Nun-ing Inquiry 1997; 4: 88-98

Tradition and culture in

Heidegger’s Being and Time
Michael Crotty
faculty of Health Sciences, The flinden University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Accepted for publication I 8 December 1996

CROTIY M. Nursing Inquiry 1997; 4: 88-98

Tradition and culture in Heidegger‘s Being and Time
In nursing literature, Heideggerian hermeneutics, as expounded in Bang and Time, is taken well near unanimously to be an
invitation to explore tradition and culture. Understanding, we are told in the name of Heidegger, is to be found in the realm
of common meanings and shared practices. This interpretation of what Heidegger is about in Being and Time is neither
unchallengeable nor unchallenged. While a number of scholars can be found to agree with it, there are many others who
see it as an utter misreading of Heidegger. In their judgement, it is an interpretation diametrically opposed to what Hei-
degger sets forth in his treatise. For researchers interested in invoking Heidegger or following a Heideggerian approach,
this is a frustrating impasse. The only valid starting point for resolving it, this article suggests, is a close reading of what Hei-
degger actually says in the pages of Being and Time.
Key words: authenticity, Being, possibilities, the ‘they’, tradition.

The view that Heidegger’s Bang and Time sends us to tradi-
tion and culture in our search for meaning has become
dogma within nursing research. In the name of ‘Heideg-
gerian phenomenology’, nurse researchers are invited by
Patricia Benner to find ‘commonality and therefore teleo-
logical explanation and prediction based on the back-
ground skills, meanings, and practices shared in a people
with a common history and common situations’ (p. 5).*
‘The goal’, we are told, ‘is to find exemplars or paradigm
cases that embody the meaning of everyday practices’
(p. 7).l Morse agrees, listing ‘thick description, paradigm
cases, and exemplars’ as the ‘main methods of Heidegger-
ian hermeneutics’ (p. 224) .2
Examples abound in the nursing literature of this view-
point being applied without question and fuelling a search
for common meanings and shared practices. Nancy Diekel-
mann is one such example. Detailing research undertaken
into nursing education, she states that ‘interviewtexts were
analysed hermeneutically using Heideggerian phenomen-
ology (Heidegger 1927/1962, 1959/1966, 1954/1968,
1955/1977) as the philosophical framework for the analy-
sS.3 ‘During the seven-stage Heideggerian hermeneutical
analysis’, Diekelmann goes on to say, ‘common meanings
and shared practices of nursing education began to
emerge’ (p. 246).3
Gullickson presents Heideggerian hermeneutics in the
same light. As she, sees it, Heideggerian hermeneutics
‘seeks to uncover the shared practices and common mean-
ings of the everyday lived experience’ (p. 1387).4 Kondora
follows suit. For her too, the ‘method of Heideggerian
hermeneutics seeks to uncover shared meanings’, and ‘to
understand a given culture ... one must seek common,
everyday, shared meanings’ (p. l2).5 Nelms is even more
explicit. The commonalities found in culture provide the
‘constitutive pattern’ that the researcher, following Hei-
degger, is seeking to delineate:
In Heideggerian hermeneutical research, a constitutive
pattern is the highest level of data analysis. A pattern is
composed of common themes and thus reflects the shared
meanings and common practices of a given culture
(p. 371) .6

Correspondence: Department of Public Heakh, Flinders Universlty of In seeking support for their view of Heidegger as a cham-
South Australia GPO Box 2 100, Adelaide. SA 500 I , Australia. Email: pion of culturally derived understandings, nurse
nurnjc@gamgee.cc.flinders.edu.au researchers have quite a range of scholars to call upon.

Their favourites for the role are Hubert Dreyfus and
Charles Taylor but, should they want more, there is cer-
tainly no shortage.
According to Charles Guignon, for example, we should
be guided in this matter by Heidegger’s designation of
human being as ‘thrownness’ and his emphasis on the
‘boundedness’ of human freedom.’ Guignon takes these
concepts to imply that our very ability to engage in self-
interpretation and take appropriate action is rooted in,
and founded upon, our cultural heritage:
To say that Dasein is ‘thrown possibility’ is to say that our
agency is always situated in a cultural context that provides
the pool of possibilities from which we draw our concrete
identities as agents of particular types. And, above all, it
means that we are historical beings whose possibilities for
self-interpretation are made accessible by our shared
history (p. 130).’
Guignon himself invokes of Charles Taylor. Taylor’snotion
of situated freedom, he says, is ‘an understanding of action
as nested in and guided by a range of meaningful, histori-
cally constituted possibilities, which are binding on us
because they define who we are’ (p. 131).7
Harrison Hall is yet another apologist for this position.
‘For Heidegger, we are always choosing from among the
cultural possibilities and against the cultural background
of intelligibilityinto which we have been thrown’ (p. 137).a
Such an array of scholars arguing in this vein would
seem to make the case unassailable. But that would be a
premature conclusion, for there is arguably an even greater
array of scholars holding the very opposite and interpret-
ing Heidegger as dismissive of all prevalent traditional and
cultural understandings. As it happens, Guignon is
expressly presenting his interpretation of Heidegger as a
counter to what he describes as a ‘common way of reading
Being and Time’. Among those reading Heidegger in that
common way are Jtirgen Habermas, who declares Heideg-
ger guilty of the ‘decisionism of empty resoluteness’
(p. 141),9and Richard Wolin, who in Guignon’sjudgement
offers an ‘extreme form’ of this interpretation by claiming
that Heidegger’s philosophy of existence ‘tends to be
inherently destructive of tradition’ (p. 32) .lo How extreme
a form it is, or whether it is extreme at all, becomes ques-
tionable when one reads the expositions of other theorists
from this camp. Wolin, in fact, sounds thoroughly typical.
In this line of interpretation, Heidegger is characteristically
understood to be utterly rejecting the meanings embedded
in tradition and culture as pathways to authentic being.
Those meanings emerge, to the contrary, as barriers, blind-
folds and little short of enslavement.
This is something of an impasse, then. According to
Tradition and culture in Being and Time
some, Heidegger says ‘Yea’;according to others, Heidegger
says ‘Nay’. There is a ‘proculture’ reading of Heidegger
and an ‘anticulture’ reading of Heidegger. This is an
impasse only if we are concerned to invoke Heidegger on
our side and to clairn that our approach is ‘Heideggerian’.
