even better, if one suspects she will be
happy with this choice? I think Beauvoir’s response is that in the current situation
(hers? ours?) these are the avenues that cannot freely be chosen; the weight of the
situation is far too oppressive and extensive in these matters, we are already caught
9 We might now prefer or use the term ‘homemaker’ for housewife, though this seems a linguistic
attempt to make an active term (hence, a maker) out of someone Beauvoir sees as resigned to
repetition and maintenance (of the home).
18
�up in the situation by the time we think we can freely choose, we are choosing from
within and therefore not transcending it. It is like letting the prisoner choose the
color of her chains and then convincing her how happy she should be with her
choice. Jane Austen might best illustrate this point: Charlotte, perhaps herself a
proto-existentialist as it turns out, tells us that “happiness in marriage is entirely a
matter of chance” (16), but Lizzie disagrees. Lizzie rejects two proposals she thinks
will make her unhappy. So it looks like Lizzie makes a free choice, in the end, to
marry for love and happiness, but we cannot overlook that haunting the entirety of
the novel is the threat of economic disaster of social disgrace, of some future for
Lizzie, her sisters, and Mrs. Bennett that is so unthinkable Austen doesn’t fully
describe it for us. Yes, Lizzie chooses her marriage and yes, she thinks that it will
make her happy, but it is a radically situated and highly determined choice. We
cannot know what Elizabeth Bennett would have chosen in a different situation.
It is a common trope and an active topic of debate that the feminist
movement-- in particular the second wave feminism inspired by The Second Sex is
(was?) about choice. Perhaps a perfunctory reading of The Second Sex might
confuse Beauvoir’s notion of freedom with this concept of choice—indeed, we often
consider freedom and choice as equivalents--but this would be to misrepresent the
morality for which Beauvoir actually advocates. Often, the options described as
‘choices’ are actually direct consequences of an oppressive situation. Furthermore,
many of these so-called choices are only available to the group Beauvoir identifies as
the bourgeois, but we might now think of as hetero-normative women within a
comfortable socio-economic group. For so many women, for example, the ‘choice’ to
19
�stay at home with her children is not an option. At the same time, these women are
often judged by standards-- standards formed from the facts and myths of the
situation-- they are judged by standards of motherhood that proclaim the choice to
work as the completion of feminism, and at the same time subtly regard the decision
to stay home as the better one. For as long as women’s work is a choice, it also
remains easier to underpay them-- theirs is, of course, likely to be the second
income. Beauvoir’s sense that the economics of the situation cannot be surpassed
seems right from this perspective. So much of what we uphold as genuine choices
and possibilities for women, are in fact implicit reinforcements of the status quo.
Choice and freedom are not the same. It is for this reason that real freedom,
Beauvoir’s freedom, requires full participation in the human experience for all
humans, not the choice for one group to participate or to opt out. To be optional is to
remain secondary.
Conclusion
I actually find the conclusion to The Second Sex the most perplexing, and
perhaps, disappointing part of the book, and this is both because I find Beauvoir’s
hopefulness perplexing and, given the time elapsed since the book was written,
frustratingly sad because the claims of the book resonated so profoundly with me
and with the students I studied it with this year. Perhaps to avoid writing my own
perplexing and disappointing conclusion, I merely offer some questions:
If you look back at the opening passage from Beauvoir’s Introduction, does it
make more sense to you that woman’s existence could be lived as a drama between
the conflicting experiences of herself as free subjectivity and as situated objectivity?
20
�Could you understand why a single change, such as equality before the law, is too
abstract and insufficient to really change a situation constituted by systematic and
multifaceted oppression and othering of women? Do you think freedom and
happiness are different goals, and, if so, in which might consist human flourishing?
Is it alienating to women to assume that the term and idea man can include them? Is
it possible that the universal claims found in some of the books we read here might
apply differently to women because of their different experiences and situation? Do
you know what it is to be, or to become, woman? Could asking this question increase
the liberating possibilities of a liberal arts education?
But perhaps most importantly at this moment is the question of whether you
want to think more about these topics, to read a bit more from Beauvoir, and to
continue the discussion I have been hoping to begin tonight.
21
�Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamamda Ngozi. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Electronic edition.
Ahmed, Sarah. “Snap!” Feministkilljoys.com. 2017/05/21.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Indiana: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2001.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, trans. New
York: Vintage Books, 2011.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Le deuxieume Sexe, I&II. Italy: Gallimard, 1976.
Ferrante, Elana. My Brilliant Friend. Anne Goldstein, trans. New York: Europa Editions, 2012.
22
�
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Why We Should (Still) Read Beauvoir
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 5, 2017 by Rebecca Goldner as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Goldner is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. Her talk is about the importance and relevance of the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In particular, her talk focuses on de Beauvoir's seminal work <em>The Second Sex</em> and the perennial questions it asks. From what it means to be a woman, to how this question impacts debates over subject and objectivity, and the way in which we practice the liberal arts, Ms. Goldner's talk places these questions in the context of de Beauvoir's work and shows their relevance for the past and future of liberal education.
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-07-05
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Permission has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986. Deuxième sexe. English
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Existentialism
Women
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“Reasons without Reason: Anti-rationalism in Heidegger’s Being and Time”
by Lee Goldsmith
(Delivered at St. John’s College Annapolis, June 29th, 2016)1
Every polity—but especially a democratic polity—faces difficult questions that they must
answer together. Often we settle the answers through political institutions, but sometimes the
questions remain in the informal sphere of social life. On many of these questions we disagree
with one another deeply, sincerely, and seemingly intractably. It is no surprise then that public
discourse can be exasperating, even among friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, we should not
succumb to the exasperation. However we finally resolve difficult questions—and even if we
never do—it would be best if public discourse were reasonable. Even where we persistently
disagree, we ought to be able to articulate the reasons we have, understand those of others, give
rejoinders, and, if necessary, reconcile ourselves to a resolution. In order to continue working
together as a polity, we ought to be able to have reasonable disagreements where everyone
involved can acknowledge the sincerity of the reasons offered, even if the reasons are ultimately
unconvincing. If public discourse is to be public reason, we must treat each other as capable of
having reasons.
