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By Russell Schoch All’s right in the center of the Berkeley campus when an antique but mint-condition Karmann Ghia sits in its accustomed spot, directly in front of Moses Hall. The car and the parking spot belong to Hubert L. Dreyfus, who bought the sports car in Germany just after he came to Cal in 1968. The Berkeley professor of philosophy also brought another German import to Berkeley and to American philosophy: Martin Heidegger. Dreyfus is almost single-handedly responsible for the prominence of Heidegger, and "Continental philosophy" more generally, in the United States. How did a nice Jewish boy from Terre Haute, Indiana get first to Harvard and then to a meeting with the Nazi-tainted Heidegger in Germany in the early 1950s? "It's an interesting story," says the excitable and vigorous Dreyfus, who this spring--quite belatedly, his students and colleagues agree--was honored with a Distinguished Teaching Award. He did not begin life in a philosophical way. "I spent my youth blowing things up and making poison gasses," he confesses in his Moses Hall office. "A friend and I had a strange game, which was lighting sulfur in a spoon and then swirling it around to see what caught fire--whether it was the curtains or the rug--and then rushing over and putting the fire out." He also remembers accidentally firing a missile through the window of his junior high school. "I wanted to go to MIT, where I could make bigger and better explosives, but my high school debate coach said: 'You should go to Harvard.'" Accepted at both schools, he flipped a coin and wound up at Harvard in 1947. He entered as a physics major, but switched to philosophy, writing his senior honors thesis on the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Continuing at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, Dreyfus joined an "underground Heidegger group" of students who were translating and commenting on the philosopher's magnum opus, Being and Time, which had yet to appear in English. Hooked on Heidegger and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus won a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and set out to visit Germany. While there, in 1952, Dreyfus wrote to Heidegger and asked for a meeting. Dreyfus only later realized why Heidegger quickly accepted the invitation: "He was very isolated at that point, because of his connection with the Nazis. He was probably happy to have anyone to talk to, and to hear that I was planning to teach his philosophy in the United States." Was Dreyfus, only 23, nervous about seeing the man many consider the 20th-century's greatest philosopher? "I suppose I was," Dreyfus replies. "But I had been distracted by the legs of Mrs. Heidegger. She was on a ladder in an apple tree in the front yard when I came to the house, and all I could see was her legs. So I was already bemused when Heidegger came to the door in his lederhosen and green suspenders and funny hat." Dreyfus saw a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness on Heidegger's desk and asked the German philosopher if he was reading the French existentialist. (It was later revealed that Heidegger had written a fulsome letter of praise to Sartre.) Heidegger told Dreyfus: "How could I read such dreck?" Dreyfus completed his Ph.D., then began teaching humanities at MIT, which, at the time, had no philosophy department. His first published article was on Cervantes, and he continues to read and teach the classics, from The Odyssey to Moby Dick. While at MIT, he became interested, from a Heideggerian standpoint, in all the fuss being made about the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. He spent a year at the RAND Corporation studying it and then wrote a scathing report--"From Alchemy to A.I."--which became the basis for his continuing battle against the claims of artificial intelligence. "The A.I. people represented just that rationalist tradition in philosophy that the people I studied--like Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty--were calling into question," Dreyfus says. What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason came out in 1972 and was updated twenty years later (What Computers Still Can't Do) and has been translated into 11 languages. He and his brother Stuart, who has taught engineering science at Berkeley since 1966, developed what has become known as the Dreyfus skill model in Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (1986). "The truth is that human intelligence can never be replaced with machine intelligence simply because we are not ourselves 'thinking machines,'" the brothers wrote. "Each of us has, and uses every day, a power of intuitive intelligence that enables us to understand, to speak, and to cope skillfully with our everyday environment." Which is what Hubert Dreyfus had learned decades before from the "anti-rationalist" Continental philosophers. Continental philosophers, Dreyfus explains, are those writers, mostly in France and Germany, who were influenced by Martin Heidegger's break with traditional philosophy and its emphasis on reason and deliberation and on concepts and language. Heidegger and the various branches of phenomenology he fostered wanted instead to study everyday practices, "being-in-the-world," as Heidegger famously calls it. Using a hammer was one everyday practice he wrote about to nail down his points. Dreyfus's long-awaited commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time--which started out as a set of Fybate Lecture Notes transcribed from his first course at Berkeley in 1968--was published as Being-in-the-World in 1991. Heidegger's opponents, wrote one critic, tend to divide into two camps: "those who believe his writings are largely gibberish and those who believe they are entirely gibberish." A reviewer of Dreyfus's book countered: "If only Heidegger had made himself as clear as Dreyfus makes him, he would long ago have established himself in the English-speaking world as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century." A similar split can be seen in Berkeley's philosophy department itself. In a Festschrift published for Dreyfus on his 70th birthday, his long-time colleague and philosophical opponent John Searle wrote: "Most philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition seem to think that Heidegger was an obscurantist muddlehead at best or an unregenerate Nazi at worst." One of the most exciting combinations of courses on the Berkeley campus has to be the one that takes place on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. First, Searle teaches his course on analytic philosophy of mind, followed directly by Dreyfus's