Becoming oneself : a Heideggerean analysis of complicity

Knowles, Charlotte Elizabeth (2016) Becoming oneself : a Heideggerean analysis of complicity. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This work seeks to illuminate the issue of an agent’s complicity in their own unfreedom via appeal to the work of Martin Heidegger. A secondary aim is to demonstrate what use Heidegger’s philosophy can be put to for theorising matters, such as complicity, that resonate specifically with feminist concerns. Chapter One begins with a brief historical account of the concept of complicity as it is appealed to in a gendered context. It then moves on to examine the issue of complicity as it is implicitly articulated in contemporary literature on adaptive preferences, autonomy and self-deception, identifying what insights into the phenomenon can be drawn from such approaches. Chapter Two offers an overview of the way in which complicity manifests itself in a Heideggerean context in the phenomena of falling and fleeing. This chapter also acts as an introduction to the way in which Heidegger’s ontology incorporates the insights into complicity drawn from the contemporary literature. Chapters Three, Four and Five take a more detailed look at complicity in a Heideggerean context via appeal to the notion of disclosedness. Breaking disclosedness down into its constituent elements, Chapter Three examines the way mood accounts for the insight of the self-deception theorist that complicity involves a form of concealment. Chapter Four turns to Heidegger’s conception of understanding and the insight from autonomy that complicity must be analysed as a way of Being. Chapter Five examines discourse and the insight from adaptive preference that any analysis of an agent’s complicity in their own unfreedom must take into account the agent’s social setting. Chapter Six explores the way in which the three insights already considered can be unified in Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity qua coming to understand oneself as Dasein. Here some of the broader implications for analysing complicity via a Heideggerean ontology are also examined.

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