Unfortunately, many participants in public discourse scrutinize each other as if they were
not offering reasons but some non-rational consideration. Bruno Latour describes the problem
ably:
One could say, with more than a little dose of irony, that there has been a sort of
miniaturization of critical efforts: what in the past centuries required the formidable effort
of a Marx, a Nietzsche, a Benjamin, has become accessible for nothing… You can now
have your Baudrillard’s or your Bourdieu’s disillusion for a song, your Derridian
deconstruction for a nickel. Conspiracy theory costs nothing to produce, disbelief is easy,
debunking what is learned in 101 classes in critical theory. As the recent advertisement of
a Hollywood film proclaimed, ‘Everyone is suspect… everyone is for sale… and nothing
is true!’2
To sum up: when reason is suspect, so is everyone else. If we believe that humans can act only
non-rationally—that is to say, not on the basis of reasons but due to causes such as desires,
drives, and manipulated beliefs—then we will treat others’ words and deeds as expressions or
outgrowths of subterranean roots, and the truth of our criticisms as the more secure, the deeper
beneath the surface those roots stretch, the more inscrutable they become. Our public
appearances will be interpreted in the first place as idiosyncrasy rather than potential
communion. When we encounter difference or disagreement, we will tend to explain away its
bearing on us and have our own explanations likewise dismissed. Most importantly, deep public
questions about how we are to live together peacefully and respectfully will tend to elicit
recriminations rather than answers. I expect anyone who has tried to have serious conversations
1
I would like to note that my work on Heidegger has been deeply influenced by my teachers, Cristina Lafont and
Rachel Zuckert, although I do not reference their work in this piece. I owe them much thanks.
2
Latour, Bruno. “What is Iconoclash? or Is there a world beyond image wars?” in Iconoclash, Beyond the ImageWars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Weibel, Peter and Latour, Bruno, ZKM and MIT Press (Cambridge, MA:
2002). The movie tagline is from 1997’s L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson, although I believe the last
clause should read, “and nothing is as it seems.”
1
�with strangers on social media will recognize the phenomenon: the cheapness of critique erodes
the soil of productive public discourse.
I do not mean to suggest that public discourse today is more fraught than it has been in
the past. However, we do face a different problem today than our predecessors did. Latour’s
quote provides the clue that the erosion of public discourse today arises at least in part from the
popularity of reductive anti-rationalist critics of rationalist thinkers. By ‘rationalist’ here, I do not
mean the traditional notion: someone who holds that we have some central concepts and
knowledge independent of sensory experience. Instead, I mean someone who holds that human
beings have a faculty of reason. A faculty of reason is a systematically unified set of principles,
encompassing more than classical logic, that binds each of us because it is part of us. Prominent
rationalist philosophers, in my sense, include Plato, Leibniz, and Kant. Each held that reason is
governed by a single principle—the good, the principle of sufficient reason, the unconditioned—
and that subordinate principles align with the fundamental unifying principle as well as cohere
with one another, producing a systematic set of principles for thought that a person could
discover through introspection. For the rationalist, a person has a reason when she correctly
subsumes her situation under the principles set out in the faculty.3
Anti-rationalists, on the other hand, deny that human beings have such a faculty. And
anti-rationalists are reductive when they treat any appearance of having a reason as the
manifestation of a proximate cause alone. Reductive anti-rationalism rose to the foreground as a
final critique of Enlightenment ideals. Reductive anti-rationalists—among whom we might count
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—worked from the premises of modern scientific inquiry to show
that we do not have a faculty of reason. Even the appearance of having reasons is illusory,
generated by a false consciousness of our own self-constitution. From the perspectives of history
and psychology, they maintained, human considerations are too diverse, contextually embedded,
and self-interested to cohere with a systematically unified set of rational principles. In light of
these alternate explanations, the existence of reasons is an extraneous hypothesis.
The reductive anti-rationalists pose a serious objection to rationality and, thereby, the
very possibility of public reason. One response to their challenge would be to defend the
rationalist position. I will not be exploring that line of thought here. Instead, I will present a third
option, which I lift from Heidegger’s work in Being and Time. According to the schematization I
have presented, Heidegger is an anti-rationalist: he presents a purportedly complete account of
human existence that excludes any faculty of reason. Nevertheless, we can reconstruct from
Heidegger’s work a conception of reasons. To be specific, Heidegger’s account of authenticity
and the roles that death and conscience play in that account provide the basis for an account of
when a person has a reason to do or believe something.4 That is to say, Heidegger holds out the
possibility that we might be able to accept the anti-rationalist critique of rationalism without
losing reasoning from the picture of humanity. From this Heideggerian account of reasons
without reason, we can look again at the question of public reason with fresh eyes.
I have drawn this account of a faculty of reason from Susan Neiman’s work on Kant. (Neiman, Susan. The Unity of
Reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford UP (New York: 1994).) The three features—universality, unity, and
systematicity—are meant to be minimal conditions. They provide the beginning of a complete account of a faculty
of reason but not at all the whole thing.
4
Steven Crowell has already developed an account of rationality based on Heidegger’s conception of conscience.
For the basic account, see: Crowell, Steven. “Conscience and Reason: Heidegger and the Grounds of Intentionality”
in Transcendental Heidegger. eds. Crowell, Steven and Malpas, Jeff. Stanford UP (Stanford: 2007) pp.43-62. This
essay does not address that work directly but implicitly extends it.
3
2
�To flesh out my interpretive assertion, I will begin with a brief overview of Being and
Time, then present you with two key quotes that will serve as the focus for an interpretation of
authenticity as the basis for having reasons. After that, I will conclude with some reflections on
the relationship between Heideggerian reasons and public reason.
