The THINK.NET list is clearly not functioning properly. Therefore, I'd
like to try the slow readings here on this list. Tonight I'm just going
to post what I have on $45 and a few recent reflections on authenticity
and inauthenticity as they function within the context of Heidegger's
attempt to give a phenomenology of time and human temporality
[zeitlichkeit]. My approach to Heidegger deviates significantly from
others insofar as I take the concept of time to be a truly fundamental
issue, at least in his earlier, phenomenological period. I take him at
his word when he says the Daseinanalytik is really just a means to a
phenomenological radicalization of the concepts of time and being. I also
take him at his word when he says he thinks time is _the_ horizon for an
understanding of being.
Throughout, I rely on the Macquarrie-Robinson translation for quotes and
pagination. I cannot read or translate German to save my life.
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**$45. Outcome of the Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein, and the
Task of a Primordial Existential Interpretation of this Entity**
The essence of Dasein is existence ("an understanding
potentiality-for-Being which, in its Being, makes an issue of that Being
itself" [p. 274]), and its basic state is being-in-the-world, the
structural totality of which is care. So far so good. But what makes all
of Division One a _preparatory_ analysis of Dasein is its failure to
conceive Dasein as a whole and its failure to include an analysis of
authenticity as a possible way-of-being for Dasein. The Daseinanalytik is
only as perspicacious as the phenomenal grasp we have of Dasein.
Therefore, a truly accurate account of the meaning of Dasein's being must
include authenticity and must conceive Dasein as a whole. The
understanding of being which Heidegger seeks can be radically clarified
only if Dasein's being is made fully ontologically clear. Why? Because
Dasein _is_ a kind of understanding of being through its most basic
background way of grasping or understanding all that it encounters, and
understanding _this_ fully, explicitly, and as a unified whole just is to
understand being in general. But when Dasein is finally understood as a
totality, temporality turns out to be the basic ontological meaning of its
being (care). Since fundamental ontology is phenomenology for the early
Heidegger, the temporal interpretation of Dasein must be phenomenological;
it has to go back over everything of Dasein's basic constitution revealed
in Division One. Thus, everything of Division One has to be reworked, and
it will be reworked in terms of temporality.
It is basic to Dasein that it have the character of being-ahead-of-itself.
But then this means that it always has something, some potentiality of
itself, some way of being, outstanding (unfinished). If this is so then
we must find some way of "completing the circuit," as it were, and getting
Dasein into view as a totality. This Heidegger accomplishes through the
concept of death. The possibility of authentic existence is revealed
through guilt (specifically through 'wanting to have a conscience'), and
the possibility of an authentic being-a-whole is developed by fusing death
and guilt together in anticipatory resoluteness.
Now, when Heidegger talks about a "primordial" understanding of Dasein,
what does he mean? I believe it just means that all the presuppositions
(fore-havings, fore-sight, and fore-conceptions) of the hermeneutical
Situation must be explicitly understood, and that Dasein must be
understood in its totality, not just in its basic essence (care). This
lends a clue to understanding the role of authenticity and why Heidegger
makes so much of it.
I do _not_ interpret Heidegger's talk of authenticity and inauthenticity
to be a system of values somehow "smuggled" into his fundamental ontology.
It is quite clear from _BT_, especially from chapters 2 and 3 of the
second division, that Heidegger does have very strong opinions about the
respective merits of authentic and inauthentic existence, and he does want
to convince his readers to opt for authenticity insofar as they are able,
but that is _not_ the primary philosophical significance of his discussion
of in/authenticity. The authentic mode of existence is important for
fundamental ontology because it is only in authentic existence that Dasein
as a whole can be understood with true, full perspicacity. Authentically
existing Dasein is no longer fallen into the confused self-understanding
that occurs in inauthentic existence. When inauthentic, Dasein
understands itself as a peculiar kind of p-at-h _thing_, an ego, whereas
authentic Dasein suffers no such confusion and so has a clearer grasp of
what Dasein itself most basically _is_.
I think Heidegger's talk of authenticity and inauthenticity can be
substantially clarified if it is understood in light of Husserl's use of
those terms. At this point in his career, Heidegger was still very much
in Husserl's philosophical debt. For Husserl authentic reference to an
object is "filled out" with the intentional object itself in a genuine act
of awareness, whereas inauthentic reference to an object is an empty,
purely signitive, linguistic reference. So I think authentic existence
for Heidegger should just be understood as that mode of existence in which
Dasein's being is fully explicitly present to it in its
self-understanding. When Dasein exists inauthentically, its own essence
is not fully and genuinely present to its self-understanding.
The one thing that I never did quite understand is how Heidegger intends
to explain why a given person should, in their Dasein, switch at any
particular moment from inauthentic to authentic existence. Why is a given
instance of Dasein authentic at one time t1, but inauthentic at times t2 -
t8? What precipitates this shift, what allows it to happen? Why does it
happen at one given moment and not at another? He'd better have _some_
kind of explanation for this, because if he doesn't then the only evidence
he has for the genuine concrete possibility of authentic existence, and
thereby for a fully adequate fundamental ontological understanding of
Dasein, is the experience of anticipatory resoluteness. Readers not
sufficiently fortunate to have had such an experience would then just have
to take it on Heidegger's word that there really is such an experience and
that it's not just some kind of momentary fit of paranoid neurosis (or
some such).
Anyway, once we manage to get clear on the nature of Dasein's temporality,
we will be able to push even further into an understanding of time that is
more fundamental still-- namely, Temporality [temporalitaet]. _This_ will
then give us our phenomenological horizon for clarifying the meaning of
being in general. So the entire Daseinanalytik is really just a first
step toward a fundamental, thoroughly radicalized, phenomenological
understanding of Temporality [temporalitaet], which is not Dasein's
temporality, but rather the Temporality of being in general. Once we do
_that_, our understanding of pretty much everything (indiviudally and as a
whole) has been radically transformed. Once we do that, the project of
Part One of _Being and Time_ is finished.
I still have no idea whether Temporality applies to all modes of being
_except_ Dasein, or all modes of being _including_ Dasein. Does anyone
out there have any idea which it is, or whether there might be some other
sense to zeitlichkeit and temporalitaet? I've spent an awfully long time
trying to find the answer to this question and all I have gained is
different levels of confusion.
-David Schenk.
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