From normative commitment to existential commitment : Heidegger and Brandom -

Abstract

This work aims to answer the question of whether an existential datum such as the confrontation with ‘nothingness’ poses a challenge to conceptual rationality understood in Brandom’s terms or whether the difference between normative commitments and existential commitments is one that transcends rationality. I want to do so via Heidegger’s Being and Time and Robert Brandom’s Reason in Philosophy Animating Ideas. In Chapter one, I articulate the relationship between authenticity and inauthenticity as two modes of existing characteristic of Dasein. Chapter two elaborates on Brandom’s account of inferentialism as presented in Reason in Philosophy, Animating Ideas. Chapter 3 uses Brandom’s presentation of inferentialism to elucidate Heidegger’s account of pre-understanding. As it turns out, the game of giving and asking for reasons is a condition for Being-in-the-world. In chapter four, it will be shown that acknowledgement of the nothingness concomitant with ontological transcendence CAN be factored in the game of giving and asking for reasons. IF Brandom’s functionalism leaves something out it would be the encounter with nothingness or anxiety as the mood that precedes the call of conscience or the resolution to act that directly follows from it. If Death as annihilation cannot be understood using everyday vocabulary then a more sophisticated fine-grained vocabulary is needed. To say that we do not on a daily basis understand that mortality means annihilation is not argument for the claim that nothingness is a non-discursive absolute. Brandom would be willing to concede that the radicality of existential commitments outstrips the resources of discursive justifications. But this radicality requires a higher order conceptual understanding for Heidegger’s account to hold. Dasein’s nothingness is itself discursively articulated in Heidegger’s own work. And Heidegger uses unusual terminologies with hyphen precisely to capture what cannot be captured