Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self

Themes From Division Two of Being and Time

Denis McManus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317676669
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Though Heidegger's Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last hundred years, its Division Two has received relatively little attention. This outstanding collection corrects that, examining some of the central themes of Division Two and their wide-ranging and challenging implications.

An international team of leading philosophers explore the crucial notions that articulate Heidegger's concept of authenticity, including death, anxiety, conscience, guilt, resolution and temporality. In doing so, they clarify the bearing of Division Two's reflections on our understanding of intentionality, normativity, responsibility, autonomy and selfhood. These discussions raise important questions about how we may need to rethink the morals of Division One of Being and Time, the broader project to which that book was devoted, the shaping influence of figures such as Aristotle and Kierkegaard, as well as Heidegger's relationship with his contemporaries and successors.

Essential reading for students and scholars of Heidegger's thought, and anyone interested in key debates in phenomenology, ethics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of mind.

Contributors: William Blattner, Clare Carlisle, Taylor Carman, Steven Galt Crowell, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Sophia Dandelet, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, Jeffrey Haynes, Stephan Käufer, Denis McManus, Stephen Mulhall, George Pattison, Peter Poellner, Katherine Withy, Mark A. Wrathall.

1 AUTHENTICITY AND THE QUESTION OF BEING

Charles Guignon

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771861-2

The question of Being and the search for a method

According to generally accepted accounts, when Heidegger was put up for a promotion and learned he had to produce a major publication, he retreated to his cabin and wrote a final draft of the first Division of Being and Time in about four weeks. This first version of the work made up the book that was published in Husserl's Yearbook the next year. Heidegger continued writing during the summer of 1926 and in the end he completed the Introduction and two divisions of the projected three that were supposed to make up the first half of the completed work.¹ Like anyone composing a major monograph, he drew on materials from his lectures and notes from the preceding years. Some of the concepts produced during the high-pressured composition of Being and Time seem to be relatively new for him – for instance, the terminology of zuhanden and vorhanden. Also fairly new, so far as I can see, is the systematic use of the word we translate as “authenticity,” the German Eigentlichkeit, a neologism based on the very common word eigentlich, which means “really or “truly.” The word eigentlich was used by both Brentano and Husserl to refer to an intentional act that is fulfilled, so it was not surprising to find it used in a text in that tradition. What is surprising is Heidegger's use of the word to refer to a possible way of life or mode of existence for humans, a life that reveals what it is to be human in a privileged way. The idea of an authentic existence turns out to be crucial for disclosing our Being, and that in turn is supposed to provide a path to working out the overall project of Being and Time, which is disclosing the meaning of Being in general.

Needless to say, we can find precedents for Being and Time's conception of authenticity in Heidegger's earlier lectures and writings. For example, Oskar Becker reports that Heidegger in 1919 talked about “genuine life-experiences, which grow out of a genuine life-world (artist, religious person),” experiences that produce the phenomenon of “life-intensification” (TDP 175–76).² However, as Theodore Kisiel, Herman Philipse and Denis McManus have pointed out, throughout the 1920s Heidegger continually reframed key concepts and theses in the light of the thought of major thinkers or schools of thought that captured his interest at the time.³ With respect to the concept of authenticity, the frame for this notion in the early 1920s – influenced by the prevailing movement of “life philosophy” – made it plausible to think of the first version of “authenticity” as involving a vocational commitment to some serious calling such as the religious life (e.g., Luther) or art (e.g., van Gogh). In contrast, the frame of Being and Time itself, influenced by the Neo-Kantians, made it harder to connect the idea of authenticity to a vocational calling, since it presumably is a possibility open to all fully developed instances of Dasein, including people with dull or uninspiring occupations.

In fact, Being and Time itself seems to assign various frames and functions to the notion of authenticity. For our purposes here, it is important to see that a key role of the concept is to play a methodological role in the overall project of Being and Time. Seen in this methodological light, what Heidegger wants to show is that the goal of understanding the meaning of Being – that is, the job of “fundamental ontology” – is something that can be achieved only by a person who is, or at least fully understands what it is to be, authentic. It is this methodological role I would like to try to clarify in what follows.

