Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity

Abstract

No one in our day has done more than Hubert L. Dreyfus to make American philosophy less parochial. For some forty years, he has helped the rest of us understand what our European colleagues are up to, introduced us to them, and encouraged the study of their works. By commenting on them, by organizing conferences about them, and most of all by weaving their works together with work being done by anglophone analytic philosophers, Dreyfus has rendered invaluable service to the international philosophical community. It is no exaggeration to say that without Dreyfus the gap between European and anglophone philosophy would be, at the end of the twentieth century, far greater than it in fact is. By behaving as if the analytic-Continental split were of no great importance, he has done a great deal to narrow it. My own acquaintance with European philosophy owes almost everything to Dreyfus. Back in the late 1950s, when I was at Wellesley and Dreyfus was at Harvard, he encouraged me to read Merleau-Ponty and tried to convince me that Husserl was not nearly as pointless as I thought. Had I not been intrigued by his account of Husserl's break with Descartes, I should never have taught Cartesian Meditations. 1 By helping John Wild and others translate the early portions of Sein und Zeit 2 and letting me reproduce copies of the result, Dreyfus made it possible for me to assign bits of that book to my Wellesley classes. (This underground, unauthorized, mimeographed translation was the basis for most teaching of Heidegger in the United States prior to the publication, in 1962, of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation. People whose German was weak but who knew Dreyfus had a big head start.) Toward the end of the 1960s, when I started reading Derrida, Dreyfus was one of the few friends with whom I could hash over La Voix et le Phénomène 3 and who could explain to me what was going on in Paris. Later on, in the 1970s, Dreyfus helped me to get acquainted with Jürgen Habermas and with Michel Foucault. Many other American philosophers owe their personal acquaintance with these two men to Dreyfus's mediation. He made it his business to ensure that not only Berkeley, but the U.S. academic community as a whole, realized that exciting and original philosophical work was being done in non-anglophone countries. He encouraged students to work on these figures, and he became one of the very few senior figures in American philosophy on whom young philosophers who were interested in Heidegger or Foucault could rely for support. Students whom Dreyfus trained at Berkeley have become influential and important commentators on European philosophy and, in their turn, have encouraged and supported the efforts of a third generation of scholars. When intellectual historians track the gradual flow of postwar French and German philosophical thought into the United States, Dreyfus's archive will be one of their principal sources. Dreyfus would not have been able to do all this without amazing reserves of energy and great personal charm. But his achievements are due above all to his inexhaustible intellectual curiosity-his willingness to read anything that comes along with the hope of finding something new and important in it. The sheer joyous optimism of his approach to philosophy, his assumption that there is probably something useful and interesting in any new philosophical publication, is primarily responsible for his contribution to our country's intellectual life. In a period in which it has sometimes seemed that American philosophers read less and less in every generation, and in which specialization in philosophy has reached hitherto unheardof extremes, Dreyfus has remained a colleague with whom one can profitably converse all along an amazingly wide spectrum of philosophical topics and authors. x Richard Rorty xii Richard Rorty The editors would like to give special thanks to Geneviève Dreyfus, without whom this volume never would have appeared, as well as to Larry Cohen at The MIT Press. Preparation of the volumes was completed while Jeff Malpas was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. A number of students at Brigham Young University and the University of Tasmania have assisted in the preparation of this manuscript, including