Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus is presented as both an interpreter of Martin Heidegger and a critic of the limits of Heidegger’s project. His importance here lies in a tension: he recognizes Heidegger’s account of human beings as engaged and situated in the world, and describes everyday practices as possible sites of resistance to technological mobilization; yet the book argues that these practices can themselves be enlisted in that mobilization.

Intellectual Position

Dreyfus appears among readers who acknowledge the force of Heidegger’s turn in Being and Time: instead of treating the human subject as a detached observer of the world, Heidegger understands human beings as already thrown into situations and involved in them. The passage groups Dreyfus with some Wittgensteinians, alongside readers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Alain Badiou, in a broad criticism of what Heidegger leaves unresolved. On this reading, he does not adequately locate human existence within the historical totality of social practice. Dreyfus’s role is thus not simple rejection: the account credits Heidegger’s breakthrough while marking a limit in how far it goes.

Everyday Practices as Resistance

In discussing preparation for the Kehre and the possible arrival of new gods, the book identifies Dreyfus’s proposal that people participate in practices capable of resisting total technological mobilization. The practices gather people around ordinary things and temporarily bring the object and its users into a shared world. A wine jug or an old stone bridge can focus such a gathering; a family meal can draw upon its members’ culinary and social skills and bring familial roles, warmth, humor, and loyalty into expression. In this account, resistance is not abstract: it is sought in concrete activities organized around things and the forms of life they gather.

The Limits of Local Resistance

The book questions whether these local gatherings can reliably stand outside technological mobilization. From a strict Heideggerian perspective, practices of this kind may instead be incorporated in advance into its smooth operation. Transcendental-meditation courses, for example, can be taken up as a way to make workers more efficient. The problem is not that a wine jug, bridge, or family meal has no meaning, but that meaningful practices can be made compatible with the system they are supposed to resist. Dreyfus’s account therefore becomes a point of departure for asking whether local worlds offer genuine opposition or merely a more personal form of adaptation.

The Question Left Open

The discussion sets the prospect of local gathering beside two other possibilities: full engagement in technological mobilization and withdrawal from public circulation through Gelassenheit. These are presented as interpretive possibilities in the book’s treatment of Heidegger, not as positions attributed to Dreyfus. Their contrast sharpens the difficulty his proposal faces: if everyday practices can be absorbed, resistance cannot be guaranteed simply by retreating into familiar activities. Dreyfus’s brief appearance consequently frames a broader dispute over whether a shared local world can interrupt technological power, or whether that power already includes the practices through which people hope to escape it.