In Being and Time the central question for investigation is: what is the meaning of being?
Heidegger’s answer is temporality (H.1).5 Let’s take the question first. Heidegger initially
demarcates being as what distinguishes entities as such from each other and what makes those
entities intelligible to us (H.6). To say that temporality is the meaning of being is to say that
temporality is the first basis on which entities are distinguishable. (If you are having trouble
imagining what this means, consider that a basic property of matter is to persist through time
despite changes in location.) His conception of temporality is abstruse and difficult to grasp,
even for those who have studied it intently. At a first pass, temporality is the unfolding of past,
present, and future in which the future takes priority.(§65, especially H.327-8) But Heidegger is
not an eschatologist: the meaning of being is not to bring about some destined or desired state of
affairs. Rather, the future is essentially what is not yet, what is possible but never actual.6 In
time, I hope to make this essential futurity clearer. But to do that we must turn to the outline of
Heidegger’s argument.
The crux of Heidegger’s argument that temporality is the meaning of being rests on the
claim that we ourselves stretch through past, present, and future, and are the fundamental source
of all other distinctions among entities. We are the distinctively ontological entity, who asks the
question of being and cares about answering it (H.12). In caring about that question, we open up
a world of people, places, and things and find meaning within it. To pick out this distinctive
character of our being, Heidegger coins the technical term ‘Dasein.’7 Heidegger uses the term—a
common German noun for ‘existence’— in order to distinguish the biological interpretation of
humanity—homo sapiens—from that which makes us truly human. Dasein is being in the world
(H.53) and the entity for whom being is at issue (H.12). It is not for anything in particular
(H.130) and is distinctive precisely because it can interpret its own existence all the way down to
the most basic concepts (H.9). Dasein is in the world by both being determined by it and
determining it in return. For this reason, Heidegger calls Dasein a thrown-project (H.199). We
are thrown and socialized into a world with an established order, from the past, that we now, at
the present, have to project ourselves into, so as to make for ourselves a future. In doing so we
inherit complex distinctions among entities that we then have to apply to our own situations and
sometimes even add, edit, or discard in order to make better sense of the world and who and
what are in it. When we add, edit, and discard distinctions, we do not do it for ourselves alone
but anticipate that it will make better sense of future situations as well. Indeed, it would be
5
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 19th edition, Max Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen: 2006). I will provide references
to Being and Time within parentheses. These will mostly point you to passages I am paraphrasing. The format for
the page references is ‘H.#’ where the ‘H’ indicates the pagination of the published German text and the ‘#’
indicates the page. In any translation of Being and Time you can find the German pagination along the outside
margin of the pages. In a few cases, I reference not the pages but the section of Being and Time. In that case the
section number will be preceded by this symbol: ‘§.’
6
Hence, Heidegger’s slogan: possibility is higher than actuality (H.38).
7
Heidegger initially defines the term at H.7 and spends a large section of the introduction characterizing Dasein’s
special role in ontology.
3
�unjustifiable to offer a purely idiosyncratic concept for others to use because Dasein lives in an
always already shared world.
According to Heidegger, as we have it so far, the meaning of being is temporality
because humans live by unfolding the phases of past, present, and future with each other. It is not
that time is a container in which we exist but rather that humans create a past, present, and future
through their interpretive social activities. According to Heidegger, the sense of time as a
container is derived from the sense of time as unfolding through meaning-making (H.424-5).
How, then, does Dasein make meaning and why is meaning-making connected to time?
Here is the summary answer that we will spend the rest of the talk unpacking: Dasein makes
meaning for itself as a movement from inauthenticity to authenticity (die Eigentlichkeit), and it is
enabled to make this movement by its mortality. By ‘authenticity,’ Heidegger does not mean
what we tend to mean by it, namely, being connected to one’s roots or being different for
difference’s sake. Rather, inauthenticity bears these descriptions just as well as authenticity
because by ‘inauthenticity’ Heidegger means being lost in the crowd, which one can be when
one is trying to reconnect with one’s roots or trying to stand out just to stand out. Authenticity, at
a first pass, is recovering oneself from the crowd, individuating oneself from others, and taking
ownership over oneself (H.12, H.42-3). It is in this movement that Dasein becomes able to have
reasons.
What then is this movement like? We must start from a structural description of what it is
like for Dasein to be in the world.8 Imagine yourself cooking dinner for your family. You are in
your kitchen, surrounded by your supplies and tools. You have ingredients, a knife for cutting
them, a cutting board on which to cut them, and so on. You also have a recipe that sets out the
steps for cooking the meal. The meal, in turn, is the end-product of a sequence of steps or inorder-tos that employ your resources and tools. Moreover, the meal is for you and your family.
You all are ends of the cooking but in a different sense than the meal is the end. You will
appropriate the meal from the cooking activity to the eating activity. You are the end as
consumer rather than product. In turn, the eating activity has the same structure: it serves to
sustain you so that you can go on to participate in other activities. As far as this structural
description takes us, it seems as though we are the executors of activities in order to be executors
of other activities. Everything is for-something already given. Even you seem to be forproducing and for-consuming endlessly. But observe: this indefinite series of activities tells us
nothing about how you benefit from the activities, unless we assume that merely participating in
activities, whatever they are, is beneficial. Of course, that is a non-starter. A person may choose
to forego eating and bring the series of activities to a close. Although it might be sad that she do
so, it can nevertheless be good for her, in which case the distinction between beneficial and
harmful collapses. Thus, the indefinite series of activities cannot be the whole story of our
participation in these activities. Our activities cannot be merely in order to participate in other
activities. We must at least be capable of participating in them for the sake of something final,
something that brings the indefinite series to a third kind of end, the end of explanation or
justification. In other words, we must be able to say why we participate in activities without the
answer admitting of a further why-question. The world in which we live is not a holistic totality
8
This structural description (which philosophers also call a phenomenology) is based on §§15-18. Of note:
Heidegger provides very little argument that the for-the-sake-of-which must be part of the description and that is the
crucial move he makes against the reductive anti-rationalists.