It is possible, of course, to engage freely with Heidegger’s
thought in transactional mode and create new meaning
out of our engagement with his texts. Meaning derived in
this fashion will be new for us and, yes, new for Heidegger,
since our concern here is not to identify the meaning Hei-
degger intended his text to bear. Instead, the purpose is to
construct human meaning which, in one way or another,
may enrich our lives. Having engaged in such an exercise,
we would do as well to acknowledge our debt to Heideg-
ger’s text but we are surely not free to ascribe to Heidegger
the insights that have emerged for us in this fashion or to
describe them as Heideggerian.
On the other hand, if we do wish to identlfy our stance
with that of Heidegger himself, the impasse remains and
we find ourselves asking: What does Heidegger really hold
in this matter? To answer this question, we need to look for
ourselves at what he :saysin Being and Timeand make up our
own mind.
Why Being and Time and not the later works of Heideg-
ger? First of all, in the nursing literature, it is Being and Time
that is routinely appealed to in this matter. In any case,
after the alleged ‘turn’ (die Kehw) in his thinking, Heideg-
ger moves from his fixus on the phenomenology of Dasein
to a hermeneutical conversation with the pre-Socratic
Greek thinkers and with the poet H6lderlin. However com-
mentators may argue about Being and Time, with that move
Heidegger shows very clearly where his total interest lies.
He is definitely not concerned now with inherited and pre-
vailing cultural understandings. Instead, he is single-
mindedly on the track of Being, which reveals itself in an
immediate - and, in the case of the early Greeks, an ‘orig-
inary’ - way. This revelation is at once an unconcealing
and a concealing, arid Heidegger invites us to take a ‘step
back‘ from this ‘dif-ference’ between Being and beings to
discern the event that gives Being and to become ‘shep
herds of Being’. There is no place here for tradition and
culture, at least as these are ordinarily understood, and our
present discussion is hardly relevant to the thought
expressed in Heidegger’s later works.
What, then, about Being and Tim2 True enough, we
must reckon with Heidegger’s own protestations that there
was no Kehre and that already in Being and Time he is
engaged heart and soul in delineating a radical ontology
and not something else. For all that, perhaps in Being and
Time Heidegger accords an importance to tradition and
89
M Grotty
culture that is no longer discernible in the later writings?
We need to see what he has to say.
TRADITION
Heidegger has quite a deal to say about ‘tradition’ in sec-
tion 6 of his ‘Introduction’ to Being and Time (pp. 41-49)
The section is headed ‘The task of destroying the history of
ontology’. These are hardly reassuring words for those who
want to claim that Heidegger is affirming the value of tra-
dition. And, within the section itself, there are words
aplenty that are less reassuring still.
Dasein, Heidegger warns us, ‘falls prey’ to the tradition
in which it stands. He is talking about analysing Dasein
‘with regard to the average kind of Being which is closest to
it’ (p. 42) .I1 This, of course, is human being in its everyday
(or ‘inauthentic’) mode. In that mode, when Dasein fails to
seize upon ‘its latent possibility not only of making its own
existence transparent to itself but also of inquiring into the
meaning of existentiality itself, it ‘is inclined to fall back
upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret
itself in terms of that world by its reflected light’.” There-
with it ‘falls prey to the tradition of which it has more or
less explicitly taken hold’ (p. 42).11
It is tempting to seize on this ‘falls prey to’ and play up
the conclusion that Heidegger sees tradition as nothing
less than a predator. The original in German, however, fails
to bear this out and we find the translators, in a footnote,
admitting that their ‘falls prey to’ is not quite right. The
verb used is ‘verfaallen..This is a most significant word in
Heidegger’svocabulary and, if its use here cannot be taken
to ascribe a predatory role to tradition, it does at least link
conformity to tradition with ‘fallenness’ or ‘falling’.
For Dasein, ‘falling’- being ‘fallen’ - is ‘a basic kind
of Being of the “there” ... a movement which is existentially
its own’ (p. 172).11Basic it certainly is, and it is always with
us (‘Being-in-the-world is always fallen’, p. 225), but it
represents inauthentic being for Dasein. Heidegger links it
not to Being-one’sawn-Selfbut to ambiguity; not to under-
standing but to curiosity; not to the discourse that unveils
new reality but to idle ta1k.l’ As features of concernful
Being-in-the-world,ambiguity, curiosity and idle talk are for
Heidegger the very hallmark of inauthentic existence.
To see conformity to tradition in the everyday mode of
existence as a dimension of fallenness is to say that tradi-
tion, as such, is no help to Dasein as it seeks to realize its
‘latent possibility’ of making its own existence transparent
to itself. Not only is it no help but it is, in fact, a hindrance:
This tradition keeps it [Dasein] from providing its own
90
guidance, whether in inquiring or in choosing. This holds
true - and by no means least - for that understanding
which is rooted in Dasein’s ownmost Being, and for the
possibility of developing it - namely, for ontological
understanding ... When tradition thus becomes master, it
does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so
inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it
rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come
down to us and delivers it over to selfevidence; it blocks
our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the
categories and concepts handed down to us have been in
part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed, it makes us forget that
they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that
the necessity of going back to those sources is something
which we need not even understand (pp. 42-43).”
Becoming Dasein’s master (sic). Blocking Dasein’s
access to primordial sources. Keeping Dasein from under-
standing. None of this sounds very complimentary. And
there is more to come; for, in linking the tradition to fall-
enness, Heidegger is linking the tradition to the ‘they’. In
our fallenness, in the everyday mode of human existence,
we are governed, he declares, by das M a n - the ‘they’,the
anonymous One:
This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is
one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with
never a possibility of extrication. In it, out of it and against
it, all genuine understanding, interpreting and communi-
cating, all rediscovering and appropriating anew are per-
formed. In no case is a Dasein, untouched and unseduced
by this way in which things have been interpreted, set
before the open country of a ‘world-in-itself’ so that itjust
beholds what it encounters. The dominance of the public
way in which things have been interpreted has already
been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood
that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world
‘matter’ to it. The ‘they’ prescribes one’s state-of-mind,
and determines what and how one ‘sees’ (p. 213).11
Heidegger is clearly not ascribing any value, in terms of
his purposes at any rate, to the received notions that are
the legacy of our tradition. That legacy, on his terms and as
the quotation just given attests, is nothing less than a seduc-
tion and a dominance (he has earlier even described it as a
‘dictatorship’; p. 164).I1 What everyday conformity to the
tradition effects is not an authentic self, a self that belongs
to itself, but the inauthentic ‘they-self, a self that is the
creation and plaything of the ‘they’.