course on Heidegger. "We go to each other's courses at least once a semester," says Dreyfus. "He comes and defends himself against the objections I'm making, and I defend myself against the objections he's making." Even though he officially retired ten years ago, Hubert Dreyfus continues to teach the courses he's made famous, on Heidegger and existentialism. The reason he always finds his parking spot is that he arrives daily around 6:30 a.m., staying on campus roughly 12 hours each day, except on the weekends, when he leaves, by family decree, at noon. His French-born (and "lapsed Catholic") wife Genevieve insists that her husband take one day off a year, Christmas Day. Yes, I do. In the first place, I don't like the translation. Heidegger claims that what Aristotle meant is: "man is a speaking animal." But "rational animal" is the definition people in universities, including this one, are taught and believe. If "man is a rational animal" means thinking things out, deliberating, and following rules, there's nothing wrong with that definition. That's what you have to do in a situation in which you have no experience. But human beings are at their best when they're not being calculating, detached, deliberating, rational animals--when they're behaving as intuitive experts, not beginners. The first part of [Heidegger's] Being and Time is really a description of what it's like to be "in flow": to be an expert in any skill, and especially an expert in "finding your way around in the world." Man at his best is an involved-in-the-world, skillful, coping being. What does the Dreyfus skill model say? It says that there are roughly five stages of skill: beginner, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. At the first stage, the beginner needs rules--in learning to drive, say, or play chess. When you're learning to drive, you're told that you should shift from first to second when the speedometer reads 10 miles per hour. And that's fine; you need some sort of rule because you've never done it before. But as you move along in experience and become more advanced, you'll soon see that such a rule doesn't make sense--if you're shifting gears on a hill, or in a car with a full load, the "shift at 10 miles per hour" rule will cause your car to stall. With more and more experience, you become competent, and then proficient. After a while, you are able to drive without even thinking about it. You just do it. You're an "expert" at it. The very same sort of progression happens in chess. Expert chess players don't think about rules? Not at all. They know what the issue is intuitively, immediately. Just as a good driver doesn't have to stop and think about rules when he's entering the freeway in heavy traffic--if he has to, he shouldn't be driving! A chess master can see almost immediately what the issue is in a game. My brother, to test our model, once brought a pre-arranged chessboard into the room of a chess master. And before he could even put it on the table, the master said: "White has to attack the king side now." Grand masters have to make a certain number of moves in a certain amount of time. I heard one say that he found his arm going out and making a move before he had time to take in what was going on. I've heard athletes say similar things. In our book, Stuart and I quote Larry Bird, who said that he sometimes passed the basketball on the court before he had time to see what was going on. When two champion chess players are running out of time, their arms could be making grand-master moves and they wouldn't understand what happened until later, when they saw the video. I once said at an academic meeting, which caused a great stir, that people are at their best when they're not conscious. It's like being in flow--where you don't need to reflect, you don't need, finally, to know what's going on. This all sounds very far-fetched, but then I realized that every one of us does it every day--for example, in conversation. Two people talking to each other make certain moves--they avoid embarrassing each other, they switch from topic to topic--all so fast that you'd have to re-run it, as people do in conversation analysis, to see the amazing moves they're making. And what does all this mean? It means that the "expert"--the person who acts intuitively--doesn't think or calculate or reason at all. He just does what normally works--and it normally works. He or she does the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way, as Aristotle says. This is the opposite of "the thinker," someone like Hamlet, who's "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Can you think of an example in your own life when you made a major decision without trying to figure things out? Perhaps the best example I can give is that I trusted my intuition when I didn't do normal philosophy as it was done when I was a graduate student; instead, I read Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, wrote my dissertation on phenomenology, and then taught it. I had no reason for doing so except that it felt right to me. How would you differentiate between Heideggerian and traditional philosophy? Heidegger challenges traditional philosophy, particularly since Descartes in the mid-17th century. The Cartesian notion is that we are subjects--that is, minds--and in our minds are experiences. The problem for philosophy ever since has been: how are we related to the external world? But Heidegger denies that there is any such internal-external split in man. Instead, he says that what philosophy has neglected since Descartes--indeed, since Socrates--is the level of our everyday coping with things in the world. He writes a lot about what it's like just to hammer. And normal philosophers aren't so "involved in the world"? Descartes is the perfect example: he retired into a warm room and made sure he didn't have any passions to bother him, and he thought very clearly and very reflectively about his experiences. So he tells us in the Meditations. And he came up with some very bizarre conclusions! For instance, he didn't know whether or not he had a body, and he had to try to find arguments to show that he did. That's how it looks, I think, if you're sitting around completely passively, just thinking. But if you are hammering a nail, to take Heidegger's favorite example, the question of whether or not you