4
�of in-order-tos. The world includes final ends or, in Heidegger’s vocabulary, for-the-sake-ofwhiches (worumwillen).
In this description of daily life, we discover a holistic network of tools and activities in
which we can participate for the sake of something beyond the products of those activities.
Consider again these activities in relation to a for-the-sake-of-which. We do not engage in these
activities merely as free floating individuals without any prior entanglements. On the contrary, at
every moment we occupy at least one social role, whether we have chosen it or not. We are
children, parents, students, teachers, citizens, politicians, clients, lawyers, and so on. Each social
role brings with it a package of norms that guide the occupant toward the appropriate behavior
and away from the inappropriate. These norms manifest themselves in what an occupant counts
as satisfying the duties under that role and what others expect the occupant to do to satisfy those
duties. For the most part these expectations will overlap and be independent of the specific
personality occupying the role. Thus, we often express these norms via the impersonal pronoun,
‘one.’ For example, as a child, one heeds one’s elders. When entering a subway car, one waits
for riders to exit before entering. As a lawyer, one does not divulge private information about
one’s clients. In each of these cases, it would be inappropriate to act against the anonymous
expectation except in extraordinary circumstances. To do so would be a basis for censure from
anyone aware of the transgression (H.126-7). What one does, then, is general in two senses: I can
be the ‘one’ at any time and I can encounter the ‘one’ in others at any time. We can follow the
one’s norms without relating it to any for-the-sake-of-which because we can just mimic what
others do. But, at the same time, I can never be the ‘one’ simply. I can only be the ‘one’ via a
particular social role that establishes what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior for me at a
given time. Even as the ‘one’ I cannot do whatever others are doing and count as following the
social norms. I have always already followed certain paths rather than others.
Consequently, the ‘one’ is unstable. Social norms are not only the rules I follow but also
how I justify my actions. For example, as a teacher, if I am asked why I am granting a student an
extension when her hard drive crashes, I can cite the norm that teachers should not punish their
students for circumstances beyond their control. If I were asked that question and could give no
answer or merely cited what other teachers usually do, I would have failed to justify my
teacherly action. Similarly, if I am asked why I am a teacher rather than something else, I ought
to be able to respond with more than, “Someone told me to do it.” But when we are first
socialized into our social roles, that is the only answer we are prepared to give because up to that
point we have simply been learning how to be guided by the ‘one,’ yet the ‘one’ does not provide
the basis for an answer. Only a for-the-sake-of-which could. Precisely to this problem,
authenticity provides a solution.
Let us now turn to the passages at the heart of my interpretation of authenticity as the
basis for having reasons. The first passage concerns Dasein’s conscience, the voice that calls
Dasein back from its absorption in its everyday activities as the ‘one.’
In being a ground—that is, in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its
possibilities. It is never existent before its ground, but only from it and as this ground.
Thus being-a-ground means never to have power over its ownmost being from the ground
up. This not belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness. It itself, being a ground, is
a nullity of itself. Nullity does not signify anything like not-being-present-at-hand or notsubsisting; what one has in view here is rather a not which is constitutive for this being of
Dasein—its thrownness. The character of this not as a not may be defined existentially: in
being its self, Dasein is, as a self, the entity that has been thrown. It has been released
5
�from its ground, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this ground. Dasein is not
itself the ground of its being, inasmuch as this ground first arises from its own projection;
rather, as being-its-self, it is the being of its ground. This ground is never anything but the
ground for an entity whose being has to take over being-a-ground. (H.284-5)9
That passage contains a lot of thought to digest all at once. I will elucidate it for you shortly. For
now hold in mind these two key points. First, Dasein is a ground that it must take over. ‘Ground’
here could also be translated by ‘reason.’ And, so, we might interpret this to say that Dasein must
become a reason for itself. Second, Dasein never has power over this ground from the bottom up.
It lags behind its possibilities in two senses. It engages in certain activities rather than others
before it ever considers whether those activities matter to it. And it is not the source of those
activities. To become a ground then is precisely to struggle with which activities matter to it and
how it can also be a source of them.
The second passage comes from Heidegger’s analysis of death. As I mentioned above,
Dasein’s mortality enables it to become authentic by disclosing to it how to make a responsible
choice for what to do with its life. Here Heidegger clarifies the relationship between Dasein’s
death and its array of choices:
The ownmost, non-relational possibility [death] is not to be outstripped. Being towards
this possibility enables Dasein to understand that giving itself up impends for it as the
uttermost possibility of its existence. Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic beingtowards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead,
anticipation frees itself for accepting this. By anticipating and, thereby, becoming free for
its own death, Dasein is freed from being lost in possibilities that accidentally impinge
upon it with the result that becoming free for death allows Dasein to understand and
choose authentically, for the first time, the factical possibilities that lie upstream and
ahead of the one that Dasein cannot outstrip… As a non-relational possibility, death
individualizes but only in order to, as a possibility which is not to be outstripped, make
Dasein, as being-with, understanding of the capacity-to-be of others. Since anticipation of
the possibility which is not to be outstripped discloses also all the possibilities which lie
ahead of that possibility, this anticipation includes the possibility of taking the whole of
Dasein in advance in an existentiell manner that is to say, it includes the possibility of
existing as a whole capacity-to-be. (H.264)10
Again this passage might be overwhelming. So, again, I offer two key points to hold in mind.
First, the possibilities among which Dasein makes its most fundamental choice of what to do
with its life “lie upstream and ahead” of its death. In so far as Dasein understands death, those
possibilities transcend it, by which I mean they can last forever even if in fact they do not.