DAS MAN: THE ‘THEY’
Being and Time is peppered with references to the ‘they’. In
terms of Dasein’s task of ‘making its own existence trans-
parent to itself‘ and realizing its ‘potentiality-for-Being’
(though not, Heidegger hastens to add, in any moral
sense), these references are overwhelmingly pejorative.

Among other things, Heidegger has this to say about
das Man (the ‘they’, the One, the Others):
des Man is the inauthentic Self (p. 381). It is the they-
self distinguished from the authentic Self,for das Man
causes Dasein to be given to itself in terms of the ‘they’
and to be for the sake of the ‘they’fp. 167).11
das Man is constituted by the way in which things have
been publicly interpreted and this expresses itself in
idle talk (p. 296). It allows possibilities to be presented
to Dasein only according to the way in which it has p u b
licly interpreted things (p. 315), keeping Dasein from
taking hold of the possibilities of Being (p. 312).11
das Man offers allurements (p. 439) and engages in
seduction (p. 213). In consequence, it achieves domi-
nance (p. 213) and ‘masters’ Dasein (p. 210), holding
Dasein in subjection, under dictatorship (p. 164).11
des Man causes Dasein to be dispersed into the ‘they’
(p. 167). Dasein is absorbed (pp. 210,315) in the ‘they’
and the world of the ‘they’kconcern (p. 229). Dasein is
dissolved completely into the Others’ kind of Being, so
that it is not Dasein itself that is but its Being is taken
away by the Others (p. 164). This stands in stark con-
trast to the authentic Self, which is the Self which has
been taken hold of in its own way (p. 167).11
das Man causes Dasein to be lost. Heidegger is fond of
saying this (p. 234, p. 297, p. 312, p. 313, p. 315, p.-335,
p. 344, p. 345, p. 365). What he means is that Dasein
loses itself in terms of the distinctive potentiality-for-
Being which belongs to its ownmost Self (p. 297). As a
consequence of this ‘lostness’, Dasein is unable to hear
itself (p. 315) or be itself (p. 365). In fact, das Man hears
and understands nothing but loud idle talk and covers
up its failure to hear the call of conscience (p. 343). In
consequence, Dasein’s concern dwells in tranquillized
familiarity and Dasein itself has a tranquillized and
familiar kind of Being-in-the world (p.234).1*
das Man’s tranquillization of Dasein is important to its
purposes. It experiences nothing more alien than an
authentic Self, i.e. the Self individualized to itself in
uncanniness and thrown into the nothing (pp.
321-322). So das Man gives approval to Dasein’s losing
of itself and aggravates the temptation Dasein experi-
ences to cover up from itself its ownmost Being-towards-
death (pp. 297-298).11
das Man deprives the particular Dasein of its answer-
ability and thus disburdens it (p. 165). It evades choice
(p. 443), is irresolute, and causes Dasein to get ‘lived’
by the commonsense ambiguity of that publicness in
which nobody resolves anything but which has always
made its decision already (p. 345).11
‘Irudition and culture in Being and Time
das Man closes Dasein off from Being with others, for it
offers ambiguous ‘fraternising’ and undertakings that
cannot allow people to be authentically with one
another (pp. 344-345). In fact, d u s Man is essentially
ambiguous, making Being-with-one-another an intent,
ambiguous watching of one another, a secret and reci-
procal listening-in’ (p. 219).”
das Man closes Dasein off from the Situation, i.e. the
‘there’ disclosed in resoluteness, for das Man knows
only the ‘general situation’. What happens is that das
Man loses itself in the opportunities closest to it, and
pays Dasein’s way by a reckoning up of ‘accidents’
which it fails to recognize, deems its own achievements
and passes off as such (pp. 346-347).11
das Man closes D w i n off from the authentic possibili-
ties to be found in the Situation, for das Man is lost in
the making present of today. It can understand the past
only in terms of the present. In short, it is blind to pos-
sibilities and can only receive the ‘actual’ that is left
over and information about the ‘actual’that is present-
at-hand (p. 443). How does dm Man achieve this? By
shaping Dasein’s mood. It is Dasein’s mood - die Stim-
mung, the way in which Dasein is ‘attuned’ to the world
- that makes it aware of authentic possibilities. Having
a mood constitutes Dasein’s state-of-mind (better, its
‘discovered state+f-affairs’; p. 296). What Heidegger is
telling us is that dus Man shapes the whole process. It
has its own way of having a mood; it needs moods; it
makes moods for itself (p. 178);and it is decisive for the
possibilities of even having a mood (p. 213) .I1
This is quite a litany. The received notions we find in
our culture are the voice of the ‘they’ resounding through
human existence in its everyday mode. As such, it would
seem clear enough that for Heidegger they are a disvalue
and not a value as Dasein looks for authentic Being.
Not clear enough for Guignon, it would seem:
Similarly, for Heidegger our identity as agents is given
form through the ways we are tuned into the possibilities
circulating in the ‘they’ or the ‘one’. Dasein’s self-
understanding is drawn from the public world into which
it is thrown. ‘From rhis world,’ Heidegger says, ‘it takes its
possibilities, and it does so first in accordance with the way
things have been interpreted by the =they”.This interpre-
tation has already restricted the possible options of choice
to what lies within the range of the familiar, the attainable,
the respectable - that which is fitting and proper’ (BT,
23) (p. 134).7
Here Guignon takes Heidegger to be saying something
quite favourable about the role of the ‘they’.The ‘they’,he
explains, ‘provides the medium from which we slip into
familiar roles - being a teacher in the school system, a
91
M Crotty
moderate in politics, a church-goer in the religious system,
and so 0n’.7He finds ‘possibilitiesfor coherent action’ and
they are ‘deposited in our public language’ (p. 134).’
