Heidegger and socio-ontology: A sociological reading

Cambridge University Press, 2023

Many critics and commentators hold that Heidegger had next to nothing to say about human sociality. In this book, Nicolai Knudsen rectifies this popular misconception. Drawing on his influential philosophy of mind, his philosophy of action and his conception of being-with, Knudsen argues that the central idea of Heidegger's social ontology is that we can only understand others, do things with others, and form lasting groups with others if we pre-reflectively correlate their behaviour with our own projects and the world that lies between us. Knudsen then uses this framework to formulate Heideggerian contributions to current debates on social cognition, collective intentionality, and social normativity. He also reinterprets Heidegger's famous concept of authenticity in the light of his social ontological commitments, and shows how Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism betrays his own best insights into the fundamental structure of social life.

This book chapter shows how the early Heidegger's philosophy around the period of Being and Time can address some central questions of contemporary social ontology. After sketching "non-summative constructionism", which is arguably the generic framework that underlies all forms of contemporary analytic social ontology, I lay out early Heidegger's conception of human social reality in terms of an extended argument. The Heidegger that shows up in light of this treatment is an acute phenomenologist of human social existence who emphasizes our engagement in norm-governed practices as the basis of social reality. I then defuse a common and understandable set of objections against invoking the early Heidegger as someone who can make any positive contribution to our understanding of social reality. Lastly, I explore the extent to which the early Heidegger's philosophy provides insights regarding phenomena of collective intentionality by showing how the intelligibility of such phenomena traces back to individual agents' common understanding of possible ways of understanding things and acting with one another. With the early Heidegger, I argue that this common understanding is the fundamental source and basis of collective intentionality, not the non-summativist constructionism on which contemporary analytic social ontology has sought to focus with much effort. The lesson about social ontology that we should learn from the early Heidegger is that there is a tight connection between the social constitution of the human individual and his or her capacity to perform actions or activities that instantiate collective intentionality.

The aim of this work is to examine Heidegger's social ontology, roughly the human being's relation to others. In eight chapters Knudsen elaborates Heidegger's thinking of being-with, different forms of being-with (such as shared action) and, say, the politics of being-with. Knudsen, understandably, focuses on the early Heidegger and attempts to relate Heidegger's thinking concerning social relations to fields that, quite often, have not studied Heidegger at length to develop their positions: one will find, for instance, accounts of Hilary Putnam alongside Heidegger. This dialogue between the two big strands of contemporary philosophy is perhaps not always successful even though it at times surely is illuminating. Knudsen's book, however, takes a slow start and at times gets lost somewhat in the definition-craze that haunts much of analytical philosophy (a craze that is a bit ironic when compared to Heidegger's questioning of what a being actually "is", for Heidegger obviously never allowed a definition to exhaust the being of an entity). Knudsen throughout offers a very lucid account of Heidegger's positions-certainly when it comes to Being and Time-and of contemporary thinkers in the field of social ontology. It is clear, too, that Knudsen is somewhat enamored with phenomenology-who can blame him! Yet, although Knudsen for instance assumes the normativity of phenomenology-one must "get the phenomenology right" (130-1)-it is hard to imagine whether this alone will convince his dialogue partners. It is this that makes this reader wonder whether the dialogue between the two strands of philosophy here has always succeeded. In the Introduction already, Knudsen describes Heidegger as an externalist: the reality of the outside world, better, the "solicitations of the environment" (2), make for the fact that the human being is always caught in, and claimed by, a network of relations on which he or she, in turn "constitutively depends" which puts Heidegger "at odds with […] contemporary analytical social ontology as well as recent social phenomenology" (5) which both see individuals or the dyadic relation between the other and me as the ultimate level of explanation. Using a term from Donald Davidson, Knudsen describes Dasein's relation to the world and to others as triangulation: Dasein understands itself through the world which it always shares with others. Chapter one sets out to elaborate Heidegger's social ontology by pointing to a transcendental social structure according to which entities, properties, social and natural alike, appear as they do because "subjectivity itself implies a set of necessary and a priori social relations" (19) that is, the transcendental structure of intentionality as such already "implies a form of

European Journal of Philosophy, 2020

This article traces the development of how the early Heidegger tried to integrate the structures of social life into phenomenological ontology. Firstly, I argue that Heidegger's analysis of the three elements of the lifeworld—the with‐world (Mitwelt), the environing world (Umwelt), and the self‐world (Selbstwelt)—is ambiguous, because it shifts between defining sociality as a domain of entities and a mode of appearance. This is untenable because the social as a mode of appearance constantly overflows the definition as a domain by implicating social structures in phenomenological explications of entities that, formally, belong to other domains. Secondly, I argue that Heidegger realized this and subsequently changed his terminology from Mitwelt to Mitsein in order to avoid confusing the mode of appearance with the innerworldly entities. The systematic consequence of this line of argument is that the object of social ontology must be the world as such rather than a particular domain. Lastly, I respond to the common worry that this position is unable to explain the significance of interpersonal encounters by arguing that the world not only makes the appearance of others possible but also that the world is itself at stake in these encounters.