Dasein knows itself to be finite but does not know the same about its possibilities. Second, the
transcendence of the possibilities puts Dasein in authentic contact with others. By becoming
authentic, Dasein recognizes others as similarly capable of authenticity and able to share in
9
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. tr. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward, Harper & Row (New York:
1962), pp.330-1. I adjusted the translation to make it clearer.
10
Ibid, pp.308-9. Again, I adjusted the translation to make it clearer. I discovered this crucial passage thanks to a
comment in Page, Carl. Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy. Penn State Press
(University Park, PA: 1995), p.141. Like Page I understand this passage as undermining the common interpretation
of Being and Time, according to which Heidegger shows that eternal truths or goods are impossible. Unlike Page,
however, I do not interpret this passage to leave open the possibility that human beings could know or understand
anything as eternal.
6
�possibilities authentically with Dasein. Let’s now dig deeper into these thoughts and see how
they give rise to an account of reasons without a faculty of reason.
In the first passage Heidegger describes Dasein as both a ground for its existence and
having to take over its being-a-ground. Dasein, of course, is not the ground, like a self-caused
thing would be. Dasein is caused to be in a number of ways, including parentage and
socialization. Nevertheless, Dasein is one of those grounds. But a ground in what way? Part of
the answer to this question comes prior to this passage. Dasein’s conscience calls to it but says
nothing (H.272-4). Instead, it points Dasein to its ability to become authentic and to the implicit
choices it has not not yet owned. In turn, Dasein interprets the call as indicating its guilt.
Heidegger does not mean “guilty” in any of its ordinary senses. Dasein’s ontological guilt is not
original sin, moral wrongdoing, being the cause of certain events, or debts to others. Rather,
Dasein is guilty in the sense of being responsible for its choices, where ‘responsible’
(verantwortlich) takes on its etymological meaning: able to give an answer (H.280-8). By
heeding its conscience, Dasein takes over being-a-ground by interpreting itself as answerable for
its choices. Conscience brings Dasein into a discourse, albeit a merely internal one so far.
Intriguingly, Heidegger describes Dasein’s being-a-ground as a nullity. By this he means
two important things. First, Dasein does not give itself the factical possibilities for its existence.
And this goes all the way down. Conscience is silent because anything it could say would be
expressed in a public language that one speaks and remains inevitably ambiguous. Precisely here
we might expect that a faculty of reason could provide unambiguous content. But such a faculty
could only express itself in a public language, which needs interpretation in still further terms.
Second, Dasein negates possibilities. That is to say, Dasein is a ground for its existence by
eliminating factical possibilities for itself. Dasein chooses by means of exclusion rather than
invention. For the most part Dasein excludes without realizing it and, when asked, tends to defer
responsibility for its actions to some authority. When it becomes authentic, it alters its
relationship to the exclusions. It connects its exclusions to the pursuit of something worth it for
its own sake and ceases to defer responsibility for its actions to anyone else. In this sense we
should say Dasein alters its existence as a ground from being merely a cause of events to a
reason for them.
But we should not pass over these crucial and interesting claims without noticing how
counter-intuitive they are. Human beings are endlessly creative. From the slightest pun to the
inception of a whole new realm of activity (such as modern natural science), human beings seem
to be more than merely a nullity. We do not only negate possibilities we add them. What then
would justify Heidegger’s counter-intuitive claim?
The answer to this question lies in the second passage. In it, Heidegger is discussing the
relationship between Dasein’s anticipation of death and the factical possibilities on which it
resolves in becoming authentic. The concept ‘possibility’ as Heidegger uses it encompasses any
way that Dasein could be.11 At bottom, any description befitting of Dasein is a possibility for it.12
For our purposes, however, we should focus on the two kinds of factical possibility that are
fundamental to a life-path. The first are the social roles discussed above. Dasein occupies at least
one and usually multiple roles throughout its life, and these roles govern what it does daily as
According to Heidegger, when we use ‘possibility’ in other senses—e.g., logical possibility (not in violation of
the principle of non-contradiction)—we derive the meaning of ‘possibility’ from its meaning as applied to Dasein.
12
When we take note of history—the rise and fall of peoples, empires, and civilizations—we must distinguish
between live and dead possibilities. ‘is a samurai’ is a description befitting Dasein but not live for anyone today.
11
7
�well as how it organizes its weeks, months, and years. Moreover, these roles are the sort of
activity it can find enriching or fulfilling. They engage its capacities in a complete way. Dasein
knows this because the possibilities can draw it out of the stultifying fear that attends the
anticipation of its own death and they are worth pursuing unto death. They are not merely means
to other states of affairs. Rather, Dasein can engage in them until there are no more states of
affairs left to it.
We might conclude, then, that social roles are the factical possibilities that we pursue for
their own sake. But that would be imprecise. Social roles are constitutive of pursuing something
for its own sake, but what makes a given social role a for-the-sake-of-which is not the social role
itself. Instead, we find some aspect of the social role worth pursuing for its own sake. The social
role engages us in charity or requires lifelong learning or puts us in contact with some other
value or good that we take to be final. These values are only accessible to us through social roles
but they are not reducible to them.
These are the factical possibilities that Heidegger is discussing in the second passage:
social role and ultimate value combined. By anticipating death, Dasein no longer sees its
possibilities merely as means to other possibilities ad infinitum. Observe: although a given social
role can be constitutive of something worth pursuing for its own sake, it is not essentially so. For
example, I can choose a career as a mere means to supporting a loving, nurturing family. When
Dasein is inauthentic or “lost in its possibilities,” all social roles look like mere means. The final
goods that social roles can manifest remain hidden as long as Dasein ignores its own mortality.
But when it confronts that mortality, Dasein reveals that aspect of social roles to itself. It frees
itself for a choice by putting the social roles into a framework where a responsible choice
becomes possible. Specifically, it frees itself from the condition in which nothing appears worthy
of choice.
