Abstract
The pragmatic tradition inspired by H. Dreyfus and M.
Okrent uncovers a great pragmatic potential in Heidegger's notions of understanding and possibilities. Pragmatists claim that 1) understanding is based on grasping meaningful possibilities open in a given situation, 2) that meaningfulness as such is grounded in the background practices and 3) that such practices consist in skills, habits and not explicit beliefs.
Taken together, this amounts to a thesis also known as "primacy of practice." The problem with such an approach is that the combination of the phenomenological method and the primacy of practice formulated this way leads to the placement of the source of meaningfulness beyond any possible human competence, leaving us without possibility of feedback on it. I will argue that pragmatic motives in Heidegger must be explicated differently: instead of sourcing meaning from the pragmatic ground, we could also demonstrate that meaning itself is pragmatic, i.e. its essence consists in disclosing and maximizing possibilities of acting and thinking.
The ecstatic character of Heidegger's notion of understanding, which is "equiprimordially" constituted by significance and for-the-sake-of-which, gives us a thread into such a conception. I will argue is that 1) understanding is guided by the maximization of our ability-to-be, i.e. by the maximization of disclosed possibilities and that 2) practices are created and organized in a way that maximizes such possibilities.