Phenomenology and the Primacy of Practice Thesis (II)

This chapter will offer an alternative account of meaningfulness based on Heideggerian vocabulary (Sect. 3.1). We will argue that practices themselves are a result of Dasein’s dynamic settling into the world, a settling that has no other aim but to maximize Dasein’s ability-to-be. Using games as our primary example, we will demonstrate how the meaningfulness of practice follows from the interactivity of its possibilities, which lead to the disclosure of further, context-dependent possibilities. In the second section (Sect. 3.2), we will also see that disclosing interactive possibilities (and, thus, maximizing our ability-to-be) goes hand in hand with the foreclosure of non-interactive possibilities. By polemicizing with both early and later Heidegger, we will arrive at a pragmatic notion of foreclosure that presupposes constant dynamics between the opening up and the closing off of practical fields.