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by Hubert L. Dreyfus
Introduction
The est Training is multi-faceted and intense. After one encounter
I by no means feel that I have grasped all the implications and inter-
connections. In any case I will not go into how the training affected my life,
but rather the assessment of a certain way of accounting for them. Nor am I
experience have deep affinities with the phenomena presented and analyzed
used to render the basic est insight more consistent and compelling.
and Soren Kierkegaard, what I take to be the truth set forth in Being and
Time and in the training, as well as the quality of life which this truth
makes possible.
less central to the truth of the training which I personally feel require
and coherent truth which transforms the quality of the lives of those who
experience it. Moreover, this truth contains radically new insights into the
nature of human beings and the cosmos which were unknown both to Greek
philosophy and to the mystical tradition from which it grew. Since, however,
experience to the one elicited by est and struggled all his life to find an
adequate language to express it without falling, as he put it, into the ruts
Time (1927). Since his account parallels and illuminates the est approach I
manifestation of Being itself. Both Heidegger and Erhard are wary of the
Erhard puts aphoristically (If you experience it, it's the truth. The same
prose.
Thus in order to make the truth directly manifest, phenomenology must break
which supports them until human beings (which Heidegger calls "Dasein") can
Thus if one can face, first, what est calls not knowing, one can achieve
natural knowing or certainty. What often seems to the trainee defending his
certainty which goes with directly experiencing the truth at each moment.
Division I of Being and Time and then, in Division II, the whole process has to
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the kinds of objects and people we are brought up to expect and cope with.
This account is similar to the est account of the social world as the product
absolute agreement. [I did not receive the board material on this subject, so
reality does not rest on individual agreement -- the agreement has always
trained into this way of understanding ourselves and other entities by the
time we begin to think, and since it is the element in which ~we perceive and
move (like water for the fish), Heidegger says we are thrown into it and calls
also responsibility. (The double meaning of the German word Schuld.) In est
terms: " ... [Y]ou can remember you caused it any time you want to."
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social space, which he calls the world, is prior to various sub-worlds such as
the world of business, the world of the theater, and all particular "private'"
which objects are located, and from the universe which is the totality of
objects. All objects, including the whole universe, can only be encountered
within the world. We will look at the implications of these differences in the
next section.)
various kinds of being and so open up this space, Heidegger shows that
everyday human beings do not realize they are a clearing and thus do not
own their own lives but are lived by the Anyone (Das Man) -- Heidegger 's name
for social and cultural norms i.e., for what "one does".
Each person is so totally determined by these norms, Heidegger says, that the
who of everyday Dasein is the Anyone-self. Such a self is unowned or
inauthentic (Uneigentlich). In language identical with Erhard's, Heidegger
says that such a self does not assume responsibility for its world and so has
no freedom, spontaneity and choice -and hence no joy. Everyday Dasein simply
identifies with its social role and acts out the social patterns which have
formed it.
With Dasein's lostness in the "Anyone", the factical potentiality-for-
Being which is closest to it (the tasks, rules, and standards, the
urgency and extent, of concernful and solicitous Being-in-the-world)
has already been decided upon. The "Anyone" has always kept Dasein
from taking hold of these possibilities of Being. The "Anyone" even
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hides the manner in which it has tacitly relieved Dasein of the burden
of explicitly choosing these possibilities. It remains indefinite who
has 'really' done the choosing. So Dasein make no choices, gets carried
along by the nobody, and thus ensnares itself in inauthenticity. (p. 312)
In Division II, it turns out that human beings persist in this lifeless
the experience of the fact that the whole social order and all of science is
says.) Dasein is not the Anyone-self but it has no other content. It is a pure
To deny this truth which is deeply disturbing, Dasein flees into the public
world and hides in what Heidegger calls idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.
anxiety is "held onto" rather than denied, then Dasein owns up to and assumes
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responsibility for itself and so becomes authentic. In est terms a person then
This does not mean that one gets a new content for the self the
everyday self just is the pattern of the Anyone, and there is no other content,
but one sees that the true Self is not this content. Heidegger calls this
experience of holding onto anxiety and thus freeing one's self from the
consistent on this point, suggesting that what we flee is ultimately fear and
pain, and that our defenses attempt to insure not the meaningfulness of our
lives but the survival of the mind. Erhard has a problem similar to
Heidegger's, however, since he can give no account of why the being identifies
and Heidegger agree that "Get it/lose it is what life is all about." For
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Dasein's demand for a stable, grounded meaning in its life leads human beings
to fall back constantly into inauthenticity. For Erhard, on the other hand, it
would seem to follow that once one had seen that the being is not the mind
and that defenses always work in assuring survival but always fail by
Heidegger can explain why we do not remain authentic, but only by positing a
need for meaning for which he has no further account. Erhard posits no such
need, but on his view it remains mysterious why once out of everyday self
deception, human beings ~who have "got it" fa11 back into everyday assholeism.