This brings us to the two crucial claims that ground a Heideggerian account of reasons.
First, the factical possibilities in question “lie upstream and ahead” of Dasein’s death. The
German reads “vorgelagert sind.” I’ve used the hendiadys “upstream and ahead” to render the
double-meaning of “vorgelagert.” The idiomatic German meaning of the adjective is “upstream”
or “off the coast,” but it is derived from semantic pieces that mean something like “to be camped
ahead.” So, we have here a metaphor for the conceptual and explanatory relationship between
Dasein’s factical possibilities and death. On the one hand, “lies upstream” suggests a common
philosophical metaphor for explanatory priority. If a is upstream from b then a explains b or
some aspect of it, while b explains no aspect of a. Thus, Heidegger is claiming that Dasein’s
factical possibilities explain some aspect of Dasein’s own death. On the other hand, the “lies
ahead” suggests that these possibilities are part of Dasein’s future and, indeed, extend into the
future beyond Dasein’s own death. But if the factical possibilities only become available for
authentic resolution through Dasein’s anticipation of its own death, how can those possibilities
explain any aspect of its death? And how could those possibilities transcend Dasein’s death?
The answer to these two questions comes towards the end of the paragraph where
Heidegger tells us that death, “as an un-outstrip-able possibility, makes Dasein…understanding
of others. Recall that Dasein develops its basic capacities as it is socialized by others. Of
necessity the socialization process subordinates Dasein to authorities who teach it the social
norms. As a result Dasein always starts out as inauthentic and sees inauthentically the factical
possibilities into which it has been socialized. However, when Dasein understands itself as
capable of authenticity, it also understands that others have the same capacity. It follows that the
socialization process offered more to Dasein than first met its eye. Dasein inherited factical
8
�possibilities that set its mortality in relief. Death too is a possibility; it is distinctive as nonoptional and final. Dasein’s factical possibilities can fit the finality of death, but they are not nonoptional. They present Dasein with a choice. Thus, the socialization process, in which Dasein
inherits factical possibilities, explains how Dasein understands death as a basis for making
meaning for itself and not just the cessation of its existence. Of course, the factical possibilities
cannot explain the fact that Dasein dies. Nevertheless, they can explain how Dasein can
distinguish death as a possibility that makes meaning possible, as opposed to impossible.
Furthermore, the factical possibilities on which Dasein can resolve are not limited by
Dasein’s death. Because Dasein understands them as inherited through the socialization process,
it also understands that others have engaged in these possibilities authentically. And just as
Dasein is the future to those who are no longer, so Dasein will hand down its authentic factical
possibility to future generations. Or what is the other side of the same coin, Dasein shares its
authentic factical possibility with others and knows that it can. Dasein’s authentic resolution
individualizes it but at the same time brings it into a community which stretches before its birth
and after its death. It commits itself to a common project with others with whom it works in
concert.
With this interpretation of the second passage in hand, I can now answer the above
question about creativity. The answer comes in two prongs. First, Heidegger can explain
creativity as a reshuffling of factical possibilities. When we seem to invent something new, we in
fact draw upon a pattern or patterns from one or more areas of life and apply them to another
area where the patterns had not previously applied (as far as we know). Even modern science, as
Heidegger shows (§69b), is derived from possibilities already available. Thus, Dasein can be
creative while merely negating given factical possibilities. Second, no factical possibility—
however new—gets its content from an individual Dasein alone because every factical possibility
is always already shared. Even the most innovative person offers her innovation to a community.
What that offering means and whether it is a success depends not on the will and intellect of the
individual innovator but rather on how the community takes it up. Thus, individual Dasein
contributes no irreducibly unique content to the possibilities in a community. By itself, Dasein is
a nullity.
Based on the foregoing interpretation, we can reconstruct a conception of reasons from
Heidegger’s conception of authenticity. A reason is a consideration in favor of forming a belief,
drawing an inference, or taking a course of action. But not just any consideration in favor of
something is a reason for it. I might have a desire to bash my neighbor’s mailbox with a baseball
bat but that is not, by itself, a reason for doing so. A reason requires further grounding. We have
to be able to trace it back to a source, a principle, a good. Unlike other considerations, a reason
has a pedigree. Even when I perceive my desire to bash my neighbor’s mailbox as a reason to do
it, it is a reason only if I can trace that desire to a principle that licenses satisfying it. (And I
doubt any pedigree exists for such a desire.)
We are subject to desires and impulses throughout our daily lives. Our thoughts, bodies,
and decked-out environments elicit them. In turn, we have to sort through which ones to satisfy
and which to suppress. For the most part we do this in an unconscientious way (which is not to
say unconscious). We follow the impulses and desires that align with our tasks and suppress the
ones that do not. When we reflect on what we are doing we perceive ourselves as having reasons
for sorting through our impulses and desires as we do. But we rarely trace the complete pedigree
of those purported reasons such that we verify them. This omission opens up the question
whether what we take to be our reasons are in fact reasons.
9
�One way that a consideration might fail to be a reason for a person—a way central to a
Heideggerian account—is that the person traces the consideration back to an external authority.
For example, when I follow a recipe, I defer to the authority of the chef who wrote the recipe.
The instructions for me are not reasons, as they are for the chef who can explain how and why
they produce the final dish. And should the recipe fail, the chef is prepared to examine what went
wrong and attempt to fix the problem. The chef, who takes responsibility for the success of the
recipe, has reasons with respect to making the dish whereas I merely have considerations.
Indeed, each step in the recipe, the dish, those whom the chef will serve, and the wider world of
expert food-making, all manifest reasons for the chef, whereas I do not have those reasons. The
world of mere in-order-tos is transformed by authenticity into a world of reasons. That
transformation takes place because the chef takes herself to be an authority, in the sense that she
is an author—albeit not the unique author—of norms governing proper food-making. Her
authorship, however, is in no way a creation from nothing. She always engages with the norms
that she has inherited, and is answerable to others who, like her, take responsibility for those
same norms.
