As perhaps the main theme of our study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, it is important to acknowledge, define, and understand what he, Heidegger, means by “authenticity.” In general, human existence is the openness where beings are revealed. Being refers not to a thing but to the event of being revealed or made manifest. To be inauthentic means to objectify oneself as an ego-subject, which conceals the fact that one is emptiness or openness. In contrast, to be authentic means to resolve to accept that openness that one already is. Thus, one can only be open to others and to living possibilities when freed from the distortions and sedimentations of egoism. Even though it is true that Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity changed during his lifetime, from resoluteness to releasement–from self-possessedness to being-appropriated by an event–we can still make some introductory observations that will serve as foundation for our study.
It is Dasein that oscillates between inauthenticity and authenticity, deepening and widening its understanding of its situation through the hermeneutic circle and thereby through new interpretations of temporality. By concealing his finitude, the inauthentic individual understands himself as ego, as an eternal thing. This person seeks [ontological] security by attempting to manipulate a world of things. He is here under the spell that he is fully individuated and free when in fact his goals and perspectives are determined by prevailing social custom. It is though anticipatory resoluteness that an authentic individual stops the egoistical self-objectification, accepts his mortality, and thereby opens himself to possibilities heretofore unseen.
More particularly, beings can only be revealed within the horizons of human temporality, which can be chosen authentically or inauthentically. Living inauthentically means to live temporally by dominating beings, those things in the world that appear, including other people. This is a fragmented life. In contrast, living authentically means to accept one’s mortality, affirm one’s finitude, and thereby become open to one’s limited possibilities in an integrated way, i.e., combining past, present, and future ekstases. Later, Heidegger adopted Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence and re-interpreted authentic temporality as the happening of an historical event rather than as the being of a resolute individual. In the later view, the authentic individual was a vessel to be emptied so that Being could manifest itself in a way that was historically changing.
In short, Heidegger believed that people were largely inauthentic because they live in a world wherein authenticity has become largely impossible. In the modern industrial [technological and informational] world, everything is understood as a commodity, as an object to be manipulated and dominated. This has occurred because Being has become hidden and we have forgotten that we are the openness for Being to reveal itself. As such, we now live in an egoist world writ large, where everything is to be exploited. He later modifies his voluntarist view about willing resolutely and instead adopts the goal of the renouncing of willing [see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, for the significance of his position on willing; it is profound]. Heidegger’s critique is thus a critique of the West and its reification of the self as a thing, as an ego-subject. Authentic existence can only occur, he believed, when the self-as-ego is eclipsed by the manifestation, acknowledgement, and celebration of one’s finitude. It is only then that an individual can truly open himself to his possibilities in time. Let’s explore this a bit.
For both Heidegger and Sartre, we have been misled into believing that the self is a substantial self through economic ideologies forcing our sensibilities of greed and lust. Yet, if we analyze the different components of consciousness, we see that the ego exists only immanently through conscious; it is perhaps a mere product that has served, for better or worse, to perpetuate capitalism and all its vagaries.
But the self is much more than than a reification of the past as [sedimented] ego. It is future directed, as well, through our choices of value and the good. It also exists pre-reflectively, as the wellspring for past and future. This element of the self is not a potentiality of an inner essence to be realized but rather carries with it a field of possibilities as it interfaces with the world. These possibilities emerge from one’s awareness and interpretation of one’s future within the world. This capacity to apprehend nothingness thus creates a distantiation between the self and its objects, allowing perspective, allowing the freedom of choice that comes from one’s construction of intentionalities, moving forward. Let’s be clear that the reflective look forward or backward assumes a substantial self, which Heidegger thinks is false [and Sartre, illusory]. The goal, therefore, is to free oneself from this falsity and from this illusion, thereby unlocking authentic possibilities in living.
In the pre-reflective mode [Sartre's terminology], which we can call the “pre-ego-construction,” there is only an awareness of the gap between self and world but not yet an awareness of the self as object. In this mode the self is aware of not being the material world or coinciding with any particular interpretation of the world. It is an openness to being, an awareness of temporal continuity. We cannot with justification speak of it as an “I” or “me” in this mode because those constructions are reifications of translucent, temporal awareness. Thus the self without identity, the pre-reflective self, is qualitatively different from the reflective self. This spontaneity of the [pre-formed], pre-reflective self, is the fuel for authentic possibility for the revelation of Being within one’s one personal and cultural history. The goal is to deconstruct ego structure not build it. We will, of course, explore much more about Heidegger’s primary concept of authenticity in future segments, as well as in our [Seattle] Seminar on Existential Phenomenology, but for now meditate on temporality and the spontaneity in Being.
Kevin Boileau, Ph.D., J.D., LL.M.
Writing in Seattle, WA
USA