In any case, both Heidegger and Erhard agree on the important point
that acceptance of its nothingness does not remove the Self from the world
and others but enables it to participate fully for the first time.
calls "leaping in for" another, but rather by letting each person experience
his own anxiety, which Heidegger calls "leaping in ahead of" the other and
turning him back to face his own nothingness. Heidegger sums up:
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The new flexibility gained by holding onto anxiety does not, however,
that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of
Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our
individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakeable joy in
this possibility. (pc 358)
which are the clearing in which all entities are encountered~ the authentic
clearing, an active nothing which gets its content from these practices but is
not identical, with any of them. At this early stage of his thinking, (for
horizon for understanding Being, which each of us is, the ecstatical temporal
unity.
It is neither public nor private, but is the "source" of both the social world
primordial 'outside of itself' in and for itself", (p. 377) and, in the part of
what one learns in the est Training is obvious and significant. Both
that there is no ground or meaning of reality and no deep self which has a
Freudian myth of getting in touch with the deep secret meaning hidden in our
claims we can fulfill ourselves by discovering our true needs and using our
neglected capacities to satisfy them. If the true Self has no content, then it
quite, pure and consistent on this point. Occasionally the trainer talks of
realizing one's potential.] Moreover, getting in touch with the deep self
cannot be a change, a development. etc. The training makes clear over and
over again that transformation is not growth. Heidegger also insists that
modification" which leaves the content of one's life unchanged while totally
significant and instructive. Each in its own way suggests that although
the nothingness of the true Self, this very insistence has brought him
understood as a direct and uninterpreted merging with the way things are.
truth directly manifest, but it does not do away with concealedness ("All
Heidegger concludes:
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shared situations, working with shared tools and directly confronting other
people in cooperative work and play. It is only when we withdraw and reflect
that we "discover" our own private experience, and it is only when we reflect
distorted view that my world is what is real and the shared world is an
The fact that we all share one world is so natural and yet so hidden by
the philosophical tradition that Heidegger has to work through the tradition
in Being and Time in order to get the reader to see that Dasein is a public
the truth were trying to get out around the conceptualization. After much
talk about going inside my world, my space, my mind, the trainer once said:
"All that stuff out there needs cleaning up." Or, at another point: "Stay with
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your experience. Stay out there, not in your head." That is the right way to
talk. I am back there in the past, out there in the present, and ahead of
myself in the future, not inside my head. Even moods are not inside. As
"A mood is not an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatic
way and puts its mark on things and persons. It comes neither from 'outside'
All that is inside are the aches and pains in my physical body. So in the
Of course, this is not to deny that I have opinions and desires which
are mine and that you have yours and that I should try to understand yours
and to let them be, it is only to emphasize that all this communication takes
in which we encounter other entities, from the universe which is the totality
of what is. For the same reason, in Division II he equates the ultimate empty
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temporal openness with Being, but never with the totality of beings. Thus
Heidegger agrees with the equation of Being and Nothing, but he would object
If one does equate Nothing and Everything and experiences the fact
that we are Nothing, it seems to follow that we can experience that we are
everything. (The same goes for the equation of Nowhere and Everywhere.) This
leads to the process in which we expand our awareness to encompass the whole
think about or conceive the furthest galaxy; I cannot perceive it. To say I am
the trainer did say, that there might be life on one of the other solar
are some particular point of view at some particular place and time. This
difficulty arises for any view that claims that we are ultimately all one
the Anyone and so has no content of its own; on the other hand, authentic
content. Est, however, cannot individuate "the being" in this way, since, if
occurs because the training blurs what Heidegger calls the ontological
difference -- the difference between Being and beings. The same prob1em comes
up in even more exaggerated form on the ontic or empirical level in the est
in the universe, how does one record differ from another so that they can be
linearly ordered? One might think that one record has me as a baby, another
three. Since the records are all total, they are all identical and there is no
way to order them. Such a view cannot make sense of "successive moments of
this problem in terms of the relative clarity and distinctness of the moments
we call most recent but this way out is not open to the view presented here,
plurality of points of view. Since each record contains all points of view,
all perceptual perspective, all pains, etc., there is no way to explain what
makes one of the points of view mine, or why one record stack comes down on
me, when I see a bicycle, for example, rather than on you, since the bike
trauma is in your stack too. In what sense is my stack mine and your stack
yours?