If we read on from the quotation from Being and Tim
that Guignon has just given us, we are given a very differ-
ent picture, all the same. Heidegger does not speak warmly
about our slipping into familiar roles. He does not
attribute possibilities for coherent action to the ‘they’ or its
public language (which, in fact, he consistently describes as
‘idle talk’). His words about the ‘they’ restricting our
options to the familiar and the respectable are not
intended in any positive sense. In this very same paragraph,
as Guignon comes to acknowledge in later writing,’* Hei-
degger speaks of this restriction as a ‘levelling off of
Dasein’s possibilities’ and ‘a dimming down of the possible
as such’ (p. 239) .11 What is the outcome of this levelling off
and dimming down? Heidegger is not slow to tell us:
The average everydayness of concern becomes blind to its
possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is
merely ‘actual’.This tranquillizing does not rule out a
high degree of diligence in one’s concern, but arouses it.
In this case no positive new possibilitiesare willed, but that
which is at one’s disposal becomes ‘tactically’ altered in
such a way that there is a semblance of something h a p
pening (p. 239).”
So we may be as diligent as we like in the familiar and
respectable roles to which Guignon directs us and which
stem from the ‘they’.We may be enthusiastic teachers, well
and truly politically engaged, and the most fervent of
churchgoers. Yet Heidegger has no praise for such ‘dili-
gence’. Instead, he accuses us of being blind to our possi-
bilities and dismisses our .efforts as illusory - a
‘semblance’. Conforming to dus Man, by embracing the
concepts and values inherited from our tradition and pre-
vailing in our culture, is not the path to authenticity.
AUTHENTIC BEING
What about the authentic mode of human existence? In
the everyday mode, the understandings embedded in cul-
ture may be bane rather than boon, nothing less than a
barrier to authentic existence; but is it not possible that,
once authentic Dasein does emerge, these same under-
standings become meaningful? There are certainly pas-
sages in Being and Time that, at first sight at least, seem
capable of being read in this way.
Authentic Dasein? In the quotations about dus Man we
already have a number of references both to authenticity
and to the pathway whereby Heidegger sees authenticity
being achieved. The authentic Self, we have no doubt
noted, is ‘the Self which has been taken hold of in its own
92
way’. It is ‘the Self individualized down to itself. Authentic
Dasein means ‘Beingene’s-Self and ‘taking hold of the
possibilities of Being’. Authenticity has to do with ‘the dis-
tinctive potentiaIity-for-Being which belongs to Dasein’s
ownmost Self‘.’’
In these same quotations there is mention of ‘angst’,
the ‘call of conscience’, ‘uncanniness’, ‘the nothing’,
‘Being-towards-death’,‘resoluteness’ and the ‘taking hold
of possibilities’. For Heidegger, these are stepping stones
along the path to authenticity.
‘Angst’ (anxiety, anguish, dread) can be seen as the
starting point. The achieving of authenticity begins with
‘tranquillized’ Dasein of everydayness finding its tranquil-
lity disturbed by angst. Angst is not fear about this or that
entity in the world; it is existential anxiety. It relates to
Dasein’s very way of Being:
That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-
world as such ... That in the face of which one has anxiety
is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere
(pp. 230-231).”
Such angst, Heidegger informs us, discloses to Dasein ‘the
world as world’ and thereby ‘makes manifest in Dasein its
Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being; that is, its
Being-pee for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold
of itself (p. 232).11 Yes, angst functions to ‘bring Dasein
face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it face to
face with itself as Being-in-the-world’ (p. 233).”
The tranquillized familiarity shattered, Dasein no
longer feels at home. ‘In anxiety’, says Heidegger ‘one feels
“uncanny”’ (p. 233).11 What it hears, in the midst of its
anguish, is the voice of conscience - ‘the call of care from
the uncanniness of Being-in-the-world’ (p. 335): * I
Conscience attests not by making something known in an
undifferentiated manner, but by calling forth and sum-
moning us to Beingguilty ... The understanding of the
appeal is a mode of Dasein’s Being, and only as such does
it give us the phenomenal content of what the call of con-
science attests. The authentic understanding of the call
has been characterized as ‘wanting to have a conscience’.
This is a way of letting one’s ownmost Self take action in
itself of its own accord in its Beingguilty, and represents
phenomenally that authentic potentiality-for-Beingwhich
Dasein itself attests (pp. 341-342).”
This disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a con-
science is, according to Heidegger, ‘distinctiveand authen-
tic’ (p. 343).11 He calls such disclosedness ‘resoluteness’.In
German there is an etymological link between resoluteness
and disclosure: ‘Resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] is a distinc-
tive mode of Dasein’s disclosedness [Erschlossmheit]’ (p.
343).I1 Heidegger describes the ‘they’as irresolute, we may
recall, but Dasein’s authenticity subsists in a resoluteness

which the ‘they’ cannot extinguish. ‘The irresoluteness of
the “they” remains dominant notwithstanding, but it can-
not impugn resolute existence’ (p. 345).”
The resoluteness that Heidegger has in mind is, above
all else, an ‘anticipatory’ resoluteness. What it anticipates is
death. ‘Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility’ (p. 307) and
conscience calls it to a resolute self-projection upon that
possibility.11 Projecting itself in this fashion means that
Dasein takes hold of the meaning of its finitude in the face
of the nothingness of its being. It recognizes the ‘nullity by
which Dasein’s Being is dominated primordially through
and through’ (p. 354) . I * It comes to understand at last that
there is nothing in which it can ground itself other than its
own freedom and self-possession.
This is a horizonapening state to achieve. It permits
Dasein to return to its situation and see for the first time its
possibilities for authentic Being:
The Situation is the ‘there’ which is disclosed in resolute-
ness ... Far removed from any present-at-handmixture of
circumstancesand accidents which we encounter, the Sit-
uation is only through resoluteness and in it (p. 346).”
REPETITION OF WHAT HAS BEEN
A situation that ‘is only through resoluteness and in it’. At
first blush this sounds as if we have a totally new situation
on our hands. That is not the case, however. It is not a mat-
ter of creating a new situation but of modifying a situation
that exists already. Dasein must return to its original situa-
tion and Heidegger goes to great pains to point this out.