The foregoing suggests a Heideggerian conception of rationality.13 According to it,
someone has a reason for a potential action—mental actions included—when the state of affairs
fits the norms governing a social role he authentically occupies. Accordingly, a reason is part of
a chain of in-order-tos that someone relates to an activity worth pursuing for its own sake. This is
the sense in which Dasein’s conscience makes it a ground for reasons. Its conscience calls it to
relate the states of affairs in the world to whatever can bring an end to a series of why-questions.
Heideggerian reasons, then, are always parts of lines of reasoning that reach a conclusive end. As
a part of a line of reasoning, Heideggerian reasons are discursive.
Moreover, Heideggerian reasons are constrained by publicly known norms. Since reasons
are parts of responses to why-questions, they can be exchanged with others as explanations or
justifications for actions or beliefs. And since the reasons are grounded by a resolution on social
roles, the reasons a person may offer must be shown either to accord with publicly known norms
for those roles—as, for example, a novel application of them—or improve on one or more of
them—as, for example, refusing to implement corporal punishment as a teaching tool. Not just
any series of statements offered to an interlocutor—even by authentic Dasein—qualifies as a line
of reasoning. Dasein’s autonomy is not unlimited, despite lacking the law of reason. Instead, it is
answerable to those from whom it has inherited its factical possibility and to whom it will hand it
down.
Heideggerian reasons are serially grounded, discursive and constrained. By contrast,
mere considerations are serial but not grounded and discursive but not constrained. Consider the
desire to bash a neighbor’s mailbox. I can connect that to a further consideration, such as venting
anger or getting revenge. But those further considerations do not bring an end to why-questions.
The considerations are ungrounded. Similarly, bare appeals to authority suffer the same defect.
They fail to end the series of why-questions because we must ask what justifies deferring to that
authority. Mere considerations are defectively serial. They also show a symmetrical defect with
respect to discursiveness. I can offer a mere consideration to someone else, and they can
recognize it as something that favors my action, in the way that desires always favor their own
If this Heideggerian account of reasons has reminded you of Kant’s conception of autonomy there is good reason
for it. In the concept of authenticity, Heidegger sought to retain the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy
without relying on a faculty of reason that gives the laws for being autonomous.
13
10
�satisfaction. But the consideration is unconstrained by any norms that would distinguish the
desire as licit or illicit. The interlocutor cannot share in endorsing the consideration. Again, the
same goes for appeals to authority. The interlocutor must wonder why the authority offered
should be binding on himself. Mere considerations offer explanations for actions but not
justifications.
You might be wondering why social norms offer justifications where mere considerations
do not? After all, social norms are positive phenomena, instituted by human beings.
Consequently, appeals to social norms seem like just another appeal to authority. Here the
double-aspect of factical possibilities plays a crucial role. The social norms that constitute the
social roles Dasein plays are always in service of the values that make the social roles worth
pursuing for their own sake. Justifications in terms of social norms always take for granted that
the norms continue to serve those values. If an interlocutor raises an objection that a norm no
longer serves that value, then that breakdown must be repaired either by dispelling the objection
or emending the norm.
A moment of reflection on values such as charity, friendship, equality, and liberty reveals
that they are multiple and not objectively prioritized. As Dasein pursues its factical possibility it
will have to weigh values against one another when they come into conflict. Heideggerian
reasons, then, are ultimately grounded in a choice for how to prioritize values. At this point, the
differences between Heideggerian reasons and the traditional account of rationality become
clear. As noted above the faculty of reason displays three central features: universality, unity,
and systematicity. None of these features apply to Heideggerian reasons. First, Heideggerian
reasons are not universal because they depend on a choice to prioritize values into a hierarchy
that is not itself rationally required. Even though an interlocutor can recognize that a reason is
binding for her friend, given his authentic resolution, the interlocutor herself, who resolves on a
different factical possibility, might find that his line of reasoning does not bind her because they
prioritize values differently. Heideggerian reasons, then, are not categorially universal, although
they encompass at least all those who share an authentic factical possibility. Second,
Heideggerian reasons are not unified: they do not trace back to any single principle. Whereas the
faculty of reason is unified by a principle embodied in a concept such as the good or the
unconditioned, Heidegger’s account of rationality is unified by Dasein’s ability to authentically
resolve on some factical possibility. This ability, as we saw, is conceptually contentless—it is a
nullity, the ultimate source of negation—and each person uniquely exercises it. The conceptual
content derives not from the ability to become authentic itself but rather from the possibility
adopted in its exercise. When Dasein reasons, it reasons back to its fundamental factical
possibility and then can offer no further reason, should a disagreement persist. Dasein makes a
Lutherian commitment in whose favor it can say nothing else. In Heideggerian lines of
reasoning, not all roads lead to Rome. Finally, since reasons are neither universal nor unified,
they cannot be systematic. It will always be possible that two lines of reasoning will be
ultimately incompatible. For example, two appellate court justices might sincerely disagree over
whether the norms of constitutional interpretation permit them to rule that every application of
the death penalty is a cruel punishment. That they disagree does not indicate that at least one of
them is mistaking what reasons they have. They each could exhaust the reasons they have
without reaching the same conclusion.
