Authenticity and Play

Heidegger’s account of authenticity emphasizes receptivity and responsiveness and these qualities receive even more pronounced emphasis in Wittgenstein’s appreciation of the importance of play. Wittgenstein’s investigations of language-games and scenes of teaching and learning highlight the dynamic evolution of communication and action. His account of action styles us not as agents but as players—musical or theatrical improvisation serves as a model for Wittgensteinian authenticity. The chapter also responds to the concern voiced by Rush Rhees that Wittgenstein’s emphasis on games opens the door to sophistry and it draws out the importance of the grammatical middle voice in Heidegger’s treatment of receptivity and responsiveness.

Anxiety, Scepticism, and Rule Following

Heidegger claims that average everyday Dasein is inauthentic: we have a tendency—which Heidegger characterizes as ‘falling’—to disown or fail to acknowledge our own role in constituting the significance of our existence. A pivotal moment in turning us toward our authentic potentiality-for-being-a-self is the mood of anxiety in which we encounter the world as evacuated of significance. In such a mood, we come face to face with the essential open-endedness of our existence, which Heidegger characterizes as uncanny. Heidegger’s dynamic of falling and anxiety finds striking echoes in Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule following and scepticism. The sceptical challenge Wittgenstein confronts with regard to rule following resembles the mood of anxiety in which we are suddenly confronted with the sense that we have no good reason for going on as we have done until now.

Grammar and Ontology

Wittgenstein characterizes his investigations as ‘grammatical’ and emphasizes their difference from factual or empirical investigations. In particular, he claims, philosophical confusion arises when we regard philosophical questions as questions of fact. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on keeping distinct grammatical and factual investigations echoes Heidegger’s emphasis on what he calls the ‘ontological difference’, namely the distinction between ontic investigations of beings and ontological investigations of being. For both philosophers, keeping their investigations distinct from factual investigations means that they understand themselves not to be discovering and expressing novel truths but to be retrieving and clarifying an understanding that we already have. And for both of them, this retrieval calls for a careful examination of our everyday practices.

Being-in-the-World and Forms of Life

Division I of Being and Time offers an analysis of Dasein’s average everyday existence. Heidegger’s use of ‘Dasein’ to talk about human beings draws attention to the way in which we are embedded in a world that has significance to us. In particular, he observes how things show up to us within a holistic network of significance as ready-to-hand equipment, which he distinguishes from the atomistic thinghood of presence-at-hand. This account of practical engagement echoes Wittgenstein’s treatment of language as embedded in significant activities and forms of life. For Wittgenstein, a grammatical investigation of our criteria for the use of words is also an investigation of the significant world in which those words have a use.

Introduction

And all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it happened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other, ‘Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard’. And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, ‘Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth’. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. And the LORD said, ‘As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, nothing they plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other’s language’. And the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is called Babel, for there the LORD made the language of all the earth babble. And from there the LORD scattered them over all the earth....

Authenticity and the Everyday

This chapter develops two claims that are central to the argument of the book. First, it articulates a conception of authenticity in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that echoes the conception we find in Division II of Being and Time. This account builds on the treatment of rule following from the previous chapter and contrasts an ‘authentic’ reading of Wittgenstein with Kripke’s sceptical reading. And second, it argues that, for both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, authenticity is not a liberation from the everyday but rather a clear-sighted embrace of the everyday. Our average everyday existence is inauthentic to the extent that we regard that existence as fixed independent of us. An authentic everydayness, by contrast, acknowledges the uncanniness of our everyday practices, which have no external support or justification beyond our own investment in them.

Attunement and Being-With

Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger emphasize the public nature of the everyday: we not only share our world with others, but the intelligibility of that world finds public articulation. Wittgenstein emphasizes our attunement in sharing forms of life and constantly invokes the first person plural in talking about what ‘we’ do. This chapter offers a deflationary account of this ‘we’, resisting conventionalist and transcendental idealist readings. Heidegger’s account of Dasein as being-with takes on darker tones, as he describes the levelling influence of das Man, whereby we unreflectively align ourselves with what ‘one’ does. Contrary to some interpreters, the author argues that the influence of das Man, while inescapable, is not also suffocating, and that Heidegger’s account of distantiality allows us to see that we constantly maintain a necessary distance from das Man.

Conclusion

Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger have been associated with the idea of an ‘end of philosophy’: their work is sometimes read as representing a fundamental rupture in the philosophical tradition, such that the discipline formerly known as ‘philosophy’ can no longer continue as before in the wake of their intervention—and this is a reading they sometimes encourage....

Wittgenstein’s Pursuit of Authenticity in Philosophy

An important difference between Wittgenstein and Heidegger is their use of metaphors of covering and discovery. Heidegger characterizes his phenomenological method as uncovering a concealed ontological framework whereas Wittgenstein insists that ‘nothing is hidden’ and that the only thing to be uncovered is covert nonsense. Wittgenstein’s method is marked by a resolute rejection of a hermeneutics of suspicion and relies instead on using pictures or objects of comparison to dislodge recalcitrant prejudices. The difference from Heidegger on these counts is manifest in Wittgenstein’s treatment of the problematic of realism and idealism. Wittgenstein’s method makes heavy use of questions and dialogue, inviting his readers into a mimetic engagement with the problems he addresses, which contrasts with the diegetic form of Heidegger’s investigation.

Heidegger’s Pursuit of Authenticity in Philosophy

The concern with authenticity exhibited by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein applies reflexively to their work: being authentic and philosophizing authentically are deeply intertwined concerns. This chapter focuses on the way in which Heidegger attempts to extricate himself from traditional philosophical problematics, focusing primarily on the problematic of realism and idealism and on the concept of truth. Heidegger develops a method of formal indication by which he tries to direct us toward an ontological understanding without relying on the problematic form of the assertion. However, Heidegger attempts at points to articulate this ontological understanding—most notoriously when he asserts that Newton’s Laws were not true before Newton—in ways that work against him.