Saturday, January 17th 2009. Use

Use
From Heidegger’s Phenomenological Approach to Wittgenstein‘s Pragmatic Approach

Coordination: Charlotte GAUVRY

The philosophy of the XXth century is mostly focused on the notion of practical experience and on the notion of “use” of the world. In our working session, we will seek to analyze this central notion of “use” through a comparison between the early Heidegger’s (until Being and Time) acceptation of “use” and Wittgenstein’s pragmatic one.

From the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues relentlessly the pragmatic thesis that every speech act is determined by its use. The “use” of the world is the critical way to determinate the sense and its context. The working session’s first aim will be the analysis of this determination.
A cautious comparison with early Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis will be fruitful. Indeed, in Being and Time, the “use” also determinates the setting up of context and sense. Indeed this work can be read as an analytic of the daily life acted in the world. Its insertion in the world is more a pragmatic than a spatial one: ‘in-der-Welt-sein” is an “use” of the world, its trade (“Umgang”). The “sense” itself is determined by its “use”: it is a sense determined by the needs of the praxis rather than through its reference.
However, some central discrepancies remain with Wittgenstein’s approach. Heidegger’s “use” is right away defined as a categorial one and as one determined by and for the Dasein. In the 9th paragraph of Being and Time, “use” is determined by the category of “Zuhandenheit”. Such a “use” is formal and, in one sense, transcendental. Here is a crucial discrepancy. The working session will have to interrogate it.

But the comparison with Heidegger‘s earlier lectures, prior to the Dasein conception, will be extremely relevant to our analysis. The analysis of the facticity of these early lectures, influenced by Dilthey’s hermeneutic and by Bergson’s philosophy of life, presents the advantage of interrogating the notion of “use” without requiring the hypothesis of an a priori or of a conventional determination. Our session will also analyze these early lectures: the understanding of Husserl’s concept of intentionality through the paired concepts of “Bezugssinn/ Vollzugssinn”, the redefinition of context through the trinity: “Umwelt/Mitwelt/Selbstwelt”, in order to interrogate Wittgenstein’s notion of “use” and its possible limitations by reality, by life or by nature.