Haugeland’s first attempt to address this question turned on the notion of a
“unit of accountability,” but as we shall see, he developed this notion initially in too behavioristic a fashion.
Each unit of accountability, as a pattern of normal dispositions and social roles, is a subpattern of Dasein—an institution. But it is a distinctive institution, in that it can have behavior as “my” behavior, and can be censured if that behavior is improper; it is a case of Dasein. (DD, 11) What makes a piece of behavior “mine” is that “I” can be censured for it. What does it mean to say that “I can be censured” for a piece of behavior?
Haugeland uses disciplining children as an example: when a child puts his hand in the cookie jar in contravention of parental rules, the parent might spank the child’s bottom. (Haugeland was reared in the 1940s and ’50s!) Why spank the bottom when it was the hand that committed the crime? Because the bottom and the hand “belong to the same person.” But what does that mean? It means that inflicting a deprivation on the bottom (“censuring it,” in Haugeland’s language) tends to generate conformity in the hand. In this initial statement of the idea, then, the unity or integrity of the individual person consists in its responding to deprivations inflicted on any part of it. This way of framing the idea, however, is reductively behavioristic, and in particular, it does not distinguish responding to punishment from taking responsibility for conforming
to the norms whose violation leads to punishment.
By 1990 Haugeland had begun to emphasize this constitutive investment of the individual self in the roles that he or she plays: “To cast oneself into such a role is to take on the relevant norms—both in the sense of undertaking to abide by them and in the sense of accepting responsibility for failings” (DD, 38). Let us view Haugeland’s statement here as a challenge: we must say something about the individual self’s responsiveness to the norms that constitute the Anyone. Unsurprisingly, it was Haugeland himself who made the signal contribution to addressing this challenge, though it took him another ten years.
The first iterations of California Heideggerianism regarded Division II of Being and Time as an existentialist addition to Division I, something that one could ignore if one’s interest were primarily in the traditional philosophical questions of the nature of truth, the constitution of the self, and the intelligibility of the world. Division II was treated as pursuing vaguely Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean reflections on existential authenticity. Non-California Heideggerians had long held to the indispensability of Division II, but typically the connection was taken to be something rather different. For example, if everything Dasein does in its everyday life is fleeing from anxiety, hiding from a deep truth, then the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur) in Division II unmasks the charade of everyday human life. Haugeland’s breakthrough insight was to see that what Heidegger calls “guilt” and “conscience” are conditions of the possibility of the phenomena analyzed in Division I. They are not (or perhaps not only) modes of access to some dark underbelly of everyday life but phenomena in virtue of which individual agents are able to live everyday lives in the first place, irrespective of any deep truth from which they may also be hiding.
Dasein does not just robotically execute normative rules. Yes, primarily and usually we do unthinkingly conform to the normative expectations of our social environment. I do not have to think to avoid stripping down to my underwear during an Intro to Philosophy lecture, nor do I have to think before I enter a building via the door, rather than the window. One of the principal phenomenological insights of Division I is that we mostly conform to social norms unreflectively. Nonetheless there is a difference between conforming to a norm and executing programming.5 To conform to a norm is to be responsive to normative valences (stripping down while lecturing would be shocking) or statuses (the instructor is permitted to call on students during the lecture).
Unlike natural properties and powers, normative valences and statuses can be
defied. Normative valences and statuses call upon agents to comport themselves in specific ways, and these calls can be defied or flouted or simply ignored. There must be some facet of Dasein’s disclosedness that unveils normative valences and statuses to us. Haugeland identified disposedness (Befindlichkeit, which he renders as “findingness” in “Truth and Finitude”) as the medium of such disclosedness. A concrete determination of disposedness is an attunement. Attunements “tune Dasein in” to what matters in a situation; that is, they reveal normative valences and statuses in the broadest sense of the term.