The ‘world’ which is ready-tehand does not become
another one ‘in its content’, nor does the circle of Others
get exchanged for a new one ... (p. 344).”
Resoluteness, (IS authentic Beingm’s-SelJ does not detach
Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it
becomes a free-floating ‘I’ ... (p. 344).11
Resolution does not withdraw itself from ‘actuality’ ...
(p. 346).”
Authentic Beingm’s-Selfdoes not rest upon an exceptional
condition of the subject, a condition that has been
detached from the ‘they’ (p. 168).”
To be sure, now that authenticity has been achieved,
the situation is revealed in an entirely new light. It is trans
formed by the encounter that authentic Dasein is finally
able to have with it and Dasein’s return to it is repeatedly
described by Heidegger as a ‘moment of vision’ (pp. 376,
387,437,442).11 Yet it remains the original and thoroughly
historical situation from which Dasein set forth. The path-
way whose stepping stones are ‘angst’, the ‘call of
Tradition and culture in Being and Time
Ihrownnesdfallenness
repetion of possibilities
a ‘handing down’
F i e 1 Heidegger’s Befindlichka‘t
conscience’, ‘uncanniness’, ‘the nothing’, ‘Being-towards-
death’, ‘resoluteness’ and the ‘taking hold of possibilities’
is ring-shaped. The whole thrust towards authenticity turns
out to be a circular movement.
Dasein’s Befindlichkbt, its ‘discovered state of affairs’
(see translator’s note p. 172),” is existence within a histor-
ical situation. It leaves that situation only to return to it
(Fig. 1). This situation, which remains the domain of dus
Man, is the only one Ilasein has and, resolute as it may now
be, it has no option but to readdress it. ‘Even resolutions
remain dependent upon the “they”and its world’ (pp. 345
-346) .11 Heidegger claims that projecting oneself on death
guarantees the totality and authenticity of one’s resolute-
ness, but death cannot provide the possibilities of existence
that resolute Dasein searches for. These are to be found ‘in
terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown,
takes over’ (pp. 434-435).11
It is a heritage residing within a situation shaped by his
tory. Authentic Dasein’s return to it is a moment of vision,
but it is always ‘a moment of vision for what is world-
historical in its current Situation’. In that moment of
vision, ‘Dasein brings itself back “immediately” ... to what
already has been before it’. What this moment of vision
offers to Dasein is ‘a “fateful”repetition of possibilities that
have been’ (pp. 442-443) . I 1 Authentic repetition,
‘grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness’,
means ‘going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that
has-been-there’ (p. 437) .I1
Yes, the possibilities have been there from the start.
They are found in a situation that stands in, and emanates
93
M Crotty
from, a tradition. For this reason, the return to the situa-
tion is couched by Heidegger in terms of ‘repeating’ and of
‘handing on a tradition’. ‘Repeating is handing down
explicitly’,he said, and it means ‘handing down to itself the
possibility it has inherited’ (p. 437) . I 1
What, then, of those who interpret Heidegger as send-
ing us back to tradition and culture to find meaning and
purpose? Are they right, after all? For a start, it is obviously
not as straightforward as that and we find Heidegger enter-
ing a number of caveats:
Arising, as it does, from a resolute projection of oneself,
repetition does not let itself be persuaded of something by
what is ‘past’,just in order that this, as something which
was formerly actual, may recur. Rather, the repetition
makes a reciprocative r q m h to the possibility of that exis-
tence which has-been-there.But when such a rejoinder is
made to this possibility in a resolution, it is made in a
momat of virion; and as such it is at the same ,time a dis-
avowal of that which in the ‘today’, is working itself out as
the ‘past’. Repetition does not abandon itself to that which
is past, nor does it aim at progress. In the moment of
vision authentic existence is indifferent to both these alter-
natives (pp. 437-438) .I1
What is Heidegger telling us here? That authentic Dasein
i s indifferent to what is past. That authentic Dasein does
not abandon itself to what is past. That authentic Dasein, in
fact, disavows what is past. To conform to tradition in every-
dayness is to embrace the past, but authentic Dasein does
something quite different and it involves a different ‘tem-
porality’. In Heidegger’s ‘moment of vision’, resoluteness
and the new ability to see and take hold of possibilities
transform the situation and relate Dasein to the past in a
way that it has never previously experienced.
‘Blind for possibilities’ under the thraldom of the
‘they’, Dasein had been able to understand the past only in
terms of what, historically, happened to be left over for it.
As Heidegger asserts, tradition succeeds in presenting what
has come down as self-evident. It blocks Dasein’s access to
the primordial sources of the categories and concepts
handed down to it. It does this by making Dasein forget
that there is any need to go back to these origins or even
that they have such origins. Heidegger is far from seeing
any value in such a legacy. It is for him nothing but a bur-
den, for in it the past has become unrecognizable. As a
result, Dasein finds itself at the mercy of what just happens
to remain for it. It ‘only retains and receives the “actual”
that is left over, the world-historical that has been, the leav-
ings, and the information about them that is present-at-
hand’. In short, Dasein ‘understands the “past”in terms of
the “present”’.This is a great handicap. Dasein is ‘lost’ in
this making present of the ‘today’ (p. 443).11
Things are very different once authenticity is achieved.
94
Dasein is no longer abandoned to the mere ‘leavings’. It is
no longer forced to understand the past in terms of what
just happens to be present. Now it can genuinely repeat
that which has been. For the first time, the historical possi-
bilities lie open before it:
On the other hand, the temporality of authentic histori-
cality, as the moment of vision of anticipatory repetition,
deprives the ‘today’ of its character as present, and weans
one from the conventionalities of the ‘they’.When, how-
ever, one’s existence is inauthentically historical, it is
loaded down with the legacy of a ‘past’ which has become
unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern. But when his-
toricality is authentic, it understands history as the ‘recur-
rence’ of the possible, and knows that a possibility will
recur only if existence is open for it fatefully, in a moment
of vision, in resolute repetition (pp. 443-444).”
