Anxiety, Scepticism, and Rule Following

Abstract

Heidegger claims that average everyday Dasein is inauthentic: we have a tendency—which Heidegger characterizes as ‘falling’—to disown or fail to acknowledge our own role in constituting the significance of our existence. A pivotal moment in turning us toward our authentic potentiality-for-being-a-self is the mood of anxiety in which we encounter the world as evacuated of significance. In such a mood, we come face to face with the essential open-endedness of our existence, which Heidegger characterizes as uncanny. Heidegger’s dynamic of falling and anxiety finds striking echoes in Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule following and scepticism. The sceptical challenge Wittgenstein confronts with regard to rule following resembles the mood of anxiety in which we are suddenly confronted with the sense that we have no good reason for going on as we have done until now.