Impacto económico y social del estudio

Let us begin by considering what any explanation of intentionality must pro- vide. Intentionality is philosophically perplexing because by means of it we are not simply in causal interaction with entities but have to do with them as something. One way to get at this distinction is to say that to be involved with something “as” something is to be governed by the conditions that the thing must satisfy in order to be what it is taken to be. This means that inten- tionality is a normative notion, governed by conditions of success or failure. For instance, for me to experience something as a pen (for it to be the “inten- tional content” of my “state”), I must be responsive to the rules which consti- tute something as a pen.8_{Stating what these rules are can be difficult—in-} deed, whether they can be stated at all is a matter of some dispute—but only if

it is true that in the face of the thing’s failure to live up to (some of ) its satis- faction conditions I would admit that my experience “had not been” of a pen, I could not have been involved with it as a pen at all.

Now Heidegger appears to have an account of this sort of normativity. In keeping with his rejection of a Cartesian subject whose mental states de- termine the content of its experience, Heidegger locates the norms govern- ing intentionality not in the individual subject’s representations but in social practices. Before being an individual subject, Dasein is a socialized One (das

Man), constituted by what is “average” (the normal) and thereby caught up in

what is normative.9_{It is because I conform to the way “one” does things} that entities can become available to me as appropriate and so “as” pens, shoes, eating utensils, and the like. Such normativity simply arises in the course of practices; it is not the result of (and hence not explicable in terms of ) reason. Intentionality rests not upon a transcendental logic but upon the de facto normativity of practices.

Robert Pippin, however, has questioned the adequacy of this account, ar- guing that it explains only how we act in accord with norms, when what really needs explaining is how we can act in light of them. By emphasizing “mindless” conformism over any “quasi-intentional features of taking up or

sustaining a practice,”10 _{this interpretation conceals a moment of self-con-} scious agency that has not been given its due: even to say that I am con- forming to a norm is to say more than that my behavior just happens. When Heidegger suggests that in practices I “let” things “be involved,” this implies more than simply using things appropriately; it implies that I use them “in light of such appropriateness.” Social practices are such that one can be doing them only if one takes oneself to be doing them.11_{The Kant-} ian rationalist will explain the distinction between acting merely in accord with norms (conformism) and acting in light of them by appealing to self- legislation or pure practical reason, and Pippin acknowledges that Heideg- ger’s rejection of such rationalism has some plausibility: “We do of course inherit and pass on much unreflectively, or at least in a way that makes the language of self-imposition and justification look highly idealized.”12_Nev- ertheless he requires that Heidegger provide some account of “the internal structure of . . . sustaining and reflecting” social practices, without which we cannot distinguish acting in accord with norms from acting in light of them. Because Heidegger does not provide such an account, his appeal to sociality is ultimately aporetic.13

Pippin recognizes that such an account should be given in Division Two of Being and Time, but he believes that “the themes of anxiety, guilt, the call of conscience, authenticity, and resoluteness do not shed much light” on the problem. Because they represent a “total” breakdown of the seamless con- formity to the norms grounded in das Man, they provide merely an “inde- 46 Steven Crowell

terminate negation” of the conformist self, one that reveals no positive re- sources for a normatively oriented “sustaining and reflecting” of inherited norms.14_{In short, Heidegger lacks an adequate concept of self-conscious-} ness in Hegel’s sense: because these chapters present Dasein’s authentic dis- closedness not as something it works toward by “reasoning, reflecting, con- testation with others” but as an “original event,” Dasein’s authenticity, its “‘acting for the sake of its own possibility,’ cannot be rightly understood as acting on, or ‘having’ reasons, as if it came to its ends, or could come to them as its own, only by virtue of such reasons. This would be a secondary mani- festation for Heidegger and would suggest an unacceptably subjectivist un- derstanding of such activity (as if the subject were the ‘origin’).”15_{Thus, on} Pippin’s reading, Heidegger’s position offers nothing but the mindless social conformism of the One, the “arch, defensive neo-positivism” of a disclosive event that simply reifies “mentalités, epistemes, ‘discourses,’ ‘fields of power,’ and so on.”16

But is it true that Division Two of Being and Time sheds no light on this problem? Can the existential analyses of anxiety, conscience, and resolute- ness really be relegated to the scrap heap of “indeterminate negation”? Pip- pin challenges us to look again at these chapters to see whether they might yield something like a notion of normative self-consciousness—something that would illuminate what it means to act in light of norms, or to act on reasons, without implying (as Pippin, following Hegel, does) that authentic disclosedness must be a consequence of deliberation, or “reasoning, reflecting, contestation with others.” Perhaps critics have been putting the wrong question to these chapters, one that conceals the place that reason already occupies there.