For Heidegger, anticipatory, resolute repetition is the
authentication of our historicality. Historicality is not
authenticated by conformity to tradition. On the contrary,
such conformity in the everyday mode is an inauthentic
way of relating to the past. Tradition, Heidegger states,
uproots historicality. Historicality becomes authentic when
Dasein projects itself onto its ownmost possibility and con-
stitutes itself as resolute Being-towardsdeath. This is a
move forward. ‘Dasein “is” its past in the way of its own
Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historizes’out of its future
on each occasion’ (p. 41). I 1
THE CONTINUING ROLE OF THE ‘THEY’
As the voice of the historically effected situation, the ‘they’
remains. Heidegger offers no way for Dasein to extricate
itself from ‘this everyday way in which things have been
interpreted’. ‘In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine
understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-
discovering and appropriating anew, are performed’
(p. 213).11 To interpret ‘things’ is to interpret Dasein and,
in relation to ‘the way of interpreting Dasein which has
come down to us’, Heidegger has the same message. He
insists that ‘in each case it is in terms of this interpretation,
against it, and yet again for it, that any possibility one has
chosen is seized upon in one’s resolution’ (p. 435) . I 1
In it, out of it, against it. In terms of it, against it, yet for
it. What does Heidegger mean? What is the relationship
between authentic Dasein and the voice of tradition and
culture? For a start, as already noted, it means that tradi-
tion and culture, which embody the ‘interpretedness’ in
which Dasein inextricably finds itself, is its only locus of
action. Authentic or not, Dasein has nowhere else to go.
We are talking, Heidegger reminds us, of ‘an entity whose
disclosedness is its “there”, its ”in-the-world’”, but he has

~~~ ~
already told us that it is ‘an entity whose disclosedness is
constituted by discourse’ (p. 214).” The tradition, pre-
sented to us in discourse, bears the possibilities that Dasein
takes hold of in its new-won authenticity. In each case,
therefore, it is only in and out ofthat everyday way of inter-
preting things, only in term.~of that interpretation of itself,
that Dasein can resolutely seize upon possibility and set
forth on the path to genuine understanding, interpreting,
communicating, rediscovering and appropriating anew.
Against it? The tradition carries those possibilities
along, true, but, as long as Dasein remains in ‘average
everydayness’, it succeeds only in concealing them and
obscuring their primordial origins. In the moment of
vision, however, Dasein finds fresh light cast upon the his-
torical situation and seizes upon possibilities it is now able
to see for the first time. These possibilities are located
within its original, historical situation but, in taking hold of
them, Dasein remains ‘indifferent’ to the past in the sense
in which the past has been understood in the everyday
mode. It ‘does not abandon itself’ to that past. Its seizing
upon possibilities is even a ‘disavowal’of that past. So, when
Heidegger states that taking hold of the authentic possibil-
ities means taking over a heritage and handing down the
tradition to itself, he is not talking about conformity to the
everyday understandings bequeathed to us in the tradition
or at large in our culture. When he tells us that hidden
within Dasein’s resolute returnis a handing down to itself
of the possibilities that have come down to it, he is careful
to add the rider, ‘but not necessarily us having thus come
down’ (p. 435).” In short, it is not a simple matter of some-
thing having value because we inherit it from tradition or
find it in our culture. Heidegger is dismissive of ‘the end-
less multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as
closest to one - those of comfortableness, shirking and
taking things lightly’. Resoluteness, he says, ‘snatches one
back’ from this endless multiplicity and ‘brings Dasein into
the simplicity of itsfate’. Therein, ‘Dasein hands itself down
to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inher-
ited and yet has chosen’ (p. 435).11
If Dasein now finds itself in the simplicity of its fate, it
must be recognized that fate (which Dasein shares with its
equally resolute generation as ‘destiny’) ‘doesnot first arise
from the clashing together of events and circumstances’. It
arises, instead, from the future; from its resolute projection
of itself. As ‘free for death’, Dasein ‘understands itself in its
own superior power, the power of its finite freedom’
(p. 436).11
The authentic possibilities are historical, to be sure.
They have been there all along. Yet it is only when Dasein
projects itself upon its ownmost Self that they emerge as
Tradition and culture in Being and Time
authentic possibilities. They are truly historical only for the
entity which is ‘essenriallyfitural’.Only that entity can be
‘equiprimordially in the process of having-km’, and which
‘can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inher-
ited, take over its thrownness and be in the momat of vision
for “its time”’ (p. 437).”
This is a radical transformation of Dasein’s situation
and the possibilities it has to offer. In that sense, it is well
and truly against the interpretedness that dominates in
average everydayness. The power the situation has over
everyday Dasein through its endless multiplicity of possibil-
ities cut off from their primordial roots has been broken.
Every ‘accidentaland “provisional”possibility’is driven out
(p. 435).11 In place of that multiplicity there are now
authentic possibilities that resolute Dasein is able to see
and choose. Heidegger’s claim that possibilities chosen in
one’s resoluteness are seized upon f i , and not just against,
the traditional way of interpreting Dasein is understand-
able. The situation housing all of Dasein’s possibilities has
been redeemed.
For Guignon, however, this is not a radical transforma-
tion at all:
It is because we are, at the deepest level, participants
within the systems of interaction of the public world that
Heidegger can say that Dasein just is the ‘they’ (BT, 167).
For this reason, authentic existence is only an ‘existentiell
modificationof the ‘they’ (BT, 168,312) (p. 134).’
We should note the occurrence here of the word ‘existen-
tiell’. Heidegger distinguishes between existentzial and exis-
ta’nziell. The former relates to existence at the deeper level
of intelligibility, the realm of the underlying structures (the
ontological sphere). The latter relates to the more imme-
diate level of the concrete acts of existence, a level Heideg-
ger styles the.ontic sphere. The translators of Being and
Tine render existnztzial and existanziell as ‘existential’ and
‘existentiell’, respectively. Within the ontic sphere, then,
Guignon is claiming i n this statement that Heidegger sees
Dasein as just the ‘they’ and authentic existence as only a
modification of the ‘they’.
Heidegger does indeed say that Dasein is the ‘they’but
he is not talking about authentic existence. He is talking
about the inauthentic existence - the ‘theyself’ -which
Dasein possesses in the everyday mode. As he goes on to
say, ‘This very state of Being, in its everyday kind of Being,
is what proximally misses itself and covers itself up’ (p.
