Heidegger on Being a Person

This paper presents a non-standard and rather free-wheeling interpretation of Being and Time, with emphasis on the first division.' I make Heidegger out to be less like Husserl and/or Sartre than is usual, and more like Dewey and (to a lesser extent) Sellars and the later Wittgenstein. My central point will be Heidegger's radical divergence from the Cartesian-Kantian tradition regarding the fundamental question: What is a person? According to Aristotle, man is a logical or "word-using" animal, a political or "community-participating" animal, and a featherless biped. In a sense easier to appreciate than to explain, the last is only incidental, while the first two are important; but those two are not our only important differentia. People (and probably only people) make and use tools, play games, judge themselves and others critically, and develop cultural traditions. It may seem that apes and social insects share some of these characteristics, at least primitively; yet people are clearly quite distinctive. A satisfactory account of what it is to be a person would expose the roots of this distinction, thereby showing why certain differentia are important, and others only incidental. For instance, Christian and modern philosophers interpreted Aristotle's "logical" as "rational," and proposed this rationality as our fundamental distinction. Thus Descartes held that people can talk because they can ratiocinate; and he could well have said the same for making and using tools. Similarly, Hobbes tried both to explain and to justify our living in a commonwealth by showing that it is rational. I see Heidegger, on the other hand, as starting from Aristotle's second definition-trying, in effect, to ground all other important differentia on our basic communal nature. But how can we conceive animals that are "political" in the relevant sense, without presupposing that they are rational or word-using? My reconstruction of Heidegger's answer to this question is the foundation of my interpretation. Imagine a community of versatile and interactive creatures, not otherwise specified except that they are conformists.