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At first, these passages do seem to recommend DC, but a closer reading reveals that they cut against it. In the first passage, the claim that what
Dasein factically resolves in any particular case cannot be discussed in the ontological inquiry of Being and Time does not mean that there can
be no such thing as factical reasons that count in favor of Daseins resolute self-choice. Heideggers point is that such a choice is highly
idiosyncratic. It is an ontic decision rooted in the factical makeup of the individual who makes it. It would be absurd for a philosopher who
maintains that humanity has no nature to specify objective ontic criteria for self-choice.
In his very influential account of DC in Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, Tugendhat made the second passage infamous by relating it to a story from his student years: When
Heidegger first presented his ideas in lectures at Marburg, the students remarked jokingly, We are resolute, but we do not know to what purpose. 30 The joke, obviously, was designed to
ridicule Heideggers concept of resoluteness. According to Tugendhat, the students found the alleged existential ideal vacuous because Heidegger had failed to specify any objective criteria upon
which a resolute individual ought to resolve, claiming insteadand rather unhelpfully by Tugendhats lightsthat only the resolution itself can give the answer. As with the first passage,
however, Heideggers point is not that resolute Dasein must choose itself blindly but that there are no objectively specifiable criteria to guide such a decision for all Dasein. This is clear if we
of life on the basis of what it discerns to be factically possible at the time, which means that it responsibly and concernfully strives to choose a life that is con- gruent with its idiosyncratic factical
makeup. It chooses itself, then, not on the basis of abstract objective criteria that apply to all Dasein but rather on the basis of its own highly specific sense of who it wants to be. Thus, Heidegger
had no canned advice to offer Tugendhat and the other students regarding the purpose upon which they ought to resolvefor determining such purpose and thereby becoming who you are is not
a generic process. This does not mean that resolute Dasein makes no recourse to reasons in its decision. It implies that the reasons it draws upon are not objective norma- tive entities that
motivate all Dasein in the same way; rather, resolute Dasein chooses on the basis of reasons that are internal to its own perspective as an agent.
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