Abstract

An alternative title for this discussion might have run: "Heidegger or The Concept of Mind." Its ambivalence provides a direction. Read in an inclusive or appositional way "or" has the sense of "Heidegger Revisited," while interpreted exclusively it confronts us with the necessity to choose between two incompatible versions. No one would seriously dispute that there are significant differences in technique, motive, and goal between Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Ryle’s Concept of Mind, and in their philosophizing generally. Ryle’s technique is that of the linguistic portrayal or sentence-frame analysis; his goal is not a science or a clarification of the meaning of Being, but rather a "theory of mind" or philosophical psychology. His method lies within what may be termed a behaviorist perspective and, implicitly, adopts the verification principle of meaning. Unlike Skinnerian behaviorism, the source of the behavioral indicators of "mind" as well as its measure is provided for by ordinary, cultivated English. In Heidegger’s work the appeal to the evidence of ordinary language, the language of everyday being in the world, is frequent. He often cites linguistic usage for guidance in his analyses, as for example the passages on the hammer, on social inauthenticity, on temporal expressions, and on the grammar of listening and hearing. At this stage he is not as self-conscious of this method as is Ryle in a later period, although it is consonant with Heidegger’s emergent stress on the importance of language. For Heidegger of course these analyses of ordinary language are not ends in themselves, because this realm is meant to exhibit certain a priori structures of human existence, which he calls "existentials" in contradistinction to the "categories" applicable to things. Furthermore, his interest in these existential clarifications is governed by his contention that they afford a necessary basis for and prelude to ontology, for which reason he designates this endeavor "fundamental-ontology." The analysis of being human, consequently, can never, according to Heidegger, be autonomous and self-sufficient, because man’s constitution is meshed with that of others, things, and instruments, with works of art, thought, and politics, and above all with Being. His analysis also differs in an important way from Ryle’s in his view that our understanding of the world is ensnared in the conflicting claims of authentic and inauthentic possibilities for life. As a result, from the outset, ordinary language, a theme to which he later returns in his essays on Hölderlin, represents a threat as well as a rich fund of expression. Lastly, there is nothing in Ryle resembling Heidegger’s detailed examination of gossip, hearsay, and curiosity, boredom, fear, and dread, time, freedom, and death.