The question of Being

Readers of Heidegger are well aware that he starts his magnum opus with a question he finds formulated by Plato and other early philosophers, the question that asks in the broadest way possible what is it to be anything of whatever sort we happen to be considering. Despite the fact that this might seem to be an extremely simple question, there is room for debate about whether the “to be” (Sein) in question is understood in the sense of what is characteristic of a thing of a particular sort (a copular or predicative sense) or whether it is understood in the “existential” sense (e.g., “There is such a thing as a boson”). Heidegger's claim is that “Being” in the sense of the word he wants to clarify is both its being what it is (the defining characteristics of something – its So-sein) and its “that-being” (that it is, in some sense of the word “is” that needs to be clarified – its Daß-sein) (SZ 5).⁴

The question of being is immediately recast as a question about the meaning of Being, the question: What is the meaning of Being? The reasoning here seems to be that, because we can inquire about what there is (das Seiende) only insofar as anything shows up as counting in some way for us, the question of Being will ask about the meaning or intelligibility of being rather than Being itself. Heidegger holds that we are all equipped to deal with such a question because we all have “an average kind of intelligibility” that enables us to understand what things are at all: in his words, “we already live in an understanding of Being” (SZ 4).

A careful reading of Being and Time reveals that the question of fundamental ontology – the question of the meaning of Being in general – is the definitive focus not only of the two divisions of the book that have come down to us, but of the uncompleted third division and second part as well. Because the question of Being is the central issue of the book, the discussions of selfhood and authenticity, which are taken up primarily in Division Two, must be shown to be subordinate to this larger goal. This order of questions explains why Heidegger at the outset seems to change the subject from an inquiry into being as such to an inquiry into human being (Dasein). The “ontological priority” of Dasein is explained by the fact that Dasein is the entity for whom Being as such is intelligible or comprehensible. Meaning and intelligibility are correlative terms. In order to ask how anything comes to be intelligible, however, requires that we give an account of that entity for whom things in general can be intelligible, namely, ourselves. As Heidegger says,

What we are seeking is the answer to the question about the meaning of Being in general, and, prior to that, the possibility of working out in a radical manner this basic question of all ontology. But to lay bare the horizon within which something like Being in general becomes intelligible, is tantamount to clarifying the possibility of having any understanding of Being at all – an understanding which itself belongs to the constitution of the entity [Seiende] called Dasein.

(SZ 231)

Since any account of the meaning of Being must first give an account of the conditions for the possibility of understanding in general – the frame of reference or “horizon” in which Being is intelligible – and since we (that is, “Dasein”) always already have an understanding of Being, the inquiry will begin with an “existential analytic,” where this means an account of Dasein as the entity for whom anything can be intelligible. In other words, the claim is that our way of being provides the parameters in terms of which anything like the being of entities can come to appear as it does. To make sense of the project of addressing the question of Being, then, we need to get clear about Heidegger's characterization of Dasein.

The Being of Dasein

In sections 4 and 9 of Being and Time, Heidegger provides what he calls the “formal meaning” of Dasein's Being (SZ 43), an initial formulation that “anticipate[s] analyses, in which our results will be authentically exhibited for the first time” (SZ 12).⁵ According to this “formal indication,” Dasein is an entity that is unique among other entities insofar as it is defined by a relation it has to itself. In Heidegger's words, Dasein is distinguished by the fact that, “in its Being [i.e., in living out its life], it has a relationship toward that Being – a relationship that defines its Being [i.e., defines its identity as a whole]” (SZ 12). What this means is that Dasein is not an entity that is simply enduringly present, like a rock or a tree, an entity whose Being can be thought of in terms of the concept of a sub-stance with attributes. Rather, its Being consists in its taking a stand on what it is throughout the course of its life as a whole, “from its ‘beginning’ to its ‘end’” (SZ 233). Dasein is a movement, though not in the way a baseball moves when thrown, where the ball remains what it is despite the throwing. Instead, Dasein is a movement in the sense that its Being just is this movedness: a coming-to-be where the unfolding happening of its movement is its Being. Dasein is conceived of here as an event, a happening (Geschehen), or a movement. (Heidegger uses the middle-voice “movedness,” Bewegtheit.) It is because we are always under way, taking a stand on what our lives are amounting to, that Dasein “can say to itself ‘Become what you are’” (SZ 145). To say that Dasein is the stand it takes on its life in its actions is to say that its doings express some overarching sense of what its life is all about, and that its life is nothing other than the ensemble of these actions as they are bound together in a particular way (in a distinctive How, to use Heideggerian language).