168).I1 Nor is there an ‘only’ in either of the texts to which
Guignon refers us. While Heidegger says that authentic
existence is an ‘existentiell modification’ of the ‘they’,
there is no notion that he sees this as some kind of minor
change, as Guignon’s ‘only’ would suggest. On the con-
95
 M Crotty
trary, as we have seen, it is the profoundest of changes. The
response to the call for authenticity launched by the con-
science has sounded the death knell for the ‘they-self.For
the authentic self, at least to the extent that it is an authen-
tic self, the ‘they’ loses its significance.
And because only the Selfof the they-self gets appealed to
[by conscience] and brought to hear, the ‘thq’ collapses.
But the fact that the call passes ouer both the ‘they’and the
manner in which Dasein has been publicly interpreted,
does not by any means signify that the ‘they’is not reached
too. Precisely in passing ouerthe ‘they’ (keen as it is for pub
lic repute) the call pushes it into insignificance (p. 317).”
Heidegger has told us that, in the inauthentic mode of
existence, the ‘they’ is a seduction and a dictatorship
whereby Dasein is lost in a tranquillized existence and kept
from being its own self. Now he is telling us that, even in
the authentic mode, the direct, explicit content of tradi-
tion or culture is of no help in any straightforward sense.
Authentic possibilities may be said to be latent in the situa-
tion presented to us by tradition and culture, but these pos-
sibilities are not to be identified with everyday meanings
and shared practices which, by definition, are known to all
and sundry. Authentic possibilities, to the contrary, reveal
themselves only to the Dasein that has been awakened by
angst, responded to the voice of conscience and become
resolute Being-towardsdeath. This is no mean feat. Hei-
-
degger describes it as ‘a fantastical exaction’ so demand-
ing that one must ask whether it ever happens (p. 311) . I 1 At
best, the victory gained over everydayness in the moment
of vision is partial and temporary. It is ‘often just “for that
moment” ’ and everydayness is never extinguished
(p. 422).11 ‘Out of this kind of Being - and back into it
again - is all existing, such as it is’ (p. 69).11
The ‘proculture’ interpretation of Heidegger, includ-
ing the ‘Heideggerian hermeneutics’ typically expounded
in nursing research, makes no such requirements and
imposes no such limitations. It tends to ignore completely
the pistinction Heidegger makes between authentic and
inauthentic existence in the recognition and seizing of pos-
sibilities. Angst, the call of the nothing, resoluteness,
Being-towardsdeath - these have no real part to play.
However ‘everyday’we may be, this so-called Heideggerian
hermeneutics evinces no reservations about our ability to
find genuine meaning in our cultural heritage. It simply
directs us all, in the name of Heidegger, to the inherited
and prevailing understandings.
On the basis of what we find Heidegger saying, and
especially in the face of the role he ascribes to tradition and
the meanings abroad in our culture, there appears to be no
justification for interpreting Heidegger in this fashion.
96
What he directs us to, before all and above all, is the future.
Authentic understanding, he tells us quite clearly, is ‘pri-
marily futural’ (p. 387) and the ‘primary phenomenon of
primordial and authentic temporality is the future’
(p. 378).11 He bids us look in the first instance, not to the
past that tradition transmits or to the present discoverable
in culture, but to the future, in a projection that encom-
passes death and therewith finitude and nothingness. In
the freedom-to-be that this projection bestows, Dasein is
able at long last to discern authentic possibilities in its situ-
ation. These are possibilities that tradition and culture
have failed to reveal up to this point but have instead, as
the voice of the ‘they’,actually concealed from Dasein by
making them mostly ‘unrecognizable by ambiguity’
(p. 435).11 The very reason why, as everyday Dasein, it has
been unable to project itself ‘upon possibilities of its own’
is because it is ‘absorbed in the “they”’.Yes, it is lost in ‘the
publicness and the “idle talk” of the “they”’ and therefore
‘fuiLr to hear its own Self’ (p. 315).11When ‘tradition thus
becomes master’ and ‘Dasein has had its historicality so
thoroughly uprooted by tradition’, it is in no position ‘to go
back to the past in a positive manner and make it produc-
tively its own’ (p. 43).”
HEIDEGGER OR MEAD?
These statements of Heidegger notwithstanding, the ‘pro-
culture’ reading of Heidegger presents our world of inher-
ited meaning in very positive terms. In this vein, Guignon
states that the ‘they’ is ‘enabling’ because it is what ‘first
opens us onto a world and gives us the resources we need
for bang human’, providing Dasein with its ‘possibilitiesfor
self-understanding and action’.(p. 226). l 2 He returns later
to this theme:
Dasein’s possibilities of self-interpretation and self-
evaluation are drawn from the background of intelligibil-
ity of the public world into which it is ‘thrown’.As we
become initiated into the practices of the community, we
soak up the tacit sense of what is important that circulates
in our world ... these understandingsand normative com-
mitments are definitive for the kinds of people we are.
They provide us with the possibilities of assessment and
aspiration that first give us an orientation toward our own
lives and a window onto the world. Given that we have
become the kind of people we are - people who, for
example, care about children and believe in justice -
there is now no way to drop these commitments without
ceasing to be who we are (p. 233) .I2
True enough, Guignon is quick to point out that the
‘they’is not only enabling but also threatening. The threat
stems from Dasein’s ‘inveterate tendency to go along with
the flow’; that is, its propensity ‘to become ensnared in its

immediate concerns and to drift along with the taken-for-
granted practices of average everydayness’ (p 226) .1* There
is also forgetfulness to contend with. ‘We become so mired
down in ordinary chores that we forget that we are called
upon to take a coherent stand in a world where things are
genuinely at stake’ (p. 227).1*
This sounds very different from what we have found
Heidegger to be saying. For one thing, the call he talks
about is a calling forth of Dasein ‘from its lostness in the
“they”’ (p. 333) into ‘its factical potentiality-for-Being-its-
Self‘ (p. 341) .I1 There is no talk of its being called to take a
coherent stand in a world where things are at stake. That
surely smacks too much of the very humanism he expressly
rejects. What is at stake for Dasein - the ‘issue’ - is its
Being. Heidegger is so anxious to make this clear that he
states it four times in the space of three pages at the very
start of Part One of his treatise (pp. 67-69).” All the same,
making a stand in a world where things are at stake is
important to nurses, if not to Heidegger. The implications
of this for nurse researchers should not be sidestepped.