There are hints in the training that the view that everyone is
cabinet of abilities the trainer gave the impression that one could be perfect
at any skill one pleased if one just stopped resisting and covering up and
got in touch with the ability. It would, indeed, follow that if my being is
everything, it is also all skills. But this seems to deny the necessity of
enclosed paper, The Psychic Boom") that skills might well be explained in
terms of holograms, but that these holograms are the result of the specific
perform perfectly if one could only let oneself go and just experience the
activity rather than think about it, but this perfection is only accessible to
those who have put in the necessary effort to acquire the necessary
background of experience.
Granted we all are identical with the clearing or God and so are all one, it
does not follow that we are responsible for every specific thing and person
in the clearing. To be the clearing in which all specific events occur, and so
in some ontological sense their source, is not the same as being the ontic
responsibility for all events, and as we have already seen, such total
and identifying the clearing with everything in the clearing. This mistake
hologram, as scientists like Karl Pribram and David Bohm rightly point out,
has the whole of what is on it distributed all over it. It does not follow
however that each hologram contains a record of the whole universe. It simply
contains all over it a record of one limited local perspective. Even if one
still would not support the view of the mind presented in the training. Only
the microphysical level, for which I know of no evidence, would it follow that
avoided the view is not only implausible in suggesting we are aware of other
(Kehre) in his life and thought. In looking back at Being and Time he felt
that he had been right in holding that human beings are ultimately a
clearing which is more flexible and open than that provided by the
Anyone. But later Heidegger felt that equating this broader horizon with an
empty temporal disclosure space could not give an adequate account of the
meaning and differentiation that remains after one has transformed one's
life out of the public world into an openness to Being. In short, Heidegger
which remained in his thinking because he had not completely overcome his
This is not the place to go into Heidegger later writings. All I can do
is note that he admired poets like Nietzsche and Rilke who thought they
could free man from technology and mechanism by opening a pure empty space,
but that he felt this approach and the approach of Being and Time were still
left in our practices from other epochs in our past such as 5th century
Athens.
and the medieval cathedral give life meaning and purpose by focusing the
meaning of being in the practices, holding it up for the people to see and
In this way great works of art preserve and give content to the clearing. "A
work, by being a work, makes space for that spaciousness. 'To make space for'
means here especially to liberate the free space of the open region and to
establish it in its structure The work holds, open the Open of the world."
It allows people to break out of the Anyone and the mechanism of their mind
by realizing the power of pure nothingness in them. They realize they are
nothing and so not the mechanism. They can then choose the mechanism (return
to the Anyone) where "choose" means notice and accept responsibility for.
They can thus become free, flexible, spontaneous', alive, and joyful. But this
experience does not help them get back in touch with their cultural roots.
Its effect is just the opposite. Their projects become global projects all can
agree on (making the world work). They do not involve commitment to specific
point of view but he is not identified with it. I observe my point of view.
You get mine and I get yours. Then we all work on something like eliminating
hunger which involves no risk and about which there can be no legitimate
disagreement.
To put the point another way, in Being and Time all commitments although
firm are conditional. One struggles with adversity, sticks with it, keeps one's
agreements, but one is also ready to let go. "The certainty of the resolution
signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back
(p. 355). This is definitely a higher quality of life than people unaided by
est even glimmer. But it posses the problem: If everything is equal why
struggle at all; if everything that is simple is, why not abandon the team
when the going gets tough? Even late Heidegger could not answer this
question.
inauthentic and that, therefore, holding on to anxiety and being outside all
content and all commitment was authentic. He experienced instead the truth
for them is life worth living. This does not mean that one tries to get
over that in holding onto anxiety. After one has experienced nothingness
being ready to die for a truth no longer means being willing to kill for it.
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Est, like Being and Time, supports unconditional commitment, but that
commitment which est calls love and Heidegger calls resoluteness, is only the
commitment to stay open to the openness, of other, to respect their space. One
never identifies oneself with any concrete content and thereby risks a
experience that could only mean returning to ego. Nothing makes any
ultimate difference and the only experience that matters is the one that gets
one in touch with nothingness. Such openness may well give one health,
fanaticism, but it does not give one's life meaning. Heidegger himself,
although he defines Dasein as the being whose being is an issue for it, never
its paradox, risk, dread, and bliss, one has to turn to the writings of Soren
Kierkegaard.
