Daniil Koloskov: Living Without a Ground: A Praxis of Being-in-the-World

ABSTRACT: In my talk, I will seek to demonstrate that existential phenomenology and, speaking more specifically, Heidegger’s work carries with itself a promise of alternative account of pragmatism, which might be described as phenomenological pragmatism or Heideggerian pragmatism. The central aspect of Heideggerian approach is an attempt to fully account for the ontological dimension of practices, their ability to disclose what entities are and who Dasein is; phenomenological pragmatism holds that disclosure of being (which is interpreted as disclosure of meaning (see Dreyfus, 1991; Sheehan, 2014; Schürmann 1987)) happens on the level of everyday practices. In order to explicate this point, I will offer a genetic reformulation of Heidegger’s central notions of disclosure, Dasein and average intelligibility (Das Man) in terms of praxis. Investigating the dynamic interrelation among those notions, I will offer a phenomenological conception of forms of life or average background practices; form of life is not a pragmatic condition of meaningfulness but an outcome of the dynamic process of meaning-formation, which is itself essentially practical. Proceeding this way, I will argue that the formation of meaning has no overarching origin or ground but sources from the bundle of disparate practical spaces and is ‘anarchic’ in nature (Wittgenstein 1953, Schürmann 1987); the process of meaning formation is characterized by the active decentration that delaminates into multiple incommensurable situations each of which has the logic of its own.