Temporality, authenticity, democracy: Heidegger and Dewey on the meaning of time (Martin Heidegger, John Dewey).

摘要

This dissertation develops a comparative analysis and reciprocal critique of the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and John Dewey, revealing convergences in their thought stemming from their shared thematization of human being as a temporal structure. Part One of the dissertation shows that the temporal constitution of experience is the implicit theme of Dewey's mature philosophy just as it is the obvious and explicit theme of Heidegger's early thinking. For Dewey, the theme of temporality is developed by way of a "reconstructive" analysis of the temporal "dimensions" of present, past, and future in terms of the technical concepts of transaction, habit, and intelligence, respectively. In its broadly phenomenological character, this analysis invites comparison with the "existential analytic" carried out in Division One of Being and Time, which renders human being as "Da-sein," a locus of embodied striving that has been "thrown" into a situation not of its choosing yet constitutive of its possibilities, that "projects" itself toward aims that it intends to realize, and that tends to "fall" into an oblivious absorption in everyday affairs, a state of dispersal that draws Da-sein away from focusing on its ultimate commitments and concerns.; Part Two of the dissertation develops critiques of each philosophy from the standpoint of the other. In Being and Time Division Two, Heidegger shows how the contingency and mortality disclosed in the existential structure of "thrown projection" provides the criterion for an account of achieved selfhood---that is, of Da-sein's possible "authenticity." The absence of any analogous account in Dewey's thinking represents a failure to carry through the implications of the temporal analysis of human being that Dewey shares with Heidegger. But Heidegger's further invocation of a "group authenticity" corresponding to the "destiny" of a people amounts to an adventitious attempt to validate an arbitrary political bias within the terms of his philosophy. On the contrary, it is argued, the Deweyan comparison suggests that it is liberal democracy, not Heideggerian revolutionary conservatism, which "anticipates" the genuine, mature individuality of its citizens. The theme of authenticity fits more naturally with Deweyan democracy than with Heidegger's mythologization of the German Volk.