Since Heideggerian reasons are not universal, nor unified, nor systematic, Heidegger is
an anti-rationalist, as I defined it at the outset. However, Heidegger is not a reductive antirationalist. He does not reduce the appearance of reasons to causes. Although Dasein has moods
11
�and desires that inform its authentic resolution, its resolution is not reducible to psychological
drives or self-interest. In anticipating death, Dasein’s mood reveals what and who in the world
matter to it. Moreover, even if Dasein’s mood were caused by psychological drives, Dasein
accepts responsibility for its psychological make-up when it authentically resolves. By projecting
itself into a factical possibility, Dasein becomes answerable for who and how it is: it will not
excuse itself through its psychological make-up, even if that make-up plays a key role in
explaining or justifying its actions or beliefs. And it treats this answerability as a reciprocal
expectation among Daseins. Dasein does not privilege its own authenticity over the authenticity
of others. A condition of authenticity is that Dasein enables or at least refuses to impede other
Daseins’ ability to be authentic (H.122).14 Thus, the usual strategies for reducing reasons to
causes—power, economic interest, or psychological drives—are all rebutted by Heidegger’s
account of authenticity. In so far as Heidegger can treat the appearance of reasons as something
like what we expect a reason to be, Heidegger has an advantage over the reductive antirationalist accounts.
So far, I have sketched an interpretation of a Heideggerian account of reasons. The
interpretation remains incomplete because I have not addressed some key kinds of reasons—in
particular, theoretical reasons—that are not obviously assimilable to Heidegger’s account.
Nevertheless, we have enough of the interpretation on the table to consider what conception of
public reason the Heideggerian account grounds. First, anyone who has read Being and Time
knows that Heidegger is skeptical of the value of discourse in the public sphere (H.127).15 In the
public sphere, speakers pass along claims for which they themselves cannot vouch, offer
truncated lines of reasoning, and flit from one subject-matter to another without spending enough
time on them for anyone to acquire a useful understanding, let alone a reasonable one.16 Given
Heidegger’s account of reasons, it is no surprise that he would be pessimistic concerning the
value of public discourse. Clearly, not every participant in the discourse—and possibly few or
none—will themselves be authentic. Those who are not cannot offer their own reasons but can
only pass along reasons others have. As a result, members of the general public cannot decide
whom to trust on a matter that is important but not part of their own factical possibility.
Furthermore, speakers have a plethora of self-interested considerations in favor of manipulating
one’s audience rather than informing them or following lines of reasoning with them. Under
these conditions, we could be forgiven for suspecting that the speakers who have widespread
exposure in the public sphere are bad actors, whose speeches are better explained by the theories
of reductive anti-rationalists.
Although we could be forgiven, perhaps we should not let those suspicions govern our
interpretations of others in public discourse, especially those with whom we disagree. It is clear
that Heidegger, even if he endorsed the Heideggerian account of reasons I have reconstructed
here, would deny that it can support a conception of public reason. Heidegger himself would not
rescue us from the morass described by Latour. So, to Heidegger, myself and you all, I would
like to pose a question about the public sphere: is Heidegger’s pessimism inevitable? To be sure,
even if we conceive of an ideal public sphere, replete with authentic agents exchanging lines of
reasoning, we cannot imagine that the end result—even at the end of time—will necessarily be
Again, those familiar with Kant will recognize this as a Heideggerian version of Kant’s Formula of Humanity.
The word Macquarrie and Robinson translate as ‘publicness’ is ‘die Offentlichkeit.’ It is commonly used to refer
to the public sphere and rarely to the abstract property of being public.
16
These descriptions are a gloss on Heidegger’s conceptions of idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity, respectively.
14
15
12
�universal consensus on the solution to every dispute. The need for public reasoning will never be
complete nor even approach an end like a hyperbola to its asymptote. This essential
incompleteness follows from the lack of universality and unity. Heidegger himself recognizes
this essential incompleteness, which is why he describes authentic politics as a kind of struggle
(kampf, H.384-5). When reasons inevitably run out, all that is left is non-rational means of
persuading others. It would be easy to assume that non-rational means of persuasion are, a
fortiori, violent in the sense that they require some people to submit to a power they do not
endorse by their own lights. This assumption seems all the more justified because, without a
universal conception of reason, it is unclear whether there are any norms of discourse that would
undermine a public discourse that oppresses authentic voices who have reasons to offer. If there
are no universal norms then we have a strong reason to believe there is no foundation for a public
discourse that can legitimate public courses of action.
It might seem then that Heidegger’s pessimism is inevitable. However, I would like to
close by offering initial considerations that would open up an optimistic line of investigation.
First, we must recall that authenticity requires reciprocity. It is possible that we could derive
universal norms of participation from the reciprocity that authenticity requires. If oppression
inhibits Dasein’s capacity to be authentic, then authentic Dasein cannot endorse norms that
oppress others. It would follow that an authentic public sphere would not prevent anyone from
participating in it. Second, authentic Dasein is aware that its own authentic resolution is just one
among many possible resolutions. Furthermore, it is aware that its own resolution puts it into a
particular, limited perspective. Dasein does not have authentic access to all matters of public
import. When it does not, it ought to be open to the reasons that others who do have to offer. By
heeding the reasons that others can offer from their own authentic resolutions, Dasein accepts
that rationality is not something given to us that we must discover but rather something at stake
for us that we must forge. An optimistic view of a Heideggerian conception of reasons takes
public reason as a collective challenge for us. And the question is: what resources does the
Heideggerian conception—or any other conceptions that are live to the problem rationality
poses—provide for us to meet this challenge?
13
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 29, 2016 by Lee Goldsmith as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Goldsmith is an instructor of philosophy at George Washington University. His talk is about the issue of reason and the criticism of reason in the thought of Martin Heidegger. Mr. Goldsmith particularly examines Heidegger's work <em>Being and Time</em> and illucidates the critique of Reason writ large and the larger "struggle" within Heideggerean theory. His talk concludes with a potential grounding for optimism about a project of critical reason coming out of Heideggeran "reasons" rather than Reason itself. <br /><br />Mr. Goldsmith earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his B.A. from St. John's College Annapolis.</span>
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Goldsmith, Lee
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2016-06-29
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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text
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pdf
Language
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English
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Reasons without Reason: Anti-rationalism in Heidegger’s Being and Time
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Bib # 83173
Subject
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Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. Sein und Zeit. English
Existentialism
Reason
Philosophy
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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