Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, is usually considered the culminating work in a tradition called existential philosophy. The first person to call himself an existential thinker was Søren Kierkegaard, and his influence is clearly evident in Heidegger's thought. Existential thinking rejects the traditional philosophical view, which goes back to Plato at least, that philosophy must be done from a detached, disinterested point of view. Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is through our involved action. The way things show up for a detached thinker is a partial and distorted version of the way things show up to a committed individual.

Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that relates itself to itself. That means that who I am depends on the stand I take on being a self. Moreover, how I interpret myself is not a question of what I think but of what I do. I have to take up what is the given or factical part of my self and, by acting on it, define who I am. I understand myself as being a student, a teacher, the lover of a specific person, or the follower of a specific cause. Thus, the self defines itself by taking up its past by means of present actions that make sense in terms of its future. For Kierkegaard, then, the self can be understood as a temporal structure.

In opposition to mainline cognitive science, which assumes that intelligent behavior must be based on representations in the mind or brain, Merleau-Ponty holds that the most basic sort of intelligent behavior, skillful coping, can and must be understood without recourse to any type of representation. He marshals convincing phenomenological evidence that higher primates and human beings learn to act skillfully without acquiring mental representations of the skill domain and of their goals. He also saw that no brain model available at the time he wrote could explain how this was possible. I argue that now, however, there are models of brain function that show how skills could be acquired and exercised without mind or brain representations.

THE FAILURE OF REPRESENTATIONALIST MODELS OF THE MIND

The cognitivist, Merleau-Ponty’s intellectualist opponent, holds that, as the learner improves through practice, he abstracts and interiorizesmore andmore sophisticated rules. There is no phenomenological or empirical evidence that convincingly supports this view, however, and, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the flexibility, transferability, and situational sensitivity of skills makes the intellectualist account implausible.

Kierkegaard belongs right after Mark Wrathall's eloquent explanation and defense of the later Heidegger's account of the fourfold: the local earth, the seasons, our mortality, and the remnants of the pagan gods. Wrathall presented the fourfold as an attempt to answer the question: Why do we need the divine and the sacred in our lives and how should we preserve and promote them?

If he had read Martin Heidegger, Kierkegaard would have answered that any attempt to preserve the local is doomed; that technicity, the drive toward optimization and efficiency, will sooner or later wipe out traditional practices, just as it has already wiped out the last stage of onto-theology, the metaphysics of the subject, and is turning us all into resources.

Heidegger was all too aware of this possibility, which he expresses in his lament that “the wasteland grows,” that what is so dangerous about technology is that it is a drive toward the total efficient ordering of everything. The wilderness is turning into a resource – the Alaskan resource, human beings are no longer personnel, but rather material for the Human Resources Departments, and a recent advertisement proclaimed that children “are our most precious resource.” What Robert Pippin called “farmer metaphysics” is on the way out. Heidegger sadly notes the television antennas on the peasants' huts and feels that we are already failing to dwell, and that our culture is rushing into the “longest night.”

INTRODUCTION

It has always seemed to me that the text of a thinker is only worth studying if reading it makes a significant difference in how we see the world and ourselves. Our job as commentators, is to clarify the text and bring out its relevance. But how does one go about clarifying and applying a thinker like Heidegger? Since Heidegger, unlike contemporary analytic philosophers who attempt to give a logical analysis of concepts, always attempts to anchor his discussion in the phenomena, I try to use his text to draw attention to pervasive phenomena that are often overlooked, and then use an elaboration of these phenomena to cast exegetical light on the text. Finally, I test the significance of the result by seeking to show the relevance of Heidegger's insights to issues of current concern. The following remarks are meant to demonstrate this approach.

AVERAGE VERSUS PRIMORDIAL UNDERSTANDING

Heidegger says that division I of Being and Time provides a phenomenology of average everydayness and so will have to be revised in the light of the authentic way of being he describes in division II. My attempt to write a commentary exclusively on division I was, therefore, criticized on the ground that I presented as Heidegger's view theses that were taken back in division II. None of the critical reviewers, however, said what my exclusive concentration on division I led me to get wrong.

Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, is usually considered the culminating work in a tradition called existential philosophy. The first person to call himself an existential thinker was Soren Kierkegaard, and his influence is clearly evident in Heidegger's thought. Existential thinking rejects the traditional philosophical view, which goes back to Plato at least, that philosophy must be done from a detached, disinterested point of view. Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is through our involved action. The way things show up for a detached thinker is a partial and distorted version of the way things show up to a committed individual.

Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that relates itself to itself. That means that who I am depends on the stand I take on being a self. Moreover, how I interpret myself is not a question of what I think but of what I do. I have to take up what is the given or factical part of my self and, by acting on it, define who I am. I understand myself as being a student, a teacher, the lover of a specific person, or the follower of a specific cause. Thus, the self defines itself by taking up its past by means of present actions that make sense in terms of its future. For Kierkegaard, then, the self can be understood as a temporal structure.

The traditional account of skills

The rationalist philosophical tradition which descends from Socrates, to Plato, to Leibniz, to Kant, to conventional AI and knowledge engineering takes it for granted that understanding a domain consists in having a theory about that domain. A theory formulates the relationships between objective, context-free features (attributes, factors, data points, cues, etc.) in terms of abstract principles (covering laws, rules, programs, etc.) As this tradition develops, even everyday practice is assumed to be based on unconscious theory.

In one of his earliest dialogues, The Euthyphro, Plato tells us of an encounter between Socrates and Euthyphro, a religious prophet and so an expert on pious behavior. Socrates asks Euthyphro to tell him how to recognize piety: “I want to know what is characteristic of piety … to use as a standard whereby to judge your actions and those of other men.” But instead of revealing his piety-recognizing principles, Euthyphro does just what every expert does when cornered by Socrates. He gives him examples from his field of expertise; in this case situations in the past in which men and gods have done things which everyone considers pious. Socrates persists throughout the dialogue in demanding that Euthyphro tell him his rules, but although Euthyphro claims he knows how to tell pious acts from impious ones, he cannot state the rules which generate his judgments. Socrates ran into the same problem with craftsmen, poets, and even statesmen. None could articulate the theory underlying his behavior.