have a body wouldn't arise. You're just totally absorbed in what you're doing. This all sounds very simple and straightforward. Why, then, are Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger so difficult to read? Well, perceiving a table--under various lighting conditions, and from various angles, as you walk around it, and so forth--turns out to be immensely complicated. And having a body is immensely complicated to describe as well. To help the students see the phenomena in question, I also use earlier philosophers, like Pascal and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. And novelists, like Melville and Dostoyevsky. And movies, like Hiroshima, Mon Amou1r, which I take to be very Kierkegaardian, showing what he calls "knights of resignation"; and Godard's Breathless, which is wonderful because it's pop Nietzsche; and Antonioni's movies, The Eclipse and The Red Desert. Because, in all of these writers and movies, the focus is on the phenomena--that is, the human experience--and not on how we talk about, or reflect on, our concepts of it, which is what normal philosophy tends to do. You've said that you like to apply philosophy to life. I think it's in the Dreyfus genes. My brother Stuart, for instance, is an applied mathematician; he doesn't like to do pure math, make elegant proofs, and so forth. He did the math that described the optimal path for the lunar lander, for instance. He tells a funny story. He was working this out on an airplane, and he kept getting the wrong answer. All of a sudden, he realized that he had been using the Earth's gravity, when he was supposed to be thinking about the lunar lander. And he shouted out on the plane, "We're on the moon!" Everybody looked at him as if he were completely insane! You've advised both industry and the military, which seems odd for a philosopher to be doing. Well, investors want to know what's a safe bet, and so does the military. One of the ways that philosophy--in this case, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty--is relevant has been in my public fight with artificial intelligence researchers. In effect, I have used the Continental philosophers to show that A.I. is an impossible project because it has the wrong conception of human intelligence: that the mind is like a computer. This isn't so, and it can't be so, as my favorite philosophers have shown. How would this affect the military? About twenty years ago, a man came to my office on campus and said, "I have a client who wants you to represent him in Los Angeles." He wouldn't tell me who or why. So I was paid to go to a meeting where industry hears what the military wants and then makes proposals. One of the things the military wanted back then, in the early 1980s, was an autonomous land vehicle, which would be guided by artificial intelligence. Wasn't there just a test of autonomous land vehicles, in the Mojave desert? Yes! Sponsored by DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], which said they would give a million dollars to anyone who could make an autonomous vehicle go 142 miles across a desert, at an average speed of 20 miles an hour. All of the big places competed. There was an entry from Berkeley, rather an ingenious one, an "intelligent motorcycle." Carnegie-Mellon--A.I. people there are big enemies of mine--entered an SUV packed with A.I. equipment, and it was considered the likely winner. It was indeed the winner because it went further than any of the others. How far? It went seven miles before it crashed and burned up. The sort of thing you predicted 20 years ago. Right. So, years ago, I made my report to the lawyer that, whoever his client was, he shouldn't invest in any of the things the government wanted then because they couldn't be done with current A.I. techniques. Later, a vice president of Lockheed came and revealed that he was the mysterious person being represented by the lawyer. He thanked me and said that Lockheed certainly was going to stay out of such business. Let's talk about the classroom. You've just won a Distinguished Teaching Award. What does teaching mean to you? I love it. It's the main thing in my life, and I would be lost without it, which is why, although I'm retired, I haven't stopped teaching. Has your teaching style changed over the decades? When I first started teaching, as a T.A. at Harvard, I prepared my discussion sessions so that students would learn exactly what I wanted them to learn and have a kind of "ah-ha!" experience, just at the end of the hour, when they would finally see things my way. But, shortly thereafter, teaching became for me a way of being as open as possible to the interesting things my students have to say. Philosophy's much too hard for me to understand without lots of help, and teaching is a way to get that help. So, I switched over from telling students things that they didn't know that I did know, to listening to anyone who could tell me things I didn't know and wanted to know. That's what teaching has meant to me ever since. You're famous for not only allowing, but encouraging, students to interrupt your lectures with their questions and comments. That's how we learn! I want students to understand they can ask questions and that I'll take them seriously. I want them to understand, further, that they can radically transform the interpretations of the books we read. And, every once in a while, some student raises a hand and says something more important and more deep than any of the stuff that people have been writing for years about, say, Aeschylus, or The Brothers Karamazov. Heidegger talks about how teachers are really learners, and says that the most a teacher can do is "learn and let learn." Many of your students consider your philosophy course a life-changing experience. Has Heidegger had this effect on you? I'm sorry to say this, but I don't think it's had any effect on my life and way of being-in-the-world at all. I find Heidegger fascinating because he's such a deep philosopher and because of the amazing effect he has on other people. I remember one time teaching Heidegger on anxiety and the arbitrariness of everyday norms, the ungroundedness of being--which I have never experienced and don't really believe. But, hearing this, a student ran out of the class and threw up! He recognized the ungroundedness of being? Yes! Right there in the class! Why have you, in effect, never run from your class and thrown up? Perhaps because I don't take for granted the normal way of doing things, the normal way the world looks to people. It's never been upsetting to me that the world has no intrinsic meaning or that our norms are ungrounded. When I think I understand what Heidegger means by practical wisdom, anxiety, resoluteness, and disclosing new worlds, it comes out sounding very much like what I feel. And I think I was like this before I ever read a word of Heidegger. All I can say is that's probably why I have spent my life studying him and the phenomena he calls to our attention. |
 Photos by Cristina Taccone
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