The formal indication of Dasein's Being gives us a preliminary identification of the subject matter of the published part of Being and Time, the attempt to give an account of the Being of Dasein. Yet Heidegger does not say where this initial indication itself comes from. Of course, Kierkegaard had defined the self as a relation that relates itself to itself in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death (1980: 13). But I think that Heidegger has in mind an even earlier source for this conception, namely, Aristotle. To make this claim plausible, we might turn to Heidegger's lecture course of 1926, Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy. According to Heidegger's reading of Aristotle there, the kind of Being that is characteristic of humans is motion (hinein) (BCAnP 230). Humans engage in two basic types of motion:

poiésis, in the sense of making, producing, “manipulating,” and praxis, acting, in a more fundamental sense than mere making.⁶

With respect to poiésis, the kind of activity we are caught up in for most of our waking hours, the goal (ergon) of the activity is something outside the activity itself, as for example building aims at bringing into existence a house, or medical treatment brings about health in a patient. For poiésis, in other words, the projected outcome or accomplishment of the activity is of a different sort than the doing that brings it about – the house, for example, is different from the activity of building. In poiésis, when the outcome is achieved, the activity ends.

In contrast, the aim of praxis lies in the activity itself. For example, when one is engaged in building with the aim of becoming a master builder, a central aim is a cultivation of the human capacities that are involved in this sort of action. Since the goal of becoming a person of a particular sort is brought to realization in the action, the action does not end when that goal is achieved: so a skilled doctor goes on practicing medicine and strives to realize the goal of being a consummate practitioner throughout a lifetime. Mark Okrent sums up this idea when he says, “The end of my act is at once that the environment come to be in some definite way and that I be a certain kind of person” (2000: 300).

Heidegger's Aristotelian view holds that, although the various vocations and particular norms governing action are drawn from the historical culture in which one lives, there is an overarching goal or purpose present in all praxis: the goal of becoming a person of a particular sort. It is the nature of human beings, on this view, to seek the highest life (bios), a life that achieves “the highest possibility of existence, the mode of being in which a person satisfies to the highest degree the proper human potentiality for being, in which a person genuinely is” (BCAnP 230). Seen from this standpoint, a human agent is not driven by “sheer ‘appetite,’” as are lower animals. Rather, humans can be motivated by understanding (nous), the ability to act on reasons (even when those reasons have not been made explicit in the agent's mind).⁷ The condition for such a life is a sense of time: “this opposition between impulse and genuinely chosen, rational action is a possibility open only to those living beings which can understand time” (BCAnP 229). Humans therefore have a “double comportment – toward the future [that “for the sake of which they act”] and toward the present”; this double comportment “allows conflict to arise” (BCAnP 229).

The Aristotelian conception of the human being as having a double comportment helps to clarify Heidegger's obscure formal indication found in the opening paragraphs of section 4. This indication uses the word “Being” in two ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Authenticity and the question of Being
• 2 Owned emotions: affective excellence in Heidegger on Aristotle
• 3 A tale of two footnotes: Heidegger and the Question of Kierkegaard
• 4 Death, guilt, and nothingness in Luther, Kierkegaard, and Being and Time
• 5 Anxiety’s ambiguity: Being and Time through Haufniensis’ lenses
• 6 Jaspers, limit-situations, and the methodological function of authenticity
• 7 Essential guilt and transcendental conscience
• 8 Things fall apart: Heidegger on the constancy and finality of death
• 9 Authenticity and the absence of death
• 10 Anxiety, choice and responsibility in Heidegger’s account of authenticity
• 11 Reordering the beginning chapters of Division Two of Being and Time
• 12 Autonomy, authenticity, and the self
• 13 Responsibility, autonomy, affectivity: a Heideggerian approach
• 14 Early Heidegger and Sartre on authenticity
• 15 Nothingness and phenomenology: the co-disclosure of Sartre and Heidegger
• Index