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2017

This article is concerned with the question of the relative priority between political and social ontology within left-Heideggerianism, a tradition recently reconstructed by Oliver Marchart (2007). Although the title seems to imply that this question is an open and live one within left-Heideggerianism – that the two paths at the crossroads have been clearly delineated when, in fact, the current predicament of left-Heideggerianism resembles more a one-way street – this is somewhat misleading: the identification of left-Heideggerianism with a post-foundationalist political ontology that enjoys systematic priority over the social has contributed to the suppression of the question of the Being of the social and, therefore, prevented a critical re-examination of its relationship to the political. The aim of this article is both modest and ambitious: modest, in that it merely seeks to pose and motivate the question of the social within left-Heideggerianism both at an exegetical and at a systematic level; ambitious, in that the upshot of thematizing the question of the social is to indicate an alternative path or ‘social paradigm’ within left-Heideggerianism that begins with a different (social ontological) reading of Heidegger and ultimately leads to a different model of Gesellschaftskritik with wide-ranging implications. Otherwise put, the article follows the path initially taken by the early Marcuse’s ‘Heideggerian Marxism’ and attempts to see it through to its final destination by clearing some obstacles along the way, i.e. by correcting some important misunderstandings of fundamental ontology by Marchart and Marcuse.

Relationale Soziologie, 2010

The task of a critical social theory can be described as the identification and critique of alienated structures. A situation becomes alienated when it is reified in such a way that its rules are followed without knowledge of their creation and without awareness of the possibility of changing them. The identification of alienated and reified structures unfolds against the background of some ideal of non-alienated or authentic life. In this paper, I will offer a discussion of Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit and explore the possible resources it provides for a critical social theory. I will approach this task by discussing Steven Crowell’s Kantian reading of Being and Time. On the one hand, this interpretation offers certain systematic strengths in reading Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein in terms of a constitutional model of agency. On the other hand, an interpretation which reads the being of Dasein in terms of practical identity falls short of capturing the full potential of Heidegger’s account of Eigentlichkeit. I will propose an understanding of Eigentlichkeit as describing a specific kind of transparent self-knowledge of Dasein: In Eigentlichkeit Dasein understands that it has to take responsibility for its existence despite the fact that none of its reasons will ever be sufficiently justified. It is confronted with the task of grounding its existence in light of fundamental ungroundedness. This self-knowledge coincides with an awareness of the contingency of all social structures, norms, rules, and practices. I will conclude by indicating that ungroundedness becoming transparent can be a resource for social critique and motivate a request for social change.

Paper was originally presented at Oxford conference on the centenary of l'Annee Sociologique.

THE writings of Emile Durkheim and Martin Heidegger are marked by many unexpected similarities. This is especially true in the area of each thinker's social ontology. By this term I mean the author's definition of social existence and the set of ramifications that emerge out of that definition. Each wrote in his own way against a perceived background of malaise within the context of capitalist, nationalist Europe. Durkheim's category of anomie has its correlate in Heidegger's Angst, while Heidegger's philosophical analysis of finitude and mortality echoes Durkheim's interest in suicide. Both men were also adamant that the monadic self-posited both in post-Cartesian philosophy as an epistemological given and in popular sociological understanding as a social and moral fact-was a fiction. In both Durkheim' s sociology and Heidegger's philosophy, we are reminded, in ways still fresh, that human existence takes shape only as the result of a series of relations and interactions. Despite the similarities between Heidegger's and Durkheim' s des~riptions of the relational nature of what we might today call subject formation, the conclusions they reached from their analyses could hardly be more different. This essay aims to examine why that might be, bearing in mind the paradox that these two figures have exerted an enormous and simultaneous influence on much post-Second World War social thought, especially through the writings of the French structuralists and post-structuralists. The essay begins with a synopsis of Durkheim's essay, 'The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions' (in Wolff 1960), in which he 1. This notion was central to Durkheim's later work and is explicated more fully in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965).

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman (eds.), Lexington Books, 2021