Conclusion.
The est training, as Erhard well knows, is much more than a means for
human life -- the most important philosophical and religious question of any
It seems to me that Heidegger has de1t more successfully than est with this
of his view. Est's unique importance, however, is not in its theory but in its
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practice. The training, unlike a reading of Being and Time, actually gives a
person a glimpse of the authenticity that Heidegger and Erhard have both
experienced.
discuss, and perhaps even to experience, a way of life which has aliveness as
APPENDICES
and Erhard, and to see how each can be used to complete the other, I have put
Appendix I
motivation behind the loneliness, sadness, fear, grief, anger, hatred, boredom,
shame, etc. that emerged in the truth process. I was surprised, given est's
present a position or explanation, and even more surprised at the end of the
weekend when the ultimate motivation turned out to be fear of others. This
There seems to be no way that one could assert the general claim that
"All people play roles and suffer because they are motivated by fear of other
this analysis has been experienced as true and liberating by 300,000 est
graduates. But not that it was true for everyone, as the trainer, David
It has a venerable history having .been held by Thor::as Hobbes ("Every man
fears violent death at the hands of his fellows") and, in a more subtle form
into an object by the other's gaze. This latter seems to be the est position
since the fear theory immediately fo11ows the "ordeal" in which one must
submit to the gaze of the others and just be. Sartre's solution is also echoed
in the advice given at the very end of the first weekend. Sartre says that we
must realize we can prevent others from turnings us into objects by turning
since at the beginning of the second weekend we are told to forget the claims
made during the first weekend. The final word seems to be that instead of the
war of each consciousness with each other consciousness which is the last
word in Sartre, we are shown that we are all aspects of one Being so that we
The question then arises: Why then pass through the Sartrian story?
The answer is, I think, that there is, indeed, a plurality of minds or egos,
each of which does for its own survival, will the death of the others. But
Sartre.
offered by est, viz. that miracles transform the quality of a life. In the The
Brothers
between two equally self-destructive ways of acting. By being with her and
accepting her as she is, Alyosha opens up a new creative possibility for her
3. Pseudo-intinacv.
the public that takes place during and after the est training. That the
group should be on a first name basis by the end of the training seems honest
first name basis denies the fact that we do have many impersonal relations,
and so undermines the true intimacy that comes from opening up to others and
letting them be themselves with us. Laurel Scheaf said in the course of the
training that she knew the 300,000 est graduate intimately, and that Werner
loves us. Even if we all participate in and are aspects of one Nothingness, I
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find it hard to understand how I can be loved by someone whom I have never
which requires a study of its own. On the one hand est has a dramatic
Heideggerian sense of the way people use ambiguity to hide from themselves
and others. No doubt such people need to be made aware that language
requires clarity and involves commitment. In the training they are, indeed,
constantly shown what they are saying and what agreements they are making
in their speech acts. But language is much more than the exchange of precise
information, and ambiguity and metaphor cannot and should not be eliminated.
Such definitions leave the notion as imprecise as ever. One cannot even
One of the impressive ways est works, in spite of its seeming dependence on
substitute "and" for ''because'' in the claim: "I am impotent because I lack
confidence." The trainee dutifully changed his claim to "I am impotent and I
lack the (sic) confidence." The trainer never understood why this change did
desired effect.)
Appendix II
est Training is that the training often resembles an ideal philosophy class.
The participants are asked to provide definitions which are then shown to be
the trainer's constant readiness to explain, clarify, elaborate, and argue for
exhaustive.
require that to know how to do something one must able to tell how. If the
trainer has recourse to the dictionary in other cases then why not here?
Knowing - that" does require being able to tell. If one knows something
like the way to the bank, one must be able to explain it. Perhaps the example
Concentrating on knowing that, Socrates had no trouble showing that the most
2. The chart showing that the two kinds of reality are physical and
experiential leaves out the realm of ideal entities such as numbers. It does
not suffice to say that all instances of the number two, for example, are
printed tokens. The debate between nominalism and realism, as it was called
in the middle Ages, is much more subtle than that. Not that I think est
trainers should enter into such a debate. I would only hope there was some
3. The arguments against people who claim not to have 'got it' that they
up and then to point out to him that he is still sitting and to conclude from
front of the room because he is seen, not seen because he is standing in front
of the room. Great philosophers such a Bishop Berkeley have been confused by
Heidegger does in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology that one sees objects
as independent of one's seeing them, and as seen at the same time by others.
To deny this is to make the public world an illusion which is counter to the