To be tuned in to what matters is not just to “detect” some feature of the situation. It is to be responsive to it, to be guided by it. We are not guided by normative valences in the way in which iron filings can be guided by the movement of a magnet. We can defy normative valences. To find oneself standing under a commitment is to disclose the possibility of flouting it as unacceptable. “But a responsiveness that finds what is ruled out in the responding entity’s own actions to be unacceptable to that entity itself is responsibility” (DD, 204). Haugeland does not interpret any particular piece of Heideggerian terminology as designating this responsibility, but I have argued elsewhere that this is what Heidegger means by “guilt.”6 Haugeland interprets “guilt” as what he calls “existential responsibility,” which is
“responsibility for its own self as a whole, for who it is” (DD, 208).
Heidegger, however, does not put any reference to the “whole self” into his official definition of “guilt”: “Hence, we determine the formal existential idea of the ‘guilty’ thus: being-the-ground for a being that has been determined by a not—that is, being-the-ground of a nullity” (SZ, 283), which he also subsequently glosses as the “essential nullity of projection” (SZ, 285). To understand what this means, we must understand in what way Dasein is the
“ground of a nullity.”
The key to understanding the word “null” is that the German word (nichtig) is just the adjectival form of “not” (nicht). To be null means to be “not-ish,”7 or “characterized by a ‘not’” (SZ, 283), as Heidegger glosses it. “Projection”
(Entwurf) refers to our pressing forward into (including choosing) our possibilities. So to say that our “projection is essentially null” is to say that our forward motion in life is characterized by a “not.” What “not” is this? One
“stands in each case in one or another possibility, [one] constantly is not another, and [one] has relinquished it in [one’s] existentiell projection” (SZ, 285). When Heidegger subsequently describes Dasein’s freedom as residing
“in the choice of the one [possibility], that is, in bearing not having chosen and not being able to choose the other [possibilities]” (SZ, 285), he is harking back to a passage where he sent a clear signal about his Kantian interpretation of freedom:
Possibility as an existentiale does not mean the free-floating ability-to-be in the sense of the “indifference of the will” (libertas indifferentiae). As essentially disposed, Dasein has in each case already stumbled into determinate possibilities; as the ability-to-be that it is, it has already let such [possibilities] pass by; it constantly relinquishes possibilities of its being, takes hold of them, and errs. That means, however: Dasein is being-possible that is delivered over to itself, through and through thrown possibility. (SZ, 144)
One is not “able” or free to choose the other possibilities in the sense that one has already “relinquished” or forsworn them. So the “not” that characterizes Dasein’s projection is the impossibility of escaping its subjection to the pull of the normative valences in terms of which the possibilities open to it are disclosed.
We are always subject to normative imports that call upon us to live or act in various ways. Although this “being called upon” is not literally a sort of speech, it can be modeled on the speech act of summoning. The attunement of shame discloses something about or associated with me as shameful;
shamefulness calls for hiding or covering up. Shamefulness addresses us and summons us to a determinate response. This structure of address and summons is essential to our very being: to be an agent is to be thrown into life in such a way that the imports disclosed by one’s attunements summon one to action.
Heidegger calls this summoning “conscience,” for as conscience in the ordinary sense summons us to respond to our moral guilt, Heidegger’s
“transcendental conscience”8 summons us to respond to our “essential” guilt (as Heidegger puts it in SZ, 286), our being bound by norms.
This is one of Haugeland’s deepest insights about Being and Time:
Heidegger analyzes subjectivity or agency in terms of his concepts of guilt and conscience. The very concepts of subjectivity and the first person are fraught within the tradition of California Heideggerianism. Indeed, their absence has been one of the principal focal points of criticism of the movement. Those who have seized on this point, however, such as Frederick Olafson,9 have tended to insist on reintroducing a fairly traditional conception of experience or
subjectivity into the reading of Being and Time. The goal ought not to be to smuggle a Cartesian notion of subjectivity back into Heidegger but to figure out the place of the first person and a notion of subjectivity based on it within the framework of California Heideggerianism. Some have tried to address this lacuna in California Heideggerianism by arguing that what Heidegger calls
“authenticity” is the first-person point of view on one’s own life and actions.10 I have argued against this strategy elsewhere and will not repeat those criticisms here.11 Instead I want to turn to and exploit a strategy of pragmatic analysis developed by other students of Haugeland’s.