There are crucial questions to be faced by those of their
number who profess to adopt a Heideggerian perspective.
Holmes is surely right in suggesting that ‘Heideggerian
phenomenology is at odds with the general value orienta-
tion publicly espoused by the nursing profession’ (p. 579)
and in warning that, however rich in inspiration and
insight Heidegger’swork may be, nurses need to be alert to
‘the dangers which lie hidden within those riches’
(p. 585).13 The dangers to which Holmes refers are real.
They are not averted by misreading Heidegger and trying
to make of him the kind of humanist that his own protes-
tations, the burden of his writing, and especially the testi-
mony of his life, show him not to be.
The problems with Guignon’s exposition of Heidegger
do not end there. On his reading of Being and Time,
Dasein’s basic situation - its original and normal condi-
tion - is embedded in an historical culture that is mean-
ingful and empowering. It is true that there is always the
possibility of slipping into everydayness and inauthenticity.
The danger of conformism and routinization never goes
away and never grows less. For all that, the fact that Dasein
finds itself in the first instance within the intricate texture
of inherited meaning is to be warmly welcomed. ‘Our
everyday actions’, says Guignon, ‘make sense only because
they instantiate or exemplify the taken-for-granted patterns
and norms of the shared life-world.’ (pp. 225-226) .12 We
begin, it would seem, in a Garden of Eden and it behoves
us to take care that we do not fall from grace.
Heidegger has much to say of Dasein’s fallenness, but
he has no Garden of Eden. All of us, as particular Daseins,
Tradition and culture in Being and Time
have been born into that fallen state and have experienced
from the very beginning the thraldom of the ‘they’:
This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is
one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance
(p. 213).11
So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a ‘fall’
from a purer and higher ‘primal status’. Not only do we
lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we
lack any possibilities or clues for interpreting it (p. 220).”
The Self, however, is proximally and for the most part
inauthentic, the they-self. Being-in-the-world is always
fallen (p. 225).”
By statements like these, Heidegger indicates that Dasein is
‘fallen’ right from the start. It is not the result of choice.
‘Everydayness is determinative for Dasein, even when it has
not chosen the “they”for its “hero”’ (p. 422) . I 1
We have earlier considered what Heidegger has to say
of this state of fallenness. It is characterized by average
everydayness wherein Dasein is lost to its own potentiality-
for-Being under the dictatorship of the ‘they’.The way out
he offers is a narrow path indeed. It is a movement towards
authenticity via angs,t (the avowed enemy of ‘everyday
familiarity’; that is, the ‘Being-at-home’ characteristic of
the ‘they’-self), the call to guilt and resoluteness issued by
conscience, Being-towards-death and the seizing of new-
found, albeit historically founded, possibilities.
Yet we find this account being read as if it were placing
us from the start in an enabling ‘they’-world which pro-
vides inteIligibility and founds our possibilities. How could
it possibly be read in that way? Very easily, if the reader is
heir to a forceful, coherent intellectual tradition that envis-
ages the world in precisely that fashion. Elsewhere I have
argued that this is what occurred with the interpretation of
phenomenology generally, at least as far as the English-
speaking world is concerned.14 Such an outcome very
graphically, and quite ironically, exemplifies the very power
of the ‘they’ that Heidegger rails against so cogently.
Heidegger may not speak positively and warmly, as
Guignon does, of our becoming ‘initiated into the practices
of the community’ (p. 233), of ‘our embeddedness in and
indebtedness to the wider context of our culture’, of our
being ‘already attuned in the shared quest for goods defin-
itive of a community -- such goods, for us, as fairness, hon-
esty, dignity, benevolence, achievement, and so on’
(p. 235).1*Nevertheless, if Heidegger does not uphold the
value of tradition and culture in these terms, the expo-
nents of pragmatist philosophy and symbolic interaction-
ism certainly do. The thoughts expressed here by Guignon
could have been plucked straight out of the writings of, say,
George Herbert Mead. For one thing, Guignon’s talk of
97
M Crotty
our being initiated into the practices of a community is par-
alleled closely in Mead’s social psychology. Mead sees us
‘entering into the most highly organized logical, ethical,
and aesthetic attitudes of the community’, thereby coming
to recognize ‘the most extensive set of interwoven condi-
tions that may determine thought, practice, and our fixa-
tion and enjoyment of values’ (p. 337).15 ‘A person is a
personality’, said Mead, ‘because he belongs to a commu-
nity, because he takes over the institutions of that commu-
nity into his own conduct’ (p. 162).16
The pragmatist world is precisely the world described
by Guignon when he lists the ‘goods’ that define commu-
nity and speaks of our shared quest for them. Mary Rogers
characterizes this quintessentially American way of seeing
the world as a ‘pragmatic-naturalist philosophy which
focuses on the nature and genesis of a shared world, inter-
subjectivity, and communication’ (p. 140).17 The prevailing
conviction that this is what the world is like is strong and
deep. Under the force of conviction like that, it can appear
utterly inconceivable that Heidegger could really mean
something else.
CONCLUSlON
Does it matter that he does mean something else? Or, to
put the question differently, does it matter that he is inter-
preted as if he doesn’t? It is an important question, for
what we have come to in the end is very fundamental. It is
not, in the first instance, about research methodology at
all. It is not primarily about how researchers might do
research but much, much more about how we see and
respond to our human world. Do we live in a world of tra-
dition and culture that is to be embraced wholeheartedly
and unquestioningly as the creative, liberating matrix of
our humanness? If so, our efforts should be directed, above
all else, to understanding and describing that world on its
own terms. Or do we live in a world of tradition and culture
that seeks to blind us to the richness of potential meaning
that surrounds us, enslaving us instead to its own ways of
understanding and its own forms of action? If so, we are
summoned to interrogate our world and call it into ques-
tion. In the one case, we are encouraged to be accepting
and conformist. In the other, we are encouraged to be crit-
ical and seek new understanding. Does it matter? It would
seem to matter a great deal.
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